Personalization in online shopping is not a new concept but it is evolving quickly. Any business that can hold the key to improving personalized online shopping experience can obtain a bigger chance to win the eCommerce game.
If you're looking for techniques to adopt efficient eCommerce personalization, look no further. In this article, Smart Tribune will be introducing to you:
- Personalized online shopping experience definition
- The importance of personalized online shopping experience
- How to personalize customer experience online?
- Personalization challenges for eCommerce retailers
- Reasons why personalized online shopping experience is important in holiday season
- FAQs about eCommerce personalization
Let's get cracking!
What is a Personalized Online Shopping Experience?
You may have heard the term personalized online shopping experience once or twice before.
At its most basic, personalized online shopping experience is used to denote a unique and custom experience that a merchant tailors for each individual customer or clientele based on their preferences and behavioural patterns.
As a matter of fact, business owners don't have to pay that much attention to each and every buyer, artificial intelligence (AI) can lend a hand. AI gives sellers a leg up by collecting data on users' behavior and functioning accordingly to satisfy their demands and enhance their experience.
In real life, umpteen brands have benefited from personalization. Typically, relevant products are suggested to the customers on eCommerce sites or marketplaces. The personalized recommendations in every customer journey touchpoint often encourage visitors to spend more time wandering on websites and purchase more as those products are particularly catered to their interests.
Find out more: 5 ways personalization can boost your lead generation efforts.
The Importance of a Personalized Shopping Experience
It is commonly known that a personalized online shopping experience takes the center stage in breaking the monotony of non-face-to-face interaction between a brand and a customer.
It is well-documented that eCommerce personalization has an unexpectedly profound influence on customers' habits. 56% of online consumers tend to return to an eCommerce site that creates a list of items geared towards them.
Unquestionably, personalized online shopping experience is extremely beneficial. Let's check out what else personalized strategies bring to the table.
A deeper insight into your customers
Gathering customers' data is now a piece of cake thanks to the rapid evolution of technology, particularly, personalization tools. Gone are the days when you kept asking customers a bunch of personal questions and hoped for their answers, AI gets you covered.
The algorithms will track and report precisely every occurrence on your website.
The collected data oozes with customers' behavioural models and demographic. Doubtlessly, this data will assist you to make the landmark decision on the business direction, strategies, and modus operandi.
An increase in customer retention rate
As mentioned above, statistics are proving the growing customers' demand for product personalisation.
A personalized online shopping experience is preferred as it streamlines the buying process for the customers. The analysis from AI tools can recommend exactly what they're longing for even before they can recognize their wish list.
A list of potential items that a certain customer is likely to purchase can encourage them to repeatedly visit your eCommerce site. Even with a prospect that doesn't have the foggiest idea of what to buy, your brand can ease their pain by engendering proper items. The recommendation can narrow down customers' choices, hence speeding up the check-out process and boosting customer loyalty.
Have you ever had an urge of launching Amazon or Etsy apps without thinking of any items and infinitely scrolling for window shopping? And for sure, you would end up checking out some random stuff from the custom dashboard.
Yes! That's definitely the addiction that the best personalized websites can create.
An enhancement of customer experience
Throughout the customer journey, you can find an oodle of touchpoints to employ personalization, such as:
- Personalized product suggestions
- Custom search result
- Cart-abandonment emails
- Personalized offers
and so much more.
These above mentions not only boost your brand's conversion rate but also uplift your customer experience.
As the personalized online shopping experience shortens the buying process by offering exactly what customers are seeking, customers find it easier to pick and choose.
Do you remember the last time you bought online? Did you find suggestions of "You will like also" or "in the same range" interesting and spend more time on site?
More optimal marketing campaigns
Now, you understand your customers better than ever, it's time to run vigorous marketing campaigns.
With the support from analytics and AI tools as well as deep insights into customer needs, you can segment your customers first and run various promotion programmes for different groups of customers.
That's all about the theory, let's have a crack at personalized online shopping experience in practice.
How to Personalize the Customer Experience Online?
First thing first, we will break down the fundamentals, of how to deliver an effective eCommerce personalization.
Be Helpful
Whatever you implement, always put yourself in the customer's shoes. Prospects or even customers regularly pose questions regarding the items or shipping rate or fulfillment and the like. Be well prepared for it.
Offering customer self-service is a brilliant idea thanks to its high personalization, affordable cost, and helpfulness.
Customers can actively look for answers or assistance from a website chatbot or Facebook chatbot or knowledge base.
If these terms are not so familiar to you, discover more:
- How to master chatbot marketing in less than 10 minutes.
- Lead generation chatbot 101 - everything you need to know to skyrocket your revenue in 6 months.
- A step-by-step guide to successfully build multilingual chatbots.
Be helpful your own way with Smart FAQ and Smart Bot.
Offer more personalized experiences
Please bear in mind that the marketing campaigns are not supposed to be huge events only. You can add some tweaks to the content to ensure its suitability for ranges of specific customer bases.
By the same token, you can set up irresistible offers or change the currency for each consumer's location based on the IP addresses.
There exist a myriad of website personalization ideas you can make full use of in your next effective marketing campaigns. Just dig deep and personalize the customer experience as much as you can.
Higher conversion rate
Smart Tribune has just walked you through the advantages of a personalization strategy, which are
- the greater customer understanding,
- the better buyer experience,
- the increase in customer loyalty
- the more powerful marketing schemes.
Beyond doubt, the ultimate outcome is the rev in your conversion rate.
In actual fact, research shows that brands notice an increase of 40% in conversion rate after involving personalization in their buyer journey map.
Apparently, personalized online shopping experience will be the secret weapon that makes your products fly off the shelves.
Don't just stick to only one common and conventional tactic of personalization, which is product recommendation.
You have bundles of techniques to adopt throughout your customer's purchasing process. Here come manifold website personalization ideas:
- Curate content based on the consumers' locations: You're required to work closely with the IT team to make sure the language, currency, and shipping fees are all set up according to your buyers' IP addresses.
- Minimize the cart abandonment rate with personalized email: An custom email can remind a customer to check out what he has added to the cart but yet checked out. Don't forget to create a sense of urgency by adding some "trigger" elements, such as time-limited offers or stock running-out messages.
- Increase conversion rate generated by returning customers with personalized offers: It is well proven that reaching out to a new customer is four times harder than converting an existing buyer. Therefore, don't hesitate to send out discounts to loyal customers. Data of returning buyers that you should pay heed are:
- The average time between purchases
- Order history
- Average order value
- Customer lifetime value.
Pay more attention to first-time visitors
It may take possibly lots of time and effort to drive a new buyer to land on the online storefront, so take every opportunity to keep him on your eCommerce site. The longer he stays on your site, the more data you can collect, thus the bigger chance your brand can turn him into a loyal shopper.
Noticing the following info can assist your brand to deeper understand first-time visitors and better personalize that customer experience on the next visit.
- Viewed pages
- Products that are added to cart or wish list.
- Time on site
- Exit page
All of the necessary data is right at your fingertips with the application of CRM systems and website analytics tools.
Focus on a website personalization strategy
As the website is the main source that most customers visit for further information, store owners should heavily invest in it.
On the grounds that cookies are ubiquitously used, you can now obtain a slew of customer data and be fully aware of the room for improvement to smoothen customer experience. Let's delve deeper into what website elements require more attention than others.
Personalized homepage
A personalized homepage is an alternate page for the base homepage that is modified to satisfy a specific customer's preference and demand.
A generic homepage usually displays a collection of trending products for every target customer. However, after the customer's first visit, the personalized homepage should take over. It can show relevant items following the shopper's browsing history.
Customer self-service
By yielding customers with a self-service experience, you can break the gridlocks that are preventing them from checking out. Consumers themselves can seek solutions from live chat, virtual assistant, and a knowledge base to ensure suitability when purchasing your products.
It's also worth noting that instant answers are the key to a higher conversion rate and lower cart abandonment rate.
The benefits that customer self-service brings obviously indicate that customer self-service is exceedingly beneficial. You can deploy this state-of-the-art technology on your site without breaking a sweat by giving Smart Tribune demo a whirl.
Simple checkout process
It might be challenging for you to offer a simple checkout process in the first customer's checkout. Nonetheless, once the payment details are saved, one-click checkout will simplify the purchasing process.
Moreover, on the checkout page, e-merchants can also add some personalization twists to encourage purchasers to spend more time surfing sites.
"Welcome back" pop up
It will be awesome if you can bring the customer back to where they left off. The message will recall and shake up both the emotion and intention when customers abandon your site.
The reminder will serve as a shortcut that customers can take to quickly access the checkout page. This convenience not only reduces the cart abandonment rate but also improves the customer experience.
Dynamic content
Dynamic content or adaptive content is an element featured on a webpage or email that changes based on the buyer's behaviour, interest, or preference. The purpose of dynamic content is to engage customers and raise the bar of customer experience to the next level.
Some of the content that can be adjusted accordingly are the buyer's device type, browser, location, weather and temperature and so on. Apart from that, if a customer has logged in or access your site more than one time, you can personalize customer experience with dynamic content of name, gender, product recommendations, etc.
Challenges for Online Retailers in eCommerce Personalization Game
Even though a large majority of businesses are well aware of the importance of personalized online shopping experiences, their implementation doesn't live up to expectations.
A great number of retailers are still in the preparation stages for the personalization application. What's more, thousands of retailers deprioritize personalization due to several obstacles.
The challenges include:
- Data management: How retailers collect, store and analyze data.
- Data analytics: The lack of experienced human resources for analytics and data science.
- Tools and technology shortages: The proper tools to implement personalization marketing strategies.
These hindrances imply that retailers should invest more resources to fully understand the personalized online shopping experience and how to put it into action.
Why eCommerce Personalization is Important in Holiday Seasons
The holiday season is around the corner. This time of every year observes an exponential increase in purchasing ability.
Consumers are excited to pay more bills to prepare for upcoming special occasions. The huge amount of money also reflects the end-of-year massive discounts.
To stand out from the crowd of businesses attempting to sell more with a handful of tempting offers and take full advantage of the customers' buying willingness, brands should prioritize personalizing the customer experience.
In order to skyrocket your holiday sales, scroll down for the checklist for a profitable 2022 holiday season.
- Don't ignore last-year data
- Deliver localized discounts based on geodata
- Harness push notification to send out personalized offers
- Provide real-time offers by using AI
- Offer exclusive offers to existing customers
Personalized Online Shopping: FAQs
What is personalized online shopping experience?
Personalized online shopping experience is the experience that is catered exclusively to a particular customer on an eCommerce site.
What are examples of eCommerce personalization?
You can have seen thousands of examples of eCommerce personalization. It can be personalized item recommendations, abandoned cart emails, push notifications of running-out stock, and the like.
What are the purposes of personalization in eCommerce?
eCommerce personalization makes the buying experience more straightforward, more interesting and smoother. Simultaneously, a personalized online shopping experience helps brands strengthen the brand-customer connection, decrease cart abandonment rate, increase customer loyalty and boost sales.
Bottom Line
The personalized online shopping experience is of paramount significance in running an online business. Therefore, each and every brand should seriously take eCommerce personalization into consideration to scale up and win more customers this holiday season.
Should you have any questions regarding personalized online shopping experience, please contact us.
