The large eCommerce firms nowadays woo customers by planning big sale and offering eye-popping discounts. But the small eCommerce firms also have a number of options to woo customers without offering eye-popping discounts. Several studies suggest that most customers nowadays prefer buying products from personalized online retail shores. Likewise, many customers also return to online stores that personalize shopping experience and offer personalized recommendations.
As an online retailer, you can easily improve customer experience, drive online sales, increase order size, and promote customer loyalty through eCommerce personalization strategy. You can easily implement an eCommerce personalization strategy based on vital customer information like email addresses and shopping history. But you must focus on the key elements of the eCommerce personalization strategy during the eCommerce application development stage to optimize customer journey and boost sales.
7 Factors to Focus on while Making an eCommerce Personalization Strategy
1) Website Personalization
Nowadays, customers access eCommerce websites on a variety of devices. Before implementing eCommerce personalization, you need ensure that the website delivers optimal user experience. There are certain responsive design mistakes the site owners need to avoid for optimal user experience. The user experience delivered by an eCommerce website is impacted by its accessibility, functionality, performance, usability, and security. Also, the web store needs to deliver optimal user experience across devices, platforms, browsers, and networks. You evaluate the eCommerce website elaborately to measure and improve its user experience. The test results will further help you to make the web store deliver hassle-free online shopping experience.
2) Explicit and Implicit User Data Collection
In addition to focusing on website personalization, you also need to collect real-time customer information from various sources. The real-time customer information will help you to personalize customer experience displaying the most appropriate information. However, it is always important to combine explicit and implicit data collection. The explicit data is provided by a customer through his profile, surveys, or membership application. You can always accelerate explicit user data collection by asking customers to rank an individual item or collection of items, choose his preferred item, or answer specific questions.
On the other hand, you have to analyze the explicit data to generate implicit data. For instance, you can generate implicit data by observing the items viewed by a customer, amount of time spent in viewing specific items, and analyzing customer activities and behavior. You must leverage the implicit data to present personalized content and relevant information to individual customers. The combination of explicit and implicit data will help you to understand the preferences, interests, activities, and behaviors of individual customer while implementing ecommerce personalization.
3) Persuading Customers to Stay Logged In
While implementing eCommerce personalization, you must explore ways to persuade new users to sign-in and existing users to stay logged in to accelerate implicit and explicit user data collection. When a shopper visits your eCommerce website, you can easily track and understand his choices, preferences and buying habits. You can always persuade a shopper to stay logged in by offering personalized recommendations, simplifying checkout process, save contact information, and speed up product reordering. At the same time, the eCommerce personalization strategy also needs to persuade first-time visitors to sign in or submit email addresses by offering deals or giveaway. These options will help you to increase customer base and promote customer loyalty.
4) Personalized Recommendation
As noted earlier, most customers return to online retail stores that offer personalized recommendations. While implementing eCommerce personalization, you need to ensure that the products suggested or recommended to a shopper are relevant to him. At the same time, the recommendation display also needs to convey important information like product name, image, size, color, and social proof. You can recommend relevant products to customers through both onsite recommendations and email recommendations. But you can generate real-time customer engagement and facilitate cross-selling/up-selling by making on-site recommendation based on the customer’s purchase history and recently viewed products.
5) Personalized Communication
While implementing eCommerce personalization, you must explore ways to take advantage of triggered emails or transactional emails fully. Unlike conventional emails, transactional emails are personalized messages which are triggered automatically by the system based on specific user actions – sign-in, shopping cart abandonment, payment failure and order processing. You can use triggered emails as a robust marketing tool to recommend relevant products to customers and facilitate up-selling/cross-selling. At the same time, you can personalize shopping experience of customers by conveying relevant information by sending emails to customers at the right time.
6) Website Content Personalization
You cannot improve customer experience and promote customer loyalty displaying the same content to each website visitors. While implementing ecommerce personalization, you must explore ways to display relevant information to each visitor. There are a number of ecommerce personalization tools that help online retailers to personalize website content for early-stage, mid-stage, and last-stage customers.
You must make the early-stage customers aware of your products and brands by displaying relevant blog posts and podcasts. Likewise, you can persuade mid-stage customers to place orders by displaying discounts, coupons, events, and webinars. At the same time, the last stage products should be allowed to assess quality of new products through product samples and free trials. The website content personalization will help you to display relevant information to each customer and control his buying decision.
7) Prevent Exits and Shopping Cart Abandonment
You must explore ways to prevent customers from exiting the online retail store or abandoning shopping carts while implementing eCommerce personalization. A shopper may abandon the shipping cart due to a number of reasons – complex checkout process, lack of preferred payment option, unsecured payment gateway and unexpected shipping cost. Each time a shopper abandons shipping cart, the eCommerce website must send a personalized email to persuade him to complete the transaction through personalized recommendations and lucrative offers. Likewise, the web store also needs to prevent shoppers from exiting the website they are about to leave the website. It can easily retain the shoppers by offering free delivery or time sensitive discounts.
In addition to focusing on the key elements, you also need to implement various eCommerce personalization best practices. You must conduct thorough web application testing and mobile app testing of the product to make your application error free. At the same time, you must perform A/B testing to decide the best eCommerce personalization option. It is a good idea to consider these important points before launching your eCommerce website.However, it is also important to customize the eCommerce personalization strategy according to products available in your online retail store.
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