In the dynamic and fast-paced world of retail, the customer always comes first. This is as true today as it ever was. With the rise of digital, e-commerce, and social media fundamentally changing the way we connect, discover and shop today, retailers MUST BE at the forefront of customer experience innovation in order to survive and thrive.
Now, we have entered a new era of retail enabled by the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI). AI technology, specifically vertical AI or applied AI for retail, is revolutionizing every aspect of the retail value chain. These technologies are purpose-built for retail applications and deliver immediate and practical, not theoretical, impact. By enabling deeper insights, higher productivity, and powerful new capabilities, retailers can launch new growth initiatives as well as reimagine legacy operating models across merchandising, marketing, and sales.
Retailers are increasingly making massive investments in AI that enhance personalization and elevate the customer experience. One example of this is reimagining product preferences through the lens of the consumer’s own words. By applying a more robust consumer vocabulary to product details and attributes, retailers can build true customer-centricity right into the DNA of their business: their products.
Learn more about how injecting the language of the consumer across the entire retail value chain, from make to market and sell, delivers more enjoyable shopping experiences that drive sales and build loyalty.
Make
Before a product ever graces the eyes of a consumer, a series of pivotal decisions are made in its creation phase. Here are some examples of how Lily AI shines in the “make” process:
- Assortment and Purchase Planning: With greater attribute depth applied across a retailer or brand’s existing catalog and past purchase data, demand forecasting and planning teams can more easily identify similar proxy products as well as broader trends to inform what to buy and produce or pack away for another season.
- Product Design to Product Onboarding: Through a more robust, consumer-language enriched product vocabulary, retailers and brands can harness a customized, human-powered product taxonomy leveraging over 20,000 product attributes to design and describe new products and collections with consumer needs and preferences top of mind.
Market
Marketing a product is just as crucial as its creation. With Lily AI, retailers can optimize touch points like:
- SEO and SEM: Climb the organic search rankings and drive more traffic to product display pages (PDPs) and product listing pages (PLPs) by infusing descriptions, meta tags, and Google Merchant Feeds with more consumer-oriented keywords. These benefits extend to paid search as well by integrating long-tail keywords that are less competitive and thus typically more cost-effective, yet still show high shopper intent.
- Retail Media: From sponsored listings to personalization and audience targeting, ensure customers and shoppers are seeing the most relevant products available to maximize click-through (CTR) and conversion rates. With customer-centered understanding of product affinities, needs and wants, build smarter ad campaigns that meet advertiser expectations for this high growth channel.
- Trend Campaigns: With deeper and more specific product attribution data, retailers and brands can quickly and easily create product collections based on trends and themes. Retailers can take these collections a step further by converting them into fully integrated marketing campaigns across advertising, email marketing and social, so consumers can be inspired and then instantly shop the trend.
Sell
When Lily AI launched, the focus was on ‘the Sell’, recognizing the importance of ease, convenience and relevance when delivering a delightful consumer shopping experience. Below are the top three most popular ways that Lily AI gives retailers the competitive edge in driving ecommerce growth today:
- Product Copy Generation: Developing the right romance copy and highlighting all of the most relevant, SEO-friendly, and shopper-friendly attributes is too often left to manual guesswork, not to mention it’s labor-intensive, inconsistent, and slow. With Vertical AI retailers can go beyond automating title and description copy to actually optimize copy with AI-powered copy generation.
- Site Search: Search bar shoppers are high-intent consumers–they’re ready to buy and know what they want. To convert this interest into sales, retailers need to understand the conversational and dynamic language of their consumer. This requires both a site search platform and the customer-centric product attribution data “fuel” to power it. When retailers have both, there’s a better understanding of both the branded and non-branded terms, as well as the head and the long-tail searches, to display the most relevant, conversion-driving site search results for all consumers.
- Filters & Facets: E-commerce filters and facets are a core part of every website, yet for the retailer, attributing a broad assortment of products correctly so that they match the ideal mix of filters and facets isn’t always so fast and easy. That’s where AI-supported product attribution can help. By automating more of the product data enrichment process during item setup, retailers can easily ensure new products are listed in the right categories so that they’re primed for discovery and sell-through.
Customer Experience Innovation, Turbocharged by AI
In the realm of e-commerce, the digital shelf’s ability to mimic the magic of the in-store experience is paramount. Even in stores, digital and mobile increasingly intersect with and enhance the in-store experience.
Today, however, the lack of consumer-centric language and the consumer perspective within the make, market and sell phases of the retail value chain create a fundamental disconnect.
Fortunately, vertical AI solutions like Lily AI are purpose-built to quickly bridge this gap. Leveraging solutions like Lily AI, retailers can optimize and scale initiatives that ensure the entire consumer shopping experience is enjoyable, convenient, and delivers the kind of customer satisfaction that builds true brand loyalty.
Learn more about how Lily AI transforms each phase of the retail value chain and connect with one of our retail AI experts!
