The benefits of AI personalization for your fashion e-commerce

Do you ever realize how many products, services, and content pass under your eyes every day? If you think about it, the ones that catch your attention are those you feel are made exactly for you.

As the number of choices increases, we are all more sensitive to brands that make us feel unique, appreciated, and cared for. This is particularly true in industries where the personal factor is crucial, reflecting how people see themselves and communicate it to others, like the fashion industry.

For a fashion brand to stand out in the crowd, it becomes essential to truly understand customers’ preferences and grant them a personalized experience during the entire purchase journey.

In this article, we deep dive into the value personalization can bring to fashion businesses, focusing on the online shopping experience and the crucial role artificial intelligence (AI) plays in it.

Why personalization improves your customers’ online shopping experience

Personalization is key to creating unique experiences and building brand loyalty over time.

Research shows that 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. They are also more likely to return and purchase from the same brand, as they feel understood and pleased.

In a world where shopping is predominantly digital, people need to find the right products in the fastest and easiest possible way without having to dig into the whole product catalog for hours. This is a critical tenet of e-commerce businesses: to help customers research their catalog fast and discover the products that best match each consumer’s tastes and style.

How to make this happen at scale, though?

It’s not just a matter of collecting and interpreting behavioral and demographic data correctly, but it’s also about building a rich, dynamic and automatic catalog.
And that’s where AI plays a critical role.

To learn more about how AI can reshape the digital fashion industry, read our previous article, “AI and Fashion – How Technology Can (Re)shape the Customer Digital Experience”.

AI Personalization: The 4 key benefits for your fashion e-commerce

Fashion brands can rely on the accuracy and speed of artificial intelligence to build detailed customer profiles, analyze customer behaviors along the customer journey, and properly segment their potential buyers.

Integrating AI into your fashion e-commerce stack enables the exploitation of multiple innovative use cases, such as trending, customers also viewed, and customers also bought. These functionalities boost personalization by helping customers identify the right products according to other similar buyers’ tastes and styles.

Advanced, AI-powered personalization tools, like CX Personalizer by ContentWise, however, go a step further.

They integrate additional use cases to personalize customers’ online shopping experience, such as recommended for you, visual similarity, outfit completion, and optimized search.

Beyond the extremely accurate analysis of customers, and the highly personalized experiences they create, these functionalities deliver key business benefits to your fashion e-commerce.

Let’s explore them in-depth.

1. Increase Average Order Value (AOV)

First and foremost, personalization increases the total purchase amount in a single order. This happens because most of the time, as people are shown products that match their tastes and preferences, they are more likely to buy them immediately, regardless of the initial intent.

The more accurate the data collected on customers, the more attractive the products recommended by the AI system will be, increasing the number and value of items bought.

To make this more concrete, imagine your customer exploring (surfing on) your fashion e-commerce site, looking for a striped, black and white shirt. She finds the perfect one and… Click! It goes in her cart for €59. Then, at the bottom, she sees a “Complete your outfit with” banner, and she spots a pair of beautiful high-waisted black pants that would fit perfectly with her shirt and her body shape. Click! Her cart is now €98. But wait, she also sees a pair of black ankle boots she has been looking for for months. She can’t miss them. Click! She pays €159.

The customer’s order size increased (unexpectedly) because she found what she was looking for right in front of her eyes and at the right time.

2. Raise conversion rates and revenue

Personalized shopping experiences drive more conversions and increase revenues for e-commerce. This happens because visitors who land on the online shop are more qualified and more likely to purchase.

According to research conducted by Salesforce on more than 150 million shoppers, personalized product recommendations drive 7% of visits, 24% of orders, and 26% of revenue.

In addition, visitors that convert into buyers for the first time are more likely to return to the same e-commerce site, as they know they will find something they like, thereby increasing average lifetime value.

3. Improve inventory performance

The introduction of advanced functionalities to recommend products and complete outfits facilitate product turnover in stock, improving inventory performance over time.

This is a key benefit for fashion e-commerce with extended, long-tail product catalogs, where the chances for many products to go unseen are very high. Usually, these products are sold at deep discounts during sales, which has a direct impact on e-commerce margins.

4. Drive customer satisfaction and brand loyalty

Would you return to a place where you found exactly what you wanted and made you feel “really you”? Of course, you would. Everyone would.

Personalization and customer loyalty perpetually live in a virtuous flywheel: more personalized recommendations mean more chances for a customer to become loyal and to return frequently to your e-commerce, allowing you to collect more accurate data to offer even more personalized suggestions.

AI-powered personalization helps you make your customers happier in the long run, as you will be able to anticipate their needs and adapt to the way they change over time.

You’ll always be a step ahead.

AI technology for your fashion e-commerce

Advanced AI technology represents a game-changer for digital fashion retail. It not only improves the online shopping experience for your visitors and customers, but it also simplifies the job of your e-commerce team by relieving each member from time-consuming and error-prone tasks.

At the core of efficient personalization tools, however, there is the need to collect, analyze and interpret data at scale. And this is possible only with an efficient and rich product catalog that is easy to manage and provides all the relevant information to build a personalized experience.

At ContentWise, we have developed Catalog Builder and CX Personalizer, two AI-powered products that work side by side to revolutionize end-to-end your customers’ online shopping experience.

To learn more about how to integrate these products into your fashion e-commerce and boost your digital sales, contact us.