Customer Personas and AI a match made in eCommerce heaven

In 2009 ShoeDazzle, co-founded by none other than Kim Kardashian, launched an innovative shopping approach where unlike a traditional eComemrce catalog, their customers would take a style quiz and they would be presented with a personalized shopping experience.  From a development perspective the quiz would collect a handful of data points and preferences and at the end of the quiz each customer is assigned to a persona.  The most relevant products to each persona’s expressed preferences can then be presented creating what seemed like a one-to-one shopping experience, eliminating products from the customer that they will not be interested in. 

Persona based shopping is highly effective as it removes those products which the customer is not interested in, which increases the engagement and conversion rate.  In presenting a narrow slice of a merchants catalog which fit each persona, we minimize the effort a customer must expend to filter and find what they are after.  

Personas can be used for a variety of mediums from web, email marketing and paid search engine marketing.

Taking the lessons learned from persona based shopping, websites have begun to use what we do know about a customer without the requirement of a quiz to ask the questions.  The personas can be defined on what we learn from their purchases, customer journey and browsing behavior to categorize the customer into a defined persona.  A customer may evolve from one customer persona to another as we learn more from their interactions.  Persona information could be used to prioritize the sequence or order which products are presented giving those products that we believe them to be more interested in the priority placement. 

Google Analytics can provide incredible insight, yet many merchants struggle to put those insights into actionable improvements.  With the rate of change in some sectors of the market like fashion, it can be challenging to extract insights while they are still relevant. 

Enter the AI craze of 2023, where we can now leverage AI and machine learning in several important areas to enhance persona based shopping.  AI excels in its ability to crunch massive amounts of data, and we can now leverage data from sources like Google Analytics, a to automatically create a personas based on historical data increasing the number of potential customer personas and backing that up with data.  Google Analytics can provide reports on customer acquisition, customer engagement, customer behavior and also conversions.  With the depth and views offered by analytics, AI can automate the generation of data driven personas digesting and extract insights automatically.  The effect to the customer when executed should further the feeling of a personalized showroom and shopping experience, where a customer may be in a customer group or persona of one, a true one-to-one relationship.