We’ve been working for some time now on one of our latest offerings, Now Retirement, a lead generation system dedicated to providing qualified, no risk leads to the financial advisor community from the public searching for pension advice and other financial products. Although we think this site, and it’s related sites that we have in the pipeline are all very cool at generating leads for financial advisors, it’s the artificial intelligence (AI) technology that we worked with Winterwell Associates on that really gets us excited.

Amazon have been using AI for a number of years to up-sell products to users, disguising it to customers as “people who bought this also bought these”, and as we can see from the Amazon financials, along with their other online marketing techniques, it’s all working very well for them.

So what about the smaller e-commerce shops, how can they use AI to increase sales in their online stores?

The techniques we use in Now Retirement present users with content and calls-to-actions that are appropriate to each individual user based on their viewing history and the viewing history of the other users of the site who have indicated similar preferences. The idea being that we improve both the “stickiness” of the website (how long people spend on the website) and of course the conversion rates of visitors in to customers.

The technology we have developed can also be used on e-commerce websites to recommend products to your website visitors, again improving the stickiness of your site by encouraging your visitors to explore your product range and improve your conversion and up-selling rates. By tweaking the settings of the recommendation engine, you can begin to influence the recommendations that the AI recommendation engine makes,. So if you have high margin products that you wish to push, or products that have been sitting on the shelf for a while – you can change the recommendation settings to let your customers know about these products. It’s all very simple to use, but it can make a radical difference to the sales through your e-commerce website.