Ross Andrew Paquette is Founder and CEO of Maropost, a commerce platform that streamlines operations and unlocks customer insights.
Traditional retail’s greatest strength was its personal touch—store associates who knew your preferences and anticipated your needs.
Now, AI is taking personalization even further, helping retailers build even more authentic connections with millions of customers at the same time. AI isn’t just matching the intimacy of traditional retail—it’s reimagining and improving it for the digital age.
For e-commerce merchants eager to elevate their customer experiences with AI, these five tips can make shopping more personal and profitable.
1. Move Beyond “Dear [First Name]” To Build Authentic Connections
Personalized greetings were a great starting point for e-commerce, but AI has the potential to go much deeper. To truly connect with customers:
Reveal what shoppers really want: Like an all-knowing personal shopper, AI can analyze browsing history, purchase patterns and even abandoned carts to predict what a customer may need next.
Suggest remarkably relevant recommendations: Graduate from one-size-fits-all “recommended for you” assortments. Let AI automatically collect personalized product suggestions based on each customer’s recent actions, location or even seasonality.
Improve human interactions with AI: AI excels at personalization, but brands must still deliver seamless one-on-one service to surprise and delight customers. Use AI to connect service and sales teams with real-time customer data to help them make the most of every interaction.
2. Harness Behavioral Data To Enrich Customer Journeys
Today, shoppers connect with brands across multiple touchpoints, from emails and social media to online and physical stores. Using AI to analyze eRFM (Enhanced Recency, Frequency, Monetary) and other behavioral data, you can map—and learn from—all these interactions.
With eRFM reporting baked in, modern e-commerce software makes it easy for merchants to securely capture and surface transformational behavioral insights. Follow these do’s and don’ts to make customer journeys more meaningful:
Do: Focus on data that directly improves the customer experience, such as preferences, purchases or cross-channel engagement.
Do: Automate the right offers and communications at the right times to reward high-value shoppers and engage at-risk customers.
Do: Use AI to pinpoint gaps in the journey—like cart abandonment—and create personalized outreach to re-engage customers at the right moment.
Don’t: Violate trust or regional regulations. Ensure you use your customers’ information transparently, responsibly and compliantly.
Don’t: Over personalize. Like cooking, the secret to successful personalization is balance—not sprinkling in every seasoning but knowing which to use when.
3. Help Shoppers Spend Less Time Searching And More Time Discovering
There’s a reason why you’ve never heard anyone excitedly say, “I’m going searching!”
Unlike shopping, searching is not fun. It can also make or break customer experiences: 77% of consumers avoid stores where they’ve had problems finding products.
The joy of shopping is discovering things you want to buy. By instantly assessing past purchases, interactions, preferences and behaviors—even in real time—AI returns search results that feel tailor-made and just right.
To start, switch to AI-powered smart discovery software combining machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). Just make sure the tool you choose can scale as your assortment grows from hundreds to thousands of items.
4. Make Market Segmentation Less Manual And More Meaningful
Traditional market segmentation is a pain. There are spreadsheets to pivot, rules to follow and endless prompts to answer. NLP makes segmentation as easy as having a conversation—just ask for what you want and get it immediately. Here are a few campaign ideas to get you started:
Welcome: Ask for new customers or subscribers within the last 30 days.
Reactivation: Request customers who haven’t purchased in the previous 90 days.
Advocacy: Pinpoint customers who purchased at least three times.
5. Build On Your AI Foundation
As far as AI’s come in the last couple of years, it’s easy to forget we’re just getting started. The opportunities for personalization will only grow. To stay ahead:
Be proactive: Use AI not just to react to customer needs but to anticipate them, offering solutions before customers even realize they need them.
Keep learning: Regularly update your AI-enabled tools to add and experiment with new capabilities.
Stay human: As advanced as AI becomes, its role is to enhance—not replace—the personal connections that make shopping special.
Bring The Personal Touch Back To Shopping
The future of retail technology isn’t about algorithms and automation—it’s about using AI to bring back the personal touch that made shopping special in the first place.
For businesses wondering if they should embrace AI-powered personalization, your customers already expect deeper connections—the question is whether you’ll be there to provide it to them.
AI is becoming a fast and easy way to help marketers, and your peers and competitors are already using it to create more meaningful shopping experiences—where merchants know their customers and customers feel genuinely understood.
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