The Impact of AI on E-Commerce Average Order Values (AOV)

Intelligent remarketing is essential to creating businesses that scales and Artificial Intelligence is leading the charge.

Here’s what our friends at JustUno had to say on about how brands can take advantage of the traffic they are already getting.

Intelligently Remarketing with Dynamic Upsells & Cross-Sells

The When

While it is currently a hot topic, especially in e-commerce, AI is more than just a buzzword. Machine learning is enabling e-commerce businesses to learn and adapt faster than ever while increasing their profits beyond what is possible through manual means.

AI can sound daunting or ‘too robotic’ for many, but think of it as a convenient personalization tool you can leverage to make specific segments of your marketing funnel smarter. According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, retailers that implemented personalization strategies saw average sales gains of 6-10%, a rate two to three times faster than other retailers (BCG). We all understand the importance of providing the right message, to the right person, at the right time, but without AI this is simply untenable for all but the largest teams.

With the power of AI, you can level the playing field and execute your marketing strategy from a smarter and more efficient perspective. You’ll provide a better overall customer experience, free up your valuable time for additional revenue-generating activities, and most importantly, increase conversion metrics.

Let’s take a deeper look at why you should be embracing AI marketing technology today, and ways you can immediately begin implementing it into your e-commerce marketing strategy!

The What

Upsells and cross-sells are a commonly used tactic for quickly increasing average order values (AOV). You may be wondering what exactly is the difference between an upsell and cross-sell? It’s simple if you just remember these well-known fast-food examples:

• Upsell = “Would you like to ‘Mega-Size’ that order for only $1?”
• Cross-sell = “Would you like to add fries to that order for only $1?”

When you implement Justuno Plus’ AI features, our technology starts analyzing your website to produce the data required for these intelligent recommendations. This includes ingesting your product catalog, visitor behavior, and determining key things like:

• What products are most popular
• What combinations of products are the most popular
• Average order values

Once Justuno has gathered enough information about your products and visitor purchasing behavior, you can begin to include AI-driven intelligent upsells and cross-sells in your promotions. Justuno will then continuously work to optimize these as it collects more data.

The Who

Once we know what is being purchased and how it’s time to display relevant messaging to targeted visitors. Justuno’s core technology fingerprints these visitors and can recognize them when returning to your site. This allows you to show relevant offers that align with a particular segment of your funnel — whether they’re a new or returning customer, on their first, second, or fifth visit, have an abandoned cart history, etc.

Even if they have switched from mobile to desktop, used an incognito window, or took other ‘evasive’ actions, you’ll still be in the loop! That’s some serious intel on your traffic that you can have out-of-the-box with any Justuno plan, and with certain creative applications, the possibilities are nearly endless. (psst… no AI Plus features required for this)

The How

Now that we understand product sales dynamics and visitor behavior, you can leverage these details to hone-in with advanced behavioral targeting and decide exactly how you’ll deliver offers to key website visitors.

Here are just a few examples of rule sets for triggering targeted upsell and cross-sell promotions:

• New visitors that begin showing exit behavior such as cursor travel to ‘back’ button, idle time, etc. (display exit offer with a discounted popular item to reduce bounce rate)
• UTM terms (mirror offsite promo messaging onsite or display different recommendation based on a user selection)
• Visitor source from email, social, paid advertisements, and more (optimize marketing expenditure with maximum conversions)
• Visitor has added an item to cart and been on site X times without completing their checkout (display a discounted cross-sell offer with an AI suggested related product)
• Returning visitor with cart total value >X (target those ‘window shoppers’ with offers proven to convert)
• Visitor has placed an order before within past X days (display complementary cross-sell items that weren’t purchased during the last session)

Using one – or a combination – of the above rules for triggering an intelligent upsell or a related product cross-sell can instantly boost your remarketing strategy. Visitors will be seeing products they’re more likely to purchase because Justuno has used data to predict the best products to offer!

The Why

It might not seem like it could make much difference, but even increasing your AOV by a minuscule percent can compound into large overall lifts at the end of the quarter/year. With the help of AI, that and more is readily attainable, and it requires little to no effort beyond initial setup. 

If you are currently spending time analyzing customer purchase behavior and manually calculating upsell / cross-sell opportunities, then you may be a good candidate for Justuno Plus and its added AI functionality. Don’t forget that Justuno can offer as much or as little help required to get your AI-driven marketing operations up and running. From proven strategic guidance to full white-glove service, our goal is to make a bigger impact on your sales with less work required by you!

Jenna Ochoa is the Partner Marketing Manager at Justuno. She has been working in the e-commerce industry for over 5 years and occasionally writes about it on the Justuno blog.