Adding a little personalization into your eCommerce marketing can lead to higher conversions and more sales revenue. While not a new strategy by any means, personalization can mean the difference between customers choosing your brand or shopping elsewhere. The fact is that your customers want a more personalized shopping experience, which goes beyond product recommendations.
Personalization makes customers feel special and improves their shopping experience.
When personalization is done right, customers will be more likely to buy from your brand and become repeat customers. Here are some ways of how brands can offer customized and unique experiences for visitors on their websites:
Create Personalized Homepages
Your website is the first contact your customer has with your brand – the front door to your online store, so to speak. Now that your potential customers are at your door, it’s up to you to greet them in the best way possible. Personalizing your homepage helps the customers find exactly what they’re looking for in each visit.
It’s important to keep eCommerce personalization in mind when designing the layout of your eCommerce website. Make sure that your visitors can navigate easily and focus on the category they’re interested in, so they shop without any distractions. It means a better shopping experience for them and higher conversions for you.
Offer Personalized Guides
If you’re running an eCommerce store, providing on-site assistance to your visitors with quizzes, blogs, inspiration and style guides are effective ways of helping users make better buying decisions. In addition to suggesting products according to preferred styles and brands, you can also recommend products based on your visitor’s browsing and shopping history.
Many eCommerce stores also use chatbots to assist online shoppers with basic questions and navigate them to a specific product or support page. Anything to make the shopping experience a more seamless one!
Email marketing
Ecommerce personalization doesn’t end when your customers leave your web-site. To date, email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for eCommerce marketing and for reaching your customers. Implement personalization tactics in your email strategy such as personalizing email subject lines, sending abandoned cart recovery emails, offering promotions and discounts, celebrate birthdays or re-engage inactive leads. The goal is to tailor each of these to your customers and gently guide them down your sales funnel.
Display purchase history or Recently Viewed Items
Use a customer’s purchase history and product page history to learn more about their shopping habits and recommend products that you know will draw their attention. After all, they have already bought something similar before so chances are high that they may be interested in something complementary. You can also use a strong call-to-action (CTA), getting your customers to ‘pick up where you left off’, reminding them about the items they’ve recently viewed and inviting them to think about making a purchase, in a subtle way.
Create Special Campaigns
Creative campaigns can help you form stronger bonds with your customers and make them feel valued. A simple way is to offer first-time visitors an incentive to sign up for your email subscriber list and help them visit you again. Contests and giveaways are also a great opportunity for you to show off your products to a wider group of people.
Alternatively, consider campaigns such as flash sales, in which you provide a highly valuable offer such as a discount or a new product bundle to captivate your audience for a short amount of time.
Personal Recommendations
Personalized product recommendations bring value to the shopping experience and have a significant effect on conversion rates. “Continuous shopping” or review recommendations allow returning visitors to pick up where they left off, or convince customers to make purchases that other customers are happy with.
Suggesting similar or complementary items on product pages, such as a phone case that is compatible with the phone in the shopper’s cart, is a must-have for eCommerce sites today. Use the customer’s own personal tastes to suggest products in tune with their wants and needs, thus, increasing conversion rates.
Loyalty Programs
One way to encourage people to shop from your ecommerce store again is to offer a loyalty program. Your customers want to feel special and loyalty programs can reward your customers with things like private or early access to the best deals. Many loyalty programs also allow customers to accrue points with every purchase, that leads to various rewards, such as a specific discount off their purchase, a free product or even free shipping.
Whether you are a well-known or an up and coming brand, personalization is not just about making online sales. Your goal is about creating experiences that keep the ever-demanding customers coming back. Businesses that want to increase their conversion rates and profitability must incorporate eCommerce personalization strategies on their website to strengthen their brand image and keep customers satisfied.
