A Beginner's Guide to Machine Learning: 6 Best Use Cases in E-commerce

We've said it before, and we'll repeat it again: The road to e-commerce success is long and challenging, and it isn’t just reliant on one thing. However, you don’t have to be overburdened - with the right technologies and the right insights, you can reduce your manual workload and achieve business success with ease 🏆😎.

With that in mind, here’re 6 actionable ways that you can leverage machine learning to personalize customer journeys and make more informed data-driven business decisions.

Understanding machine learning

Machine learning has been a trendy buzzword in recent years. However, many people might still have questions in mind concerning this relatively new concept but don't want to ask out loud. So, let's have a look at the question of what is machine learning?

Machine Learning is a current application of AI-based around the idea that we should really just be able to give machines access to data and let them learn for themselves.

- Forbes

In the era of big data, e-commerce stores have access to more information about their customers than ever before. And machine learning can help them make sense of and make use of these valuable customer data for diverse marketing purposes.

As Business Insider Intelligence’s study presents, 72% of retailers are planning to invest in machine learning technologies by 2021.

Do you also want to catch this trend, utilizing machine learning and data-driven solutions to grow your e-commerce business's sales and revenue successfully?

Keep reading to learn about the 6 best use cases of machine learning in e-commerce!

1. Finding a Needle in a Haystack

Having an extensive catalog of products holds both pros and cons. While you can offer customers a wide range of options, sometimes you might also make it hard for them to navigate your webshop. Yet, this dilemma can be overcome with an intelligent on-site search function. With Clerk Search, you can help customers with:

• Autocorrection: Displaying shoes as the correct search results when a customer misspelled the search query as “shoo”
• Auto-prediction: Automatically recognizes the customer’s search intent and context as soon as they begin their search string
• Relevant categories: If a customer is looking for shoes, present them with relevant categories for "trainers," "slippers," "sandals," and etc., and guide their product discovery journey.
• Popular items: Placing the best-selling shoes at the top of search results as they have proven to be popular among other buyers before.

👀 Read more on how Natural Baby Shower guides customers with an intelligent search engine and increases revenue by saving misspelled searches.

Powered by machine learning technologies, your e-commerce store can rely on these advanced functions to personalize customers' search experience and always show them the most relevant products! Also, thanks to the nature of machine learning, the search results are constantly improving over time as customers are using them more and more.

2. Tailored E-tailing to Win the Heart of Your Customers

Did you know that 66% of consumers report that encountering content that isn’t personalized would stop them from making a purchase?

Worse still, if you fail at providing relevant, personalized product recommendations, you can lose customers to your competitors. As 47% of consumers check Amazon if the brand they’re shopping with doesn’t provide product suggestions that are relevant.

It's a nearly impossible task to manually pick relevant product suggestions for each of your customers. So instead, you should let technologies handle it! Clerk Recommendations allows you to reply on machine learning technologies to better understand customers’ buying interests and then AI to instantly match products and people.

With 15 prebuilt smart logics (e.g., hot products, order-based, visitor click history, best cross-sell products and many more), Clerk makes it easy for you to ensure relevance and personalization across your customer's entire shopping journey.

3. Making a Difference with Segmentation Magic

Think about you and your colleagues, are you all the same? Probably not! Variation is what makes us all special, and your customer base is no different. So why treat them as one?

It's time to let machine learning take over and make the most out of your customer data. Based on historical and real-time customer data, Clerk’s AI-driven segmentation engine can figure out complex marketing questions, like:

• Will this customer be interested in this product, category, or brand?
• How often does this customer purchase from your store?
• Is this customer still active or slipping away?
• How does this customer respond to offers and discounts?
• What is the average order value of this customer?

and the list goes on…

Here’s an example of how Munk Store uses Clerk to create scalable audience segments for varying marketing purposes, such as re-engaging one-time buyers that are slipping away, win back loyal customers that are lost, and much more!

4. Churn Out Sales, Not Your Customers

In line with function 3, machine learning is also able to utilize customer data for churn prediction. This is a prediction of which customers you are most likely to lose 😱. With this prior knowledge of which customers are losing interests, you can take countermeasures to retain them, for example, launching an email marketing campaign to reactive them:

If you want to learn more about how to optimize your marketing strategy with AI-driven segmentation in 2021, check out our latest article 👉 here.

5. Helpful Helpdesks

Whether this part of your business is called customer support, customer service, customer care, or another variation, there is one central theme: the customer. Customer relationship management is vital to building good rapport to acquire and maintain customers.

Machine learning can help map patterns of common customer queries, provide suitable responses, and figure out when to pass on a query to a manned hotline or email service. Since 69% of customers prefer using chatbots for quick questions, human-computer interaction can be leveraged to your benefit 🤩.

6. Sending More Relevant Marketing Emails

To refresh your memory: Recent data indicates that email marketing generates an excellent ROI of 4,400%, as it yields $44 for every $1 spent 💰. To take it to the next level, you can leverage machine learning and AI technologies to achieve email automation and email personalization.

Below are examples of Ugleunger, a children's clothing brand in Denmark, automating and personalizing its Welcome Email and Abandoned Cart Email, which utilizes Clerk's prebuilt triggers and product logic.

If you want to hear more on how Ugleunger delivers hyper-personalized experiences and maximizes email marketing results with minimal effort, check out the whole success story.

There’re ENOUGH hours in the day … or at least there are when you let machine learning lend a helping hand 🙌. By offloading manual tasks that are time- and energy-consuming, you can focus on the more important things! And more importantly, take time for yourself 🥰.

Being the world's #1 rated e-commerce personalization platform, Clerk.io helps 2,500+ e-commerce stores worldwide improve their CX and grow sales. If you want to find out how you can leverage machine learning to help your e-commerce site, schedule a meeting with one of our specialists today:

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