Category: AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to find applications in most industries. It’s revolutionizing the way we get work done. With the ability to collect, analyze, and apply the insights gathered from data, it can help marketers improve their strategies with ease.

This is why it’s extremely important for digital marketing companies as it can provide valuable insights into their customers and campaigns. As a result, you’ll be better equipped to reach your audience and convert them.

The best part about AI is that it can be used in various facets of digital marketing and its use isn’t restricted to just one or two tools.

But that begs the question, “How does AI redefine digital marketing?”

Let’s take a look at how and where you can use it.

How Is AI Redefining Digital Marketing?

Let’s take a closer look at eleven of the biggest ways AI is helping redefine digital marketing.

1. Through Chatbots

Chatbots are changing the way companies are delivering customer service. They can communicate with customers and resolve their issues through pre-defined flows.

However, AI chatbots take this one step forward. Armed with natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), these chatbots are able to figure out how to communicate with consumers without any human interference.

Additionally, they’re much more effective than customer service agents as they’re available 24×7.

What’s more, you ask?

They can communicate with hundreds of customers simultaneously unlike agents who can’t handle more than a handful of customers.

This means that you can cut your customer service costs and also de-stress your agents. The chatbots can direct any special or difficult questions to human agents and handle the regular ones themselves.

But chatbots find applications in marketing too.

You can also use the chatbots to collect customer information to add to your CRM or email list. When your audience or customers begin their chat, the chatbot can conversationally acquire this information.

Additionally, you can leverage chatbots to send out marketing messages to your customers. The chatbots can send out promotional messages about your latest products and services to them. This can help you generate more sales too.

2. Influencer Marketing

Artificial intelligence can also help you improve your influencer marketing campaigns. AI-powered influencer marketing tools can help you identify the right influencers for your campaigns.

By analyzing the profiles of influencers, these tools are able to ascertain if they have fake followers or not. And that’s not all. These tools can even help you figure out their brand affinity.

They can even analyze the content created by the influencers to help you figure out if it’s similar to that of your brand.

You can then reach out to these influencers and partner with them for your campaigns.

What’s more?

AI-powered platforms for influencer marketing can also help you figure out which levels and types of incentives work best for the influencers. You can use this information to your advantage to convince the influencers to work with you.

Lastly, once you’ve partnered with the influencer, you can even use AI to figure out if their posts follow FTC guidelines. This can help you ensure that you don’t land in legal trouble.

3. Email Marketing

By harnessing the power of AI, you can personalize your email marketing campaigns and drive better results.

But how can you do so?

You can send out emails based on certain actions taken by your users. This way, you’ll be able to deliver relevant emails at the right times to your users. These emails will also have the right subject lines and product recommendations that can help you push them to take the action you want them to.

Sephora, for instance, uses predictive analytics to figure out how long their products might last. Accordingly, they send out emails to their customers just before the products are about to get used. These emails ask customers to restock the products.

The emails also contain a call to action (CTA) that drives the customers to the product page from where they can purchase the product.

Image via LiveChat

4. Copywriting

AI can also help you improve your content so that it can have a greater impact on your target audience.

As AI can collect and assess data about what your audience likes or dislikes, you can figure out how to catch their attention. This can help you get more click-throughs, better conversions, and ultimately, more revenue.

Using AI-powered tools like Phrasee, you can skip the A/B testing cycles that can take a long time to bear any fruit and instead, leverage AI to get the results you want.

What’s more, you ask?

These tools can also ensure that the language remains consistent with your brand voice to make it appear natural too.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the best places to reach your target audience. With over 3.8 billion users across social media platforms, you can be sure to find your target audience on it.

However, to reach your audience and engage it, you need to craft content that’ll appeal to them.

While your copywriting skills may come in handy, social media platforms are visual platforms. Hence, you need to create visual content that will attract your audience.

This is where AI can help you out too.

AI-powered social media tools can help you figure out which visuals can resonate best with your audience. Based on these insights, they can even suggest visuals that you can use for your social media posts.

Alternatively, they can help you figure out which colors, themes, and messages can work well for you. You can then accordingly create posts with these features and reap the benefits of better growth.

What’s more?

Some tools for social media can take this one step forward and give you even more granular insights. These include things like cropping and color correction to the shot construction.

6. Searches

AI is also changing the way we search online. Earlier, all searches were text-based. However, with the advent of AI-powered voice assistants like Google Home, Amazon Echo, Siri, and others, this has changed.

About 43% of users between the ages of 16 and 64 have used voice searches today and this figure is growing as the access to high-speed internet spreads.

Image via We Are Social

But that’s not the only application of AI when it comes to searches. Search engines like Google have already started using AI to improve the quality of their search results.

In fact, Google’s RankBrain is used to understand search queries and sort the results. That’s why improving the readability of your content has become a big part of search engine optimization (SEO).

This algorithm understands the user’s conversational search query and accordingly brings up relevant results using the power of AI.

To optimize for voice searches, marketers need to change the way they create content as well. The content needs to be more conversational so that the search engine presents your website as the authoritative source of the information. This is why long-tail keywords have become a more important part of SEO.

7. Marketing Videos

As mentioned above, AI can help you figure out what sort of content works best for you. However, this isn’t restricted to just images or text. AI can also help with your marketing videos.

Considering the fact that videos are one of the most engaging forms of content, it makes sense for brands to optimize them to get the most out of them.

But what if you lack technical skills or the resources to hire a video designer?

In this situation, AI-powered video creation tools can be of great help to you. These tools make it extremely easy to create high impact videos without the need to know design or videography.

All you have to do is select video templates and customize them based on your requirements. These tools also provide loads of royalty-free media resources that you can use to enrich your videos even further.

This way, you’ll be able to create professional-looking videos in minutes without any technical know-how.

And that’s not all.

You can also use AI to figure out what your audience likes, and accordingly, you can suggest other related videos that they may like to see. This can help you increase your view time, and subsequently, their time on site. Which, in turn, can positively impact your SEO.

8. Web Design

Creating a stellar website can take quite some effort and time if you start from scratch. However, with numerous templates available out there, this process has been simplified to a great extent.

But even then, you need to dedicate enough time and resources to customize it.

Thanks to AI, this problem can be solved with ease. AI-powered tools such as Wix can help you design stunning websites based on information you provide.

All you have to do is provide some information about your images, calls-to-action (CTAs), and more. After you provide this information to the tool, it’ll design the website for you quickly without any additional effort from your end.

9. Website User Experience

The use of AI doesn’t stop at just designing a stunning website. It can also help you figure out how to improve the user experience your website delivers.

Through machine learning, you can figure out the likes and dislikes of your visitors and accordingly personalize your website layout for them.

This customization can be done based on their demographics, devices, interaction with your website, and more.

When you provide a personalized experience, it not only helps keep the users satisfied but can also increase the time that they spend on your website.

What’s more?

Personalization is not just a choice anymore. About 85% of marketers say that their customers expect personalized experiences from them.

Image via Evergage

This is perhaps the reason why nearly 58% of marketers said that they personalize their websites to deliver better customer experiences.

If you own an ecommerce business, then this personalization is even more important for you. By suggesting products or services that are the most relevant to your customers, you’ll be better placed to convert them.

Additionally, you can show related products to boost the cart value even further and increase your sales. Brands such as Amazon already use this method to customize their offerings to their users. They even send emails with personalized product recommendations to get their users to purchase products from them.

10. Digital Advertising

When you launch paid advertising campaigns, you’re already leveraging AI to boost your reach, engagement, and sales. Facebook and Google Ads use AI and machine learning to find people who’ll be more likely to engage with your posts and show the ads to them.

They also optimize the performance of your ads based on the responses that a certain audience gives to them.

What’s more?

These platforms have an auction-based advertising system where you pay the least amount for each engagement, lead, or conversion.

11. Content Curation

Lastly, AI can also help you curate high-quality content from the web. Based on the parameters defined by you, it can help you find content that’ll resonate well with your audience.

You can then publish this content on your social media accounts and get the attention of your target audience and engage them.

As this content will be relevant to their interests, there are good chances that they may engage with it.

Final Thoughts

AI is changing the way we market brands online. It simplifies web design and content creation so that you don’t need to spend big bucks on development costs.

Additionally, you can leverage chatbots to serve your customers better and market to them as well. AI also finds applications in influencer marketing, social media marketing, and even email marketing.

Using it, you can personalize your offerings and boost your engagement and conversion rates with ease.

Do you have any questions about the ways in which AI is helping to redefine digital marketing? If so, let us know in the comments.

When artificial intelligence plays on the eCommerce team, this duo is in it to win it. The thing is that AI is getting better at what it does each and every day, meaning that with its help, online store owners can make their website stronger, improve the understanding of their clients and their needs, as well as end up selling more to them. But how does this work?

Can you imagine that just when typing in a request in the search bar as you’re looking for something, say, in Google, AI is already doing its magic? We don’t even think about it but the results that you’re given straight off could be that very personalized pick that’ll suit your tastes.

Furthermore, AI is smart enough to rearrange products in the catalog page grids to show a person those items that he/she may like first basing assumptions on their previous searches or buys. Consequently, another person browsing the very same catalog page could have a different pick. In both cases, the users become a lot more likely to actually buy something. Nice, agree?

That said, on this page, we’d like to introduce you to the way machine learning and AI are used in eCommerce and will dwell upon how this technology is changing the industry of online retail. Let’s begin.

Using AI to get to know your target audience better

Among the first things that artificial intelligence is already doing to change the eCommerce industry is analyzing your customers from cover to cover using big data. This means not only collecting information on who your buyers are and where they are from, but it’s also about organizing this information in a way so that it can be used to the most of it.

By processing data on the items that a client has bought or browsed before, AI makes pretty precise conclusions regarding their tastes and preferences. This way, it pitches them personalized product selections, featuring things that a customer could most likely buy (as opposed to just cross-selling things to complete the order).

For instance, numerous online retail stores are already using such sections on their product pages as “You may also like” or “You may be interested in the following items”. These personalized blocks show those products that could be to the taste of the customers.

That said, among the undeniable strong sides of AI is its ability to create the “portrait of the customer”, capturing what this specific person needs. Having this information in the arsenal, it jots down behavioral patterns to improve the customer experience, and, at the same time, gets rid of the “show everyone the same thing” approach. Of course, in many cases, you’ll need to turn for professional help or hire dedicated Magento developers to customize such sections of the website, but this step towards personalization leads to the growth of sales. And the best part is that AI is only improving its skills!

Finding out which products combine well

Keeping a close watch on those products that complement each other and sell well together may get trickier as your product lines grow and inventories expand. Therefore, having mentioned cross-selling in the previous section, it is worthy of notice that artificial intelligence plays an important role in automating these processes too.

With the help of AI, tracking those items that become commonly purchased together becomes easier, as those combos that sell well could be then pitched by the system to product pages and appear in other parts of the website. By displaying things that look good together, for example, a great matching top to the jeans that the shopper has added to their cart, there’s a higher probability to sell more products to a single person at a time. This changes the user’s behavior of browsing, urging them to check out a couple of more items than planned initially. In much, it’s fair to say that such selections affect impulsive buying as well.

Be that as it may, with having this matter taken care of in eCommerce automatically, it becomes simpler to sell more and increase the average order size.

Making more accurate trend hypotheses

Your business has to evolve in order to grow and be compatible. Therefore, one more point of how AI is changing the eCommerce sphere deals with the changes in customer behavior and trends. For starters, AI is capable of assisting you in identifying the trends, i.e., it can help you make explicit decisions when predicting where to move on next, say, in the upcoming season.

Let’s assume that this spring most of your customers preferred to purchase many berry-colored accessories, ex. belts, handbags, and scarves. Based on the trend, you can predict that items of the same color range have a great chance to sell in the summer, for instance, pink and purple sunglasses, bracelets, and earrings, as they’ll go well with the items that were recently purchased.

AI analyzes such streams and can assist you to use them to your profit. Such assortment can influence what your customers will buy, in much impacting their apriori choices and growing the average check amounts.

Assisting clients round-the-clock via Chatbots

Customer support is another skill that AI uses deftly. Unlike actual customer service specialists who have limited working hours, chatbots are easily trained to be available 24/7. In the eCommerce field, Live Chat is an indispensable helper, capable of answering the shoppers’ frequently asked questions in real-time.

The greatest thing about such virtual assistant support is that it is provided in the format of dialogue. Moreover, since customers often have similar questions, pre-written scenarios that the chatbot follows make communication quite effective.

As such, you can pick up your chatbot’s skills by giving a full script with numerous variations. Those cases that it can’t handle yet are taken care of by employees but are jotted down for further processing.

Empowering the search bars

Another outstanding ability of AI deals with fast and efficient product searches. This is fancier than search autofill! As such, the feature of uploading an image to find items that are similar to it are already a common thing on many eCommerce websites. The visual search that finds the items based on resemblance is an incredible time-saver that, by all means, increases customer satisfaction.

Topping that, a number of online retail websites are working on accepting and properly processing the requests of a person’s voice assistants (such as Alexa or Siri) in order to allocate the needed things in the store. Accordingly, Amazon can be stated as an example of where this is possible at the moment.

Implementing augmented reality to change the game

Without a doubt, the powerful AR technology that was designed to provide potential buyers with the opportunity to test out or try on a product without having physical access to it is a pivotal moment in eCommerce. Hundreds of companies around the globe are making use of such functionality in order to skyrocket the user experience and sell more products.

Some niches that are taking advantage of augmented reality on their websites include cosmetics and beauty products, house decor and furniture, shoes, and accessories, among others.

Gifting the chance to look at the product and whether it matches or not just by turning on your device’s camera is a real hit as of late. For example, shoppers can put on lipstick or earrings using this functionality. Without a doubt, this immediate try-on removes lots of doubts, and buyers checkout the liked items with more enthusiasm and confidence.

Final word

Summing up all the above, when the artificial intelligence capabilities are paired up with eCommerce, a promising duet is formed indeed. With the power of AI used properly in online retail, it becomes much simpler to understand the necessities of the customers, predict trends, and enhance the overall user experience. All of that can surely lead to larger turnovers and help businesses expand.

Author Bio. :- Alex Husar, CTO at Onilab with 8+ years of experience in expert Magento development and Salesforce. He graduated from the Czech Technical University and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Computer Software Engineering.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone a long way. But it still has more changes and advancement to go through to achieve its fullest potential. For now, we are lucky to witness AI bringing great impact to our lives and businesses.

AI has not only been used in cybersecurity, but even in business, marketing, and customer service. AI is becoming a normal part of it.

Now you may be wondering, how AI can grow a business, or is it possible to gain profit with this technology. AI can bring you what you need. So, let us take a look at how AI can grow your business to what you envision and what to do to start utilizing such technology.

How Artificial Intelligence is Used in Growing a Business

Lead Generation

Before we get to know how AI can help in lead generation, here’s a short background about it. Lead generation is a marketing process that captures the interest using a product and service for the purpose of creating a sales pipeline. It’s important to know about lead generation and how you can get leads to increase in your sales.

With the incorporation of AI into systems, you can utilize it to analyze data from consumers gathered from social media accounts and more. It tries to understand all the gathered data and create a picture of the buyer’s persona. This information will determine a person’s buying habits, pain points, and more.

Customer Care

Customer service is an important aspect of your business, and focusing some time and money on this department is essential. However, you cannot expect your employees to work 24/7 all the time. In addition, if you are a big company that has customers from different time zones, it would be difficult to have your employees provide service to them.

Artificial Intelligence can be a savior for your customer care department. It can free up the time of your employees to focus on matters that require their skills. Furthermore, AI can take care of your customers’ uncomplicated queries, make them feel satisfied, and cater to them 24/7.

Chatbots are the most common form of AI technology used by most businesses.  Many businesses are using it for their customer services. It has been predicted to grow to 276% in this year. Even small businesses are adopting this technology, as they see the significance and effect of it on businesses.

Simplifies the Workflow

AI may seem to be a threat to people as they could replace some jobs. But the truth is, AI is not a threat to any particular position in a company or business. AI is designed to enhance and simplify workflow processes. Look at Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana. It is designed to follow simple commands and perform uncomplicated tasks like scanning emails or reminding significant events.

Other automation processes that AI can contribute is by submitting or adding on projects that are ready to head to the next step, or inform if something is wrong with the project. Leveraging AI technology into your company will free up more time for you and your employees to focus on more important matters that require human skill and interaction.

Aids in Digital Marketing Strategies

Artificial Intelligence contributes enormously to marketing departments. It provided much more sales and profit that a business can have than when opting for traditional marketing. But, how can AI drive more sales in marketing?

It can personalize marketing. People prefer getting their hands on items they know they will use, and providing them with personalized advertisements will help. According to a study conducted by Accenture in 2017, 40% of consumers shift brands or products due to lack of personalization. Personalizing all your approach to your customers gives you a bigger chance of sales. AI can help in this aspect by predicting the customer’s behavior based on their previous interactions. This data gathered can be used by marketers to create personalized emails and advertisements for each buyer.

AI can also be used in generating sales for your PPC campaign on Google and on social networks like Instagram and Facebook. AI will analyze the accounts of users and only show them ads that are relevant to them. In return, both users and advertisers would benefit from this technology.

Digital marketers can also create content using AI. It can be used to generate articles, speed up, and optimize your content marketing. You don’t have to wait for hours or days to create your content. You can also use to create social media posts and stories.

AI in content creation speeds up all process, make it more efficient, and increase the ROI.

Predicts the Outcome and Streamlines Sales Effort

Systems run by artificial intelligence are able to capture behaviors and signals of consumers that might be missed by the sales team. AI can predict a customer’s behavior, and businesses use this data to build a stronger relationship with their buyers. Aside from knowing what consumers want, AI can also anticipate if consumers are not happy with your product, without waiting for them to say it. By knowing immediately what your customers want or what makes them unhappy, you can focus on it to avoid losing customers and get more sales.

Revolutionize Human Resources

Human Resources department also plays a crucial role in the growth of a business. They are responsible for hiring the best team or employee to do the job or task and generate more sales. However, finding the right candidate among hundreds and thousands of applicants is laborious. AI has found a way to contribute to the human resources department.

Even though your department has been swamped with hundreds of applicants, you don’t have to think about finding the right candidate. AI will narrow down everything for you. It will gather candidates that match the skills you require; therefore, saving you time. Also, chosen candidates that have questions about the company’s benefits and policies will be answered by AI-integrated software.

It saves time during the hiring process, acquires more skilled candidates, and the HR department doesn’t have to answer some questions that the new employees may ask.

Real-Time Assistance

If your business requires updating customers or informing them all the time, using AI-integrated software is effective. It can connect to your customers and provide them needed information or notification. Having such technology can increase productivity and customer satisfaction. The more your customers are satisfied, the more chances for your business to grow.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence becomes an integral part of every business. It can provide you with a lot of benefits, from managing uncomplicated and mundane tasks to generating sales for your business. Although we see the great benefits of AI and how it can take over some human tasks, let us remember that AI cannot replace humans. Instead, AI is designed to work hand in hand with humans to enhanced productivity and growth of a business.

Author Bio. :- Vanessa Venugopal is a passionate content writer. With four years of experience, she mastered the art of writing in various styles and topics. She is currently writing for Softvire New Zealand.

The latest trend in the digital world which is catching the eye of the majority of the tech industry is without a doubt chatbots. These chatbots are proving the best for the business and work as the human. Chatbots demand is high in the market because every businessman understands how important a role they are playing. People avail the SEO Services for driving the traffic on their website but these chatbots are helping a lot to make the visitors stay longer on your website.

Chabot: It is a computer program that simulates the natural human conversation. People can communicate with it via chat interface or voice. When you would chat with bot, you would feel like that you are talking to a real person. A chatbot is highly admired among the people for its instant reply. And, a chatbot is made with the important layers such as application layer, APIs, conversational user interface (CUI) and database.

Chatbots are mainly of 3 types-
1. Rule-based chatbots
2. AI-powered chatbots
3. Intellectually independent chatbots

Rule-based chatbots:

It is the simplest kind of chatbot where people interact with it just clicking on buttons and use the pre-defined options. For the best answer, this kind of chatbot asks people to select a particular section among the many. It is considered the slowest chatbot and to get the answer to their queries people have to connect with a chatbot for a longer time. This type of chatbot is best for qualifying your leads, ask questions and other related activities.

AI-powered chatbots:

These chatbots are a combination of rule-based and intellectually independent. Al-powered chatbots have the ability to understand the free language and remember the context of the conversation and customer’s preferences. They are the best for addressing the random user request at any moment. Al-powered chatbots use natural language processing and machine learning along with AI.

Intellectually independent chatbots

Use machine learning that helps these chatbots to learn from user’s inputs and requests. These chatbots are trained to understand particular keywords as well as phrases.

How Chatbots work:

Chatbots work on the two processes i.e. Natural language understanding and Natural language generation

Now understanding what these two important terms-

Natural Language Understanding: It is an ability of chatbot for understanding a human by converting text into the structured data for a machine to understand.

Natural Language Generation: In this process, structured data is transformed into the text.
When a user asks questions to the chatbot, then it divided the question into the two-part i.e. Intent and entity. The intent is a request or an action the user wants to get and the entity is a detail that compliments intent.

Main Chatbot benefits-

• Enhance better customer engagement

Chatbots are the best for the online business because they help to increase customer engagement. And, for the success of any online business, this is one of the most important things. Chatbot helps to provide a better user experience. When a user has the best experience, then he/she would love to visit this kind of site again and again. And, engagement on such a website increase and it is the best sign for the growth of any business.

• Uplift the sales and lead qualification

Uplifting the sales and lead qualification of your business, chatbots work as a blessing. This is the reason businessmen opt for enrolling in the chatbot facility on their website. For businessmen, nothing is as important as sales. The ultimate purpose of any kind of business is to gain profit and it comes only on when the number of sales increases on the website. So, the chatbot is great that contribute to increasing the sales.

• Right time to ask for feedback

Apart from this, chatbots help for giving feedback at the right time. Also, it offers quick response for the customers and turns their overall experience into the best one.

• Reduce bounce rate

When a customer gets a satisfactory answer for its query, then he/she must visit that website and stay for the length on that particular website. Chatbots do a great job of reducing the bounce rate on any website.

The reason why any website bounces rate increases because customers don’t find that particular website less relevant and they move to another website in search of getting the best thing that matches their search query.

So, let’s reduce the bounce rate on your website with the right chatbot facility and satisfy your customers’ queries.

Prime 5 steps in NLP mechanism-

1. Tokenization
2. Part of speech tagging
3. Stemming
4. Named entity recognition
5. Sentiment analysis

Author bio: – Amar Prem is an experienced digital marketing executive who tries to stay up to date with current algorithm change to get higher visibility. Currently, he is working with FirstRankSeoServices.com to provide all categories of SEO Services. For completing all type of data, you can feel free to contact him all the time.

All signs point to artificial intelligence and machine learning playing an increasingly significant role in commerce now and into the future. 

Consider the following statistics:

• The growth of virtual assistants is expected to reach $15.79 billion by 2021
• 63 percent of people prefer messaging an online bot to communicate with a business or brand
• When AI is present, 49 percent of consumers are willing to shop more frequently while 34 percent will spend more money

Then there’s that other buzzword defining how people shop in the 21st century: Personalization. These days a majority of consumers will only engage with offers if they’ve been personalized. And these same shoppers will then recommend a brand that offers this personalized experience.

AI exists throughout most business sectors, but it’s really redefining the customer experience in retail. We’re seeing it in real-time, in a number of applications, from mobile apps to chatbots to “smart” solutions all geared towards not only easing the customer journey, but personalizing it every step of the way.

If brands that combine these two trends, they’ll come out on top compared to competitors.

Below we share a few exciting ways brands are using AI and personalization together to drive customer engagement and loyalty, and how your brand can start this journey.

AI, chatbots, and messaging apps

Mobile applications already play an integral role in the modern buyer’s life. The next trend is turbo-charging them with artificial intelligence to ease customers’ pain points and personalize the shopping experience. And there are few better ways to achieve this than through the use of chatbots.

Chatbots are handy AI-based customer-service assistants that simulate a human conversation, which allows them to provide personalized customer assistance in real-time. The reason chatbots are so popular is for the simple reason that people now do so much interacting through messaging apps, which is the ideal delivery device for chatbots. In fact, messaging apps are now even more popular than social-media platforms. 

Now we’re seeing more and more retail brands leverage AI and chatbots in their mobile apps. Powerhouse retailers H&M and Sephora, for example, have launched their own chatbots on the Kik app. In H&M’s case, the chatbots on this app become a sort-of personal stylist, presenting the user with different outfit options based on store inventory. 

Then there’s Taco Bell, which via the Slack app and their “Taco bot” allow customers to place an order with a single message. Even Starbucks is getting in on Amazon’s popular Alexa Platform with their My Starbucks Barista, a virtual assistant which allows you to place orders by speaking directly to your phone.

Integrating chatbots into your customer-service strategy is a relatively simple process. First, you need to determine your strategy—whether you want a text/chat platform, video chat, co-browsing (allowing sales reps to interact with a customer’s screen), etc. Then it’s only a matter of getting your platform up and running with the help of chatbot builders.

Mobile app development, on the other hand, is a more time-intensive process that requires a team of technical specialists like UX/UI designers as well as input from various departments within your company. However, if you’re a smaller operation you can look to this survey detailing how small-businesses go about creating quality mobile apps.

Checkout-free technologies

One way the online revolution affected retail was that digital technologies allowed for more e-commerce. As shoppers we were thrilled that we could sit at home and eliminate the time and headache of actually going to a brick-and-mortar locale and waiting in line to purchase a product. With the click of a mouse button, those products simply came to us. 

Now tech companies are wielding advanced AI to help get people out there and do real-world shopping again. One way they’re incentivizing the brick-and-mortar experience is through checkout-free technologies. A Brooklyn-based tech company called Caper, for example, created a “smart” shopping cart that automatically tallies and rings up items places in the cart. It not only eliminates the need for a cashier, it even eliminates the need for those new-self-service checkout kiosks we’re getting accustomed too. 

The way the smart cart achieves this is via computer-vision tech as well as three cameras in the shopping cart. The only work required of the shopper is to scan his or her item once before dropping it in, and then the cart keeps track of those items. When the customer is done, he or she can pay for his items through the card reader also installed on the cart. 

If that were the extent of Caper’s goals, it would still be pretty impressive. But they too acknowledge just how crucial personalization is for the modern shopper. That’s why they’re also developing AI solutions that can display curated recipes ideas for each individual shopper on a tablet device built into the cart. So far Caper is testing these smart carts in New York, but they plan on rolling out this exciting tech nationwide soon.

Now, if you’re a retailer interested in upgrading your brick-and-mortar location for the digital age, you don’t need to search far for your solution. Some 150 companies are currently working on automated, cashierless technologies for retail. These solutions incorporate everything from high-tech smart shopping carts mentioned above to simple mobile applications. So even if you’re a small business you should be able to find a solution that fits your budget.

Smart shelves

Speaking of smart carts, there are other AI-based initiatives geared towards getting today’s home shopper back out into physical locations. One such bit of technology is AWM’s Smart Shelf. They’ve partnered with some major brands including Walmart and Albertsons to place LED displays and optical sensors on store shelves. These displays, powered by AI, deliver targeted product info whenever a customer passes by the aisle.

But it doesn’t display any random old advertisement. Using the facial recognition technology that the company also designs, the smart shelves personalize these messages to the shopper based on demographic info like age, gender, and ethnicity. And like the above-example, AWM’s Smart Shelf uses sensors and computer vision to detect when a product has been removed from the shelf, thus allowing for cashier-less shopping.

One of the other interesting features of this technology—one that can help business processes even in the B2B space—is AWM’s Automated Inventory Intelligence. It allows real-time tracking of all on-the-shelf inventory, helping retail companies to more efficiently manage their stock supply. Impressively, their system boasts an accuracy rate of higher than 95%.

There are a number of exciting high-tech ways businesses of any size can better manage their inventory. Tagging warehouse stock with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips allows for better tracking of inventory. And combining this tech with the Internet of Things (IoT) is even more efficient. An example would be integrating all electronic devices and technologies so the warehouse manager can monitor all stock from a single location.

Conclusion

These are exciting times to be in business, but they are also fast-moving times. The sad truth is that those who can’t keep up with demands for personalization will struggle to keep and retain customers. 

If yours does, it will be because you offer your customers the seamless shopping experience they’ve come to expect. 

This article is contributed by Ryan Gould – Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing