If you’re an ecommerce brand that has yet to embrace machine learning (ML), you’re not alone – take up of the technology is still in its infancy. And that means you still have time to get ahead of the competition. And no, it doesn’t involve ChatGPT.

We recently hosted a webinar on this, covering all the essentials, from what ML is to why it matters. If you missed it, don’t worry. We’ve gathered 6 key takeaways from the webinar below.

1. ML helps you better understand your data

One of the key strengths of ML is its ability to rapidly analyse huge amounts of data, learn from it and identify patterns in ways humans simply can’t.

In turn this helps to unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation, providing you with, for example, unique insights into various aspects of your ecommerce business. Keen to improve your current sales pipeline? ML can help with that. Looking to better define customer attribution? ML can assist.

Ultimately, what ML does is provide you with an advanced understanding of your data – and a significant competitive advantage, too.

2. ML improves and enriches your data

Your machine learning models are only as good as your data – and quality matters. The good news is that ML can help improve and make sense of your data, irrespective of whether it’s fragmented, patchy, inaccurate or well past its sell-by date.

Take your website content. You might think it’s okay, but it isn’t. It’s lacking depth and focus. ML can, for example, add more detail and create more pages to help you better connect with prospects that you’ve previously been unable to capture, captivate and convert via Google or your site .

Better quality data – and more of it – is a game changer.

3. ML helps you work smarter

There is a great deal of activity within ecommerce marketing that is repetitive, labour intensive, convoluted and inefficient – think managing inventories, segmenting customers, updating product descriptions and making price adjustments.

This manual-heavy approach has always been a major drain on resources and finances, holding ecommerce brands back from realising their full potential. With ML, however, you can automate these manual processes, freeing you and your team to focus on other, more high-value activities. It also means you can redirect spend to other areas of the business like R&D.

In short, ML helps you work smarter – to everyone’s benefit.

4. ML allows you to scale faster than ever before

Being able to swiftly create quality content at scale has never been easy. When done to a high standard, it’s time-consuming and expensive. When shortcuts have been taken and content has been churned out – i.e. done in haste – the quality has unsurprisingly been subpar (resulting in poor performance).

ML makes easy work of this. It can identify gaps in your content, however voluminous, and then provide you with the very content needed to fix it, helping you, for example,  cover more digital ground in Google and capture traffic that you would otherwise lose out on.

You can call that scalability made easy.

5. ML increases sales from your existing inventory

Yep, you read that right. No additional products, no gimmicky deals, ML is able to help you generate more sales from your existing inventory.

Here’s an example. Your inventory contains products that have been tagged with relevant attributes. The problem is that they’ve not been properly tagged. Take a sofa. Tags like blue and velvet have been added, but tags like wooden legs, square arms and fixed back haven’t. These are terms customers are searching for but when they do, nothing turns up, even though your inventory contains products with those features.

ML helps to identify what’s missing, what people are searching for and automate the tagging process. Now when a prospect makes a search on your ecommerce site, they’ll find what they’re looking for. Win-win for all.

6. ML unravels the complexities of natural language

Making sense of the messy, complicated and varied way that people search is one of the biggest challenges facing ecommerce brands today. Cue keyword research, one of the key pillars of SEO.

The problem is that it’s always been limited – it requires a lot of manual work, with output tending to be limited to only a few thousand words. That’s not necessarily bad, but it ultimately doesn’t cover the full ranking potential of your ecommerce site. There are tens of thousands of more words that you could be ranking for.

We call this the keyword universe, which ML helps to unravel and organise through natural language processing. What you end up with is a clearer picture of the search landscape – one that is full of untapped potential that will give you a competitive edge.

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Our AI-powered solutions can help improve your site architecture, internal search capabilities, create on-brand content at scale and generate new and more product tags across your entire inventory. For more on how, drop us a note and we’ll set up a call to discuss your unique challenges and how we can overcome them together.