How retailers can increase customer acquisition, boost conversions with tech advancements

E-commerce is constantly growing. The global e-commerce growth rate for 2023 is forecasted at 8.9%, bringing global e-commerce sales worldwide to $5.8 trillion. With more merchants selling online and the space constantly evolving with new capabilities and solutions, competition and customer expectations increase.

AI tools can help create dynamic category pages, optimize product pages, and design storefronts across various digital devices for personalized experiences. It's less overwhelming for merchants to approach creating and managing these key components with the assistance of AI and advanced technologies on their path to achieving business goals. A good way to break it down is by looking at it through the lenses of customer acquisition and conversion boost separately.

Customer acquisition

This is the process of bringing in new customers or clients to a business. Here are some steps merchants can take to attract customers.

Have engaging content on your website: Before buying a product, more than 80% of online shoppers conduct detailed research, including looking at videos, buying guides, blogs, product descriptions, customer FAQs, "About Us" sections, and more. That's why it's so important to have accurate and captivating content. Often owners don't know what to write on their sites and they question if their language is accurate and if it will resonate with their audience. There are AI tools to help businesses generate high-quality and uniquely tailored content by entering several inputs about the desired text. Within seconds, these features create options for tailored titles, taglines, and paragraphs. These tools help combat the time-consuming efforts needed to complete a professional-looking website and essential marketing materials including social media posts, email marketing campaigns, and landing pages that help draw in the attention of potential customers and have them talking about and engaging with the brand.

Brush up your SEO: To acquire new customers, sites need to be able to be found. Merchants need to give search engines the right information for proper indexing and submit structured data markup for their site for search engines to help improve the website's search results and ranking. Search engines can also use markup to create rich results like article previews, product previews, and FAQs for search results. Again, AI tools can help identify the best meta tags and meta descriptions to be optimized for search and remove a lot of the guesswork.

Invest in an omnichannel approach and social channels: Buyers are looking to shop more on digital channels, and because of that, they're everywhere. About 73% of consumers use multiple channels for their purchases and 65% say they use social media for inspiration when making a purchase. In addition, consumers who use four or more channels spend approximately 9% more than those who stick to one channel. To attract new customers, sellers need to be where their customers are. Merchants can multiply the opportunities to acquire new customers by selling their products and syncing their catalogs across their branded online stores, physical stores, social media, and marketplaces. Merchants can use AI to create social media posts to promote products, announce sales, and engage with followers as well as generate informational videos about topics related to products to capture loyal audiences.

Conversion Boost

This is the strategic effort made to ensure customers complete their purchase. Below are some strategies merchants can implement to boost conversion rates and generate more revenue.

Get personal: Customers want to be treated as unique. Online merchants can use AI to adapt their online storefronts in real-time to generate hyper-personalized shopping experiences, catalogs, and promotions. These AI tools allow merchants to offer and present the right products in the right order for the right user to reduce friction and increase conversion. Additionally, product recommendation tools can learn from shoppers' interactions and apply different recommendation algorithms that can increase average order value.

Have the best customer service: Superior customer service is a prelude to increased conversions. Sellers can improve customer service by using AI-powered chatbots. Already in 2020, chatbots responded to 85% of customer service interactions, and 80% of retail and e-commerce businesses use AI chatbots or plan to use them soon. No matter the inquiry, AI assistants can connect with customers 24/7 and solve or streamline the process for the customer support agents in the case of more complicated tickets. Additionally, 40% of consumers expect discounts and special shopping offers from AI chatbots.

Make sure to activate abandoned cart recovery tools: Every year 4.6 trillion dollars of goods are left in digital carts, of which it's estimated $260 billion is recoverable. Merchants can have abandoned cart systems implemented on their sites so customers automatically receive tailored and customized emails to remind them of the items. Multi-step recovery tactics can help determine how many emails should be sent and in which intervals to customers. It's also worth considering adding coupons to these emails to make a purchase more appealing.

Conclusion

With more retailers selling online, it's harder to break new ground, draw in new customers, and boost sales. Both competition and customer expectations are at an all-time high. Tech advancements are paving the way for these retailers.

Now, sellers can lean on technology to help them create unique and compelling content optimized for SEO, synchronize catalogs and promotions across various platforms, and create the shopping experiences customers expect. As technology evolves, there will be more tools and opportunities for technology to do the work so retailers can focus on expanding their product and service offerings and growing their businesses.