How To Use The Power of Personalization to Drive eCommerce Sales
eCommerce shoppers expect personalization as a part of their online experience. According to a 2018 consumer research report by Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands who remember them and provide relevant offers. Furthermore, 83% of them are also willing to share their data in exchange for a personalized experience.
The key objective of personalization is to use data to make it easier for customers to find and consume what they want, how, and when they want it—based on the what of past purchases or browsing, and by understanding the why behind their preferences.
Personalization is important for eCommerce stores seeking to engage shoppers, increase repeat purchases, drive sales, and increase conversions.
Here is the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of using the power of personalization to achieve your performance goals:
First, What is eCommerce Personalization?
eCommerce Personalization is the process of delivering personal experiences on digital sales platforms by dynamically displaying content, product recommendations, and promotional campaigns based on previous actions, browsing behavior, purchase history, demographics, and other collected data.
By prioritizing intuitive platforms, you learn and react to the distinct preferences and behaviors that drive your customers’ movements.
Why is eCommerce Personalization Important?
The past two years have created a new consumer environment.. People are looking for and responding to a more personalized shopping experience. Within this article, we examine how personalized content impacts the consumer journey and how your marketing efforts translate from initial engagement to the sale.
Personalized content saves time for marketers and consumers alike, eliminating the fluff and enhancing consumer satisfaction.
Personalized content conveys that you and your brand care about your target demographic’s pain points and are focused not just on selling to them, but rather creating solutions for them. With a personalized customer-focused approach, you can deepen your relationships with your customers and their buying power in a competitive marketplace.
Consumer Data: What to Collect and How to Use It?
The most important component of understanding consumer data is knowing where and how you want to personalize the experience for your eCommerce visitors. Also, identifying where the most impact on revenue is to be had will be important to understanding where to apply resources and garner the most return from your marketing efforts.
To build a buyer persona, the first step is gathering data from existing subscribers and customers. A reliable source of data is the information that’s voluntarily input at checkout or during the newsletter subscription process. After collecting enough data to analyze, the next step is to drill down to the demographic data that helps you to create buyer personas.
Buyer personas will show you which specific identifying information will help you to create an ideal customer profile and develop targeted campaigns for your target audience. Buyer personas will help you to implement personalization strategies, plus help you monitor your customers’ behaviors to optimize the conversion rate of your marketing campaigns.
After identifying buyers by their unique personas, it will be easier to offer products, services, and original content that may be of interest to them and to further deepen your connection with your customer base.
6 Ways to Design Personalized Experiences in eCommerce
1. Customer Account Encouragement
You can cultivate customer relationships through ‘sticky' activities such as asking people to create accounts and making it easier for them to do so by providing a checkbox at the checkout that nudges an opt-in for future marketing efforts with the promise of a customized experience tailored to their preferences or at the very least, driven by the history of their previous purchase(s).
2. Personalized Email Campaigns
Email List Segmentation
A best practice is to segment your email lists by geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. Effective utilization of these data points help marketers optimize their targeting activities and provide a primed data set for A/B testing to determine which campaigns work best to reach their customer base.
Get Personal. Talk Direct In Email Marketing
After effectively segmenting your customer lists, you can ensure that you are sending the appropriate content based on a customer’s geo-location, interests, and purchase profile.
Pair your personalized email marketing campaigns with a landing page featuring parallel content to add a boost to conversion rates. Sending subscribers an email that reflects their purchasing history, along with a link to a landing page that retargets customers with more information about those products or services, has proven to result in higher conversion rates. This also has a tendency to reduce bounce rates since linking your customers to a specific landing page increases the likelihood of them taking action.
The personalization of subject lines or content of emails to include subscribers’ first names, plus the sending out of celebratory birthday emails with special offers also has a higher success rate because it activates customers based on data specific to them.
3. Use Geo-Location Targeting
Whether you use cookies or leverage customer opt-in information, you probably know where your visitors are located. This is valuable information that can significantly improve a customer’s shopping experience.
4. Craft Guided Selling Experiences
Providing on-site assistance to your eCommerce visitors with guided selling experiences such as quizzes and/or size and style guides are effective ways of helping users make better buying decisions. The results of those guided experiences provide an opportunity to personalize your product suggestions based on them.
5. Create Personalized Homepages
Homepages are the equivalency of your eCommerce storefront. Therefore, in addition to landing page optimization, please make sure you give customers a warm personalized welcome based on their purchases or browsing history.
By collecting cookies on your site, you can see which pages a previous user has visited and presented them with offers that might be relevant to their shopping experience. Personalizing your homepage helps buyers focus on the category they’re interested in and shop without any distractions. It means a better shopping experience for them and higher conversions for you.
6. Use Chatbots
Most eCommerce brands use the same pop-up chat messages for all visitors on their site. However, it is more of a brand differentiator to personalize the introduction message based on a site visitor’s URL, behavior, or any other data you can collect.
Once you understand the distinct patterns of your customer’s behaviors, you can deliver promotional offers or other incentives to persuade a visitor to proceed to purchase.
The Power of Personalization Is In Your Hands
eCommerce is here to stay and buyers are demanding a more personalized shopping experience than ever. Therefore, it is imperative that you invest in a personalization strategy to help you drive eCommerce loyalty and sales.
