Innovative Ways to Personalize your E-Commerce CX
Written by Shelanne Augustine
Technical Content Writer
E-Commerce has changed the way we live, shop and do business. With more shoppers choosing to buy online, it’s become increasingly important for companies to have an online presence – whether through an e-Commerce store or platform where customers can check their products, add to cart and make payment online.
But is that enough? Not likely. To attract new customers and keep them coming back for more, you need to provide a personalized experience.
While there’s no way to replicate the type of personal experience made through face-to-face interaction, there are several ways to offer personal touches to your customers, regardless of the channel.
E-Commerce Personalization
Before you can personalize your customers’ shopping experience, you have to understand what they want. To understand their preferences, start by studying your shoppers’ browsing behavior, order history, search history, brand affinities, and location.
You can configure your website to deliver a personalized shopping experience to your customer based on this information. Doing so will not only keep your customer engaged, but it’ll also encourage them to make repeat purchases.
Providing product recommendations based on what your customers have viewed or searched for is a great way to engage customers. Another personalized experience is to offer special promotions for products your customers have shown a liking to. This also helps in reducing cart abandonment rates.
The benefits of personalization are two-tiered:
1. They keep your customers happy
Product recommendations and special promotions have become standard across the e-commerce landscape. You can expect your customers to be looking for them as you click through your product catalog.
2. They keep you ahead of your competition
If you don’t offer a personalized experience to your customers, they know where and how to find another company that can give them the products they need, with the service they want. Investing in personalization efforts is guaranteed to give you the best bang for your buck.
Personalization Strategy
For different businesses, the strategy to provide personalization may vary slightly, but the core of this comes down to three steps:
Deciding where to offer personalization along your site user’s journey
Creating a tailor-made profile for each unique experience
Getting the customer data
There are many tools on the market that you can use to get important insights into the customer journey. These insights can help you answer key questions like “where is our customer traffic coming from?” By looking at these insights, you can determine whether the customer has landed on your page from an ad on a blog or from a google search. Based on those determinations, you can predict whether the visit will result in conversion and offer additional discounts or coupons to incentivize them to purchase.
You can also find out whether the customer new a new repeat shopper and use that information to show personalized pages. If they’re a new customer, you can greet your customer with a coupon for their first order, and if they’re returning, you can show them a product page based on browsing history.
The search box is undoubtedly the most used and most important functionality on any website. Often traditional keyword searches fail to understand what exactly the customer is looking for as it does not recognize the context of the search.
That is where AI and machine learning-based technology comes into the picture. You can personalize your search box to provide each shopper with a unique search experience based on their intent, preference, and behavior.
Hand picked for you: Offer intuitive search results with AI-Powered Site Search Solution
Tools and Technologies
To know where and how to present personalized content, you need to gather the right data. There are many tools available in the market to collect that data; most are advanced and can be easily integrated with your system.
You can use these tools to conduct website experiments, like presenting two different versions of the same page to your customer to see which they like best. You may be surprised to find a few tweaks to your website can dramatically increase your sales.
Here Are 5 of the Most Popular Personalization And Market Testing Tools:
1. Google Optimize 360: Google’s enterprise-level optimization tool that can be used to test different variables of a website to see where changes can be made to improve conversion rates.
2. Optimizely: this platform provides A/B testing and multivariate testing tools, website personalization, and feature toggle capabilities.
3. Adobe Target: Adobe Experience Cloud’s solution provides everything you need to tailor and personalize your customers’ experience to maximize revenue on your web and mobile sites, apps, social media, and other digital channels.
4. Bloomreach: With audience segmentation, targeting, and progressive profiling that adapts in real-time, Bloomreach offers dynamic content personalization. Native tools to collect data, set logic, test content performance, and identify trends enables omnichannel personalization from one central place. With Bloomreach Experience Manager, every banner, image, piece of text, widget, or other content components can be personalized.
5. Amazon Personalization: Amazon Personalize enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML) technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations – no ML expertise required. This is a fully managed machine learning service that goes beyond rigid, static rule-based recommendation systems and trains, tunes, and deploys custom ML models to deliver highly customized recommendations to customers across industries.
Of course, they’re not the only tools on the market. Here are a few others to be aware of:
How can Royal Cyber help?
Royal Cyber has been helping customers all over the world achieve their digital goals through innovative solutions and services. Our Product Lab engineers are constantly developing new products and functions to enhance our clients’ web presence and provide their customers with engaging customer experiences.
Contact us to discuss your e-commerce platform or see a demo of our products and solutions at work.
