eCommerce Personalization: Essential Things You Need to Know

For a long time, online sellers have been looking for the holy grail of eCommerce personalization to create a consistent, cross-channel shopping experience and adapt to customer needs in real-time.

The necessary technologies have recently arrived to help them do this job. But the sheer quantity of these technologies with different levels of personalization makes it unclear to design personalized user experiences using eCommerce means and the way you can achieve it.

What is eCommerce Personalization?

eCommerce personalization is the process of creating personal experiences in an eCommerce store based on previous browsing actions and behavior, purchase history, and demographics of customers.

Digital experience platforms

From the collection of those data, store owners dynamically present content, product recommendations, and other offers. 

Personalization is increasingly vital in the competitive market to help merchants engage shoppers, drive sales, increase conversion, and increase repeat purchases.

There are many different forms of eCommerce personalization, ranging from personalized product recommendations, marketing emails for abandoned carts, to onboarding quizzes.

What is the Difference between Personalization and Customization?

Marketeers will allow customers to customize their experiences, but personalization and customization are two different terms. On the one hand, brands allow customers to customize a product, which means they are placing the duty on the customers to create their own experience.

On the other hand, in terms of personalization, it is the brand that has the duty to properly leverage customer data and gives a customers’ preferred experience. Predicting the customer’s needs before they express them will help brands drive customer loyalty and enhance their shopping experience.

Benefits of Personalization in eCommerce

Personalization can be the difference between customers picking your product and the competitors’. But there are some obvious benefits to why brands should use personalization when doing eCommerce business. 

Better Sales Conversion

Customers surely don’t want to see the same experience as every store they visit. They look for something different to decide to make a purchase. eCommerce personalization can increase sales conversion rates with differences by presenting customers exactly what they’re looking for. 

For example, brands can use the helpful tactic of product recommendations when customers are about to checkout. By this way, brands will showcase favorite products of specific groups of customers, rising conversion rates for items that seem not popular with all of their customers.

Improve Brand Engagement

By knowing where your customers do shopping and the types of products they are interested in, you can improve brand engagement. And you will find the way they are likely to interact with your brand. Personalization makes customers want to connect with your brand because you have the products they want and display the products in the way they want to see them.

Increase Customer Loyalty

Your customers will become more loyal because you consistently know what they expect of your brand and how to offer the experiences they want. Customers will show their loyalty and continue shopping with the brand that they trust and understand.

Enhance Customer Experience

Customer experience is enhanced when your brand can better cater to customer needs, making their shopping time with you more convenient and enjoyable. Personalization helps brands remember customer preferences, then can direct them exactly where to go, even from the first time they visit your store.

Benefits of personalization in eCommerce

There are also other ways of personalization to improve customer experience, like showcasing their preferred products, saving payment information for quick checkout, or giving them upcoming promotions.

Understand Customers Better

Besides improving the customer’s experience, eCommerce personalization makes you understand them better. It requires brands to collect customer information to do that. The correct collected data is very valuable, it could be where your customers are located, the product types they are interested in, and also the ones they don’t like. Based on that, you can determine which products to keep making and which ones to stop offering.

Competitive Advantage

You will have an advantage over your competitors if they don’t know about eCommerce personalization. Personalization is a great way for your brand to stand out from others and attract your customers.

Customers sometimes change their decisions, but if you can provide them with a more personalized experience that is not elsewhere, they could stay with you and even become loyal customers.

Following are some statistics showing benefits of personalization for eCommerce business:

• Monetate: There is an average increase of 20% in sales when personalized experiences are used.
• Epsilon: 80% of online customers are more likely to decide to buy from a company with personalized experiences.
• Segment: 44% of consumers will become repeat buyers of a company after a personalized shopping experience.
• Forrester: a personalized service or experience makes 77% of consumers choose, recommend, or pay more for a brand that provides.

However, another survey by Forrester shows that 53% of digital experience professionals see that there is not enough the right technology for personalization.

Covid-19 has started a new cultural reset which are consumer attitudes towards shopping, and new habits are formed. Indeed, more and more consumers are seeking a personalized experience.

Learn more:

• BOPIS: buy online pick up in-store trend
• Newest Methods to Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Store 2022
• How to create a mobile-friendly eCommerce store?

Improve Personalized Experiences in eCommerce

The nature of personalization is goal attainment and these goals should be driven by customers.

Simply delivering what your business thinks is not the right thing to do. Instead, you should allow all visitors to consume the experience in the way they prefer, helping them achieve their goals throughout their shopping journey. To make it easy, you can think of an online business you interact with recently. It could be your favorite store, bank, or vacation booking site. And recall how the goals you’ve looked to are accomplished there.

Personalized shopping

More examples related to the needs of a home goods store which are so different during the wedding season. Or your vacation priorities change depending on if you are traveling by yourself or with other family members.

The way visitors interact with businesses is different and truly effective personalization looks beyond who you are to what you want to achieve right now. To collect all data of each visitor during their journey, all interaction points should work together, including browsing data, site search, product recommendations, landing pages

Of course, the whole process is more complex than said. Therefore, while it is an increasingly hot topic, most eCommerce businesses are still in the early stages of understanding how to utilize personalization.

To embark on a new personalization strategy, or develop an existing one, you should answer 3 main below questions:

Where does Personalization Occur in the User Experience?

Among the channels and touchpoints your potential customers have interaction with, where would a personalized element work the most? You should list each micro-moment benefitting from a more contextual experience. For instance, they are product recommendations, site search, customer portals, inspirational content, location-based services, site search, customer portals.

What Information will be Useful?

Do you think the tools you have, like CRM, A/B testing, marketing automation, transactional systems offer a wealth of information? Take a map of where and how you’d like personalization to occur. Also, you should know the helpful current tools for each micro-moment, and how to fill the gaps in data to complete your vision.

How can Technology and Human Insight Help?

In short, they bring all of your data and channels together and offer this contextual experience at scale.

Elements to Personalize Your eCommerce Store

Technological constraints make marketers have to settle with some level of personalization. For example, they use the customer’s name in email campaigns. However, it needs more than that to bespoke the shopping experience for modern consumers.

eCommerce personalization software

The right technology stack will help marketers deliver personalized content across the customer journey, and take advantage of eCommerce personalization.

Here are several ways to personalize an eCommerce website, for both B2C and B2B personalization. 

Create Localized and Targeted Content

Blog posts, banner content, and even product descriptions should be relevant to customers’ region, demographics, language, and interest. People tend to return to a site that contains familiar content with them.

Recommend Relevant Products

For instance, if a customer buys something from an online camera equipment store, the store can generate eCommerce product personalization that coincides with the purchased product. They might also get interested in lenses, lights, or photo editing software.

Offer Targeted Discounts

The eCommerce CMS can make a discount on a product for the customer who has previously purchased that item. Also, you can offer a lower price for a bundle of related products than purchasing each item individually.

Adjust Navigation

After the journey that customers visit your website, you might know what they are looking for. So for the next time they come back, the navigation should be adjusted based on previous browsing data. This can save your customers time and promote them to complete purchases faster.

Create User-generated Content

Although there are customers who may enjoy shopping with a brand, others base on word of mouth from their peers to come to buy from a brand. User-generated content can show your customer’s peers the popularity of your products.

eCommerce Personalization Tactics

When it comes to personalization, a major issue of digital business is that there is no clear definition for a single tactic. And each class of technology has its own limitations.

There’s no single tactic defining personalization that is often considered as running an A/B test. Instead, a whole spectrum of technologies get involved, and to create your personalization roadmap, you need to make your own unique recipe of how much you will rely on each one.

To help your visitors achieve their goal of the moment, you have to understand them and make your experience based on every level of technology.

Real-time personalization needs you to notice how a visitor’s behavior differs from their typical behavior. Then identify their current goal through the behaviors of their own or of similar users. Finally, insights across all levels of technology will help them accomplish this goal easily.

Tactic #1: Understanding Audience 

Understanding customers’ needs are the essence of the personalization process. After that, to satisfy that need, you must have a blend of the right technology and know-how to use it.

It doesn’t matter if it is a new visitor or a familiar customer, you can collect clues from how they visited your site to determine the reason they came to you. When identifying that intent right away, you can make the customer journey shorter and improve their experience.

Did an advertisement on social media bring them in? Or was it a search engine on which they look for a particular product or service? Did they come from a press article?

If you’re lucky to know a visitor who either purchased something previously or agreed to fill out a research form, you can display relevant items or content.

Here are some examples:

• If customers have entered your store as a sports retailer through a search engine with the keyword “bargain golf clubs,” your landing page will realize that. It could boost some clubs on sale and other clubs with reasonable prices to the top of the product grid.
• As an insurance company, you should not ignore someone visiting via their mobile phone from another country. By contrast, you could take them as potential clients on vacation and show helpful information on the homepage.
• For visitors who have recently ordered a laptop, an electronics retailer may want to offer some popular accessories for that computer. They might need to buy a desktop porting station, a carrying case, or an external memory drive.

Digital experience platforms and machine learning will help you take care of this task at scale. They offer related content and products to your customers.

Tactic #2: Semantic Understanding for Personalized Search

Why is it Important?

The rarity of personalized search makes a large missed opportunity. Visitors using search tools on a site make a conversion rate 1.8 times higher than the average.

The search box is considered the most important part of any site. Unfortunately, many search functions on sites today may doesn’t help because they focus on keywords instead of the contextual meaning of those words. 

Search can be complex because of spelling mistakes, different terms of the same product, use of broad terms. All of these make it a struggle to get accurate search results.

Dumb search and intelligent search are different on a practical level. Most marketing platforms still make the mistake of searching for words alone. For instance, when entering “budget black laptop” on the search engine tool, customers probably want a black, low-cost computer. But the keyword search may understand differently and deliver them to a page of low-cost black accessories for laptops.

To conclude, a semantic, intelligent search considers the words in context, like the way a human sales clerk would.

What You Can Do

You can take advantage of Intelligent search which has semantic understanding capabilities to help you have happy customers. Brands, retailers, manufacturers, and distributors need to have their business appearing on the search engine. Then they can create guided, merchandise-driven selling experiences on their own.

Intelligent search solutions can:

• Provides a handle of selling capabilities for the search box
• Enables sellers to refresh new products in a customer’s next-time visit
• Allows in-store shoppers to find the place of products on a kiosk
• Promote products that have been already purchased, or products in the shopping cart

This means online sellers can deliver personalization and recommendations to customers searching across landing pages. This will eliminate the thought to combine disparate products from other software vendors.

For example, when a user searches for generic terms like “shorts”, “exercise shirt”, “shirt”, or “running shoes”, the customers might get interested in female products. And that user is more likely a female, so some site search technologies will give her preference and recommendations to female items.

The buying experience of each customer is personalized based on the preferences that they have searched for in the past. This is the main goal of Semantic Search: helping users find what they’re looking for more easily.

Tactic #3: Targeting and Profiling

How it Work

What you can do is virtually accompany site visitors during the journey they browse your site. You can imagine a car salesman who might walk with his customer around the showroom. A good salesman can realize clues on what kind of car his customers like, including color they like, how much they can afford, and how soon they will buy the vehicle. When he knows the dealership’s inventory, he can bring them a car that suits their needs.

B2B personalization

Similarly, an online approach can work like that and online merchants can even use a trick that car dealers can’t: remaining invisible while you do it.

The importance of making this work is to provide a machine learning process with all that information, then match it in your inventory in real-time.

Machine learning can guide individuals at fast speeds. And it can also bring options that a visitor might have missed. It can recognize patterns in the visitor’s previous behavior, then match them with a segment of customers with similar characteristics. Also, the system can even understand entire segments of a new customer that your team might have overlooked.

Things to Do

As a clothing retailer in the upcoming season, you should create a landing page with the products that festival-goers will be looking for. The machine then joins in the work to boost items to perform well. Your store will have more stock available and stick to visitors’ preferences. In addition, marketers will create inspirational content targeted around regional festivals. While the machine provides the right content based on IP locations.

Intelligence to the user experience can offer real-time support to users that simply is impossible to do manually. For example, it is the case of transportation service with an app offering public directions. Based on travel speed, algorithms could identify if the user is walking, biking, or driving, and can give users the appropriate timings.

Tactic #4: 1:1 Personalization 

1:1 personalization in eCommerce can work well in situations when you have a lot of data about customers. That is when it can considerably change the products you offer to that individual. So rapid data aggregation and analysis, machine learning optimization, and cross-channel deployment are needed. If data is not enough, 1:1 personalization can be difficult for most companies to do well.

The right personalization solutions can help marketers and merchandisers use this thorough level of data to provide 1:1 personalization through search, layout, browse, and content.

To do this:

• Return accurate results for all visitors relying on AI. This ensures your search is always improving and getting better. 
• Offer accurate product recommendations based on customer search behavior and browsing history.

The recommended products are in retail websites before, with the call action, like “You Might Also Love…” or “Others Also Bought…”. They are common prompts on eCommerce stores to signal a product recommendations engine at. 

For example, for a customer who looks at high heels, you should then suggest stiletto heel shoes or shoes with around five-inch heels. Otherwise, if a customer looks for Louboutin slingback heels, then shoes by Christian Louboutin or by Christian Louboutin should be great suggestions.

How to Get Started with eCommerce Personalization

• Step 1: Identify what impacts revenue the most where you will start with. Then, understand where and how the personalization is processed for your site visitors.
• Step 2: Get to know the available eCommerce personalization software and tools out there, and pick a few to get started. 
• Step 3: Spend enough resources on the project, deciding who will take charge of this project and measure the gains.
• Step 4: Build a long-term strategy and optimization process.
• Step 5: Start to segment and personalize your eCommerce sites in the parts that bring the most benefit from the personalization. 
• Step 6: Keep tracking and monitoring the performance of the strategy, and optimize the process where needed.
• Step 7: Once you get satisfied with the strategy’s results, begin to scale across channels.

To Wrap up

There is no doubt about the importance of personalization, especially in this competitive eCommerce market where the difference plays an important role. Hopefully, this article has given you helpful information about eCommerce personalization.

If you would like to find another platform to help you work better with the personalization process, you need to make an eCommerce migration process. And an excellent shopping cart migration tool like Next-Cart can help to do the whole process smoothly.