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Nearly every business today has a website. Websites can bring more customers and increase sales. However, companies that don’t invest in their website’s user experience (UX) or usability won’t be productive. If people can’t easily navigate your website or find it unappealing, they will leave your site.
Here’s where artificial intelligence (AI) can help. AI technologies can uplift and transform your website by improving customer experience, generating more conversions, taking care of data compliance, optimizing website images, and predicting churn. This article reviews seven advanced ways to use AI to improve your business website.
How Web Analytics Work
Most analytics tools “tag” websites by inserting a snippet of JavaScript in website source code.
Using this tag, the analytics tool counts website visitors, clicks on a link, and user behavior. The tag can also collect information like geography, device type, and browser type.
Web analytics services can also use cookies to track individual sessions and to determine repeat visits from the same browser. Since browsers have various restrictions, and some users delete cookies, different analytics tools can sometimes produce slightly different results.
How AI Improves Web Analytics
Many AI technologies and tools can turn raw web data into actionable insights. Companies can use these insights to personalize product recommendations, take care of data compliance, and improve customer service.
Personalized Recommendations
Customized content and personalized product recommendations can significantly improve website engagement. It’s been reported that personalized shopping cart recommendations influenced 92 percent of shoppers online, while personalized home page promotions influenced 85 percent of visitors to buy.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are used to access and analyze large amounts of customer data to create individualized segments. Website visitors receive personalized offers, text, deals, and more.
Data Compliance
Companies are collecting large amounts of data on their websites. This includes personal data like social security numbers, behavioral data like purchase histories, and engagement data like social pages interactions. However, until recently, companies have not assigned this data the same level of governance as email addresses in a marketing database or customer records in a CRM.
Tracking these mountains of personal data can be challenging, especially on dynamic websites which might change from visitor to visitor, depending on the level of personalization. Personal data is at constant risk of exploitation or data breaches. That’s why companies need to include websites as an important part of the complete data privacy compliance story.
Incorporating AI in website compliance systems can demonstrate at least three clear benefits — reducing false positives, addressing human error, and lowering costs. Companies can also leverage AI to prevent data breaches by spotting malicious behavior patterns in data usage.
AI and Images
Studies show that people remember 80 percent of what they see and only 20 percent of what they read. MIT also found that the human brain can process images in as little as 13 milliseconds. These and many other statistics favor the idea that images are powerful means of communication. Websites use images to increase engagement, illustrate stories, present services or products, and grow social media.
However, large images can slow your website. Users are more likely to abandon a website if the page load time is more than 3 seconds. This can significantly increase your bounce rate and affect conversions. AI can categorize website images and image names to provide optimization based on the customer’s behavior. The optimization is done by detecting different patterns and structures within an image as well as other related images of similar patterns.
SEO Analytics
Google receives about 2.3 trillion searches per year. 15 percent of daily searches are new. Therefore, you’ll have a difficult time attracting new visits to your website if your website doesn’t show up for the appropriate search queries. Machine learning and AI-based SEO analytics tools can quickly identify website issues and offer feedback to improve your search rankings.
Customized Landing Pages
Product-specific landing pages help increase your conversion rates since they are focused on a single goal. This goal often matches the search intent of the visitor. Customized landing pages help a company to offer tailored image suggestions of their products or services according to visitors’ preferences.
AI can analyze visitors’ attributes and send them to the most relevant image variant. These images can be used to recognize the viewer’s shopping preference by showing visitors products of their choices.
Customer Churn Prediction
Acquiring new customers costs five times more than retaining existing ones. This statistic suggests that customer churn costs your business money and hurts your reputation. Luckily, companies can now leverage AI to analyze customer interactions to predict and prevent churn.
Companies can develop a risk model through machine learning and predictive analysis of website data. This model will indicate how likely customers are to end their relationship with the company. Then, the model can either send you a warning or automatically serve a solution to prevent that customer from walking away.
Online Customer Service
Chatbots are AI-powered systems that analyze a user’s question and serve a response based on language and behavior cues. They act as 24/7 virtual assistants for website visitors. Losing the “human touch” in such business-to-customer interactions isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Website visitors appreciate the quick support they receive, and companies reduce their customer support expenses.
Moreover, 75 percent of companies using chatbots on their website report at least a 10 percent increase in customer satisfaction. Apart from working 24/7, chatbots are also immune to stress and frustration from impassioned visitors. AI chatbots are not going to completely replace human customer service in the near future; however, their benefits in improving UX are clear.
Wrapping Up
Business success has become dependent on improving website engagement and customer journey. Businesses today are using AI technologies to analyze website visitors’ data and take analytics to a whole new level. There are numerous AI tools out there. Make sure to do the proper research to utilize them fully.