In September, Sitecore announced ongoing plans to continue embedding AI algorithms in its products. These plans align with a growing trend in digital marketing—the use of AI to create and edit content, deliver personalized customer experiences, analytics, and more.
AI-powered marketing efforts contribute to the general financial objectives of an organization. According to Gartner, companies that leverage AI in their marketing strategies are likely to see a 7% increase in profitability compared to their counterparts.
In this blog post, I’ll explore the Sitecore products that include AI capabilities and point out what digital marketing challenges they address.
A brief history of Sitecore AI capabilities
In 2018, Sitecore introduced Sitecore Cortex, which aimed to automatically identify and predict visitor trends, personalize visitor experiences, and offer content tagging recommendations. At Brimit, we have mastered this technology and published a Cortex-based solution for RFM analysis in early 2019.
Later in 2019, Sitecore released Sitecore AI—a SaaS service for automated personalization that uses Azure Machine Learning. Then, Sitecore transitioned to a composable architecture with several SaaS-based products that offer various business capabilities across content, engagement, and commerce. Powered by AI, these products reduce manual labor and automate many different marketing tasks.
Then, Sitecore transitioned to a composable architecture offering with a number of SaaS-based products that provide various business capabilities in the areas of content production, engagement, and commerce.
A holistic view of Sitecore’s composable offering
Let’s discover which Sitecore products now provide AI capabilities.
ContentHub AI capabilities: replacing manual content processes with automated operations
74% of senior marketers say they can’t produce the sheer volume and variety of content required for personalization fast enough, and 39% of senior marketers admit that manual processes are holding them back. The AI capabilities of Sitecore ContentHub deal with these challenges.
ContentHub provides the following functionalities:
- Recognition and analysis of images and videos
- Classification and tagging of the visual content
- Personalized discovery of visual content
The results of applying ContentHub’s ability to automate content tagging and image recognition
With the AI capabilities of ContentHub, your marketing will benefit in multiple ways:
- Efficiency—streamline content operations with automated processes, reducing manual efforts
- Precision—deliver accurate content targeting by leveraging AI's data-driven insights
- Adaptability—stay ahead of the curve with predictive analytics and adapt content strategies proactively
- Enhanced user experience—personalize content to ensure relevance and user engagement
Sitecore Send’s AI capabilities: segmenting audiences according to their interests and purchase intent
Sitecore Send’s AI tool is called Audience Discovery. It was created to empower e-commerce businesses to make stronger connections with their customers. Audience Discovery uses a tracking mechanism to detect actions such as product views, adding products to the cart, and purchases. Then, Audience Discovery analyzes the collected information using filtering and AI-based machine learning models to create segments, which fall into the following three categories:
- Interest in a brand or category—tagging customers by their interest in specific brands or product categories
- Overall purchase intent for a brand or product category—tagging customers by their interest in making a purchase (low, mid, or high intent)
- Funnel stage—tagging customers by their interest in making a purchase and level of loyalty (low, mid, mid-high, or high intent; active, loyal, or very loyal customer)
Toggle switches can be used to enable AI-powered discovery of automated segments and to start an automated campaign in Sitecore Send
Automated campaigns use data from automated segments and are sent through an automation workflow based on a specific trigger or condition.
As a result, your contacts are tagged based on their interest in a brand or product category, as well as on their purchase intent and funnel stage
Sitecore Search/Discover AI capabilities: anticipating purchase intent
Online shoppers today expect relevance and personalization. They have less time and lots of options to choose from. Sitecore Search/Discover dynamically displays individualized search results and recommendations to anticipate purchase intent. As a result, on average, you can expect a 15% increase in cross-channel engagement and a 13% increase in RPV.
|
AI model |
Characteristics |
|
Collaborative Filtering |
- Offers a personalized approach to making recommendations - Provides singular value decomposition - Ensures 1:1 personalization in search and recommendations - Often used to recommend products or content based on user interactions and behaviors |
| Clustering |
- Incorporates techniques like k-means clustering to segment items into groups - Utilizes latent semantic indexing, a technique used to detect relatedness between terms and concepts in text - Provides recommendations and catalog enrichment by grouping similar items together |
| Approximate Nearest Neighbor |
- Quickly identifies items that are closely related or similar to a given item - Uses locality sensitivity hashing, which helps find similar items efficiently - Ensures 1:1 personalization by making visually similar recommendations |
| Deep Learning |
- Uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract features and recognize patterns - Provides visually similar recommendations |
| Classification | - Uses a variety of methods, including restricted Boltzmann machines and random forest algorithms
- Categorizes items into predefined classes or labels - Ensures 1:1 personalization and catalog enrichment by categorizing items for better search and recommendation experiences |
In short, the AI capabilities of Sitecore Search/Discover will allow you to:
- Filter out content items that a user might like based on user interactions and behaviors
- Identify items that are closely related or similar to a given item
- Offer similar item recommendations and catalog enrichment by grouping like items together
- Provide 1:1 personalization
Sitecore Search/Discover provides 100+ AI-based recipes out of the box. Let’s have a look at one of them: Neural Co-Added to Cart.
One of the recipes available for search configuration out of the box—Neural Co-Added to Cart
The Neural Co-Added to Cart recipe allows Sitecore to get content based on page context, user history, and preferences of similar users. Sitecore Discover then uses the RBM algorithm to merge and prioritize the results and will further refine and add additional products if necessary.
Sitecore Search/Discover dynamically displays individualized search results and recommendations to anticipate purchase intent and increase conversions.
It is important to understand how digital conversion metrics translate to revenue, as well as how even small changes can make a significant financial impact. Imagine that a business has 8 million site visitors per year, with 1.2% of them making a purchase. In this case, 1.2% is the current conversion rate, which translates to 96,000 purchases or conversions annually. With an average order value (AOV) of $124, the total revenue is $11,904,000.
Let's consider a potential 20% increase in conversion rate—from 1.2% to 1.44%. According to several Sitecore case studies on brands such as Big Lots and Lane Bryant, as well as research by practicalecommerce.com, this uplift is typical. If the business operates at a 65% gross margin, a figure that is vital for determining the profit after costs, the slightly higher conversion rate could increase the annual gross margin by $1.55 million. As you can see, understanding and optimizing conversion metrics can lead to significant financial benefits.
Sitecore generative AI capabilities: reimagining content creation
Recently, Sitecore demonstrated how to use Sitecore Content Cloud with ChatGPT. This integration introduces Sitecore generative AI capabilities, which allow businesses and digital marketers to transform their content creation strategies and increase customer engagement.
Sitecore’s AI-powered solution provides a wide range of options:
- Content summary—generates a summary for an image and summarizes content for social media posts
- Text generation—makes multiple variants of a piece of content for SEM purposes, generates topics for future content, produces long-form blog posts, and creates new language variants of an existing content item
- Image generation—creates images based on a given text prompt, edits them, and generates different variants of the images
- Search—auto-summarizes questions and provides answers with increased contextual relevance
- Recommendations—provides product or content recommendations tailored to specific audience queries
- Hyper-personalization—provides personalized product descriptions and other content tailored to a target audience and creates personalized customer journeys
- Data enrichment—analyzes textual content for emotional tone to help businesses understand users better
- AB(N) testing at scale—prepares content for A/B testing
How generative AI works inside Content Hub One
To discover more personalization opportunities with Sitecore and AI, including how to use Sitecore CDP and Personalize with third-party AI tools, I strongly recommend checking out the following video from SUGCON NA 2023:
As you can see, Sitecore's generative AI doesn't just enhance digital marketing; it revolutionizes it. From personalizing user journeys to automating content creation, the digital future is here, and it’s powered by AI.
