Modern retail consumers are overwhelmed with many choices and do not have enough time to go through them. Businesses find it difficult to expose their product line to potential customers because of these factors. It often leads to decreased conversion rates and revenue. Moreover, the increasing demand for personalized experiences by customers is further adding to the challenge.
Artificial intelligence, which is revolutionizing the way businesses fulfill their consumers’ needs, can offer a solution to these challenges as well, i.e., AI-powered stylists. According to a report, the global AI stylist market is expected to grow by 38.3% between 2024 and 2031. This growth is due to their potential to ease customers' search efforts while personalizing their shopping experience.
AI-powered personal stylists enable companies in the retail industry to provide unique buying experiences, improve conversion rates, and increase a customer’s AOV.
What are AI-powered Stylists?
Shoppers often struggle to discover products that complement each other. The inability to visualize how products come together in real-time can make customers abandon their carts. AI stylists can overcome this issue by intelligently designing product bundles and allowing customers to see them in real-time.
AI-powered stylists go one step further, offering simple recommendations to build full product bundles according to the customers' preferences. Unlike traditional product suggestions that rely on customers’ current product interests, these solutions analyze their past behaviors to create bundle recommendations automatically. Customers’ previous purchases, spending habits, and browsing history are analyzed to provide personalized product suggestions that resonate with users’ interests.
These AI-powered personal stylists also leverage machine learning algorithms, market trend analysis, and product preferences to create ensembles that have a better probability of increasing conversion rates. NLP complements the effectiveness of an AI stylist by providing ongoing refinements of its recommendations based on real-time crowd-sourced intelligence.
These functionalities of AI-powered stylists provide various benefits to both customers and retailers.
How Can AI Stylists Benefit Retailers?
AI-powered personal stylists enable retailers to transform the way they engage with their customers. With hyper-personalized styling suggestions, they can reduce shoppers’ time to search for complementary products and boost their satisfaction.
Similarly, AI stylists can provide retailers with many benefits beyond increased conversions and revenue.
1:1 Personalization
The ability to analyze customer preferences enables AI-powered personal stylists to create personalized looks specific to every individual. This improves the chances of conversions and customer loyalty. Machine learning algorithms further enrich this approach and enable AI stylists to learn from evolving customer behavior.
Enhanced Marketing Campaigns
It is possible to put ensembles generated using AI stylists into retailers' marketing strategies to enhance engagement rates. Such methods include email marketing for abandoned shopping carts, follow-up shopping cart interaction, and social media advertising campaigns. Contextually meaningful and aesthetically appealing recommendations lead to an increase in retention and conversion potential.
Increase in Average Order Value (AOV)
AI stylists help businesses capture target customers and increase the AOV. Retail companies can easily entice shoppers to continue shopping by offering product bundles that complement their primary purchase. AI-powered stylists can further enhance upselling and cross-selling strategies that can support increasing sales revenue.
Improved Scalability
AI-powered stylists can analyze a huge amount of SKUs and create several product combinations. This enables businesses to eliminate the need for large merchandising teams and scale easily with seasonal inventory changes, new collections, and expanding product lines.
AI-powered stylists can sort through vast numbers of SKUs and generate various product combinations. This allows businesses to reduce the requirement for merchandising teams and easily expand in response to seasonal replenishment, new arrivals, and product portfolio growth.
Stay Aligned with Current Trends
Machine learning algorithms provide insights about market trends and customer behavior to AI-powered stylists. Retailers can use this information to adapt to the changing preferences quickly. This also helps ensure that their ensembles are relevant to individual users. Providing customers with trending recommendations can improve their engagement with the brand.
AI-powered Personal Stylist: Use Cases
AI-powered stylists can create personalized ensembles by analyzing product affinities and industry trends. This applies to several use cases across industries.
Theme-based Fashion Collections
Businesses in the fashion industry can make use of AI stylists to provide an experience similar to an in-store assistant. It can help customers to achieve their desired dressing style based on their fashion sense.
For instance, retailers can build collections in bohemian or minimalist styles. This product set includes pants, shoes, and several other accessories. It allows customers to shop for an entire outfit without intensive searching.
Styling a Room
AI-powered personal stylists can assist home decor customers in multiple ways. One of them is completing the look of a room. They can assist customers by providing furniture required for a specific room, like bedrooms or living rooms. They can also further personalize these suggestions based on the customer’s room color and material preferences. This simplifies decision-making while driving higher revenue.
Skin Type-based Collections
The beauty and wellness industry can use AI stylists to create personalized product bundles based on customers' various preferences. These include their skin type, makeup goals, hair problems, and much more. For example, if the customer has oily skin, retailers can bundle several products to help them clear this problem.
Bottom Line
AI-powered personal stylists are reshaping the retail industry by enabling them to deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences. Across industries, they improve the consumer shopping experience and generate higher business revenues. However, the success of these product bundles depends on the degree of how relevant they are to the customers’ needs.
Although AI automates the bundle creation pipeline, companies need to optimize them regularly based on how well they are performing. As a result, they can be guaranteed the success of these product bundles and their ability to generate income. With the retail sector increasingly becoming competitive, leveraging AI-based stylists sooner rather than later can help companies create a loyal customer base and maintain a competitive advantage.
