Speaker 1: 0:02

Hi, welcome to the Big Commerce Podcast. Hello, welcome to a brand new episode of the Big Commerce Podcast. My name's Luigi, i'm your host And today is a solocast where I'm going to be talking to you about how, as an e-commerce merchant, you can start leveraging AI in your website to help grow sales, improve your service and market better. If this is your first time listening to our podcast, welcome. The Big Commerce Podcast is an e-commerce podcast for merchants of all stages of growth, and each week we bring you guests from our e-commerce ecosystem, from our tech partners and also merchants.

Speaker 1: 0:36

So AI, artificial intelligence been a lot of talk over the last six plus months, and how can you use it as a merchant in your business? Now most of us will have heard of platforms such as ChatGPT and Bard from Google, but really, how can you start leveraging these platforms to make not just your job more efficient, your colleagues and your employees more efficient, but actually integrating with technology to help grow sales, to increase engagement and, fundamentally, to increase your bottom line? So let's start with the things that are a bit more immediate. So ChatGPT or Bard from Google, b-a-r-d, which is in beta, but really only Bard from Google is really unavailable in select countries. Those are the kind of tools that you could be using to really write good content from a marketing perspective. So we've all maybe had a go at ChatGPT and so forth and gains, but actually if we really understand how it works and feed it the right information, we're able to create a very comprehensive and very targeted marketing campaign. So let's start with content. Most of you should have a blog of sorts that should be releasing content at least on a weekly basis to really drive those long-tail keywords based traffic where people are for new customers. Those blogs will rank highly in Google if you're using the right terms as well and answering the right questions. So listen, answer the public, for example, to find which questions you could answer in your blog post. These are all things that you can be supported by with systems like ChatGPT from OpenAI and also GoogleBard. So don't expect it just to write the whole blog post for you. You have to feed it in some information.

Speaker 1: 2:30

So let's not assume this is going to be a way to just lazily be able to write our content, because fundamentally, just like marketing 101, it is all about investments. So the more effort you put in, the more time you put in, the better the input, then the better the output. So first of all you need to start off by writing a content plan, a content marketing plan, and again you can leverage ChatGPT to help you put that together, to look for the subjects that your customers will be able to find you from. So write a really descriptive prompt about what type of content you want to be writing, what the purpose of that content is, who the audience for that content is, how long that content should be, the things that it mustn't include, the tone of voice. So the prompt should be in itself quite a few dozen words so that the systems can understand what type of content plan they should be putting together, what kind of suggestions they should be giving you. Pretty much, given that the first draft is going to be not the final product. You're going to have to refine it, maybe take some things out or maybe be a bit more specific on the others and regenerate. But once you've got enough content for, say, two months so whether that is eight to ten posts, or if you're planning on doing two a week, then obviously twenty, sixteen to twenty then you can start working with these platforms to write the actual content.

Speaker 1: 4:09

Now you've got to balance also the length of the blog post that you want to write. So if you're looking at writing a piece of content that's going to be twenty minutes long to read, you've got two problems with that. First of all, you're going to have to understand where are you getting that content from. If you're going to be linking to sources, you're going to have to do that research yourself. And secondly, who's going to read a blog post for twenty minutes? If somebody's going to take twenty minutes, you should be looking at other forms of media such as podcasting and YouTube videos and so on. So really try and keep it succinct to kind of five minutes of reading time at the most And if you need to, you can break it down into three or four posts and drip feed those out two, three times a week.

Speaker 1: 4:49

But remember you've got to talk about, you've got to understand what question you're answering, what keywords you want to focus on, the audience, the tone of voice that the content has to be written in. Also the language is it American English, is it British English, and so on. The length maybe kind of an emotive element as well. So use those systems to start writing content, but again, don't just kind of gloss over it. It is something that requires some effort on your part in order to be able to get the best out of it, and I would recommend you do two or three at a time. Even if you're only posting it once or twice a week, you can start scheduling things out, because then really you've got to start plugging in your social media campaigns to promote those blog posts as well.

Speaker 1: 5:33

So the first one there is writing content for your content marketing strategy. The second one is using platforms like Bard and ChatGPT for writing content for your website. So, whether that's for categories or whether that's for the about us, the contact us, those kind of content-based pages, maybe you can kind of enhance the paragraph, maybe, you know, kind of add a bit more of an emotive element to it, less boredom, less kind of monotone approach to it. So, again, that's number two. Number three and this is where you start getting to more specialized platforms, such as Jasper, is using AI to optimize your product description pages. So writing your product descriptions, writing your SEO tags, so, like the title tag, the meta description tag, known which keywords to focus on the tone of voice and the length. So Jasper is a paid for system, jasperai, but actually, if you can find those efficiencies in that, it's giving you very good content, it's reducing the time that you need to spend in order to optimize one or two or products or even categories of products, then obviously that investment starts to pay off in itself, and so that's another way that you can use AI to improve your website.

Speaker 1: 6:58

It does again require some patience. You've got to learn the prompts, maybe optimize them, but you know, within a couple of hours you can easily be churning out a raft of SEO improvements to your website, and then just a matter of implementing those directly into your product records. We've also spoken to merchants who are leveraging the APIs that these platforms use in order to be able to answer customer queries. So compatibility between products or foods, for example. If maybe you're selling foods or wine and you want to know compatibilities, that's where you can utilize AI. Now, that will require a bit of development. It's not as easy to spin up, but actually, if you find that maybe you're lacking that expertise internally as a company so maybe you know that food pairing for wine, for example, resides with one person within the business and they're quite busy then that's where you can start leveraging the tools out there to kind of say right, if somebody's you know is looking for a wine that pairs well with you know, white fish and chicken, and maybe it's a bit of a sweeter dish or a bit more salad, whatever it is, it can actually give you those types of pairings. So that's obviously an example for food and wine. but you can have other things, like, if you're selling fish, for example, compatibility with those, compatibility with you know, possibly with car parts as well that you obviously need to do some research, but the possibilities there are endless. So speak to your if you don't have an internal development resource, speak to your agency and understand how they can leverage the APIs to enhance, and it might even give you a, you know, bit of an angle when it comes to your competitors, because you've got this kind of interactive approach where your customers can ask, you know, in essence different questions and get those responses which are broadly quite accurate. So remember to make sure that it is accurate to do some testing, because fundamentally, what you're doing to do is misinform the customer, but certainly that's one of the ways that you can use AI to enhance your product descriptions and offer a bit more of an engaging experience to your customer.

Speaker 1: 9:11

You may also have seen that there are AI image generators available from. Even Adobe's got its Firefly solution, but if you Google, you'll find there's plenty of AI image generators. Some of them are extremely good, but again, it requires some investment on your part to be able to feed it the right prompts and make those small nuanced changes to get the image that you want. Some of them are free because they're a beta. Some of them are paid for and you'll find the right solution for you. But instead of just using kind of just standard stock photography, you can really start making custom imagery, not necessarily for the product, but possibly for marketing assets for your website and for social media, based on these image generators, and it's a really, really good way, especially for those that maybe don't have the resources or the time for kind of designing a lot of these images. It's a great way to utilize AI and get the returns of, you know, having some unique product imagery there that can be really compelling and be a benefit and asset to your, to your website. So that's pretty much it, covering very briefly how you can utilize the tools are out there yourselves in order to to improve content, whether that's imagery, that's text and so on. But there's also plenty of tools out there in the market that leverage AI, kind of utilize AI in their system to help make the merchants life, to help make the merchants job easier, and there's everything from our partners gorgeous, for example.

Speaker 1: 10:43

Gorgeous uses AI in terms of customer service. So the response is there. so it means that the customer can, in essence, self-serve, saving you time not having to have a you know, whether it's a dedicated customer service agent or even multiple customer service agents having a manually deal with customer requests. You can utilize the chatbot, for example, to automate responses. If you're putting out things like a knowledge base, it can reduce waiting times and so your customers should be slightly happier. And if you've really worked hard on making sure that this, the information has been provided, they'll get the answer that they want and therefore they'll, you know, kind of finish that experience on a high. They'll deliver, got the information that they wanted. They haven't had to speak to somebody and also, you know, have got to man that 24-7. So, especially, you know, in the age of cross-border trading, you can really offer a 24-7 service and obviously, for those cases that can't be answered by by chatbot, then using a system like gorgeous for kind of ticket management is is great, so gorgeous. Gor, gis. There's other systems as well Zendesk, for example, sales, fire and a lot of them will also have kind of AI capabilities. But gorgeous.

Speaker 1: 12:01

We've found that when we've shown into our merchants and to our prospects, they've immediately kind of fallen in love with this. Just the system that there seems to answer a lot of our merchant requirements from a marketing perspective. Another one of our partners is claveo. So one of the most important elements of marketing is really targeted marketing. So personalization, making sure that that marketing is tailored to the person that's receiving, the receiving end of that market, whether it is emails, whether it's social media posts, whether it's any form of other content. Really it's about being able to resonate with with that marketing, and so the great thing about claveo is using the AI tools, especially on marketing automation. So whether you're doing flows and those types of campaigns, you know if they don't open, if they don't click, if they bought this product, if they've not bought an X amount of time, all those systems and really the AI in there can help you build out really good campaigns from anything from being able to generate the subject line all the way through to segmenting customers based on based on those attributes. So claveo is is a fantastic example of how they're leveraging AI in their product to enhance the experience and make it easier for merchants to offer very good marketing without the massive investment that can. That can go without.

Speaker 1: 13:26

Just on the subject of personalization and search as well, we've been speaking about personalization as an industry for about two years now, kind of during COVID, where everyone was marketing online, where everyone was selling online. It was really about trying to make that experience more tailored for the customer or for the visitor. So a lot of our partners, such as Nosto and Cleavoo, they use AI for a personalization perspective. So make understanding what type of product the customer is searching for and what they're going to want to see. That's going to be more likely for them to check out. If somebody's searching for men's shoes, then they're not necessarily going to be interested in seeing children's trousers or women's blouses. Those kind of systems that start to build a picture of the customer within their algorithm and start passing through and displaying products that the system believes the customer is most likely to want and be interested in. Again, make that experience, just improve that experience. Just improve that experience, given the customer a more positive one.

Speaker 1: 14:41

So obviously these tools now start to come with a cost. There's been a lot invested in creating them and there is an ROI element to it as well, but it's worth evaluating From a search perspective. Even our partners, searchspring, for example, have a very good search tool that's also AI-powered, and BlueMute as well for those that are a bit more in the enterprise space. So a lot of these tools have AI built into them. They're constantly improving them, but they do come at cost.

Speaker 1: 15:11

From a licensing perspective, there's been a very quick dive into how, as a merchant, you can really start capitalizing on AI. Some of these are out of the box. Some of them you're maybe really familiar with and some of them you may have to delve in further and maybe do some development work on. But there's a possibility for, across the spectrum, for you to be able to go in and write content, write strategies, optimize content, write content in different languages as well. You could also get away with translating content, especially if you're doing cross-border Just make sure that somebody's always checking that All the way through to serving your customer things like customer service and responses and then giving your customer a very personalized and engaging experience through search and merchandising and personalization.

Speaker 1: 16:02

If you've got any questions, feel free to reach out. We've changed the domain name. It's info at thebitcommerspodcastcom. Find us on social media, on Instagram and on LinkedIn. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform And if you've got suggestions for any future episodes, please feel free to reach out to us by email or on social media. Thank you very much for listening and until next time. Goodbye you.