How to Take eCommerce Personalization to the Next Level
If you are looking to take your online eCommerce business to the next level, one place to start is eCommerce personalization. When consumers arrive at your website and feel like you “get them,” 43 percent are more likely to buy.
And this intrinsic feeling like your business understands who they are selling to is precisely what online retail personalization really is.
Maybe you already have that in place. But even if you do, it’s time to kick that up a notch with these eCommerce personalization tips.
eCommerce Personalization Explained
In the real world, brick and mortar stores go to great lengths to ensure their customers feel welcomed and appreciated. This comes in the form of loyalty programs, elite packaging upon checkout, and festively decorated stores during a busy holiday season.
But in the online world, it’s a little more difficult to achieve this personalized experience. But this is exactly what eCommerce personalization is.
When you are able to tailor your user’s experience to their exact needs at the time, you help them to make choices of buying that could very well happen at your site.
Some websites, for example, use the weather as a way to do this. Maybe on the first day that it snows in a specific zip code, the website would be showcasing a snowy scene and new scarves or mittens to buy.
The consumer may be logging in to buy batteries or something innocuous like that, and then think, “Oh! I need new mittens for the kids too!”
Success in retail is all about meeting a need, and when you personalize the eCommerce experience for your customers, you succeed. You’ll get that purchase, and many more.
How to Personalize Your Site for Everyone
Whether you are getting 12 people to your website every hour or 1200, your first question with personalization will be, “How do I do that for everyone?” There are a number of plug-ins and apps that will help to read the data of your consumers so you know how to tailor their shopping experience.
Data for you can be turned into dollar signs. Is your business experiencing the 3 benefits of big data?
There is no one solution for personalization, nor is there one way to do so. Personalized offers based on previous shopping, weather recommendations, and other forms of data will help your customer purchase and keep coming back.
Even email programs can target individual customer needs and personalize them accordingly to get each consumer that gets an email to buy.
The keys to a successful personalization protocol are ensuring you meet your consumer’s needs, and that you aren’t turning them off.
There is a very fine line between having too much information about your customer, and getting too deep into the “creepy” factor and meeting those needs. But most consumers generally like coming into an online retail experience feeling like the retailer “gets them.”
Cashing in Multiple Ways
One form of eCommerce personalization that takes your current program up a notch is in using personalization for your customers across multiple devices. More and more buyers today are going from iPhone to iPad to desktop to buy from the same company.
Make shopping more convenient for them by implementing tactics that learn from the data when consumers are using multiple devices. Then the next time they log on from somewhere else, their experience is tailored.
Another tool you can use is by implementing a protocol that allows for multiple channels. Right now you are probably only using the digital channel.
Kick that up a notch by making the user experience more personal from beginning to end. Notes in packages that are shipped out thanking them for their purchase are ways that you can stay consistent in superior service from login to home delivery.
While more consumers are shopping online now, they still want to feel like they are human when they are ordering from a robot. You can find ways to up the ante on your personalization by literally personalizing the experience and offering door-to-door service in multiple ways.
Prove it Works
Anytime a consumer is shelling out their hard-earned cash, they want to feel appreciated. You do this for your customers through eCommerce personalization.
A very popular method of this is offering a “shoppers who bought this also bought that” feature as you see on sites like Amazon and eBay.
Little plug-ins like this can make all the difference between turning on and turning off your customers. One study reveals that this feature alone generated 68 percent of revenue for one business.
Get creative when kicking your customer service plan up a notch, and adopting eCommerce personalization tools that work. Find out how the 5 data analytics trends of 2019 will help knock your business out of the park this year.
