Speed matters—to both website visitors and existing customers, which is why brands that get it right benefit from higher conversions. But in the highly competitive world of e-commerce, being able to respond accurately and quickly is a challenge.
Today’s online shoppers seek instant access to what they’re looking for from products to services. It can be difficult for brands to identify what the optimal information is to display on specific web pages depending on the stages in the customer journey. It would be easier if customers had the same preferences and followed a simple linear path to buying. In reality, the customer journey is more like a pinball machine with website visitors bouncing between multiple e-commerce sites, social media, and review or rating sites to validate they’re making the right buying decision. The more they bounce around, the more touch points there are and the more complex and time-consuming the customer journey becomes. This also increases the likelihood that they’ll abandon the process entirely.
This is why brands need to leverage technology to better understand what visitors want and how they are responding to the various digital experiences being served. Finding the right answers requires moving on from simple A/B testing tools to more advanced forms of optimization that are agile, can scale, and adapt across all digital channels. It is becoming increasingly important in e-commerce to be able to generate meaningful insights quickly so that brands can respond faster to constantly changing customer preferences and market dynamics.
Advancing experimentation and personalization with AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to become the optimization and conversion expert’s best weapon in terms of gaining a competitive advantage. AI helps brands navigate the infinite complexity involved with improving user experience (UX) to make buying a quick and easy process.
Experimentation and personalization using AI delivers the ability to optimize the entire customer journey because it keeps track of all touch points and how visitors are responding to the experience presented to them. AI makes it possible to run more experiments with more ideas and thousands of different combinations. Optimization and conversion teams can exponentially expand their brand’s customer experience (CX) in ways previously unattainable which enables them to find entirely new ways to deliver journeys that convert.
Teams don’t have to pre-select which two ideas to test, all ideas can be added to the mix for natural selection as part of the optimization process. The ideas that aren’t performing will automatically get paused or discarded. The benefit of this is that at a strategic level it’s easier to identify which ideas didn’t perform well without wasting additional resources on them. AI quickly identifies the best performing ideas and combinations of ideas and prioritizes these for further improvement. You’re learning what works, quickly discarding what doesn’t and then working to create even better experiences from the top performing ideas. It’s important to note that each digital channel has unique capabilities and their UX must be optimized accordingly.
Across our clients we frequently see top performing ideas on desktop that don't do well on mobile. Conversely, low performers on desktop are often the top performers on mobile. This highlights the importance of optimizing using thousands of combinations across all channels and letting AI-driven experimentation and personalization track what visitors are responding to.
AI-driven experimentation and personalization enables agility and speed
The requirement for speed is driven by brands needing to respond quicker and more accurately to customers while they’re browsing. It’s about creating better connections with website visitors and being able to serve up content that is personalized and relevant to what they’re looking for. AI’s active learning uses the best performing ideas to serve up digital experiences based on visitor responses and continues to learn as customers respond in new ways. This helps provide early insights on shifts in trends which enables brands to pivot and realign to new customer preferences much faster.
For marketers focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as Time to Conversion, this ability to respond better to changing customer behaviors is significant. By offering relevant information it reduces shopping around and moves visitors closer to making buying decisions—which in turn can reduce the time to conversion. The only way to keep up with the pace of change in the marketplace is having the ability to optimize at scale, across all channels and always drive to find the next top performing ideas. This keeps the focus on being able to continually win at UX and CX because you’re able to respond faster to changing customer needs. Evolv AI can help increase your ecommerce conversions and optimize your customer personalization. Schedule a demo of our digital optimization platform today.
