eCommerce Personalisation is defined as the practice of creating personal interactions and experiences on eCommerce websites. It’s achieved by sharing specific content, media, or product recommendations based on the browsing behaviour, purchase history data, demographics and psychographics of a user.

Personalisation: The Cold, Hard Truth

Whether you’re an avid fan of personalisation, like our good friends at Nosto, or not. You cannot deny the cold, hard facts:

  • 48% of consumers spend more when their experience is personalised.
  • 90% of marketers believe personalisation is the future.
  • 74% of consumers get frustrated when content has nothing to do with them.
  • “Visitors who viewed this, also viewed this” personalisation can generate 68% of eCommerce revenue.
  • 50% of consumers say they’ll spend more money with a brand that personalised their eCommerce experience.

It all makes sense. Through personalisation tactics, you are saving your shoppers time and effort by presenting them with what they want, when they want it. However, there’s plenty of personalisation strategies that you can implement so it’s important you choose one that’s best suited to your business objectives.

Read more: Nosto, The Perfectly Personalised Shopping Experience

We’re going to take a look at some of the most popular types of personalisation to boost sales and improve your eCommerce conversion rates.

As a general rule…

1. Use customer details wisely

Many eCommerce brands still aren’t fully utilising their customer data; eCommerce websites offer a wealth of important consumer information so it’s crucial you analyse this data and use it to your advantage.

Whether it’s on-site, through email or on social media, any brands applying an anonymous, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach are limiting conversions and hence, losing out on revenue.

Think about it: Are you using your customer’s name, age or gender to make the content you share with them, more personal? Incorporating these basic details will help you to become more relevant to them and show them you care. All in all, personalising content makes customers more likely to purchase and makes your marketing efforts worthwhile.

Nosto Open Rate Facts | iWeb Experts in eCommerce
Source: Nosto

Email Personalisation

2. Send emails based on user behaviour patterns

Sending emails based on how your customers have acted on your site is one of the easiest ways to make the most of behavioural insights. Whether you create quick win automated basket abandonment emails or run longer, remarketing campaigns.

We all know the saying “actions speak louder than words” and the same applies to email personalisation. Behavioural personalisation focuses on what the customer does, not who they are, and so it ends up being highly effective.

Plus, customer data can become outdated if users change address or demographic information and thankfully, behaviour insights are based on the latest interactions making them timely and relevant.

Emails you can send based on behavioural data:

  • Basket abandonment emails
  • Push out “similar items” based on previous purchases
  • 10% discount on a particular category they’ve been browsing
  • Personalised newsletters on deals on the items they’ve seen
  • Follow up emails to easily review a product
  • Send relevant blog posts or buying guides or product guides based on what products they’ve bought or have spent time searching for

Website Personalisation

Although we’ve previously shown how you can use email to up your personalisation game, there’s plenty of aspects on your website you can enhance. Web personalisation tactics can also be quick wins for delivering a better user experience for consumers and include the following:

  • Homepage content including banners, messaging, navigation, site search, adverts and advert placement, etc.
  • Product pages including messaging, reviews, similar item content boxes, blog posts or other extra material.
  • The checkout process including making it a shorter more streamlined process through offering one-step checkout, social media sign-ups and a variety of payment methods they can choose from.

It’s a great way to increase your conversion rates and give an end-to-end personalised customer experience from the minute they first interact with your brand, through to checkout.

3. Add personalised banners and category or product blocks to the homepage

Web personalisation works when it’s in the right places. Your homepage is a key spot to get consumers interested in your products, by displaying the right products and so, it’s important you personalise this page.

If you know what your consumers are searching for or what they tend to buy from you, you should be putting these categories or products in front of them through personalised banners, adverts or product/category suggestions.

When Shoeline personalized their homepage banner to show different products based on visitors’ previously demonstrated interests, they achieved a clickthrough rate of up to 26% and a conversion rate of 18%. – Optinmonster

Make sure these banners or product suggestions have relevant calls to action fitting to what you want to achieve from directing your customers here/showing them this content:

  • Shop Our Sale Now
  • Browse New-In Tops
  • Get Style Advice
  • Talk To Us

Alternatively, if you have been promoting your sale section to your customers through email and found that it’s generating lots of on-site traffic, you should make this a prominent section on your homepage to ensure you’re giving these customers an easy route to shop this section.

4. Recommend product specifics/categories based on browsing behaviour

Product Specifics

A great way to upsell your products is to recommend similar items to products that your consumers have previously browsed or bought.

Look through your analytics data to identify which pages they continue to revisit or products that have been added to their basket but then abandoned. That way you can show customers alternative options or items that may complement their purchase.

Tip: Go cheaper with the suggested item. If you’re displaying another product that’s slightly under the price of the product that’s already in their basket, they often feel more inclined to checkout with both items. This is because they can see the products complement one another and it won’t make their purchase too expensive to buy both.

Category Recommendations

When it comes to category personalisation, Amazon completely dominates this area. They display a personal page where you can see a whole selection of categories based on your previous onsite searches and browsing data.

 

Amazon eCommerce Personalisation Tactics | iWeb Experts in eCommerce

 

Amazon segments all of the products you’ve previously bought into the relevant categories. E.g: phone chargers into “Electronic Accessories” and food items into “Buy It Again in Grocery”. That way you can quickly and easily make repeat purchases or get inspiration for other products that match the items you’ve previously looked at.

Just bear in mind, these product or category recommendations can include gift purchases and so, your suggestions could be slightly skewed from being completely personal to you.

Customer Profiling

5. Use customer profiling to generate predictions on your new customer’s shopping patterns

Aside from some of the quick wins mentioned in points 1-4, you can then put your personalisation practices on steroids and take them to the next level. However, to do this, you need to incorporate customer profiling.

Customer profiling is where you take into account customer insights and use algorithms to sort through multiple cases of consumer data. Segment data and spot trends to make recommendations for new consumers based on what previous, similar customers have liked.

Although it can be a slightly longer process, it’s still an easy way to generate super accurate predictions on what your customers will do next – sometimes before they even realise themselves. That way, you can be one step ahead to make sure you’re giving them the content that’ll make them convert.

Takeaways

Don’t just limit your personalisation tactics to the easy, quick wins. Although they’re great to get you started, looking into customer profiling and investing in a personalisation tool like Nosto will be extremely beneficial in the long run.

Put these 5 types of eCommerce personalisation tactics into place to boost your sales. In turn, you’ll reap the benefits of a better online experience, encouraging consumers to increase their basket spend all through building a “we care” relationship with them.

Want to learn more? Contact us today for more information!

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