E-commerce personalization is a technique for allowing brands to provide specialized marketing messaging and shopping experiences to customers, based on how they interact with the brand. Every online store needs a specific e-commerce personalization strategy to convert prospects into paying customers. Personalized e-commerce experiences could be as simple as greeting a customer by name in personalized marketing emails or as complex as providing a custom recommendation based on their online purchase history.
The more personalized the content and recommendations are given, the more effective it will be in eliciting a response from the customer. In the end, e-commerce personalization increases conversion rates and makes online stores more profitable. We can analyze the personalization setups that provide this benefit by separating them as personalized marketing campaigns and as personalized shopping experiences.
Why Personalized Marketing?
Personalization has always been about taking into account user preferences and behavior to improve or adapt content and/or offer to them based on previous exposure; however, it has taken on a whole new meaning in the last few years, especially in terms of marketing.
Thanks to the developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that offer much more advanced applications, there are now algorithms and tools that enable us to analyze every aspect of customer behavior and way of thinking to create much more personalized messages.
E-commerce marketers are putting immense effort into using an approach that shows care and attention for each customer by tailoring messages and offers to their needs, tastes, and interests. This approach has proven to be not only influential but cost-effective as well. Personalizing content adds value to the e-commerce experience and reduces customer churn while also increasing sales and conversions.
Benefits of Personalization in E-commerce?
Personalization is a powerful tool to delight your most valued customers and deepen their connection with your brand. It can make a huge impact on growth. The ability to offer targeted promotions, tailored content and relevant product recommendations based on an individual customer's preferences will increase sales, customer loyalty, and conversion rates.
Forrester suggests that roughly three-quarters of consumers (around 77%) have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.
McKinsey data shows that through a positive customer experience, 20% higher customer satisfaction and an increase of around 10 to 15% in sales and conversion rates are possible. Using segmentation and personalization properly increases return on investment (ROI) and revenue.
How to Set Personalized Marketing Campaigns in E-commerce?
Personalization setups can take many different types, depending on your brand's unique promise, offerings, and specificities. Therefore knowing the right techniques associated with setting the accurate personalized marketing campaigns and materials is something all e-commerce marketers are focused on.
Personalized e-commerce marketing is a systematic approach towards improving the result on all levels like generating more traffic, increasing the conversion rate, upselling & cross-selling, and increasing the average order value (AOV).
However, for achieving these benefits, creating relevant personalized offers is not so simple. The e-commerce website or app has to have ample data about customers to be able to make relevant decisions for them. That’s where the art of personalization comes into place.
Consider this structure in two aspects. First, a well-performing e-commerce platform with a high capacity to make the necessary integrations is needed. Through such a platform, brands can create a data collection system across channels while providing a seamless experience to their customers. Our platform Inveon inCommerce provides a supreme way to master data by tracking brand-specific consumer journeys and detailed data dashboards of the advanced no code reporting module. In addition, while providing an advanced integration capability with the support of our wide partner ecosystem, also makes room for building a strong structure on the third-party side.
Since the necessity of advanced personalization setups in omnichannel can not be overlooked, as well as creating advanced omnichannel experiences, trouble-free data capability in each channel also stands out as an important need. A unified view of customer data across all channels is crucial for effective personalization.
Secondly, in addition to technical capability and platform requirements, strategic planning is also important in terms of business case management. Inveon GrowthLab team, through their expertise and extensive know-how, works to achieve exactly that. Our team, which works as an extension of your internal e-commerce team, is a unique structure in building a systematic strategy through the capabilities of data analytics, customer experience management, UX design, and growth partnership expertise.
Creating Personalized Shopping Experiences
These days, we are able to automatically understand much more about the customers to craft better experiences. Therefore, there are various instruments to employ personalization.
According to the segmentation of your traffic and customers like source, device, past behavior, location, etc., you can personalize the experience accordingly. For example, a customization setup based on past behavior might look like this: after observing the price sensitivity of a customer group who are constantly making price comparisons, a pop-up discount to make the purchase complete can be offered.
At a further point, offering personalized options that are not segment-specific, but directly tailored to the specific person can be considered. While doing this, millions of different options can be used, such as dynamically creating personalized content on your website, adjusting notification settings accordingly, offering suggestions based on recently visited pages or purchase history.
The Importance of Data for E-commerce Personalization
When you start collecting data, you need to set up a system for tracking conversions and creating audience segments based on this data in order to grow your customer base. There are various tools and services that can help e-commerce companies in this regard, but businesses need to develop a suitable system in order to see results and understand customers better and improve their sales performance.
Companies today spend huge amounts of money on data. They capture every click, every transaction, every call. However, most of this data can be just noise. To avoid such a case, a comprehensive data collection structure needs to be built, along with strong data analysis tools to convert them into actionable insights.
Your customers want to be unique and feel special. Good personalization is the difference between a customer who wants to stay for a long time and one who might as well click on another website. It’s up to you as an e-commerce business owner to identify users and use data analytics to learn which one of those is your typical buyer.
Hence, every professional in the e-commerce business focuses on individualizing the shopping experience for each customer. Personalization has been adopted as an essential requisite by e-commerce entities to stay in competition and yield results out of these efforts. E-commerce personalization helps businesses to increase the ROI and fulfill customers’ requirements and expectations.
As well as being a very effective method, making personalization possible is a complicated process with various necessities. While carrying the process through, a brand needs a strong platform that will support customizations and advance personalization setups, successful reporting and dashboard structures for data collection and monitoring, and a team that will transform this data into actionable insights and determine the next steps accordingly. Inveon is here for the perfected personalized consumer journeys to help brands. Get in touch today with our experts, so we can identify what you need and get to work right away.
