Marketing strategies are continuously changing due to increasing technological advancement. Technology is responsible for raising the exceptions of people all around the globe. With an increase in innovations, it’s pretty obvious that customers are expecting more and companies are doing everything to can to remain in their good list.

Consequently, competition between companies seems to be rising at an unstoppable rate.
How can marketers keep up with all of this change?
The solution that I am about to offer might seem daunting at first, but trust me, it has its share of benefits; Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a big thing. Businesses using AI software to their benefit will find a rise in their entire company’s productivity and growth.

What exactly is Artificial Intelligence?Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence onto machines. In simple words, a computer system is fabricated to closely resemble human information, behavior, understanding, speech, and even emotions. These machines are capable of decision making and solving problems to meet specific goals, just like humans.

Have you ever talked to an AI chatbot? If your answer is no, the following example should jog your memory. Remember the time you surfed the web for a product that you had meant to purchase, you probably found an excellent eCommerce website and decided to get in touch with customer service. When you started chatting it felt as if you were getting automated responses and some responses were entirely out of context. That my friend was an AI chatbot that you were talking to.

So exactly what did I mean when I said that we could use Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce marketing? Here are the benefits that Artificial Intelligence has to offer for marketing:

1) Personalization & Buyer Persona.

The goal is to attract customers and persuade them to buy your products and services. However, understanding a consumer’s needs is a challenging task. If you’re able to understand the requirements, preferences, likes, and dislikes of your customer, you can provide them with the products that they are more interested in.

At the moment personalization is only maintained by using information such as ‘search history,’ ‘purchased goods’ or ‘site navigation.’ Such a simple analysis can never really tell what a customer might be thinking or consider buying shortly. Not having a proper insight about your visitor’s behavior is one of the common mistakes made by startups in websites.

On the other hand, customer engagement can render some powerful results. By engaging your customers in real-time, you get to know them better; you get to know what they are thinking, what their values are, what motivates them or what they strive for.

This technology holds the ability to provide a deep understanding of customers at an individual level. Enabling you to connect with the right customers at the right time, gives you a 360-degree view of your customer and improves your ‘predictive eCommerce marketing’ strategy.

How it’s done:

1. Artificial Intelligence uses algorithms based on logical reasoning. Data is analyzed for patterns and learning from these patterns; AI can respond to specific tasks effectively. For example, when visitors are navigating the websites, AI will keep track of their actions and browsing data.
2. With the help of this data, marketers can group customers according to their interests and activities.
3. After the grouping process, marketers can offer recommendations, deliver messages & notifications, and even offer products that are relevant to the customer’s taste. This results in an exceptionally personalized experience.

2) AI Assistant.

What exactly is a Virtual Assistant?AI assistant or in other words an AI ‘Virtual Assistant’ is a program designed to understand and respond to natural language, respond to commands, and perform tasks. If you don’t already know, a virtual assistant can answer routine queries that visitors put forward. Not only does it save your time, but it also holds the ability to deliver factual information to the buyers within seconds.

If buyers get timely answers to queries, then they will ultimately feel that you value their time and are working hard for their satisfaction. Virtual assistants are already in use, such as Siri, Cortana or Alexa. At the moment they are unable to perform complex tasks, but if incorporated they hold the ability to perform exceptionally well.

Here are the tasks that an AI Virtual Assistant can perform for you:

• Arrange appointments
• Answer Emails
• Check the weather forecast
• Tell you news & reports
• Make a to-do-list
• Create text messages & reminders
• Manage the calendar
• Create a shopping list
• Look for directions and nearby locations (hotels, restaurants, etc.)
• Answer all types of queries (general conversation, arithmetic, etc.)
• Play games (tic-tac-toe, wordplay, hangman, etc.)
• Request songs
• Check for traffic and flight status
• Control smart home devices

You see, the benefits of an AI virtual assistant are numerous:

1. Saves Time:
   You don’t have to go through the lengthy process of hiring an assistant, with the simple incorporation of a virtual assistant, you not only save your time you also get better results.
2. Cost Effective:Without the need of hiring an employee, you can save your money and increase your profit.
3. Reduces Employee Drama:
   Of course, workplace drama is widespread. Sometimes employees don’t get along well, which leads your company to suffer the consequences. A virtual assistant will remove all such problems.

3) Faster Customer Service With Artificial Intelligence.

ECommerce Marketing is all about satisfying your clients so that they become potential buyers.
Consumers want to feel valued at individual levels; however, giving value to your customers is only possible with real-time interaction.

There is a very low possibility of interacting with thousands of customers at individual levels. To help improve the user experience, businesses have even hired mobile application development companies to create mobile apps and Progressive Web Apps for leveraging user interaction and increasing customer retention.

Thankfully, Artificial Intelligence provides a solution for this challenge as well; ‘AI chatbots’ offer better and faster customer service. AI chatbots can interact with humans in a manner that keeps them engaged and also provides them with valuable information.

Here are the benefits of customer service chatbots:

• Rapidly answer queries:Keeping customers waiting is the easiest way to lose sales. With real-time chatbots, you can respond to customer queries within seconds and save your customers from the otherwise agonizing 20 minutes.
  Chatbots don’t need to rest or sleep; this allows you to provide your consumers with 24/7 customer service wherever and whenever.
• Increased customer engagement:Chatbots are designed to resemble human nature, so whenever a customer tries to initiate a conversation, it will be able to respond and continue the conversation.
• Reduce workload:Not only do Chatbots hold the ability to answer questions within the minimum amount of time, but they can also answer several customers at the same time. Chatbots keep a record of frequently asked questions as well as similar requests so that they can provide rapid solutions to all customers.
• Reduction in errors:We all make mistakes, of course, we’re only human. Unlike humans, if a chatbot is given proper instructions, it can provide error-free answers to all queries and reduce the chance of errors.

4) Cost-Effective & Profit Friendly.

Artificial intelligence can reduce the cost of customer service by a striking 30 percent. Juniper estimates that by 2022, companies will save up to $8 billion per annum on customer support costs.  If you’re using an AI chatbot for customer service, it will answer 80 percent of your customer queries within a minimum amount of time and also reduce the chance of errors. By using a chatbot, you get access to several perks, one of them is increased revenue and cost reduction.

So how do chatbots reduce costs?

• Reduction in labor cost:
  To provide customer service, you will have to go through the lengthy process of hiring staff member and once hired; you will have to offer them allowances. Suppose a bot handles about 5,000 queries per month, in that case, the annual cost savings would amount to about $207,000 in contrast with human agents. An AI virtual assistant will not only save your time; it will save you money as well.
• Reduce operational cost:Chatbots can quickly answer customer queries and provide authentic answers within seconds; this reduces the number of incoming calls, emails, messages, and social media inquiries and lowers the operational cost.

5) Smarter Ads, Messages & Notifications.

Artificial intelligence is a self-learning program, making continuous interactions with an environment allows it to develop familiarity. Similarly, when a chatbot interacts with various human inquiries, service requests and different types of conversations, it learns from each iteration and self-tunes itself to provide relevant solutions.

Now suppose a customer makes a query that the AI is unable to respond to, in that case, the question will be passed on to a human agent. What will happen is that the AI will learn from that iteration and the next time that query is asked, it will quickly deliver a solution to the customer.

An AI’s ability to self-learn enables it to develop familiarity with customer requests, conversations, purchases and navigation; by using this data, it can direct the right advertisements, offers, messages and notifications to the right customers at the right time.