How To Sell More Apparel On Black Friday With AI-Driven Personalized Marketing
By: Ian Mckinnon
Tags: Black Friday, Conversion Optimization, Customer Retention, AI, Personalized Marketing

How To Sell More Apparel On Black Friday With AI-Driven Personalized Marketing Ian Mckinnon Follow Sep 6 · 5 min read

Automate on-/off-site marketing and maximize conversions in 2021

Online traffic doesn’t get any heavier than during the BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) long weekend, which begins this year on Friday, November 26.

Lots of ecommerce pros go to great lengths to prepare early with the intention of selling as much as they can.

Fashion ecommerce is especially busy, with 55% of shoppers planning to buy clothing, shoes and leather goods.

What kind of products do you plan to buy on Black Friday? Statistics via/ Statista.com

So how can AI help apparel merchants during BFCM?

AI-driven personalized marketing automates conversion optimization and customer retention by gaining insights into what consumers want in real time.

AI solutions optimized for fashion and beauty can employ computer vision to view your catalog and create highly detailed product tags. When these tags are combined with shopper data (transactional, real-time browsing behavior), personalized preference profiles can be created and used to keep shoppers on your site longer, buying more and even returning to shop after they’ve left your site.

So how does that work? Personalizing your marketing with your own customer data is the key.

Using individualized pop-ups to engage hesitant shoppers

If you have exit-intent pop-ups running on your site you can tempt shoppers with personalized offers when they begin to make moves to leave. When browsers on your site begin scrolling down a PDP (product details page) after viewing a product, or if they begin jumping between PDPs it often means that they may soon leave your site.

Exit-intent pop-ups can be set to appear when this browsing behavior occurs, giving you a much better chance to:

Increase customer engagement

Reduce cart abandonment

Improve your conversion rate

As these actions occur, the AI automatically deploys exit-intent popups that make discount offers on products that match the shopper’s preferences.

A Shu Uemura shopper preference profile with a personalized discount pop-up based on the shoppers favorite colors and transaction history.

Cross selling with personalized product recommendations

Preference profiles with detailed, attribute-level product tags plus customer data can be used to make recommendations on any page of your website, increasing your chances on cross-sells.

Browsing behavior is monitored and site visitors end up seeing recommendations that match their preference profile. Recommendations for returning visitors are even more on point.

This combined product/customer data is a powerful thing. Using it to engage customers personally has been shown to boost AOV and get 5X ROI.

From the moment a shopper arrives on your landing page, personalized recommendations can be set to engage customers. Product page recommendations are especially effective, having been shown to increase sales by as much as 51%.

Reconnecting authentically with shoppers who abandoned carts

7 out 10 carts get abandoned at checkout and the annual Black Friday shopping spree is no exception. One of the best ways to prepare is to leverage your customer data and personalize your remarketing/retargeting.

In recent years it’s been shown that sending personalized emails that include authentic touchpoints from shoppers’ recent online experiences get higher open rates and CTR than any other form of email outreach. 11% of these emails end up converting a sale!

There are actually lots of things you can do to prevent shopping cart abandonment in the first place.

But when it does happen, the best thing to do is to have a well-thought-out recovery plan for email/SMS remarketing and retargeting ads.

How to send personalized remarketing emails

The trick to getting authentic touchpoints for emails is to mine your customer data and create preference profiles and the best way to do that is to leverage machine learning.

There are plenty of SaaS providers out there with AI-driven solutions that automate data collection, saving you time and giving you valuable insights about your customers/website visitors.

With this data in hand you can write the kind of effective follow up emails that drive sales after shoppers have left your site.

If you schedule them to be sent right away it’s best, within a couple hours of the cart being abandoned to remind shoppers while the experience is still fresh.

Use SMS remarketing

While email remarketing gets a high open rate, the open rate for SMS is super high at 98%.

One reason is that we often see an SMS before an email. When an SMS pops up, we read immediately because it’s so short and usually easy to read in its entirety as a notification.

Pay for retargeting ads

Retargeting ads also work well for recovering abandoned carts. The most effective way to run a campaign is to base it on specific segments.

AI-driven solutions can help identify these segments, right down to their browsing/spending habits and product preferences at the attribute level.

Conclusion

Black Friday ecommerce competition is intense and merchandising can make or break your success. Good merchandising engages customers, making the experience interesting and comfortable and guiding them along the customer journey.

The key takeaway is that setting up your backend with accurate product tags is a critical first step that gives you more control of everything you want to do.

About Rosetta.ai

Rosetta AI offers image-based personalization for more engaging shopping experiences, detailed shopper data for email marketing/SMS campaigns, and preference analysis insights for better business decisions.

On average, our clients double their order value and triple their conversion rate because shoppers on their websites are more engaged by the industry-leading accuracy of our personalized recommendations.

Rosetta AI has been featured in Forbes Top 25 ML startups and Analytics Insights Top 10 companies.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial today and start growing your business on day one!