It may not be possible to know the name of every visitor to your ecommerce website, but it doesn’t mean your online store has to treat them like a number. “Me-commerce” is both the present and future of personalized online shopping, meaning customers appreciate feeling like a welcome guest every time they visit. Even more, they love timely assistance and relevant recommendations to point them in the right direction.
Here are the areas in which you can use personalized online shopping to improve your website’s user experience and boost loyalty (not to mention conversions).
Navigational personalized online shopping
Pretend you’re a customer trying to buy a pair of women’s work pants online. You decide to shop at the web store of a brand you’ve visited in the past, so you log into your account. In scenario A, you encounter the generic home page and have to navigate to the category and product page yourself. In scenario B, you enter the site to find women’s clothing listed as the most prominent link on the navigation bar. Which scenario makes you more likely to buy?
This is the principle behind navigational personalization for ecommerce. The idea is your store can use shoppers’ browsing and purchase history to personalize their user experience. This is one of the primary benefits of convincing customers to make an account rather than check out as a guest. You can track their usage and help streamline their shopping experience.
Helpful personalized online shopping recommendations
If you’re a Netflix user, you’ve likely browsed the “Top Picks for [Your Name]” section for inspiration. Why? Because these movies have been carefully curated based on your tastes. It’s comforting to know out of thousands of titles, there’s a place you can go to find media relevant to you. As Practical Ecommerce points out, ecommerce retailers can learn a thing or two from this predictive model of personalization—including how to use metrics like product ratings, browsing history, purchase history and shopper persona to make intelligent recommendations.
Ease of personalization should be at the center of any enterprise ecommerce solutions comparison; a difficult-to-navigate platform can’t guide customers toward their end goal.
Attentive customer service
It’s easy to feel anonymous when you’re shopping online. Unlike in physical retail stores, you can’t flag down a salesperson to answer your burning questions. But live chat is changing this. Using a live chat system, brands can communicate with customers during the transaction, resulting in opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.
The owner of one live chat customer service platform, LiveHelpNow, notes order values increase between 100 and 300 percent when a customer can speak to a representative before buying. Overall, it’s a great way to communicate quickly and clearly with customers, reassuring them your brand truly cares about their shopping experience.
A personal touch
When a customer opens their inbox to find an email blast from your ecommerce company, does it feel like a cookie-cutter message to thousands of people? Does it sound like a marketing robot wrote it? Or does it have a little extra something that makes it feel personalized and inviting? The difference between these two scenarios can greatly influence your open, click-through and conversion rates.
To start, try automatically sending behavior-triggered emails based on actions a consumer has taken with your site, whether it’s adding an item to their cart, creating an account or logging in for the first time in a while. These have click-through rates 152 percent higher than your run-of-the-mill, traditional emails, because they show your store understands where the customer is in their shopping journey.
Ecommerce personalized online shopping benefits
Increase sales
Sales is the biggest goal for companies when it comes to implementing personalized online shopping. There are plenty of ecommerce personalization statistics to prove it. If your customers are satisfied and happy with the personalized experience you have created, the average growth rate of your sales can be up to 20%. In addition, it also lays the foundation for a breakthrough in long-term sales.
Strengthen customer loyalty
If we rule out the quality of products and services in a competitive environment, consumers will tend to choose brands that provide them with a better experience. Because they feel they are in good hands with their interests, habits and other special needs. From there, they’ll also be more secure when buying from these online stores.
Increase value for each order
If you don’t trust a company, would you dare spend more money on items you’ve never used? Companies that offer a good personalized online shopping experience often use it to better take advantage of customers and add value to every order. Offering products that customers might like, as we discussed above, is an example of this.
Encourage buyers to introduce friends
This is also one of the long-term benefits of eCommerce personalization. From a happy customer, you have at least one new lead and so on exponentially. After a while, your reputation will only be widely known through word of mouth and personalized online shopping marketing strategies.
Reduce the cart abandonment rate
This is not an individual company’s problem. The average cart abandonment rate is considered very high and is caused by the customer’s poor experience when going through the checkout process for their order. At this point, you need personalized online shopping strategies to find the root cause and encourage your customer to come back to complete the transaction.
It is easier to forgive when you make a mistake
People say: “The customer is king”. And it has never been so true in the e-commerce market. Just one small mistake and you can lose a number of potential customers. However, when customers show compassion and acknowledge the efforts you have made to please them, they will become more empathetic and forgiving of your mistake.
Design of personalized online shopping
Whatever you do, be careful and remember that what you do has to be customer-centric. Every customer has different expectations of the personalized online shopping experience. In the meantime, your own desire for this experience may also be expressed in different circumstances. Hence, researching and planning ecommerce personalization is not always easy. Repeat the personalized online shopping research with the following 3 questions:
- When should ecommerce personalization be done?
- When users interact with you, their experience should be personalized at the right time, as that is when it becomes the catalyst for their decisions.
- What kind of information do you need to create personalized online shopping?
As soon as a salient touchpoint is identified, the selection of the right elements there should be personalized for each customer. Benefit from an additional e-commerce personalization engine that provides you with a lot of information such as marketing automation, CRM, A / B tests or transaction systems, etc.
How do you combine the power of technology and people?
On a large scale, human effort will not be enough to collect data, analyze it, or plan the personalization of e-commerce. At that point, advanced technology and software will automatically take care of these things. Your job is only to navigate them and choose the best strategies for your situation.
The key differences between B2C and B2B personalized online shopping
As a company, you surely still want your online experience to be as personalized as it is in B2C e-commerce. As you know, creating a personalized customer experience isn’t easy, and in the case of B2B ecommerce personalization, it’s even more difficult. The following are the elements that distinguish B2B ecommerce personalization from B2C personalized online shopping:
Complex personality and diverse customer base
B2B means your audience isn’t just one particular person making decisions. It is therefore far more difficult to convince your customers to agree with the products, services and experiences you offer.
Aim of long-term cooperation
While the main purpose of B2C ecommerce personalization is to generate more sales, in B2B it is more focused on improving the long-term and win-win partnership between two companies to work more efficiently and reduce production costs to lower .
Information from target customers
If you are a B2B online retailer, you can easily know all the information about your customers as it can be published on company information pages. Hence, it is easier to gather information about these objects than to encourage customers to register for an account like the B2C model.
Ecommerce personalized online shopping strategies
Understand your audience
This is the essence of the process to create a personalized experience. It determines the performance of the program that you will start later. However, as mentioned earlier, to understand the whole customer buying process from A to Z you need the right combination of technology.
Optimize search
If you search for customer information indiscriminately, you will drown in a huge pool of information without knowing what to do with it. Instead, focus on keywords that users are interested in to suggest articles related to the product they are looking for. This increases the likelihood of targeting consumer psychology.
Goal & profile
Technology can help you get the exact list of prospects by tracking traffic, registrations, ad views, and so on. From there, you should find clues about your customers’ preferences, shopping habits, search history, answers, and find their questions to help you reach them deeper.
Personalize 1: 1
To complete the ecommerce personalized online shopping process, you will need enough information. In addition, you can quickly aggregate and analyze data, use it across channels and optimize machine learning so that your customers feel that your brand is the ultimate goal, one that gives them exactly what they need and that they can trust over the long term.
Conclusion
In conclusion, ecommerce is trending more toward “me-commerce” these days. It’s the present and future of personalized online shopping.
