6 AI Tools to Drive e-Commerce Sales for Brands

In today’s fast-paced digital world, you need more than great products you need a complete plan to achieve long-term success to deliver e-Commerce services for outdoor products. From putting your marketing in front of the right people to optimizing your website, there are a lot of tasks that need expert input if you want any chance of pushing beyond the competition to succeed in outdoor industry brands e-Commerce.

2023 is the year we finally see the full impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on B2C e-Commerce? We think so, and we aren’t alone. 

Whether it’s leveraging a sales assistant to offer human conversation to more online shoppers, allowing customers to get the answers they need to complete a purchase, updating customer profiles automatically, getting ads in front of the right set of eyeballs or smartly sending emails, AI is making a major impact on an e-Commerce sites ability to perform when and where the customer wants to engage.

"For AI to work, it requires three major elements: smarter data models, easy access to unlimited amounts of data, and cheap and powerful cloud computing. Today, these three elements are becoming not only accessible but commonplace."

According to a report by Forrester, marketing tasks are leading the way in adopting AI tools to drive sales.

Here’s a closer look at six tools that can have an immediate impact on driving online e-Commerce sales.

1) SRAX

Whether you use in-house talent or outsource it, becoming a master of PPC advertising can is not only daunting, the fact is it is changing so much it is time-consuming and costly. You need an AI partner to stand beside you. Enter SRAX. This AI tool uses an advanced algorithm to automatically optimize PPC campaigns on Google, Facebook, and other platforms.

By matching keywords to site content and using a real-time bid optimization system, this tool puts relevant messages in front of the right customers. Best of all, the technology backing this system focuses on maximizing your cost-effectiveness, helping reduce the cost per click associated with each campaign.

2) Liveperson

When people are shopping and they have questions, they want immediate answers. If they cannot get Getting immediate, relevant answers to shopping the answers they’re looking for, think they will hang around? Chatbot implementation has become more important than ever, especially if you have a smaller customer support staff.

Liveperson uses AI and machine learning to help your store deploy highly effective chatbots that can work in tandem with a human customer support team. With the use of a quality chatbot, customers can quickly get answers to their basic questions, resolving concerns and increasing the likelihood of a sale.

Just how fast is AI moving the needle on the use of chatbots? Here is what the 800 pound gorilla (Amazon) is doing right now. 

“Alexa,” says the man gazing intently at an Amazon Echo in a dark conference room. “Let’s chat.”
“Well, how are you today?” Alexa says.
“I’m great, how are you?”
“Well, I’m always busy, as people keep chatting with me … But listen, this is just hilarious, it’s a recent post on Reddit: ‘Toothpaste is just mouth soap.’ ”

The scene above is part of Amazon's latest strategy to build a truly conversational chatbot. It's an ambitious goal, and Amazon is determined to be the first to give machines the gift of gab. So it challenged 15 teams of computer science graduate students to build “a socialbot that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes.”

The reward? Fame and future glory, but also the $1 million Alexa Prize. And you're still hesitating to understand to implement this technology now.

3 & 4) Phrasee and Seventh Sense

Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to drive customers to your online store, but crafting body copy, subject lines and calls to action that actually appeal to people are often easier said than done. Phrasee takes this challenge out of your hands by using an advanced AI system that determines what type of content will have the biggest impact on your target audience.

Machine learning doesn’t just ensure that the AI system produces content that sounds like it was written by a human being, it also writes content that matches your brand voice. Allowing AI to craft more effective email content is a surefire way to increase store sales.

Now you want to get that email to the interested individual at just the right time. Step into Seventh Sense. Seventh Sense delivers your emails at personally optimized times, getting the right email, to the right person, at the right time. This platform integrates with HubSpot.

5) Betaout

While Betaout offers several AI features that can help with behind-the-scenes tasks like workflow automation and building KPI dashboards, its ability to assist with abandoned shopping cart recovery is likely to have the most immediate impact for online stores. It is estimated that shoppers abandoned $4-trillion in merchandise in 2017 alone, meaning that if you aren’t making an active effort to recover these customers, you could be missing out on quite a bit of cash.

Betaout’s AI tool uses customer data to send real-time updates to a customer after their cart has been abandoned. Betaout pulls information directly from your site and the customer’s cart to send emails or even text messages to customers who abandoned their shopping cart. Inventory updates, limited-time sales and other alerts will greatly increase the likelihood of your customers returning to their carts to make a purchase.

6) Twiggle

Modern web customers don’t want to navigate through a series of menus to find the product they’re interested in. Google, Bing and other search engines have made it so that we expect a similar search experience when visiting an online store. The problem, of course, is that most online stores don’t have the capability to deliver relevant results for searches like “small blue shirt” or “chair with leather cushions.”

Twiggle ensures that customers who visit your online store won’t be frustrated by search tools that don’t understand what they typed. This AI product uses advanced knowledge of human linguistics to understand what your customers are looking for and display the right results—just like in a real search engine—that will help you make additional sales.

With the right AI tools on your side, you can automate and personalize key marketing and sales tasks in your B2C e-Commerce platform. Best of all, you don’t have to wait to start enjoying these benefits. Start using these tools today, and you’ll see what a difference they can make for your store.

AI is helping the B2C e-Commerce process by gleaming order out of this chaos and allowing your e-Commerce site to offer people what they want when they want it. It’s all about the Customer Moments. Implementing strategies that will enable us to win in those customer moments is key to the success of outdoor brands in the year ahead.

"Customers expect that they can get what they want in their immediate context and moments of need."

- Rusty Warner, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research - ecommerce fulfillment services