To drive conversion, skin care brand Asian Beauty Essentials uses artificial intelligence to write copy for shoppable blog posts in both English and Spanish, says founder and CEO Lauren Petrullo.

It produces six blogs a week, some of which drive more than 9,000 visits per month, she says.

To achieve this, she uses a technology trio:

• Ahrefs, an SEO tool for growing search traffic
• Surfer SEO, which helps the retailer grade and rank content
• Jasper, an AI content generator to write the posts

Asian Beauty Essentials made its blogs shoppable in October 2022, she says. Petrullo first identifies the blogs that are generating the most traffic, then adds shoppable components to them to see if that will drive conversion. That includes both links back to the ecommerce portion of AsianBeautyEssentials.com as well as products shoppers can add to their cart directly from a blog page.

For example, an Asian Beauty Essentials blog called “The Easiest 5 Step Korean Skin Care Routine for Rookies” suggests products that each have an “Add to Cart Now” button. Clicking on the product images or titles takes shoppers to each product listing page.

Asian Beauty Essentials adds products to its blogs so shoppers can put them in their carts without leaving the page.

advertisement

Once a blog post on Asian Beauty Essentials starts to convert orders, Petrullo measures how many shoppers add products from that post to their carts and how many shoppers complete the purchase as opposed to abandoning the cart. She also checks the average order value from the blog post to determine if she should create similar blog posts or take a different approach.

After making the brand’s blog posts shoppable, its average order value grew to more than $100. That compares with about $34 prior to making blogs shoppable.

Petrullo says she made the decision to add Spanish-language blog posts in June 2022 after going through her customer list and evaluating where orders were coming from and what customers’ last names were.

“My current focus is making sure the content is authentically correct and therefore a really good user experience,” Petrullo says. “I trust that the conversions will come later, and so far, those hypotheses have been winning out.”

Expanding artificial intelligence to email

Asian Beauty Essentials uses Klaviyo as its email marketing provider.

Klaviyo determines the average order value for different customer segments. Among the biggest insights Klaviyo provides, she says, is how many times a customer has purchased after clicking on an email and what products she purchased together.

But she says she especially values the AI components Klaviyo offers. The vendor sends emails at the times a consumer is most likely to open it and engage on a link. Brands can also send emails based on when customers are likely to finish products that need replenishing. She also used Klaviyo’s “Back in Stock” feature, which adds a “notify me when available” button on the website to products that are out of stock. This helps her determine how much product to reorder.

Klaviyo can also automatically exclude customers from email lists if they have already bought items the email is promoting.

She says all the AI technology was a “huge, huge investment,” and it seems to have paid off.

Read more

This is part of Digital Commerce 360’s March 2023 Strategy Insights edition. Our members have access to all the articles in this month’s issue, Data-Driven Retail.

This article is part of a larger piece, “Retailers use data to improve web conversion and improve the customer experience.”