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The bridesmaid dress retailer revamped its blog in Q2 2023 with a strategy, plan and one goal in mind: to have Azazie.com show up higher in search engine results, says marketing manager Keily Hernandez. 

Azazie has had a blog on its site since 2019, with search engine optimization as one of its goals as well as using it to promote giveaways and promotions without significant financial investment. But SEO wasn’t the primary focus, and the merchant didn’t have a team dedicated to managing it. As a result, Azazie did not rank highly in search results for its targeted keywords, Hernandez says. 

Now, Azazie updates the blog one to two times a week. Each month, Azazie picks a keyword to focus on, such as “bridesmaid” or “bridal gown,” and focuses all its marketing content, including social media posts, influencer content, content across the website and its blog, on that keyword.  

“We have everything point back to us as the leader of that keyword,” Hernandez says.  

This focused and integrated effort has led to a 24% increase in sales revenue attributed to organic search (which includes blog content) from April until September 2023, compared with that same period in 2022, Hernandez says. And the content is resonating with shoppers, as sales from shoppers who viewed Azazie’s blog content increased 50% from January through September 2023, compared with the year-ago period.  

Azazie is among the roughly half or so retailers that offer a blog or editorial content on their site, according to Gartner data. A Gartner analysis of 300 U.S. retailers (75 luxury retailers, 105 multi-brand retailers and 120 monobrands) in March 2023 finds that 47% of retailers have a blog or editorial content on their site, such as articles related to the products they sell, content about that category’s trends, company history or policies.  

Merchants cite several reasons why investing in editorial content can help their bottom lines, including more traffic from search engines, higher conversion rates and low return rates. But execution is key, as retailers will not see any return on their investments if they are not thoughtful and thorough with their strategies. And investments can be significant, as merchants may have to invest in internal employees to generate the content or hire outside agencies. 

Only 6% of online shoppers say blog content is an important feature for a well-designed and functional online shopping experience, according to a Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights survey of 999 online shoppers in October 2023. But shoppers put a higher value on similar content, which retailers could publish on a blog, such as how-to guides, at 19%, and an About Us page, at 12%. 

Data from research firm Forrester Research Inc. also finds that only a small subset of consumers consult a blog before a purchase. 3% of U.S. online adults who purchased clothing or footwear (online or in person), and 5% who purchased furniture or home improvement products in the past six months visited the retailer’s blog in the past month, according to data fielded between November 2022-March 2023. 

Yet, only 17% of shoppers say online retailers have met or exceeded their expectations with providing detailed product information such as origin story, history, business policies and sustainability. And only 12% said online retailers have met or exceeded their expectations with additional content such as how-to guides and blogs.  

Retail blogs boost SEO value, organic search traffic

While shoppers may not rely on blog content to make a purchase, retailers and analysts still believe it can be an important component in the online shopping journey. In fact, shoppers may not realize that a blog post was how they landed on that retailer’s site to begin with. If brands write their blogs and editorial content with search engine optimization in mind, it can have a large impact on bringing in organic traffic, says Brad Jashinsky, director analyst at Gartner.  

And organic traffic is important for Azazie. The wedding apparel retailer says about 10% of its site traffic and sales come from organic search, which includes shoppers finding its site from the blog articles. 

“I would think and I would hope that every company and every brand in every industry has a blog,” Hernandez says. “It’s kind of like the low-hanging fruit of organic content.” 

Chip Malt, CEO and co-founder of cookware brand Made In, says that roughly 25% of its site traffic comes from organic search, which includes shoppers who come to Made In’s robust blog. On average per month, its blog receives 2 million page views, and each reader views about six pages in the blog, Malt says. This shows good engagement, Malt says. On average, this is about 20% of the site’s overall page views, he says.  

What’s more, when Made In sends content-focused emails, the click-through rates are three times higher than its selling-focused emails, Malt says. Similarly, its content-focused ads on Google produce click-through rates at four to 10 times higher than selling-focused ads, he says. 

Education through content has been a part of cookware brand Made In’s strategy since Day 1, Malt says. Made In launched a blog six months prior to launching products on its cookware site and the fourth employee the brand hired was a part-time content contributor, he says.  

“Education is a part of the brand’s story,” Malt says.  

Made In sells high-end cookware that’s designed for cooking enthusiasts and is popular among professional chefs. For example, its 10-inch blue carbon steel frying pan is $109, and the brand’s average order value is $330, according to Digital Commerce 360 estimates. The blog helps to explain the value of its cookware.  

Today, the brand has 10 full-time employees on its content team, it publishes roughly 50 blogs per month and the blog ranks for 56,000 keywords within Google Search, Malt says. About 50% of these keywords are in the top 20 search terms on Google, with 25% of those on the first page of search results, he says.  

One of the top navigation tabs on MadeinCookware.com is “Learn,” where the brand publishes its founding story, recipes, care for its products and cooking techniques. As Made In has expanded its product lines to include bakeware and wine glasses, it also has added content to support these products as well.  

“If we are offering this line of cookware, we also want to keep up the pace of content. …. It’s something we wanted to do for our community,” Malt says.  

Retail blog content connects to shoppers post-purchase 

This large breadth of content distinguishes the brand from its competitors, such as All-Clad, Malt says. 

“Long term, we believe if you are shown All-Clad or Made In, and you walk out the door and you are on your own, and you went with Made In, you have all this helpful content behind you. And that makes the consumer go with us overall, because they see us as a value-add,” Malt says.  

All-Clad has a blog on its site with recipes and other product content. All-Clad did not provide a comment as of press time.  

Top online floral merchant 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. also invests in editorial content as a way to engage with shoppers, says chief marketing officer Jason John.  

It operates six blogs across its 17 brands, which include a variety of giftable products such as cookies and chocolates as well as flowers. The goal is to deepen the relationship with shoppers, so they don’t just view the e-retailer’s ecommerce sites as shopping destinations, John says. It updates each blog multiple times per month.  

“It takes us beyond one transaction and helps solidify us as a part of the customer relationship,” John says.   

1800Flowers.com addresses themes within each brand’s product assortment and customer base to appeal to shoppers. For example, topics that have resonated with consumers are about how to write sympathy cards, including pet sympathy cards, for its 1800Flowers.com blog, and articles about hosting holiday dinners for its food and gifting brand HarryandDavid.com.  

Results from retail blogs 

Web visits to its blog have increased 70% year over year, John says. Even more telling is that shoppers who view a brand’s blog content convert at a 3%-5% higher rate than shoppers who don’t. This speaks to the quality of its blogs, John says.  

“You need a North Star with content,” John says. “A lot of companies, you can tell they are putting out content to put out content, and they are putting out content for a commerce outcome. We don’t believe there is authenticity in that type of content.”  

While conversion metrics are a clear performance indicator, Made In says privacy regulations can make it difficult to track a direct conversion to a blog post, because many shoppers don’t accept cookies and may visit the site several times before deciding to make a purchase. The path to purchase becomes more muddled especially with products that are high-ticket and more considered, like Made In’s relatively pricey skillets and knife sets. Instead, Malt describes its investment in content as a “brand tax that we absorb,” meaning a cost of doing business for higher-end products.   

Besides increasing site traffic, results from investing in a blog shows up in other ways, Malt says, such as aiding in the customer journey, helping its customer service team and low return rates. If shoppers are more informed about the products they buy from reading the blog, they are more likely to purchase the right product for their needs and not return it. He points to its stainless-steel products, which have a less than 2% return rate, without sharing more. 

Roughly a third of the visits to Made In’s blog come from shoppers already on the website, and the rest from outside the site, such as search results, emails and ads. If Made In was only doing the blog for SEO purposes or completely focused on that as the goal, Malt would expect 99% of the traffic to come from outside sources. But that’s not Made In’s primary goal.  

The fact that a third is internal traffic shows that the content is providing value to shoppers as they consider the brand’s products. Instead of having an article only live in the blog section, Made In peppers relevant content throughout the site to aid in the shopper journey, Malt says. For example, on the search results page, it may surface a post about the difference between nonstick and stainless-steel cookware.  

“We believe content should be intertwined in the customer journey and are happy to have internal traffic get there,” Malt says. 

Using blog content in multiple ways is smart, Gartner’s Jashinsky says.  

“If you are going the extra mile to make great content, you need to make sure it’s discoverable, across social, across search, and product pages and search pages,” Jashinsky says.  

How retailers know what to feature in blog content

Made In surveys its shoppers via email and uses that feedback to inform its content strategy. Based on 20,000 comments, Made In determined it needed more blogs about how to care for its products post-purchase, and now publishes such articles regularly.  

“The nice part of being a direct brand is that people tell you exactly what they think,” Malt says. 

Made In’s editorial team plans the focus of its blog posts for each month. Each of the brand’s departments, such as its product, customer service and marketing teams, give input on their teams’ current priorities. For example, the product team may say that it is launching a bird beak’s paring knife that month and request at least two articles featuring the product. The customer service team might say it’s had an influx of shoppers calling in about how to season their carbon skillet and propose a video blog and step-by-step instructions on how to do this.  

“Customer service acts as a very direct line to our actual customer. So our customer service team has direct input into the content calendar,” Malt says. 

The customer service team’s input gets particularly high priority when planning the blog’s editorial calendar, as the articles they suggest can help them assist customers much faster, Malt says. For example, with the “how to season the carbon skillet?” question, instead of taking 10 minutes to write out tailored instructions for each shopper, agents can direct shoppers to a video or blog that addresses their need.  

“It’s an efficiency play,” Malt says. While Malt doesn’t have a direct KPI figure to tie to its retail blog, he knows speeding up solving customer service issues keeps agents and shoppers satisfied.  

Azazie also taps its customer service team for input on what it should include in its blogs.  

“If they have a question about a trend, we can respond and create a content strategy to that, that tying into what’s trending, and what we are also offering,” Hernandez says. 

For example, a common question shoppers call in about is sizing for a bridesmaid dress while pregnant. Azazie has a blog that provides examples and tips on this topic, but it was first published in 2016. So, the content team refreshed the blog with examples of Azazie’s current maternity dresses and relevant links to its products. The customer service team refers to this blog while helping shoppers and directs shoppers to read it.   

Azazie also looks to any interactions it’s gotten on social media and trends in the bridal industry to inform its content strategy.  

The blog is under the purview of its digital marketing team, and Azazie also employs an SEO consultant to help determine its content and execution. Overall, the blogs that gain the most traffic and lead to the most sales are the ones that are integrated into its overall marketing strategy and are tied to press releases and influencers, she says.  

“It’s a lot of moving pieces and work, in order to put a campaign behind a keyword, but those are the most successful, the ones with a content strategy,” Hernandez says.  

Involving multiple departments in content creation will serve retailers well, Gartner’s Jashinsky says. Retailers would also be wise to track which types of content shoppers click on, and use that information to personalize product recommendations and for ad targeting. This is a way to gather first-party data directly from the consumer, which is especially valuable now that cookies that track shopper behavior across the web are increasingly being phased out, and can greatly benefit retailers in the long term, he says.  

If retailers do decide to make a focused effort on improving SEO through blog content or guided selling tools like a quiz to match shoppers with suitable products, they should expect it could take a year or two to see results, not months, Jashinsky says.  

“We always tell clients, this is not something you can get up and running in a week or month,” Jashinsky says. “This takes many months to get up and running, and takes a year or two to start to see significant payout. So you really need to make sure you have a long-term strategy and you are ensuring you reallocate this content as many places as possible to make sure that investment pays off.” 

For something like a quiz that guides shoppers through a series of questions and links to relevant product pages, retailers should expect to pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to a vendor to build it, Jashinsky says. But to do an editorial program at scale — which may take a team of writers to publish content daily and collaborate with different teams, plus the technology to plug into personalization software — that could take hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions, he says. 

For Made In, these marketing costs show up as the salaries for 10 employees dedicated to digital content instead of spending these dollars on ads. Similarly, the cost of the blog for Azazie shows up in its marketing staff resources. 1-800-Flowers also has an editorial staff that “fluctuates” depending on the time of year, John says without revealing more. 

Retailers that do strategically invest in content often see an increase in traffic from organic search, and small increases in basket size and conversion rates for shoppers that engage with this content, Jashinsky says. This, of course, varies by how well the content strategy is executed and product category.  

“Whether you are selling online or in-store, it is a pretty cost-effective way to increase SEO and increase conversion rates, and typically almost every retailer is already creating content and already has a lot of these pieces in other parts of ecosystem,” he says.  

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Retailers unveil new Halloween merchandise

Three retailers told Digital Commerce 360 they’ve grown Halloween merchandise offerings in 2023. The Home Depot Inc. has seen an increase in demand for giant items since the success of the 12-foot-tall giant skeleton, which it launched in 2020, says Lance Allen, senior merchant of decorative holiday at Home Depot. To capitalize on the trend, Home Depot introduced its “Dead Water” collection this year with a $349, 12.5-foot-tall animated predator of the night and a $399, 13-foot-tall animated Jack Skellington. Home Depot ranks no. 4 in The Top 1000, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest online retailers in North America.

Home Depot’s popular skeleton decoration.

Fun.com, which owns HalloweenCostumes.com, says giant decor items are also selling well this year. 25-foot-tall Michael Myers and Stay Puft inflatables are “flying off the shelves,” says Mark Bietz, chief marketing officer at Fun.com.

Though not necessarily new, alien costumes have been a surprise hit this year, Bietz says. Alien costumes sales are up 75% over the same period in 2022, which he attributes to recent news about investigations into aliens.

Lingerie brand Adore Me is leaning into Halloween merchandise this year in a way it hasn’t done in the past, vice president of strategy Ranjan Roy says. Previously, the retailer had success with products that could work double for Halloween and other occasions, like a sheer bra with black cats, which is also the retailer’s best-selling Halloween product this year. In 2023, Adore Me launched costumes for the first time, including devil and angel body suits. 

Social media dominates Halloween marketing

Adore Me is using influencers and social media marketing to build off its Halloween campaign from last year, Roy says. In 2022, it ran a campaign about how to turn lingerie into a Halloween costume, before selling actual costumes in 2023. This year, Adore Me hosted an influencer event with content creators making costumes out of Adore Me’s offerings.

Adore Me is also using digital, out-of-home advertising like advertisements on subways and billboards ahead of Halloween, Roy says. This is the second campaign like this the retailer has done, along with Valentine’s Day 2023. The retailer plans to continue investing in this type of advertising.

“It kind of bridges the gap between a digitally native company like us with traditional out-of-home advertising,” he says.

Fun.com and Home Depot both use social media to show off Halloween offerings, the retailers said. 

“One of the biggest changes we’ve made this year is with short-form video. We are producing and deploying more video than we ever have in the past,” Fun.com’s Bietz says. “It’s been amazing to see how customers have responded to having more rich experiences with our brand. As we create more, our customers are also giving back with videos of their own that we are pleased to feature and share on our websites and social platforms.”

He pointed to TikTok videos demonstrating the scale of giant decor items.

@halloweencostumes.com Battle of the giants! Michael Myers vs. Stay Puft, who would win? #25ft #codeorange #inflatabledecor #michaelmyers #staypuft #halloweendecor ♬ original sound – Leovincem

Connected TV ads have also driven “excellent results” for HalloweenCostumes.com so far this year after investment last year, Bietz says.

Retailers offer new fulfillment options

Getting purchases to customers ahead of the holiday they’re intended for is key. That’s less of an issue this year, Adore Me’s Roy says.

“This is actually the first year since pre-COVID where [fulfillment] is not glaringly top of mind,” he says.

With fulfillment less of a problem this year, retailers are focused on giving consumers more options and speeding up delivery. Fun.com opened a new fulfillment center in Kentucky to relieve its other facility in Minnesota that was maxing out capacity.

“This has also greatly improved our customer experience, as we can deliver much faster to more of our base,” Bietz says. 

Walmart recently expanded its fulfillment services for third-party sellers to include big and bulky items, a spokesperson said. The big-box retailer also has a variety of other fulfillment options, including late-night express delivery and pick-up options ready between 30 and 90 minutes. 

Walgreens also has 30-minute pickup, one-hour delivery, and 24-hour delivery, a spokesperson says. Walmart and Walgreens rank No. 2 and No. 19, respectively, in the Top 1000.

Reports of consumer demand are mixed

The National Retail Federation projects U.S. consumers will spend $12.2 billion on Halloween this year, up from $10.6 billion in 2022. Much of the increase in spending can be attributed to higher prices, particularly for candy,  Neil Saunders, managing director at retail analysis firm Global Data, previously told Digital Commerce 360.

Fun.com’s Bietz says overall demand is softer this year, but the online retailer is growing sales by offering new products. New merchandise and marketing plans are paying off, he says.

Adore Me is having a bigger Halloween season than in the past, Roy says. In the first half of October, which is the retailer’s peak Halloween buying season, Halloween sales were up 21% over the same period in 2022.

Peter Lucas contributed to this story.

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The OpenAI consortium released its generative AI bot ChatGPT for public use during Q4 2022, and it quickly became the hottest topic around. Months later, everyone in the online retail industry is still buzzing about generative AI, but how many businesses are actually using the technology today? And how many would want to talk to us about it?

Turns out, quite a few.

While many merchants we talked to are still just piloting and exploring how best to use the burgeoning technology, many brands have live generative AI programs up today. This Strategy Insights, “6 ways retailers are using AI right now and how generative AI will change ecommerce,” showcases examples of many large retail brands (and a few smaller ones) and how they are using generative AI right now.

Below is just a sampling of examples you’ll find in the rest of this report. Download the entire Strategy Insights here.

1.) Stitch Fix taps generative AI to write  ad headlines and product descriptions

Apparel retailer Stitch Fix uses generative AI to write headlines for Facebook and Instagram ads. In the past, it would take about two weeks to develop a creative campaign and draft copy. But now, human copywriters can evaluate a headline created by the generative AI system in less than one minute — and they approve the machine-created content 77% of the time, Stitch Fix says.

2.) Babylist uses generative AI to write email subject lines

Baby products marketplace and registry says its marketers are expected to use generative AI to help create ideas, content and copy, says Lee Anne Grant, chief growth officer. Babylist finds that ChatGPT-generated subject lines increased open rates for marketing email in half of their tests. It concluded that ChatGPT is a “great resource for when the team needs subject line inspiration or help writing one,” Grant says.

3.) J’evar uses generative AI to create product models

Online-only jewelry merchant J’evar has its product designers use generative AI to speed up how it creates custom jewelry pieces. Instead of going through dozens of product mockups over the course of weeks, genAI can help its designers produce product samples in minutes, says J’evar founder and CEO Amish Shah.

4.) Newegg uses generative AI to summarize customer reviews

Online electronics retailer Newegg built a generative AI tool in house that creates one product summary for a product based on all of the published customer reviews. This review is published at the top of all the reviews. Reviews are an important feature for Newegg, as 20% of Newegg.com shoppers read reviews, and these shoppers spend 40% more money on the site than non-review reading shoppers, says Andrew Choi, director of brand and website experience for Newegg.

5.) UrbanStems creates images with genAI

Online flower merchant UrbanStems is using generative AI in multiple ways, including having it create images of potential products it wants to sell. For example, the brand can tell its generative AI software to create an image of a 10-stem red and white arrangement of peonies in a glass vase and white background — and send that image to its merchandising team to create the product in real life. This helps the brand quickly experiment with new designs, without having to purchase flowers and conduct a photo shoot just for a design mock up, says Katie Hudson, content director for UrbanStems.

6.) EBay enables its marketplace sellers to use genAI to write product descriptions

Marketplace giant eBay built a tool based on Open AI’s ChatGPT that creates a product description based on data sellers provide about a product’s category, condition, color, brand and more. Roughly 20% of sellers shown the generative AI tool use it, and of those, 90% accept at least part of the description, says Xiaodi Zhang, vice president of seller experience at eBay.  

Download the free Digital Commerce 360 October Strategy Insights, “6 ways retailers are using AI right now and how generative AI will change ecommerce” here.

—April Berthene, Editor, Strategy Insights

Additional reporting from Digital Commerce 360 editors Don Davis, Gretchen Salois and Abbas Haleem.

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“What we know about our customer is she is interested in fashion — but she’s not a fashionista and looks for guidance,” says Tom Nowak, chief marketing officer.

That’s why the retailer launched “Evereve TV” in 2021. It is composed of videos featuring how clothing fits employees. Each week, the retailer posts about four to five videos. There is also a livestreaming session on Monday mornings. The content has to be fresh because clothing items tend to sell quickly, Nowak says.

“We always have to be doing new content because there’s always new product,” Nowak says. “We can’t run these as evergreens.”

A popular video category is denim, specifically blue jean pants, Nowak says. There are videos that talk about overall denim trends and others of employees showing how different styles fit them. One video features a staff member showing viewers how to cuff the ends of jeans or what type of top to wear depending on the jean leg cut. A typical shopper views an average of 1.8 videos with a completion rate of about 60% for all videos which range from under a minute to as long as 5-6 minutes, Nowak says.

“There’s a pretty high completion rate,” Nowak says, without revealing more.

Evereve staff members showcase various types of jean pants and how to style them.

Evereve TV videos lead to higher conversion

Shoppers who watch Evereve TV are more likely to buy, Nowak says. From August 2023 through mid-September 2023, conversion rate increased 12.7% for shoppers who watched the videos compared with those who did not. Evereve did not share its overall conversion rate.

Currently, Evereve TV accounts for 4% of the retailer’s web traffic. “Our hope is to increase this over time,” he says.

Conversion for shoppers engaged with videos focused on denim was about 20%. The best performing denim video was a how-to styling wide-leg denim video. This particular video resulted in a more than 35% jump in conversion during the two-month period, Nowak says.

The average order value for shoppers who engage with any Evereve TV videos was 28% higher compared with those who did not during the August through mid-September 2023 period, he says. Evereve declined to share its overall AOV.

Evereve staff address body type and fit

Nowak says the Evereve customer relies on it for a curated shopping experience.

“Finding the right pair of jeans can be life changing,” Nowak says. “It’s an important category for us. It’s an emotional experience — will you come out of it feeling awesome, psyched or disappointed?”

There’s a nuance to fit, Nowak says. The ability to showcase different styles for different body types is valuable, he says.

“Having our staff represent those body types and personally talk through the pros, cons, things to look for — there’s a lot of trust in that because they have knowledge of the product,” Nowak says.

In addition to a higher conversion rate, Nowak says that customers tend to purchase more units of clothing at checkout after watching the curated styling videos. This includes complementary clothing items to go with a pair of jeans or more than one pair of jeans, he says, without revealing more.

Retailers are focusing on authentic brand voice — and conversion

Evereve plans to continue using Evereve TV to align in-store and online shoppers.

“Evereve is very much about the styling experience,” Nowak says. “It’s very high touch. Our NPS scores are through the roof. With ecommerce, we have to raise the question about how to bring that styling point of view and guidance into the digital universe.”

Net promoter score is a customer satisfaction metric that measures how likely customers will recommend a brand or product to a friend or colleague. Retailers conduct customer surveys asking for a ranking based on a scale of 1-10. Nowak did not reveal the actual NPS number.

Getting consumer attention is critical, says Calla Murphy, vice president of digital strategy and integrated marketing at Belardi Wong.

“Clients are focused on authentic brand voice — and conversion,” Murphy says. “We see retailers use video on product detail pages as well as in email and customer relationship management (CRM) efforts as well as in paid ads across Meta, Google, YouTube and TikTok.”

Nowak believes Evereve TV is the retailer’s best way to reach both in store and online consumers.

“We’ve figured out that to have our staff talk about the same things, products, needs, occasions and body type issues our customers can relate to is really at the heart of what we’re trying to do,” Nowak says.

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“We want to meet the consumer where they are, and they prefer digital experiences — but it’s also really good for our business,” Glaser says. “We get so much more data to inform our future plans and marketing choices from a performance marketing perspective.”

General Mills can be more flexible by offering digital promotions, Glaser says. This includes incentivizing the consumer to take action when they’re most likely to convert.

“How do we build those relationships with consumers?” asks Glaser.

One way General Mills is building incentives for customers is through the Fetch rewards mobile app. Consumers download the Fetch app and create an account. They take photos of their grocery shopping receipts from in-store or online shopping and upload them to the app.

Consumers earn points they can redeem for gift cards. Eligible receipts that have at least one participating brand may receive at least 35 points. Each dollar is worth one point. 1,000 Fetch rewards points are worth $1, for example, and consumers need to reach 3,000 points in order to redeem for gift cards at stores including Starbucks, Macy’s, Amazon, Nordstrom Rack and Home Depot as well as for Visa cards. Fetch charges participating retailers like General Mills a referral fee.

Brand loyalty: What it is and how to build it

There is a lot of data exchanged between Fetch and General Mills, Glaser says.

“We get a ton of data from the Fetch partnership — about 62 million lines of data per day,” he says.

That data feeds into the brand’s customer data platform (CDP), which is a software platform that collects first-party data from multiple sources to help brands create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.

“Loyalty programs are something that the consumer packaged goods (CPG) space isn’t necessarily ubiquitous — it’s something not all CPGs have nailed,” Glaser says. “We wanted to be intentional. What does that look like? How does it come to life?”

In March 2023, General Mills said it had added 2 million customers to its Good Rewards loyalty program with Fetch within the first six months of launch.

Consumer engagement experience

Fetch has about 18 million monthly active users, with 6 million of those using the app every day, says Robin Wheeler, the chief revenue officer at Fetch. In April 2023, the rewards app said it had surpassed $152 billion in annual gross merchandise value (GMV) across U.S. in-store and online retail sales.

“Fetch isn’t your traditional kind of shopping app,” Wheeler says. “It’s a consumer engagement experience.”

A larger portion of consumers are Millennials and Gen Z, Wheeler says.

“The younger generation is definitely coming to Fetch and I think a lot of that is tied to the experiences they’re seeing on social media,” Wheeler says.

Fetch rewards: adding brands

Fetch shares its general merchandise value scanned daily, Wheeler says. Fetch employees also track potential opportunities.

“We’re reading the trades and keeping up to speed on industries,” she says. “If we’re seeing national brands start to compete with a certain brand of deodorant, for example, our primary goal is to focus on where we’re seeing a lot of activity where we’re not currently rewarding consumers. Because that’s low hanging fruit.”

The company uses this information as it attempts to build relationships with other brands.

“There are plenty of big companies we haven’t started working with, and we need to be there,” she says.

This includes providing carousel information displayed at the top of the app that consumers see when they open it. Whether the promotion is about back to school or another busy shopping period, brands also want to include their offers and create more consumer awareness.

Fetch also has daily spin feature where consumers can obtain a daily reward.

Brands use influencers to reach new customers

This includes learning about the app from social media influencers, Wheeler says.

Fetch can share with brands what consumers are spending based on the receipts they upload to the app. Brands can target consumers, whether they’re loyal customers or “competitive buyers, which you have a to work a little bit harder for,” Wheeler says.

Fetch works with influencer agencies to source talent, Wheeler says. The company monitors influencer content and when it finds the right fit, it reaches out with affiliate links.

While the majority of Fetch receipts are in-store, Wheeler says online receipt uploads are growing.

“We have integrations with Amazon and Walmart,” Wheeler says. “We also have emailed receipts. If we have your email integrated and you order from DoorDash, we’re able to scan and pick up that receipt. So emailed receipts are definitely growing.”

Consumers can connect their Fetch account to their email, Amazon and Walmart accounts to earn Fetch rewards.

Fetch social

• 61% of Fetch monthly active users engaged with social features during July, up from 24% in January.
• Daily Reward launched in December 2022. Consumers have played daily rewards over 222 million plays since then.
• People who engage with social features/in-app games are more likely to scan receipts every day and have retention rates around 4-5 points higher than cohorts that don’t engage with these features.

Fetch eReceipts

• On average in 2023, about 10% of all receipts submitted to Fetch were eReceipts.
• About 29% of Fetch users who scan receipts also submit eReceipts.
• Top retailers include Walmart, Target, Sam’s Club, Walgreens, McDonald’s, Starbucks.

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The tool allows J’evar’s jewelry designers to input information about the product’s materials and specifications, and the generative AI will produce an image of that product. The tool saves the brand weeks of manual design time on products, says Amish Shah, founder and CEO of the direct-to-consumer brand of jewelry featuring lab-grown diamonds.

J’evar began using its jewelry product AI generator last year in 2022. The retailer feeds metrics and images into a knowledge bank — or a database of text, images and metrics for materials that include the weight of gold and silver, among other key details — for the generator to refer to before it produces an image. Shah jokingly refers to it as “JevarGPT 1.0” and “AI for Jewelry 1.0,” the former a reference to OpenAI consortium’s ChatGPT.

For example, Shah says if he wanted to make a bangle, he could input a text prompt to the generative AI, specifying how much the weight of gold should be for that piece, how thin or wide it should be and what design style he would like. He can even ask it to produce 50 iterations from that single prompt. In return, the generative AI will output complete designs, some of which might be ready to turn into tangible products. Other product designs the AI outputs require J’evar designers to modify the design until it can be producible.

Shah says one key reason J’evar can’t produce all the designs is because of the inability to cut diamonds into the shape the AI generates. But even this ability is coming soon with new machinery, he says.

Exploring generative AI for design

“You’re looking at optimization, efficiency, speed — which is of course going to lead to cost reduction in the longer term,” Shah says about using generative AI. “But importantly, from an output perspective, we’re looking at precision and a higher level of creativity.”

In the past few years, developers have trained artificial intelligence to do more than analyze data and tell its users what to make of the data. They’ve trained AI to generate writing, images, videos and sounds. This is called generative AI, and online retailers have already begun to design new products and produce new variations of existing products — and do so quickly. With generative AI, retailers can create and test multiple product ideas in just minutes, much faster than the weeks or months it might take to design now. Online retailers, including J’evar and Auricle Technology, are learning how to use generative AI to assist their product designers, making the process more efficient. But because generative AI is still new, it has limitations on what it can do.

J’evar uses its own generative AI technology to help its human designers speed up the creative process.

Gen AI’s value outshines its current limitations

While generative AI is excellent for learning and processing massive amounts of data, it is not yet at a point that it can understand movement through space, says Brendan Witcher, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester. It doesn’t think about engineering and structural elements or physical viability yet, he says. Although generative AI is not at that point yet, he says, that doesn’t mean it can’t be eventually.

“You want to design a shoe. Great,” Witcher says. “Well, a shoe’s a shoe until you put it on and have to run in it, then it falls apart on you because you didn’t think about the physics of how movement happens.

“The big question is when do we bridge the gap between the work that needs to be put into generative AI to understand the movement through physical space that objects need to go through often, and the commercial viability of doing that.”

Informed assessments

However, even with its current limitations, Witcher says generative AI’s value comes from the assessments it already has learned to make. He says people do their jobs based on the knowledge they receive in their training, and “AI kind of works like that too.” But generative AI “takes it to the next step” and looks at more data than humans can process, and then make assessments about what the best subsequent steps are. It can also come up with ideas humans couldn’t or wouldn’t think of because the human mind doesn’t process information the way artificial intelligence tools can, he says.

“We can’t absorb that much data and extract from it an idea. It’s just impossible for us,” Witcher says. “It shouldn’t be lost that just developing an image of something that you wouldn’t be able to think of because you weren’t trained to think that way has huge possibilities.”

Witcher says generative AI’s value extends beyond production speed to unique creations.

“A lot of people talk about generating imagery with AI, but what to me is most important is the ability to do it over and over and over again until you get something you like,” Witcher says.

Will generative AI replace human designers?

Generative AI is not here to replace humans in the design phase, Shah says. Especially not in the jewelry industry.

“Human intelligence supersedes artificial intelligence, at least I can say that for jewelry,” Shah says.

Generative AI is more like an assistant to human designer, Shah says. It’s not the technology that’s telling designers when a piece has been finalized. It’s a human making that decision, Shah says. Just like Adobe and Corel are graphics software tools for designers, generative AI is a design tool, not a human replacement, he says.

“Once we get the initial output, it is then modified to be producible,” Shah says.

Forrester’s Witcher agrees that AI should be used as a tool and not a replacement for creative individuals.

“If all the people learn how to do things on generative AI, then no one learns how to do it beyond generative AI,” Witcher says. “Over time, you start weeding out the expertise from the low-level individuals and nobody becomes a high-level individual.”

Witcher adds that the majority of AI use isn’t leaving artificial intelligence “to its own devices.”

“It’s more assisted intelligence — the AI standing for assisted intelligence — where we’re using it to be more productive in our own jobs that we currently do today,” Witcher says.

J’evar uses generative AI to speed up the design process

Traditionally, Shah says, jewelry design is a long process that can take a few weeks or even more than a month. In the case of commissioned designs, J’evar designers would first have to understand what kind of product a customer wants before going into iterations. In the example of designing a bangle, the designers would have to first determine if a customer wanted a wide cuff or something they could stack, something lightweight or heavy, thick or thin, if they wanted diamonds or gemstones, and so on.

Then, the designers would do initial mockups to ensure they understood the customer’s request correctly. This process would typically be one to three weeks of showing designs to the customer and sketching accordingly, Shah says.

In one case, Shah says he and his team had gone through 55 variations before a customer said, “I love it.” After that, his team would then go to computer-aided design (CAD). From there, it would go to rendering.

“By using AI, we are able to take that process down to pretty much hours and in some cases, literally within minutes,” Shah says.

Moreover, when working manually, the designer has to move every single diamond into place, making sure they are in the correct position. AI speeds up that process, Shah says. In milliseconds, the generative AI processor can move diamonds and gemstones, raise or lower gold weight, or change the width or thickness.

“It’s almost like putting a thousand designers and the type of work they would have done into the knowledge bank and then letting the system do a combination from those thousand designs to give you back results,” he says.

J’evar fed years’ worth of jewelry data into its generative AI platform. The platform produces images that human designers then adjust in the design phase.

Developing a custom generative AI processor

Shah says his family’s 90-year history in the jewelry business gives him an advantage over others in developing custom generative AI technology for J’evar.

“It sounds complex, but you have to keep in mind: We’re in the business,” Shah says. “We’re in the jewelry business, so the core bank or the core information that’s required is sitting with us. It’s not something I have to go outside and source.”

J’evar feeds text and imagery into its generative AI to teach it what to output. When inputting prompts, J’evar designers primarily use text to generate an image.

“That knowledge bank is sitting there,” Shah says. “Now, it’s all about organizing it and feeding it into the system in a format that can then be analyzed and the GPUs can run and start combining things and getting them back to you.”

Iterations at scale

Sometimes, what generative AI produces needs less human modification than others. For example, Auricle Technology uses generative AI tools to swap out logos and colors on its different products.

Auricle Technology founder William Cooksey says he created his electronics accessory brand out of necessity. He uses Apple AirPods for long hours most days, and the hard plastic begins to hurt his ears after a while. That led him to create AirPod skins made from silicone that are softer and anchor better into his ears.

When his manufacturer sent back prototypes, it printed Auricle’s logo on them. That led Cooksey to realize the importance of branding and how he can “pivot and get into the licensing game.”

The direct-to-consumer brand launched in 2021 now creates customized merchandise including AirPod skins, AirPod charging case skins, phone cases, wireless chargers and mouse pads. And through licensing agreements, it prints these products with logos for more than 90 teams in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer, as well as about 130 college teams.

Rather than have a designer manually change the colors and logos for each team, the brand has integrated generative AI into its design process, Cooksey says.

Unlike J’evar, however, Auricle does not have the budget nor the in-house capacity to develop an all-new generative AI engine. Its business model is also different, focusing on customization rather than new product development.

New technology, but make it affordable

Cooksey instead works with Goals Media Group to use generative AI into its product iterations. Goals uses technology Microsoft for Startups provides, says Goals founder and CEO Aubrey Flynn. This means it receives access to Microsoft’s resources, including technology and tech experts, among other benefits. Microsoft has announced it would invest $10 billion into OpenAI — the company behind text-based generative AI brand ChatGPT and image-based DALL-E.

Cooksey says his lead designer and Flynn determined generative AI was the way to go from designing products with one team logo to hundreds “in a short period of time without breaking the bank.”

Auricle also uses Goals and its generative AI offerings to develop marketing materials like images for social media that highlight products from different teams at different stadiums. The generative AI creates an image complete with Auricle branding, the team’s branding, and any copy it needs.

“Being a small business, not having a lot of capital, it’s really exciting me that we can still come up with quality images without breaking our budget,” Cooksey says.

“When you deal with those leagues, they want you to be able to launch all the teams at the same time,” Cooksey says. “I just wouldn’t have been able to afford to do that.”

Generative AI’s impact on metrics

Goals has about 650 clients and nearly half are online retailers, Flynn says.

Flynn says that social media marketing creatives that generative AI produced can increase consumer interactions with the ad by more than 35% compared with that brand’s normal creative, according to data from its clients.

This includes creatives entirely generated through AI, visuals that already existed that AI has augmented, and copy that generative AI has helped develop for those types of visuals.

“I’ve seen AI-powered creative outperform to the extent where cost per click on a certain product may have been 30%-40% less expensive based on some of the guidance from AI on the copy and the imagery,” he says.

He adds that brands like Auricle — which lack access to capital, resources, infrastructure and more that large brands have — need to adopt technology like generative AI early on because it’s less expensive than some alternatives like hiring designers or manufacturers from the start.

Early results are insightful, but ‘is this just another buzzword?’

Shah, Cooksey, Witcher and Flynn all expressed the same idea: It may be early, but the application of generative AI in product development is promising.

While some may say generative AI is another buzzword, Witcher says what separates this technology from other tech fads is that companies are already allowing individuals in their organizations to play with, understand and experiment with generative AI.

“They’re almost crowd-sourcing proof of concept,” Witcher says. “It’s a unique characteristic to generative AI that it’s so easy to do and work with that almost anybody can do it.”

Although results are limited in some ways and sometimes imperfect, online retailers are using generative AI imaging to design new products essentially from scratch, customize existing products and develop marketing content. They can develop multiple iterations of these images at once or continue iterating on the same image multiple times until they’re satisfied with how the image looks. They can then take the design that generative AI produces and tweak it manually, saving them the time of doing each iteration manually — and saving them the creative energy it takes just to design a new product iteration.

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The launch into Target stores was 1.5 years in the making, Holloway says. Since the start of 2023, Bala has sold its products online at Target.com, which was a key component to the in-store launch, Holloway says.

“It’s the reason we are not launching in 200 stores but almost every store,” she says.

Overall, Holloway is excited for Target’s large audience, which will give Bala a reach that paid online media would not allow the brand to achieve, she says.

“For us, Target was always the North Star,” she says.

Overall, for Bala’s businesses, roughly a third of sales are wholesale. A third are from the Amazon marketplace, and a third are from its direct-to-consumer website, ShopBala.com.

“With such a big partnership with Target, next year could look completely different,” Holloway says.

Target is No. 5 in the 2023 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000.

Influencers promote Target launch

Since Q2 2022, Bala has worked with influencers to promote and sell its products. It calls them ambassadors. The brand has more than 400 ambassadors who use Bala products in their workouts and post about the products on social media.

“We reach audiences we otherwise wouldn’t have,” Holloways says about working with influencers. “It directly impacts our growth. It’s a mini machine of sales people and marketers.”

Influencers receive a coupon code they can share with their followers. Then, the influencers receive a commission on those sales. The commissions range from 5%-10%, says Brooke Konzelmann, Bala’s head of public relationships and partnerships.

For the Target launch, Bala contacted 10 of its highest-performing influencers to post about the launch and promoting the three SKUs that Target will sell in Target’s exclusive color, Ocean. For example, a mom posted a workout routine of how to use Bala’s products for a post-partum Pilates workout, and then linked to the products to buy on Target.com.

Bala’s profit margins are typically higher if shoppers buy directly from them versus a wholesaler. But this isn’t always the case, Holloway says.

“These days, customer acquisitions costs are so high,” she says.

In fact, 59% of retailers rank costs/profitability of campaigns as their biggest marketing challenge, according to a Digital Commerce 360 survey of 97 online retail marketers in May 2023.

So, while shoppers may spend more money on Bala products when shopping directly on shopBala.com compared with a wholesaler, Bala still has to factor in the cost to get that shopper to its direct-to-consumer website. It doesn’t have to factor that cost in for its products sold at Target.

Balancing sales channels

But to survive as a business, Bala needs both wholesalers and direct-to-consumer, she says.

Digitally native brands have historically focused on sales through their direct-to-consumer websites. But like Bala, more have diversified into selling in other channels. Of the 80 digitally native, vertically integrated brands Digital Commerce 360 ranks in its Top 1000, 42 of them sell on a marketplace.

Overall in 2023, Bala plans to sustain the large growth its had during the pandemic. Its goal is to continue to have sales growth in 2024, Holloway says.

For sporting goods retailers in the Top 1000, online sales as a category grew 0.04% in 2022. That’s well below the Top 1000 growth rate of 5.1%, according to Digital Commerce 360 Research.

“Target is going to play a huge role in that growth because if the partnership goes well, Target will easily be our biggest retailer,” she says. “And then, sky’s the limit.”

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Babylist, an online marketplace and baby registry aggregator, treats generative AI as a “co-pilot,” and not necessarily a time-saving tool, says Lee Anne Grant, chief growth officer.

Lee Anne Grant, chief growth officer, Babylist

“It’s a tool to help generate ideas, content and copy,” she says. “In some ways, using it is taking us more time.”
This is because Babylist’s creative team uses the technology to inspire rather than outright write complete blog posts or other marketing content. Marketers ask AI questions and then think about how the results can help them create.

“We had an all-hands meeting [in early 2023] with the goal to approach the technology in an educational development way,” Grant says. “You’re not only allowed to use it for your job, but you’re also expected to.”

More retailers are likely to follow suit as the technology continues to advance and retailers learn how to wield it. 56% of U.S. marketing or advertising decision-makers already use generative AI in their marketing efforts, according to consulting firm Forrester Research Inc.’s June 2023 business-to-consumer marketing survey of 154 executives. These large language models, chatbots and image generator vendors include ChatGPT, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.

Digital marketers are learning that the more they test, the more the technology learns. This affordable tool can help — but not replace — marketers. Babylist uses ChatGPT to test copy for newsletter and marketing email campaigns. Online florist UrbanStems uses generative AI to write blog posts, and it creates images for social media marketing creative. And men’s footwear brand Koio uses AI-generated copy for brainstorming email and ad ideas. The costs are low, and retailers like UrbanStems are mindful that if they aren’t using it, their competition certainly is.

Retailers must consider the potential upsides — and pain points — when using generative AI

Digital marketers are using generative AI to draft ideas and examples for emails, SEO and other marketing materials. While the potential benefits are vast, there are also concerns, says Jay Pattisall, vice president, principal analyst at Forrester.

Marketers must consider how brands, retailers and agencies are using the technology, Pattisall says. Copyright law does not protect AI-generated art, for example.

But the potential for how brands can use AI is exciting, he says. Advertising agencies are building platforms for their clients as part of their own proprietary technology. Retailers are building in-house, too, he adds.

“But at this stage, it’s more practical to buy because there are more options available on the marketplace. That may change in the future,” he says.

Babylist tests ChatGPT-generated email campaigns

Babylist uses ChatGPT to test newsletter marketing email campaigns. In 2023, Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., owner of major baby products retail chain Buy Buy Baby, filed for bankruptcy. Babylist saw this as an opportunity to acquire Buy Buy Baby’s customers.

Babylist ran a test for an email marketing campaign on April 29 with ChatGPT for its two newsletter audiences. It sent out one test to 10% of its “pregnant” newsletter recipients (about 59,000 subscribers out of 589,000 on the total list) and 10% of its “parent” newsletter recipients (222,000 recipients of 2.32 million).  Half of each group received one email written by a Babylist editor and the other written by ChatGPT.

The results? For the pregnant group, the editor’s email won with a 2.9% higher open rate compared with the generative AI’s version.

• The Babylist editor’s subject line: “buybuy BABY Bankruptcy & Your Registry: What to Know.”
• The ChatGPT’s subject line: “What the buybuy BABY Bankruptcy Means for Parents.”

For the parent group, ChatGPT gained a slight edge over the human editor with a 0.37% higher open rate.

• The Babylist editor’s subject line: “buybuy BABY Bankruptcy & More Parent News.”
• The ChatGPT’s subject line: “What the buybuy BABY Bankruptcy Means for Parents.”

Babylist found that ChatGPT-generated subject lines increased open rates in half of their tests. It concluded that ChatGPT is a “great resource for when the team needs subject line inspiration or help writing one,” Grant says.

AI helps retailers brainstorm ideas

ChatGPT-generated content helps Babylist’s creative team create better content, Grant adds. The value is in the brainstorming.

“If a copywriter is feeling stuck on a new concept for TikTok video, they can ask ChatGPT to generate a bunch of ideas,” she says.

Using generative AI allows retailers to scale and personalize marketing based upon the brand’s approach, says Forrester’s Pattisall.

“Let the people be in charge of the creativity and let the machines help scale and volumize the marketing,” Pattisall says.

Retailers must consider copyright and liability issues

Babylist employees are instructed not to share proprietary or confidential information with ChatGPT or any other public generative AI platform, Grant says.

This is important because retailers must also take care about what materials they use to “train” the AI model, Pattisall says.

“If those inputs are using data points that are copyrighted material, then the model potentially is violating the copyright by using rights-protected materials,” he says.

One example of this is between visual media company Getty Images and Stability AI Inc. Getty Images accused Stability AI of using more than 12 million photos without permission or payment to use those images. The complaint, filed in February 2023, says that Stability AI unlawfully used Getty’s copyrighted images and text, including metadata, to train its AI text-to-image tool Stable Diffusion.

Metadata is the information used to summarize how and when the data was created as well as the source, type and owner of the data. Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image model that uses deep learning to generate high-quality images from written descriptions.

“All of Getty’s images are copyrighted images,” Pattisall says. “So the liability is a concern for marketers.”

UrbanStems jumps onto generative AI to keep up with competitors

Competition prompted online flower retailer UrbanStems to focus on generative AI, says Katie Hudson, content director. In early 2023, the retailer was already using generative AI to create notes to accompany its flowers. Hudson says she noticed competitors doing the same — and she read about it in the media.

Katie Hudson, brand marketing and content, UrbanStems

UrbanStems decided to look into how it could use the technology beyond brand awareness, Hudson says.

Mother’s Day is UrbanStem’s busiest holiday. It accounts for 15% of the retailer’s total annual revenue. For Mother’s Day 2023, the retailer used ChatGPT to write a blog about the 10 best brunch spots for Mother’s Day in Washington, D.C.

UrbanStems marketers wrote the introduction, AI wrote the rest of it, and the article appeared in the retailer’s blog section on its website.

“During May, which includes Mother’s Day, we saw this local post drive 5% of our organic blog traffic. It was in our top 10 performing posts for the month,” Hudson says.

Blogs are not intended to drive conversion, but rather, improve organic search results, she says.

“Our blog had our highest ever non-brand search traffic during Mother’s Day,” Hudson says.

This could be attributed to the brunch blog, among other marketing efforts, she says. Over the two weeks leading up to Mother’s Day, UrbanStems’ organic search’s conversion rate increased 17%, she says.

UrbanStems used AI to write a top 10 best brunch spots for Mother’s Day in Washington D.C. in April 2023. The post increased organic blog traffic 5% in May. It was in the top 10 performing blog posts of the month.

UrbanStems has not drafted enough generated-AI posts on its blog to truly compare performance, Hudson says. Part of the reason is because it typically takes several months for its blogs to gain traffic and views in search engines like Google, she says.

Digital marketers use AI to automate content creation tasks

Not only did this ChatGPT-post drive traffic to its site, but it saved its marketers time as they did not have to manually research brunch places.

The retailer is drafting at least one AI-generated blog post a week to test how the posts perform, Hudson says. UrbanStems marketers use templates to help guide the AI. Marketers can use saved templates and copy and paste information like name insert and word count requirements, she says.

“We don’t have to do everything from scratch,” Hudson says.

What’s left is copyediting.

“I find where it’s saving us time is truly the structure of the blog. It builds it out. We give it all the key questions you might want answered and it will give us some interesting facts. We then go in and tweak as needed,” Hudson says. “Instead of a blog post taking a couple of hours, it will take 20 minutes.”

AI results need human assistance

The AI results aren’t perfect, as sometimes the AI will make up descriptions for products it does not know, or it will not write in the tone UrbanStems’ brand voice, Hudson says.

“We asked ChatGPT to write about a bouquet with a certain kind of flower and the description was way off. It didn’t know our products at all,” Hudson says, without revealing more. “It was kind of guessing. So, we had to go back and do tweaks.”

UrbanStems is feeding ChatGPT its own product descriptions. This will help it better understand the tone of the “brand’s voice” as it learns, Hudson says.

“We’re still working on having AI understand our brand voice. AI tends to create cheesy writing [for descriptions],” she says.

So for now, UrbanStems is still writing its own product descriptions.

“We are using AI to draft all our SEO content, some of our blog content, and all our meta descriptions and title tags for SEO purposes,” she says.

Retailers use AI to generate marketing content

Babylist also uses generative AI for search engine optimization. The online marketplace uses Frase, a generative AI content writing software vendor.

Typically, marketers log into Google Webmaster Tools to search what to use for SEO, Babylist’s Grant says. Now, Frase generates frequently asked questions keywords that Babylist should use to make sure an article they’re writing is SEO-optimized, she says.

“That frees up our editors to take the time to write an article and create better quality content,” Grant says, without revealing more.

Forrester’s Pattisall says generative AI will allow retailers to send more relevant communication. Marketers can uncover new ways to grow and acquire new customers. They can also use the technology to keep existing customers at a cost that does not exponentially increase year after year, he says.

“[Retailers] can maintain their business margins,” he says “They can provide the type of marketing services that they’re good at in a way that doesn’t break the bank. [The technology] allows them to be profitable,” he says.

Generative AI produces images for social media

Another way marketers can use generative AI is to create images. UrbanStems uses AI software program Midjourney that creates images from text prompts. Marketers ask it to create an image of a 10-stem red and white arrangement of peonies, in a glass vase on a white background.

Hudson says the results were encouraging.

“While it still looked like AI — not quite like a true image — it was a great starting off point,” Hudson says. “I sent that off to the merchandising team and they were able to use that image for vendors to use as a reference. That’s a huge value to us.”

AI-generated images allow UrbanStems to experiment and create new bouquet designs quickly. They do not have to buy the flowers and conduct a photo shoot to mock up new designs, she says.

Hudson says the retailer uses the standard tier of Midjourney, which means it has limits on how many images it can have the AI create in a month. Businesses can also pay more to have the AI generate images in seconds or create images in 10 minutes for cheaper.  A basic plan can cost $10 a month to $120 per month for a mega plan.

UrbanStems uses Midjourney to create images of flower arrangements to use as product mock ups to share with vendors.

Using generative AI to generate social media images

During the summer of 2023, UrbanStems ran a test via social media to see if it could gain consumers insights using AI generated images.
The test used products UrbanStems already sells, but the goal was to see if it could gain insights before actually creating new products.

The retailer launched “This or That” polls using Instagram Stories, where viewers could vote on which bouquet they preferred. The stories were live for 24 hours. UrbanStems paired similar bouquets together that have similar price points and color schemes.

The retailer’s average interaction rate for Instagram stories is 20% of its 233,000 followers view the story.

The poll’s results reflected real-life sales, Hudson says. The winning bouquets had higher
online sales compared with the bouquets with fewer votes, she says. The bouquets Sol vs. Neon Lights polled from July 12-13, 2023, with Neon Lights as the clear favorite with 79% of the vote compared to Sol’s 21%.

In UrbanStem’s Summer 2023 summer poll “This or That,” in its Instagram Stories, The Sol received 21% vs. The Neon Lights (79%).

These results give Hudson confidence that the brand could do a poll like this with AI-generated images so UrbanStems will know what shoppers’ preferences are before going to market with those products.

What’s more, it’s insights like these that Hudson believes will lead to further investment from its management team in Midjourney and generative AI applications in general.

“I feel confident I could get our company on board investing in [higher-cost plans],” Hudson says. “It will take some of the heavy lifting off our junior marketers that no longer have to be in the weeds looking up SEO terms, for example. We want our employees to grow in their role and not be bogged down.”

Marketers test and learn from AI

Another way retailers are using AI is to help alleviate the workload for junior marketers. Some retailers like men’s footwear brand Koio are just getting started using generative AI.

For about six months, Koio has used ChatGPT for email subject lines, says Joe Anhalt, vice president, marketing, growth.

“It’s one of the first places we go for inspiration,” Anhalt says. “It might take a few times and we have to make tweaks on our own, but the prompts are showing us results.”

The shoe retailer uses the AI-generated copy for performance ads on Facebook and Instagram, he says, without revealing more. The brand uses software vendor Zenlytic with generative AI tool Zoe. Zoe answers questions and generates reports about how marketing campaigns and specific promotions are performing.

While Koio hasn’t tracked how AI is performing compared with human marketers, the tool has saved it considerable time, he says.

“The larger win for us has been not needing a full-time employee to produce some of these tasks,” Anhalt says.

AI has helped marketers free up time to do other tasks, Anhalt says. However, there is a learning curve for junior marketers, he says. The retailer typically pairs a junior marketer with a copywriter until they are confident the junior marketers can use ChatGPT or a similar tool to craft emails, banner ads and other site content, he says.

What does it cost to use AI?

Overall, Babylist, UrbanStems and Koio said the cost to use generative AI technology is affordable. For certain applications, ChatGPT is free and services like Midjourney and Frase charge “reasonable” rates, according to UrbanStems and Babylist.

It’s not about the cost, Forrester’s Pattisall says. “Retailers’ knee-jerk reaction tends to be, ‘how much money is this,’ or ‘how much money will this save us?’” Those are the wrong questions, he says. “The better way to think about this is how effective it’s going to be.”

Generative AI continues to evolve at an accelerated rate. As marketers learn how to use it, the technology itself improves. It’s an idea generator if nothing else, Babylist’s Grant says.

“An editor might ask ChatGPT to come up with 40 ideas for an Instagram post,” Grant says. “30 out of 40 of those ideas might be bad — but you end up with a gem of an idea from all the wacky weirdness.”

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