The personalisation trend has been running strong in the e-commerce sphere for some time now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, personalisation is quickly becoming something which consumers expect so, if you’re store isn’t aiming for personalisation, you could be losing out.
Personalisation is a powerful tool which enhances the user experience and tailors it as far as possible to individual users. But what exactly do we mean when we talk about personalisation, and what benefits does it offer e-commerce businesses and their consumers?
What is e-commerce personalisation?
Personalisation in e-Commerce refers to a range of techniques that e-commerce businesses can use to tailor their services to the person using it. This could be as simple as ensuring a mailout is addressed to each user by name to more complicated tasks such as ensuring any pop-ups on your website reflect the users preferences.
In fact, personalisation can take many forms, and many are far more complex than this one example.
How does it work?
No matter the application or its complexity, there is always data at the heart of any personalised feature. The data in question can be as simple as someone’s basic details such as their name and age. Or it might be much more nuanced data aggregated from a range of different sources.
The type and volume of data required to implement personalisation depends on the specific application it’s being used for.
However, provided you have the necessary data, even the most seemingly complex examples of personalisation can actually be quite simple to implement. The difficulty arises in ensuring you have good data that has been processed correctly. If you have that, most personalisation is just a case of filling in the blanks in a template based on the user’s data.
What are the benefits of personalisation?
Personalisation is part of a larger ongoing trend among consumers who increasingly expect bespoke services and experiences tailored to their individual needs and wants. Personalisation has been a major trend in both the online and offline worlds, which is hardly surprising given how data-centric our modern lives are.
By personalising the user experience, eCommerce businesses can make their customers feel special like they aren’t just another anonymous consumer. This, in turn, helps to foster brand loyalty and trust with customers.
The statistics on personalisation’s success are irrefutable. For example, 84% of consumers in one survey agreed that being treated as an individual, not a number was an important factor in deciding which businesses to use.
How to create a personalised shopping experience
For eCommerce businesses looking for ways of personalising their user’s shopping experience, there are plenty of options. Here are some ideas with which any ecommerce business can begin their personalisation journey.
Use data about user behaviour and preferences to create custom offers for individual customers or groups of similar customers.
Use location data to tailor marketing campaigns and product promotions to users based on their location.
Use data about your customers buying habits to prompt them during and after checkout. You can use this as an opportunity to upsell, down-sell, or cross-sell. All of these will help to build customers’ confidence in your business.
Use personalisation to enhance website navigation. As an eCommerce business grows, its website inevitably begins to feel unwieldy and difficult to navigate. Use user data to ensure your customers are seeing the products and services most relevant to them.
Even the simplest implementations of personalisation can make a significant difference to an eCommerce business’s user experience. However, more advanced forms of personalisation can produce huge potential ROIs. The key to making it work is choosing the right data to work with.
We hope this article has given you some food for thought when it comes to making sure your ecommerce store is as closely aligned to your customers as it possibly can be.
