by Tom Shackleton
Personalising the user experience is becoming increasingly important for eCommerce stores.
Being able to offer your customer a unique experience can be hugely beneficial and can help to grow your brand into one that focuses on customer needs.
While large eCommerce businesses like Amazon have been able to offer powerful personalisation for a long time, the technology is becoming more accessible and affordable to smaller eCommerce stores.
Here’s our guide to personalisation for your eCommerce store:
Why Personalise?
First off, why would you want to personalise at all?
Personalisation software and apps are becoming more accessible, but most of them aren’t free, so what value can offering a personalised experience add to your eCommerce business?
Customer Expectations
Well for a start, customers are starting to expect it when shopping online.
75% of online shoppers like receiving personalised messages and offers…while nearly the same amount get frustrated when offers and messaging isn’t relevant to them.
If you want to meet the expectations of your eCommerce customers today, personalisation is becoming more and more key.
Your customers want to visit your site and see products and offers they’re actually interested in. If you can use personalisation to meet these expectations, you’re sure to see more sales.
A Better Experience
A personalised experience allows visitors to find what they’re looking for more easily.
Customers can quickly see products related to their previous purchases and can be engaged by a personal, interactive experience.
Creating a better customer experience through personalisation can improve customer retention and create a smoother browsing experience that allows customers to reach the checkout quickly, spending less time searching for the product they want.
Higher Average Order Value
Personalisation allows you to increase the average order value of customers without appearing too pushy.
You can recommend products and offers in a more natural way, suggesting offers that closely fit the customer’s buying intentions and interests.
Personalisation can be used to cut down on abandoned carts and keep customers in the sales funnel when they may consider leaving.
It can even inform powerful marketing campaigns that target customers with products and categories you already know they’re interested in.
All of this combines to create higher value orders, and ultimately, higher sales and profits.
How to Personalise
Once you’ve decided it’s time to begin personalising your eCommerce site, you’ll need to begin considering exactly how you’ll achieve it.
There are many different options, apps and techniques when it comes to eCommerce personalisation, and some may suit your business and target customers more than others.
Simple Personalisation
A great way to introduce your business and customers to personalised content is to start simple. Updating your site with seasonal products, popular items and related purchases, like the example below from Saltrock, are all simple methods of personalisation.
You could add a ‘trending products’ section to your home page, enabling customers to find popular products quickly and understand what their fellow shoppers are most interested in. Even simple personalisation tactics like this can add an element of interactivity and interest to your site, allowing it to change based on your customers’ actions.
You could also start with personalised emails. Just including the customer’s name can make an important difference when it comes to contacting your customers in a natural and engaging way.
However, customisation starts to get really interesting, and incredibly powerful, when you start exploring the following…
On-Site Personalisation
Personalisation apps like Bunting allow you to make your on-site personalised content much more contextual.
You can begin to personalise your site based on individual visitor actions. For example, you could add abandoned cart messages with exclusive discounts to convince customers to continue the checkout process. This adds valuable personalised content that adds significant benefit to both the customer, and your sales process.
On-site personalisation can be driven by customer data, only triggered when certain conditions are met, such as leaving the page or viewing certain products.
You can also offer features such as live chat on your eCommerce site to provide personal service to customers and help them make the right purchasing decision.
Email Personalisation
As well as personalising messages and content on the site itself, you can also use customer data to provide deeper personalisation of email marketing.
You could send abandoned cart reminders to customers with a direct link to complete their checkout, or product suggestions based on their purchase history.
As long as you’re offering something that customers actually want, and is relevant to them, email personalisation can be incredibly powerful.
Email personalisation also allows you to send discounts or vouchers to customers based on their value to your business. You could highlight customers who’ve spent over a certain amount and target them with a unique offer, or identify customers showing purchasing intent and give them the motivation to place that order.
Remarketing
eCommerce personalisation can also be used to make your paid ads more effective and precisely targeted.
With customer data from personalisation apps, you can target customers with Adwords or social advertising based on products they’ve shown interest in or items related to past purchases.
For customers researching products before making a decision, seeing an ad for your site featuring a product they’ve viewed puts you at the front of their mind, and even if they don’t click the ad, they may end up purchasing from your store at a later date - because they saw your remarketing ad and remembered your brand.
You can also create lookalike Facebook audiences based on your website visitors - targeting customers who fit a similar ‘lookalike’ profile to your ideal customers.
Key Takeaway
As a personalised eCommerce experience weaves its way into your customers’ expectations, it becomes more important to include it in your strategy. Not only that, but with the wealth of different personalisation options now accessible to smaller eCommerce businesses, there’s no excuse not to begin experimenting with personalisation.
Interested in finding out more about how Statement can help you explore more advanced personalisation and remarketing strategies? Just get in touch and we’d be happy to have a coffee and discuss your plans for future marketing.
