Black Friday is a treasure trove for e-retailers who see it as the perfect opportunity to attract more customers and drive higher sales. Here’s how your eCommerce brand can use artificial intelligence (AI) to get the most out of the Black Friday:
Black Friday marks the unofficial opening of the holiday shopping season when retailers stand to drive more revenues. In 2018, it brought in $6.2 billion in revenue, respectively, which represented 23.6% growth year-on-year.
Black Friday is a real treasure trove for consumers looking to upgrade their TVs, appliances, and tablets, and even buy jewelry at incredibly low rates. Therefore, don’t be surprised when we tell you that the mega shopping festival forms 20% of all online holiday shopping?
Black Friday offers a massive opportunity for eCommerce companies across the globe to double up their revenues. However, it is not as easy as running a promotional sale on the online store or posting a few ads on social media about the exciting discounts.
eCommerce companies must optimize this relatively brief period and use all the tools at their disposal, i.e., data mining to identify the most valuable target audience, channels to provide customers access to product information, and systems to handle peaks in customer service inquiries.
That’s where you can leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Adding to that, here are the 5 key takeaways on how eCommerce companies can extract the best from this time with the help of AI algorithms:
- Create personalized offers
Today’s customers demand hyper-personalized content and ultra-tailored experience from all the brands. Naturally, the primary focus of eCommerce companies is to deliver personalized offers.
Amazon’s product recommendations feature a widely known example of AI in action that uses pattern recognition to determine a customer’s past buying behavior and journey to predict what they might buy in the future.
With the help of AI, you can identify the best ways to personalize buyer experiences with your eCommerce company. That way, you can reduce abandoned carts, leverage other platforms to reach customers who have unsubscribed from your emails, and initiate custom win-back campaigns across digital mediums.
Click here to know about “Implementing Product Recommendation Engines in eCommerce.”
- Enhance the efficiency of inventory management
During the mega shopping period, eCommerce companies are required to manage inventory and fulfillment as efficiently as possible. That is vital not only to accommodate the increased demand but also to ensure they are not left with unsold stock in the warehouse.
AI can enable systems to look at historical records of the products sold to predict the necessary stock levels an eCommerce company must maintain to supply uninterruptedly and to reduce unnecessary stock wastage.
For example: if item A sells 100 units in Area C, while only selling 30 units in Area H. That could be due to factors such as weather, political distress, local tastes. AI technologies take into account both seasonal and ad-hoc factors, thus ensuring an optimized stock movement.
This article talks about “4 Application of Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce.”
- Make shipping easier and cheaper
The cost part of an online transaction is shipping. And when you run a sale – especially as big as the Black Friday sale, you have to ensure fast shipping and keep up with a lot of orders. So, how do you make the process cost-effective for your eCommerce company?
With the help of AI, of course! For starters, the technologies can help determine the shortest possible route for the delivery agent, by taking into account the ETA of the container ships/cargo flights, and real-time traffic.
With AI, it is also possible to analyze historical shipping data after considering factors such as weather patterns and seasonality. That helps in reducing inefficiencies and errors in the shipping process, and also helps you to plan for contingencies – which is not a bad thing considering you are running such a big online sale.
Click here to read about “Future of SMB eCommerce: Using AI to do AI.”
- Bring Christmas cheer with chatbots
A Gartner study states that by next year, 25% of customer service operations will use virtual assistants. That trend is increasingly noticeable among the younger population, where 70% of millennials have reported having a positive experience with chatbots.
Black Friday sale is chaotic, and it is not physically possible for your customer care team to respond to all the queries that may come in that brief period. Chatbots are efficient.
They can answer multiple web users simultaneously, and offer 24/7 support with limited human supervision. Moreover, they are designed in such a way that they can learn from misspelled words, synonyms and ontologies, and converse with users in various languages.
They are also more approachable and better than writing emails or filling lengthy contact forms. Therefore, install chatbots on your online store, if you haven’t already, and never miss out on any conversation this Black Friday.
This article talks about “Automated AI Experiments: A Key to Success in eCommerce.”
- Optimize your emails for better ROI
Contrary to popular belief, email is not dead. And, it is an extremely profitable channel, if used well. Transactional emails, for example, generate 8X more opens and 6X more revenue.
Optimize them with personalized messaging, CTAs, graphics, and videos to increase sales by up to 15% during the Black Friday period. VIP Black Friday previews, relevant discount deals, and limited coupon codes are a few examples.
With the help of AI, you can identify the messaging, the best time to email, and customer segmentation that yields the most optimum results.
Click here to know more about “5 Use Cases of using Machine Learning (ML) in eCommerce to get the maximum ROI.”
Over to you
Black Friday is a significant event on the shopping calendar, and that has allowed eCommerce companies to drive more sales in the build-up to Christmas. Using AI, you can gain valuable insights from the historical data around customer behavior, past performances of Black Fridays, external shipping factors, and more.
Artificial intelligence will help you serve your customers through targeted marketing and ensure a better buying experience. The good news is you can leverage AI for your eCommerce company with Datoin.
Try the automated ML platform for eCommerce, and see the results for yourself!