How AI Can Generate Engaging Content for Your E-commerce Store

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an incredibly useful tool for e-commerce merchants. Through AI, content can be generated quickly and efficiently that contains both cognitive and emotional involvement. However, while most prompts used as the input for AI focus on cognitive involvement, they often forget to include emotional involvement. Let’s learn more about why this is important and how to ensure your content contains both elements.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that focuses on the development of intelligent machines. The goal of AI is to imitate human behavior, recognize patterns and languages, and interpret them accordingly. This ensures that artificial intelligences learn patterns and processes, allowing them to recognize tasks and problems and provide a suitable solution. AI can support you in daily decisions and tasks and help you save time and effort.

What are the benefits of AI in e-commerce?

AI is not just a catchphrase, but will be the future of e-commerce. The hype around chatbots like ChatGPT already shows this. Indeed, the use of artificial intelligence in e-commerce brings with it some distinct advantages:

• Improved Customer Experience: AI can help you generate data and help you better understand customer needs. Artificial intelligence can then create suitable offers.

• Cost and Time Savings: Artificial intelligence can automate tasks, reducing the amount of time spent. In addition, employees can focus on tasks that cannot be handled by AI, which increases efficiency and reduces costs in the company.

• Increased accuracy: Artificial intelligence can provide more accurate information about customer requirements using customer data. You can use this for your customer service, for example.

Possible applications for artificial intelligence in e-commerce

AI can help you make everyday work easier. Artificial intelligence has been used for quite some time, for example by the search engine Google. But streaming services like Netflix or Amazon also use AI to suggest suitable movies or series to users. The spectrum of possible applications is broad here. For online stores and e-commerce companies, however, some exciting potential applications are already emerging.

Product recommendations

Probably the best-known area of application for artificial intelligence is the recommendation of products. AI uses data, such as customer buying behavior, to display suitable products for cross-selling or upselling. This not only provides an improved shopping experience, but also helps you increase your average order value.

Personalization

The advantage of e-commerce is that it generates a lot of data. With the help of this data, artificial intelligence can analyze customer behavior, better understand customer needs, and thus create personalized offers.

Communication

You can also use artificial intelligence when it comes to communication. AI can help you with company communications on the one hand, and customer communications on the other. Here, chatbots are used that can answer customer inquiries as well as provide advice on products or book services. This not only saves you time and effort, it enables you to have a customer service that can actively respond at any time.

Product descriptions

Artificial intelligence is also able to create descriptions for your products. All you have to do is provide the product data and the AI generates an appealing product description from it. This is especially helpful for seasonal or limited products that are only active for a certain period of time, as there is no need to put a lot of work into creating descriptions.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value allows you to create a forecast of a customer's buying cycle. This will help you find the right time, as well as the right actions for your marketing strategy. Again, you can use artificial intelligence to have this forecast created using existing customer data and act on it.

Product reviews

Artificial intelligence can help you find fake customer reviews and respond accordingly. Fake reviews can have a negative impact on the customer's impression and also question your credibility. Moreover, AI can respond to customer reviews and provide feedback to customers.

Content Marketing

When it comes to content marketing, you can also benefit from artificial intelligence. Today, many online stores rely on their own blog or magazine, where customers can get more interesting information. To create texts for this, you can use AI and thus save time and costs here as well.

Automatic translations

Especially if you sell internationally, translations of your texts are an important aspect. To simplify and speed up this process, many entrepreneurs use artificial intelligence. This approach can be applied to all content in your online store, helping you to internationalize.

Content creation via AI and the benefits of cognitive and emotional involvement

From a psychological perspective, when people decide to make a purchase, a number of processes take place beforehand. Involvement refers to the state of mind that motivates a consumer to make a purchase or the importance attached to the product. Involvement determines how information is selected, absorbed, processed and stored.

So-called cognitive involvement refers to a customer's ability to think critically about a product or service before making a purchase decision. For example, when a customer is presented with two products that are similar in price and features, they must decide which one offers better value for money. By using AI to create content that focuses on cognitive engagement, e-commerce retailers can help their customers make informed decisions without having to spend hours searching for all the options.

Emotional involvement, on the other hand, refers to a customer's ability to feel something when presented with a particular product or service. This can be a feeling of excitement and inspiration for the product, or the certainty that it will perform as promised. By using AI to generate content that focuses on emotional engagement, e-commerce retailers can create a compelling experience for their customers that helps them build a deeper connection with the product or service.

How To Incorporate Both Cognitive and Emotional Involvement Into Your Content

When you are creating prompts for your AI content generation tool, it is important to remember the importance of incorporating both cognitive and emotional elements into your content. For example, if you are creating a description of a particular product, you should focus on both its features (cognitive) and how those features make customers feel (emotional). Additionally, you should also consider including customer reviews in your prompts so that customers can get an idea of what other people think about the product or service (cognitive) as well as how their experiences made them feel (emotional). Moreover, a prompt that will be act as input for the AI should have some important element for instance:

1. Personas: the chatbot should be asked to act as a specific person.

2. Baseline context: by providing the chatbot with the initial required information to be included and analyzed in the responses. The baseline consists of snippets of information about the content, audience, problem, or expectation. 

3. Emotional vividness: ask the chatbot to formulate vivid phrases and use emotional verbs

4. Style and tone: provide the chatbot with instructions on style, such as bullet points or tables, and preferred tone.

5. Limitations: Specify the boundaries of the response, such as limiting the number of words to certain amounts or only mention the top three keywords or clusters.

6. Conclusion: Ask for a concluding statement that may lead to a purchase.

7. Technical Elements: Ask to include (long-tail) keywords, metadata, HTML heading elements, and schemas.

Conclusion

Successful e-commerce stores rely heavily on compelling content that engages potential customers both intellectually and emotionally. While artificial intelligence is incredibly useful for generating such content quickly and efficiently, it’s important not to forget the importance of including both cognitive and emotional elements into your prompts so that potential customers can feel connected with what you have to offer them. With the right combination of cognitive and emotional involvement included in your content generation prompts, your e-commerce store is sure to stand out from the competition!