A Full Guide To eCommerce Personalization

eCommerce personalization is a fundamental aspect of branding, and no business can thrive without it in today’s highly connected, equally competitive market. The question is, how do you add personalization to the modern customer experience?
ecommerce personalization

A Full Guide To Ecommerce Personalization

eCommerce personalization is crucial to success in today’s digital landscape. Around 91% of consumers say they’re more likely to purchase from sellers who understand their needs and offer specific, relevant offers. A further 83% of respondents said they’re willing to share details about their purchase history and other customer data in exchange for personalized experiences.

The aim of any eCommerce vendor should always be to generate excellent customer satisfaction and experiences through meaningful, engaging interactions. Personalization makes customers feel special, improves your chances of getting a conversion, and increases average order value.

Why is Personalisation important?

Personalization is a fundamental aspect of branding, and no business can thrive without it in today’s highly connected, equally competitive market. Personalization is more than just a bonus for doing business. Personalized experiences build brand loyalty, boost customer satisfaction and make people remember your business.

The question is, how do you add personalization to the modern customer experience?

Different people with different needs

What is Personalization in Ecommerce?

Personalized experiences have become a mainstay of virtually every modern shopping experience. Today’s companies have endless access to all kinds of data to help them generate brand loyalty and new sales opportunities. Your customers expect you to use this data to enhance their experience.

Ecommerce personalization simply refers to the strategies ecommerce companies use to transform one-time visitors on their store into loyal customers. It can involve everything from dynamically showing product recommendations and personalized content based on data analytics, to using certain marketing strategies for different customers.

Why is Personalisation important?

Personalization can also be effective to increase retention in the long run. Recurring conversations provide more information from which companies are able to develop ever-more relevant experiences.

Personalization allows brands to engage with their shoppers in a unique way, based on everything from real-time insights to demographic customer data. With the right strategies, customers benefit from a better online experience, while the vast majority of sellers experience higher revenues and conversion rates. It’s a win-win!

While there are many ways to invest in a personalization strategy as an eCommerce brand, the majority of campaigns break down into three key areas:

  • Personalization efforts in your marketing strategy
  • Relevant online shopping experiences
  • Exceptional customer experience and service

How to create a successful personalized marketing strategy?

Marketing can be hard. Launch. There will be very much work that must be done and factors should be considered. The personalisation platform you choose must be reviewed by different people.

Once you’re sure you’ve found it, you must incorporate things into the back end of your website for collecting data like how many visits, the amount of time a person spends on a certain page and more. After receiving these statistics, you will then be analyzing it in order to identify the best kind for your customers. This is a test that validates performance.

The first stage in a successful ecommerce personalization strategy is typically to create personalized content to appeal to specific groups you want to draw to your ecommerce store. Personalized marketing involves using data about buying habits, market segments, and different consumers to tailor how you attract your customers to your store.

You can use information from past interactions with customers to help you, as well as relevant data collected by other companies and analysis teams.

Some of the most common components of a personalized marketing strategy include:

Custom content

Content marketing is one of the most popular tools for marketers in today’s landscape. It involves creating blogs, articles, videos, and countless other resources designed to attract clients to your store through multiple stages of the buyer journey.

With a clear insight into your target audience, created through user personas and buyer profiles, you can create content specifically designed to address the needs, expectations and pain points of different customers. For instance, HubSpot creates content specifically for “small business” owners, and targets keywords like “SMB” and “small business” to stand out in the search engine results.

Hubspot Personalized Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing

One of the easiest ways to reach out to customers with different preferences and buying habits, is by creating campaigns on social media. Many of the top social channels, including Facebook and Instagram, allow companies to specifically create advertisements and campaigns geared towards people within a specific demographic.

You can customize your social media messages with specific keywords and benefits relevant to your target audience. There are also tools for tracking the engagement levels of each post you make on social media, so you can track the results of your campaigns. Some companies even use a geolocation source of data to target customers in specific regions.

Lululemon's personalized marketing

Email marketing

Like social media marketing, email marketing allows companies to access a number of ways of creating a more personalized experience for clients. You can segment the people who subscribe to your newsletter based on their age, gender, location, and various other factors.

Once you create your segments, it’s easy to personalize the right content to suit different requirements. For instance, you might deliver different content to people who downloaded your most recent eBook on software, to those who purchased a product to do with business analytics.

Implemented personalized marketing in your overall digital marketing strategy, now is the time to learn, invest and do so.

Personlized email strategy

How To Build a Personalized Experience For Every Visitor

After you successfully attract your customers to your store, the next stage is ensuring they have an amazing experience when they’re there. Remember, 58% of customers say they’ll pay more for a guaranteed good experience.

Personalized experiences build brand loyalty, boost customer satisfaction and make people remember your business. Recent research reveals that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers personalized experiences. In 2017, 90% of U.S. consumers found personalized marketing somewhat or very appealing. That was five years ago . Think about how much the world has changed since then. If personalization mattered to customers then, it’s importance is unquestionable today. ‍

The best way to personalize the experience customers get when they come to purchase products on your store, is with the right apps and tools. Solutions capable of leveraging dynamic data on your website can easily transform the relevance of any interaction.

Some of the best ways to build a personalized experience for every visitor include:

Creating dynamic homepages

According to studies, it only takes around 50 milliseconds for a customer to form a first impression of your business. Most of the perception they have of your organization will depend on what they see when they land on your homepage.

Tools like Dialogue can embed into your store to capture information about a customer’s preferences every time they visit a website, presenting smart personalized widgets on your website’s homepages. This ensures you can deliver exciting insights into your latest products to new customers, or information on your customers favourite products to existing clients.

Dynamic homepage

Make dynamic product suggestions

91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.

Customers today want their online shopping experience to be as streamlined and straightforward as possible. Sometimes, this means getting a little extra advice on which products they might be interested in. The right data driven technology built into your sales and marketing strategy can help to guide your customers towards the products that interest them.

For instance, you could integrate a “people also bought” carousel onto your product pages to show similar items which might encourage your clients to purchase more. You could also use dynamic analytics of your website conversions to showcase which products are trending.

Best sellers recommendations

Try personalized guidance

Offering custom product guides and advice to customers isn’t just something you can leverage for your ecommerce marketing efforts. You can also implement personalized guides into the shopping experience, to offer clients information about everything from sizing options to the details they might need to know about products they’re interested in.

Dialogue offers a “Storyteller” service which uses technology to deliver short, personalized stories about products to assist customers in their purchasing decisions. L’OCCITANE achieved a 15% engagement increase with this strategy alone.

Storyteller by Dialogue

Remember to Focus on Excellent Customer Experience

Finally, remember the customer experience, and your opportunity to deliver a more personalized experience doesn’t stop once your customer has made a purchase. Businesses need to think about the after-care process after a consumer has engaged with their company too.

The right data analytics software will allow marketers and sales professionals to collect information about consumer preferences and interests throughout the purchasing journey. This data can then be implemented into future marketing campaigns, loyalty strategies, and more.

To help drive better levels of personalization at scale businesses should pay close attention to:

Different customer segments

How different users search for products, what kind of marketing campaigns drive them to the website, and what products they identify as being best for their needs. This information will help improve your buyer personas.

Segmenting your marketing strategy

Opportunities to foster loyalty

Where can you improve your chances of loyalty among your customers? Outside of personalized recommendations, can you offer customers samples of products, free shipping, and other bonuses to improve the customer experience?

free shipping

Customer feedback

Collecting reviews and feedback about your business, brand, or company will help you customize your marketing and sales strategies according to your audience’s expectations. Pay attention to both positive and negative reviews.

The more information you can collect about your e-commerce customers and their needs, the easier it will be to develop a personalized strategy that pays off!

What are the benefits of PERSONALIZATION?

Increase customer retention

You could acquire more customers, however that would cost more money. Also retention can be difficult. Personalized marketing helps increase customer loyalty and sales. Segment a client based on the site visit. Therefore, you are able to send the person an email. You can email them according to their behavior. For instance, he added the item and then discarded the cart. Offer coupons for people who want to make the cart more efficient. Give them discounts and catchy offers for them to come back and take action.

Increase in revenues

Individualizing does not represent an end goal. This must take place in the same continuous manner that attracts customers attention and serves their needs. Identify channels to attract customers. Whether B2B or B2C, marketers can leverage personalisation. B2B marketers can segment customers by targeting them. This allows you to personalise your content for increased traffic. In addition, personalisation may be combined with loyalty program and sale promotions to measure sales growth.

Enhance brand loyalty

Your brand loyalty is dependent upon what your customer gives. In other words, their love and loyalty to brands increases. According to research, consumer preferences have increased for such brands, which reflects user beliefs.

Shop Circle - The importance of a personalized experience for your customers

Tell me the best brand experience you had? Probably some of this felt personal and lasted long after. Personalization is a key element of your brand’s identity, and no firm is successful without this feature. Personalization has become an integral part of every day business life. Personalized experience builds brand loyalty, increases customer satisfaction and keeps the audience interested in future business.

To learn more about enhancing your customer experience, check out our post: 5 ways to improve your customer website experience

Sign up for our Newsletter