Retail marketers are actively seeking AI solutions that will boost creativity and engagement. But the good news is that many such AI solutions are already available, just often overlooked.
Intelligent marketing automation platform Klaviyo has just released online a research paper The AI Trends Report For Ecommerce Marketers. More than 1500 marketers reveal how they’re using AI today – and how they hope to use it in the future. It concludes that marketers are actively seeking AI capabilities for their brand – capabilities that already exist.
“That’s pretty remarkable,” observes Jessica Schanzer, lead product marketing manager at Klaviyo. “It shows that so many marketers are literally missing out on using technology that already exists to empower their campaigns and customer interactions.”
As the report confirms: “Nearly half of the e-commerce marketers who are using AI on the job wish they had AI solutions for performing marketing analytics, comparing their brand’s performance to similar organisations, and predicting customer behaviour and attributes.”
Part of the problem appears to be that marketers’ attention has been captured by the introduction of OpenAI early last year, arguably the most commoditised and popular form of AI on the market today. “It’s shiny. It’s sexy. It’s a big reason so many of us have moved from wringing our hands over whether AI is coming for our jobs to believing AI can help us do our jobs better,” concludes the report.
Download the AI Trends Report For Ecommerce Marketers research paper here.
The top five tasks marketers wish they could use AI for
Respondents to the Klaviyo research nominated a range of tasks they would like to deploy AI in to enhance their marketing campaigns and customer engagement and retention programs.
- Performing marketing analytics: 49 per cent said AI could help them deliver relevant experiences that convert browsers into buyers, using predictive analytics, including forecast next-order date, customer lifetime value, spending potential, and demographics.
- Analysing their brand’s performance compared to similar organisations: Again, 49 per cent want AI to help them identify exactly where to improve their performance by uncovering hidden strategic opportunities with benchmarks, which show how key metrics stack up against rival brands.
- Predicting customer behaviour and attributes: 47 per cent want AI to help them curate recommendations at scale, delivering personalised product recommendations to customers.
- Creating full marketing campaigns: 45 per cent of respondents said that AI could help them work more efficiently in developing marketing campaigns – much like Klaviyo’s Al tool, which already creates high-performing email subject lines, email content, and even full SMS campaigns.
- Displaying a website form at the optimal conversion time: 44 per cent of respondents said they wanted to leave A/B testing to Al. In fact, Klaviyo Al tests multiple versions of a brand’s forms to find the highest-converting display time – in a single, autonomous test.
Klaviyo AI gives marketers a serious competitive edge. Here are four essential functions that successful marketers are deploying today to stand out from their competitors:
- Review sentiment AI: This allows marketers to determine products and promotions that spark joy, spot emerging trends and identify potential issues before they escalate.
- Predictive analytics: Marketers can use AI to predict future order dates, determine lifetime customer values, spending potential and time between orders – not to mention churn risk and other vital data to optimise customer interactions and conversions.
- Personalised product feeds: Brands can automatically show products online or in communications products that customers are more likely to buy. ”Klaviyo Al does what no human ever could, explains Schanzer. It analyses all your products, narrows them down to the ones each customer is most likely to buy, and places those recommendations in in-boxes within minutes.”
- Industry-specific benchmarks: Marketers can see how their brand stacks up against rivals to help fine-tune their marketing messages and ensure they are focused on the right levers to prompt customer interaction.
Schanzer says many marketers seem unaware that such powerful tools are available for them to deploy in their customer engagement executions.
“There is a possibility that marketers have been distracted by generative AI – and, as a result, haven’t been building out more in-depth AI strategies that really move the needle,” she says.
Frankie4 and Meshki prove Klaviyo’s AI approach works
Australian footwear label Frankie4 is one of the omnichannel retailers to boost engagement and sales using Klaviyo AI. The brand achieved a 51 per cent increase in SMS campaign revenue from the second half of last year to the first half of this year and a remarkable 59 per cent decrease in the unsubscribe rate from its SMS campaigns.
One way Frankie4 achieved such success was by using Klaviyo AI to leverage SMS as a VIP channel to boost the retention of its most engaged customers. It used timely, personalised SMS campaigns to offer early sale access and sneak peeks of new products.
“Consolidating our email and SMS marketing into Klaviyo has been a game-changer, not only for conversion and revenue uplift, but it has also streamlined our workflow and enhanced our ability to make data-driven decisions to personalise our customer touchpoints,” says Rebecca Sheppard, CRM manager at Frankie4.
Klaviyo helped the brand ensure it was not hitting new customers with many generic product messages. Instead, Frankie4 was able to nurture relationships through relevant, personalised content to make consumers feel they’re part of an engaged community.
Another retailer to reap the benefits is Meshki, which boasted 240 per cent year-on-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed value during the last quarter of last year. The global fashion retailer attributes 20 per cent of its global e-commerce revenue to Klaviyo campaigns and reports that its global email campaign growth soared 167 per cent during the same quarter.
Switching its SMS campaigns to Klaviyo enabled Meshki to reach customers across multiple regions and channels, all from a single platform.
The retailer succeeded by tapping into Klaviyo AI’s dynamic product feeds to automate personalisation at scale, ensuring shoppers receive handpicked product recommendations without manually building out thousands of campaigns.
“We need to ensure our CRM strategy not only is effective but directly impacts the business’s bottom line,” says Tiarne Warren, head of trade marketing and e-commerce at Meshki. “By bringing SMS into Klaviyo, we’ve been able to consolidate our tech stack, make our workflows more efficient, and access customer data all in one place.”
