Scaling E-Commerce with Personalization & AI 

Yeah, I mean, this one point that I like to talk about, because when you talk about growth on e-commerce especially, most people only focus on acquisition. So how to get more customer, more visitors to my website, which is great, don't get me wrong. But with all the costs right now, know, costing higher, like to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, and Google stuff like that, costs like lot of money right now. So what we've seen is trying to help brand understanding that is more than just acquisition to growth. It's about retention. It's about being like a relationship with your customer. So we did that for example, like for this one client Modelova, it's a shopping website online, present in the French markets. I think they have six markets actually like French, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the US I think recently. And... We had them grow using SEO a lot. We did SEO for them for one year, one year and a half. Basically, grow them from zero to probably one million plus visitors a year. One million plus in revenue as well for the websites. 95 % of the traffic was SEO. But we did SEO, but we also had a really strong strategy when it comes to retention. So we did a lot of... email marketing. once you have the customer on the website, if you're able to grab the email, then you can initiate this kind of conversation with them. I think email was and probably still is one of the best tool to do that. So it helps to talk to the clients who be able to understand what they want, what they need, how can you provide them more solution to their problem. And one way we did that, I guess, using AI was with the, know, with the...

So yeah, I was going to say, in your opinion, you just mentioned email is still a great tool for maintaining, establishing contact and maintaining a relationship and upsell, cross-sell, and the whole customer lifecycle. What about SMS and WhatsApp? Because we're living in the world of instant communication now.

Yeah. Yeah.

So are you guys doing a lot of work in that space as well?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like WhatsApp a lot. I like WhatsApp a lot, but I like SMS a lot. The thing is, it's kind of new for some customers, so it really depends on how the customer is going to react. I was talking to someone right now that is doing business in the US, and I think in the US, they see SMS and WhatsApp very differently from how we see it in France. Yeah.

use it in Europe, I mean, because the privacy laws in Europe are much stronger, so I guess.

Yeah, I guess privacy law and also the culture. We're not used to receive SMS from the brand or from the mall unless we really feel like a strong connection to that. So I love this because WhatsApp SMS is really great. I think we had a WhatsApp campaign for one of our clients with 80 to 90 % open rates, which is crazy when you compare to email. So when comes to performance, it's really good, but you need to do it correctly. because it's really easy to send a WhatsApp message that is not welcome and that can hurt your brand image and your relationship with the client. So I love this. I feel people are more forgiving with email, a little bit more used to receiving emails. If you can do email the right way, I think it's still a good option. And I think it's easier for brands to integrate that because it's less of a risk. But I do believe the future, as you say, tends to... you know, leads to more like SMS and WhatsApp. Yeah. Totally agree. Yeah.

more instant communication, more instant communication, technology that's, and I certainly think that's kind of going to be the way forward. And I think not just that, think beyond that as well, like more conversational, know, and AI driven where, you know, if somebody's on a website, you just have them interact with any work that you guys have done in the space of AI.

Well, we like to integrate AI a lot in our internal process. So I write a lot of documents for my team in AI. I try to teach my team to use AI when they need to, even sometimes code. So I like to use AI for this type of stuff. We don't have a service that's AI based, but we did integrate some solutions that are powered by AI. Let's stay on the model of a topic for example. We created for them... a chat bot on the website, which is a little bit more than just like a typical chat bot. We see it as a personal shopping assistance. So we try to basically recreate the kind of conversation that you can have if you go to like a really nice mall or like a really nice, know, if you ever been to like an MS or like a dual store, you can see how the sales person, they're not able to sell.

The interactions are like how they, yeah, very personalized, very, yeah, humanized and personalized,

Yeah, they ask questions, they can do recommendations, they try to get you the right information. So we try to recreate that using AI because AI is this tool that enables you to do so many great things, especially when comes to human interaction. So yeah, we developed this chat bot. We deployed the first beta version, I think this summer. We've seen a really big... How do you say that? Adoption rate and really nice stats. Like we see like the retention is going through the roof. The average system time probably like double, triples. We actually ended up removing the email pop-in because we are getting more email from the chatbot itself. So the pop-in didn't make sense anymore. So yeah, really great tool to improve our rates.

adoption.

I mean, AI technology is replacing some of the ways of doing things as well, as things are progressing.

Yeah, no, yeah, it just opens the door to so many possibilities as a marketer, as a brand owner. Yeah, there's so many things that is, I mean, I'm excited about it. I'm a tech guy, so I'm excited about it. Some people aren't, but it's, I don't know what your stand is about.

Yeah.

No, I think AI is going to certainly change the way people interact with brands because the scale of personalization and the scale of communication and the scope of it will be manyfold. know, mean, AI chatbot is never going to sleep, for example. So, you know, and like that whole personalized shopping experience based on your preferences, based on... especially for returning customers as well, based on what they purchased in the past, what their interests are. As much information you have about that customer, a much better experience can be expected, and at a very large scale as well. I think companies that have a lot of traffic on their website and they struggle with providing the right level of service, when people have questions, think it's going to be a tremendous amount of impact.

Yeah, exactly. AI could be a solution to so many of these problems and it's improving so fast. Even when Recomputers 1.3.3.3.3.

Yeah, I mean, you really can't in most situations. And then the other thing I think is going to happen is because it's collecting a lot of this data and it's also self-learning. you really like, in the past, I mean, you collected all that data when you had manual interactions, you would analyze that and then you would find trends and then you would like, you know, use that as inputs to improve your products or improve your service and

Mm-hmm.

Here it is all going to get done automatically. So it's going to continuously learn itself. And then also any inputs, any direction that it wants to give, for example, a product. You're talking about fashion and retail. If their sizes consistently are either out of stock or they don't fit the customers according to the size chart, all these things will be get

Yeah, it's embedded into the process.

Mm-hmm.

will get surfaced so quickly by the artificial intelligence technology versus waiting for a human to actually analyze it and surface it. So I do think that the impact on e-commerce especially, and especially the service side and the assisted sales side of e-commerce is gonna be tremendous.

Yeah, mean, in e-commerce, think like for the past years, it's all been about OmniKanal being able to connect to the website and getting in-store and then know all your preferences. We can do that with AI. And then it was all about hyper-customization, being able to propose really event products based on your purchase history or your preferences or what you're doing, what you like and what you don't like. And I think with AI is gonna make it easier for brands to do that. And it also gonna be able to be done in a more, I'm gonna say human way. So, know, that conversion, It's not just like an email with, are your topics. Topics, you know, it's like, hey, by the way, know, Gabrielle, I noticed that you watched, you know, that you saw this product, you buy this one. This one could be like a good addition to it. What do you think? And they can adapt the way they talk to you based on what you prefer, you know? So.

Yeah

and they could replicate the brand voice, internal voice, they really can adapt to any situation. So yeah, I'm really excited about what's gonna happen in the e-commerce in the next years with the help of AI.

Absolutely.

And anything else that you would like to talk about today, any advice that you would like to leave, especially since you guys specialize in e-commerce companies that are focused on e-commerce. In fact, one of the questions that I get asked a lot, in fact, one of my friends, he is a manufacturer. And he manufactures high quality towels and products that are based out of that fabric, know, like robes and beach towels and things of that nature. From hand towels to beach towels and then, and he's been thinking about going direct to consumer. So, you know, and I, you know, I had a brief conversation with him and I told him, I said, you know, it's easier said than done because everybody thinks, hey, you know, it's just about like building a website and then, people will start coming and say it doesn't work that way. There's a lot of hard work that goes into trying to bring the customer. So any bit of advice that you can give for companies that are manufacturers and want to, or they have traditionally sold through stores, but they now want to have a direct to consumer presence, any bit of advice that you can give.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's so funny because when you start to talk about your friends about a manufacturer, I was like, I know exactly what you're to ask. It's like how to move to DTC. And even before that, should you move to DTC? Is it like a good choice? Is it the right moment? I have like an answer, I guess in two folds. So we actually do have a lot of clients who, well, they are not manufacturer, but they used to only sell B2B. So we have these cosmetic brands they used to...

You

Exactly.

not distribute themselves, but they have like networks of distributors and resellers. They will sell this product in pharmacies and stuff like that in malls. And they were doing pretty good. And they were wondering like, should we try to do this to see how hard it is? Does it make sense for us? For them, it actually did make sense for different reasons. Because they already had a business going, right? So it's not like they had to...

Yep.

raise money to be able to, you know, to pull out this new product, know, you're already in retail. Yeah.

Yeah, they're already in retail. I see there's two aspects. One, the companies are already doing, having a retail posture, maybe through more of a wholesale network and a distributed network. But then there are companies that are just pure manufacturers as well. Because a lot of those guys are also thinking, direct to consumers is a great space. And usually what I tell people is,

Yeah.

And I would love to see your perspective on this as well. Amazon, especially if you are in the US, and even in India for that matter, if you want to go direct to consumer, you cannot ignore Amazon as a channel basically. So you got to have an Amazon store. And you can see that every major brand out there has now got an Amazon store. Even the minor brands that are trying to make their presence felt.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

in the direct to consumer. Besides having their own e-commerce presence, they do have Amazon stores. So what's your view on that? mean, is that something that people, what do you advise?

Well, think it would depend on what you're selling. think so. I'm really focused on the French market when it comes to Amazon. For example, like in fashion and beauty, I don't think Amazon is the right place to sell. It depends what you're selling. If you're selling like maybe like furniture or maybe some used and sealant tools, then yeah, for sure. Amazon is just, yeah, yeah, it just makes sense. And I know people who make a lot of money with Amazon. So if you educate yourself on how it works, maybe if you find like the right...

Yeah, commodities, it makes sense, yeah.

maybe partner to lead you to that, which we don't by the way. it's not not setting my service. We don't do Amazon, know, FBA consulting, but I some people do and I some people are making like quite a good business on that. So yeah, it's cool because like Amazon basically, they answer a lot of the biggest problem that each commercial has. How to get traffic and you know, how to then ship my product to that. Well, Amazon has the answer. Yeah.

Yeah, logistics and marketing. mean, both of those, like how do you find buyers and how do you, in the US right now, and I don't know about the stats in Paris or France, but in the US, 55 % of the product searches now happen on Amazon. So if somebody's looking for a product, like for example, like hair oil or a piece of furniture, they just go to Amazon and search for it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's easier for them to do that.

vitamins, know, like anything you want in your life, you just go to Amazon and you search it. That's like 55 % of the searches are not happening on search engines, they're actually happening on Amazon. So it's become like, you know, a de facto search engine for product searches. And how is that in France? Is that the same or?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

No, yeah, in France, I don't have the stats again. We don't work with Amazon a lot, but I do know that I think I was reading somewhere that half of the products or something like this were like either from Amazon or Tmoo. So they are becoming this, I mean, they are and they are still improving their person as a big, big player in the e-commerce field. And I do believe that, yes, if you do have an item that you think could work well on Amazon, I think you should do it. It makes sense. And there's also, have so many tools also to help you do your job. So you're never gonna be alone, right? They have some tools that can help you analyze trends. have like this, like a similar tool, think, to Google, like that you can see how many times a month people are actually typing, looking for a product. You know, they have all of that. And if you really want to go higher, you can even buy some ads on them. So you don't even have to go and...

Yeah, everything. They have good analytics. They've got good, like, you know.

to like a Google shopping, you know, campaign, just like put some money into the Facebook, sorry, into the Amazon algo, and it will push you like higher. You can just do that, try a few things. I don't think you even need to have that much of big inventory to start working with them. You can start small. I have people who start small. Yeah, so you don't have to invest, you know, like a lot of time and money just by trying it out. It doesn't cost you that much, you know, but you know, the...

Yeah, that's the other thing is you can start small with them.

it could really make your business grow a lot because it's easier. You don't have to focus on marketing or logistics. just create a product and sell it.

Yep, and so coming back to your sweet spot, which is high street fashion, what is your advice to any fashion brands that are wanting to get on direct to consumers?

Well, I mean, as you said, we talked about Amazon and I think Amazon, they solved a lot of big problem that e-commerce people had. First of all, like by making like creating a store, that was like difficult and costly, then doing marketing and then shipping the product. I do believe as we say, like Amazon is making things easier, AI is making things easier. I think right now e-commerce is becoming more and more easier. I remember when I was starting to work on e-commerce, was really hard to start your own online shop. Now it's really easy. You have to like Shopify, they are becoming more and more advanced. They are powering really big, big websites. And you can basically create a Shopify store in a couple of days. So we do have these services at the agency if you want to have professional do it for or with you. But it's not a big risk, it's not a big investment to try e-commerce. But it's not gonna be easy if you do it on your own, right? Because as you said, it's good to have a website, but then how do you create traffic? How do you have people actually get into website and then buy your product? So that's a different scenario. But I will encourage brands that are maybe only doing retail or people who are only doing manufacturing to try their hands at EECOM. either on Amazon if makes sense or by creating their own e-commerce platform with a tool like Shopify that makes things really easy. I don't know what you do. I'm guessing you know Shopify. What did you take on this tool?

So we, mean, as an agency, so basically Growth Tigger, so I am actually a founder and CEO at Growth Natives, which is both a B2B and a direct-to-consumer digital transformation and marketing agency. And we do work a lot with Shopify. I think Shopify is probably the de facto tool of choice if you wanna go.

Mm-hmm.

launch a small e-commerce store and kind of test the waters with it. And there's obviously plenty of other products in the market for e-commerce enablement, starting an e-commerce store. It could be WooCommerce, could be Magento, and obviously Shopify is the most popular one. And it does have a very strong ecosystem as well. Like you were earlier talking about, know, the managing the customer life cycle. They made it pretty easy because there's a lot of apps that are available on the Shopify ecosystem that you can use for everything, for email marketing, to, you know, managing subscriptions, to managing all kinds of customer relationships. So Shopify is certainly, you know, I think I would recommend that to anybody who wants to start.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. No, I think me too. I remember like our first client, this brand, Zucoupal's very famous brand, so like in the French market. And when we started working with them, there was seven, eight years ago, I think, when our first client and they were using Magento. I think there was the 1.7 version. So we still have to manage the server, the hosting, we still have to. And I remember every time they made like a sale, you know. the website crashed because there was too many people on the website. And we kept talking to the hosting partner, like, you know, we're going to launch like a big promotion tomorrow. We're going to have like a lot of PR on it. We're going to probably like, you know, time five, 10, or usual traffic, you know, and you can figure it out. like, yeah, sure. Don't worry. get it. Every time, every time the website would crash because

the topic and yeah.

8 a.m. know the email goes and then everybody comes to the website they buy and then the website crashes I've had 10 times more traffic on Shopify on some website I don't think he ever crashed on me so just like that you know

No, think, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. there's a, but anyhow, Gabriel, it was great talking to you. You've been a wonderful guest, and I wish you the very best, and hopefully our listeners have learned a thing or two from our conversation today. Thank you for being a great guest. Thanks.

Thank you for having me, Harlan.