Ecommerce personalization is simply the delivery of messages to customers and potential customers via a digital medium, with a personal touch.
It’s a rapidly growing element of digital marketing and an issue for many businesses. The simple fact is that it can be difficult to tailor messages to individuals when you have a lot of customers using a variety of mediums.
Adding a few lines to one campaign is simple, adding them to all of your campaigns and keeping them relevant to the individual is difficult. But it’s also the most effective way of retaining existing customers, encouraging repeat business, and even generating new customers.
In order to master the different ecommerce options, you need to partner with a business that understands personalization at scale and the future of ecommerce. It’s not advisable to attempt to handle it by yourself.
However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a good understanding of ecommerce personalization at scale.
Data Collection
In order to provide personalized content to individuals, you need to collect as much data as possible. You will need to know our customer's age range, purchasing power, and geographic location; this will help you to target them with the right product.
But before this, you’ll need to collect data on all of your customers to discover how they found you, what made them purchase through you, and why repeat customers repurchase.
In short, you need to gain an understanding of your traffic, the pages visited on your site, the chain of movement through those pages, and what purchases are ultimately completed.
It helps to have the basic customer profile data, email, and to understand which group of customers you are tracking.
It is definitely better to track data in real-time if possible.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is becoming an important part of this. Bots built into programs will track and collect data for you, as well as searching the web for relevant information. Most importantly, these bots can be used to help deliver the personal ecommerce experience that your customers need.
The more personal the experience, the better the connection between a customer and your business. That dramatically increases the likelihood of them purchasing through you and purchasing other items in the future.
Don’t Generalize
Data gives you a great picture of your customers, but don’t generalize and assume that all traffic arriving at your site is the same. You need to divide your visitors into segments depending on whether they are repeat customers, new, referrals, etc.
The idea is that you’ll understand their expectations better, and this is key to delivering the very best service which will continue to engage them. (And result in additional sales).
Get Dynamic
Collecting data means you can display recently purchased items, recently viewed items, and even make suggestions based on the items that have been viewed in the past.
This can also be applied to new customers by displaying popular purchases or even enticing them with a discount off their first order.
Email Marketing
When done properly, this remains the most effective way to introduce new customers and maintain your existing customer base. Emails that connect to customers on a personal level are much more likely to be opened and acted on.
In short, you need to know as much about your customer and the purchase process as possible, this will allow you, with the right tools, to personalize contact for everyone regardless of whether they have bought from you before or not.