How Retail Leaders Can Activate AI

While AI adoption has seen incredible strides over the past few years, several barriers still prevent retail marketers from making the most of AI’s potential. Whether it’s the cost of acquiring a new solution, integrating it into existing tech stack tools, or even understanding how to use the technology to actually push the needle forward for your business, it can be tempting to put AI on the back burner. 

The only issue? Retail marketers that put off their AI efforts are going to struggle to keep up, especially since 74% of early AI adopters are already seeing results:

• Significant increases in email click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue per send
• Improved efficiency and revenue growth across retail operations
• Hyper-personalized communications that display the right message at the right time

Long story short? Removing barriers to AI needs to be priority number one, because AI implementation is already proving to be the key to future-proofed marketing success.

That’s why the debut of our report, in partnership with the Marketing AI Institute, The AI for Retail Leaders Blueprint is here. It explores both the current opportunities AI presents for retail marketers and the most strategic ways to incorporate AI into your business. In this blog, you’ll get an overview of how retail marketers can drive successful AI implementation by overcoming three common hurdles.

Pursue AI Literacy

While more than half of retail marketers understand how to use AI for tasks like personalization and optimization, they are still missing the knowledge needed for execution. This means that while AI literacy is on the rise, there’s still a gap that needs to be bridged.

Reaping the benefits of AI can’t happen without in-depth knowledge of the solution’s capabilities and applications. AI isn’t just for data scientists or IT teams; it’s for every person in your company. To maximize the benefits of AI, the very first step companies need to take is giving their employees a robust knowledge of the tool. 

Understand AI’s Impact on Current Roles

With any major technological advancement, roles and responsibilities change. In the case of AI, retail marketers that have already adopted the solution have revved up their efficiency by offloading repetitive tasks and have begun pouring more time into strategic planning and decision-making. 

These are all undeniable benefits. However, these shifts require a restructuring of how employees’ time and talents are best used. As more opportunities for strategizing and data-driven analysis have opened up, retail leaders need to decide how they can best allocate their team’s time for maximum results. 

Identify Key Use Cases and Adopt the Right Tools

The good news is, retail marketers don’t have to wait until AI literacy and role refocusing is complete before dipping their toes in AI’s practical applications. Throughout the consideration process, retail marketers can begin identifying the use cases and tools that would most highly benefit their organization.

Tried-and-True AI Use Cases

One of the best track records for AI’s success is in email. AI’s ability to not only analyze email performance, but adapt content to each customer’s preference at scale, is unmatched. Additionally, AI unlocks the ability to:

• Create nearly limitless variations of email creative and content that not only appeals to customers, but can be tested and validated constantly
• Optimize email send times to understand when individual subscribers are active and opening emails
• Generate and A/B test successful subject lines at scale
• Hyper-personalize emails at an individual level for every unique recipient

That ability to personalize and adapt to customers’ responses is one of AI’s most valuable assets, especially with personalization being a priority for the majority of CMOs.

Automatically analyzing and segmenting customers based on demographics or purchase history only scratches the surface of what AI can do for personalization. The solution can continuously adapt messaging to re-engage dormant contacts, or discover and suggest new products that align with unique tastes, motivations, and preferences. Additionally, web and mobile content can be dynamically adjusted to match customer preferences. The personalization options are infinite. 

Hoping to find more use cases for content and creative or social media and advertising? You’ll find those examples and much more in the full report. 

Discover AI’s Full Potential

Read the entire report to gain the full scope of AI’s potential and invaluable strategies for the future. You’ll also get a glimpse at how major retailers like L.L.Bean and Victoria’s Secret are already driving incredible results from AI for their marketing program.

Don’t wait. Download the report here.