By Mitchell Parton • December 9, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
This story originally published on sister site, Modern Retail.
This past Thanksgiving week, furniture and home decor brand CB2 used artificial intelligence as part of its text messaging marketing campaigns. Over the busy holiday sales periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when so many retailers are trying to reach customers, the more targeted messages helped the brand stand out from the crowd, said Ami Patel, CB2’s associate director of brand marketing.
Though CB2 is new to the AI tool — this was the first Thanksgiving week that the company used the technology in this capacity — it has worked with the SMS marketing firm Attentive since 2018. Attentive’s AI feature sends text messages to customers on CB2’s behalf, determining the right time to reach customers and customizing the messages to call out specific items tailored to what the customer is looking at on the website, for example.
According to Patel, the campaign saw a double-digit growth in engagement.
“There’s no way we could personalize to that level on our own,” Patel told Modern Retail. “Customers are responding better when the message is tailored to the item they were looking for and the stage of their shopping behavior that they’re in, versus just getting generic messages.”
Retailers have been using predictive AI for years, but many, like CB2, have expanded their use of customer-facing chatbots or tools to send out targeted messaging to specific customers. According to one report, this had an impact on Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
Salesforce reported an estimated $314.9 billion in global online sales, a new record, from Nov. 26 to Dec. 2. AI-based chatbots and product-recommendation features on retailers’ websites — as well as tools that help human customer service agents generate responses — played some role in $60 billion of those sales, or about one in five orders, Salesforce said.
“As AI gets more embedded into the shopper journey, as it becomes more intuitive and as shoppers are being introduced to newer tools, it’s having an increased impact,” Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights and strategy for retail and consumer goods at Salesforce, said in an interview. “As they become more in the mainstream, consumers are going to continue to grow in comfort and how they engage with [AI tools].”
Separately, chat platforms like ChatGPT have begun providing product recommendations to customers that link to e-commerce websites, functioning essentially like a search platform. Adobe Analytics found that traffic to retail sites from links on third-party chatbots, while still “modest,” increased by 1,950%.
AI isn’t always a magic bullet.
Industry West, a Florida-based online furniture brand, first experimented with AI two years ago when it implemented a chatbot from the London-based tech company Nibble, which negotiates discounts on the company’s clearance items with customers. The company had the negotiation bot online for this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday but didn’t see as much engagement with it as in the past, CMO Ian Leslie said.
“I’m not quite really sure what that’s chalked up to, if it’s just the customer wasn’t used to the experience, or that we had had it turned off too long or what,” Leslie said. “Generally, the customer doesn’t seem to mind. They know they’re dealing with AI.”
That doesn’t mean Industry West isn’t bullish on the technology. The company also uses an AI product recommendation tool from Nosto as well as ChatGPT for some marketing copy. It also has plans to expand its use of AI with a new HubSpot-powered chatbot that will provide information on product specifications and materials.
In Leslie’s opinion, while some AI tests didn’t work, the technology has still proven its worth. “It’s in all portions and all parts of what we’re doing as marketers in e-commerce,” he said.
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