E-commerce Personlization: How to use it to convert your shop visitors

 

Today I introduce a topic which every home business and online business person should know about.

It’s an interesting topic about e-commerce personalization.

This piece is a guest post from my friend Ana Bera, a Marketing specialist from subsciptionly.

She brings a fresh perspective on how best to position your online store in other to covert your store visitors to buyers.

E-commerce Personalization: What Is It And How It’s Important

You might have heard about e-commerce personalization but might not be sure about what it is exactly and how it impacts your business.

In simplest terms, e-commerce personalization means offering relevant products, offers, and recommendations to consumers.

That is, you put those things in front of them which they are likely to be interested in.

Here’s an example to help you understand this better.

Let’s say you own an online fashion store with over 1,000 products and 50 product categories.

Your homepage is designed so that it can display 10 products and 5 product categories at a time.

Now, let’s suppose a first-time consume types the URL of your online store. You can either choose to take her to:

-the default homepage which has randomly picked products and product categories;

-a personalized homepage with those products and product categories that are likely to be most relevant for this customer.

The latter is an instance of e-commerce personalization.

At this point, you may be wondering, “But why exactly do I need to show relevant products to customers, particularly when the search function of my site works just fine and web pages load at the speed of light? A consumer can find what she wants in a jiffy.”

This line of thinking is self-defeating on two counts.

Customers Prefer Personalized Experience

First, consumers want a personalized experience.

Many customers decide to cancel their subscription because the subscription box company failed to modify their service according to their respective customers’ requests.

As a business owner, you must give consumers what they like ‘cause if you don’t, they will happily take their business to those who do.

Poor e-commerce personalization is the reason why 41% of consumers switch companies.

Additional Sales

Secondly, by personalizing your consumers’ experience, you can entice them to buy something that is not on their mind when they come to your online store.

Continuing with the above example, let’s say right now you are running promotional offers on four different products: footwear, baby clothes, jackets, and hats.

A consumer interested in buying a pair of jeans visits your e-shop. Of course, you don’t and can’t know in advance what this consumer wants.

But let’s say you’ve data that shows this very consumer came to your site two times in the last seven days and searched for deals on women’s shoes both times.

You can leverage this information by putting the promotional offer on women’s footwear in front of her when your site’s homepage loads on her browser.

There’s a good chance that she might like your offer and purchase two products, a pair of jeans and shoes.

On the other hand, if you show her some other offer first, she might not even see the footwear offer and leave your store with just one purchase.

How To Implement  e-commerce Personalization

You may say, “Ok, all this is good, but what do I need to do to offer a personalized experience to every customer?”

Invest in a good e-commerce personalization software program.

To customize a user’s experience, you need to collect humongous amounts of data and make sense out of it.

This is not something you can do yourself.

There are a number of tools that do this amazingly well. You should pick one that meets your needs and budget.

It would be a smart strategy to allocate a sizeable portion of your marketing budget to e-commerce personalization because if you crack this nut, you stand to gain big time.

As per reports, e-stores that handle personalization well will see a 15% increment in their profits by 2020.

However, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and focus solely on personalization.

There are many other factors that significantly impact the customer experience.

So make sure you work on them too.

One such key determiner is delivering the omnichannel experience.

In a survey conducted by HBR involving 46,000 shoppers, 73% of respondents said they used multiple channels for shopping.

Moreover, companies using four or more digital channels will outgrow those offering one or two channels by 300%.

Having great insights into trends which will shape the future of e-commerce is always desirable

So browse the web for more information and keep up with the world!

Want to start an e-commerce shop? click here to get a Shopify account

 

 

5’3 ray of sunshine and chocolate addict.

As the Head of Marketing and Content at Subscriptionly she uses every opportunity she gets to learn from others and then share the knowledge and generate fun and informative content.

She is a Toronto born world traveler, hungry for knowledge and ready to make a difference in the marketing world.