If one was to explain ecommerce personalization in a simple manner, this could be it.
When you walk into a physical brick-and-mortar store, what really impresses you?
The ways in which the store engages you and treats you like you are their most special customer, isn’t it?
If you get what you are looking for, easily and quickly, without searching for it, then certainly the shopping experience is a breeze. If the owner is able to understand your preferences and shows you products according to your likes and thus, helps you save on time and effort, wouldn’t you like to visit the store again and again?
That’s exactly what online customers look for. A personalized experience. They expect ecommerce brands to understand their needs and preferences. Global statistics support the fact that, on average, more than 50% of the online retail users:
- Find more interesting products in a personalized online retail store.
- Are likely to return to a site that offers personalized product recommendations.
- Believe that retailers who personalize the shopping experience provide a valuable service.
- Prefer to shop on a site that offers personalized recommendations.
It is safe to say that ecommerce personalization is an absolute necessity for brands to survive the competition.
Challenges of Ecommerce Marketers
Rising Customer Acquisition Cost
Marketers and brands are spending almost 25-30% of their marketing budget on acquiring new customers. This makes customer engagement and retention a big challenge.
High Cart Abandonment Rate
According to Statista, the global online shopping cart abandonment rate was a whopping 69.57% in 2019. Moreover, from what we gather from our discussions with ecommerce marketers, almost 98% of users leave the website/app without making a transaction.
Tough Competition
In the highly competitive & price-sensitive market today, it is extremely difficult to build stickiness. Users either don’t come back enough, or the competitors poach them in no time.
Related Read: Personalization in E-Commerce – 7 Trends to Watch in 2023
4 Ways AI Can Boost Ecommerce Personalization
As mentioned earlier, the most effective way to acquire, engage, and retain your customers is to offer them personalized experiences that they cannot forget. To make this happen, you have two incredible gifts at your disposal – incredible amounts of customer information and AI-ML-based technology that feeds on this data to help you deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences.
There are various ways to provide a personalized website to each and every user. Here are a few scenarios wherein Netcore’s AI engine can help you deliver relevant and contextual recommendations across every touchpoint of the user journey.
1. Category page reordering
For any ecommerce platform operating at scale with a vast array of products in their catalogs, ecommerce personalization becomes crucial. Visitors often leave the website when they can’t easily find what they’re looking for or spend too much time searching.
Using behavioral data insights, the AI model can predict what the user might be interested in, and you can reorder or reshuffle the sequence in which the products are displayed. This can lead to a 60-80% increase in CTRs.
2. Personalized boutique
This kind of customization takes personalization to a whole new level. Going beyond creating a personalized home page or a product page, you can create a unique and personalized shop/a virtual storefront, or a boutique for each and every user. Doing this can help you achieve 120-150% higher CTRs.
You might want to check out how Netcore’s personalization engine helped Clovia, India’s leading under-fashion brand, increase its website conversions by 200% through personalized boutiques.
3. Product display page recommendations
Ecommerce personalization allows for relevant product recommendations on the product display page. The sooner the users see the products that are relevant(in terms of prices, designs, or product category), the higher the chances of conversion. Product display page recommendations can raise the CTRs by 30-50%.
Spencer’s, a leading online grocery store, was able to achieve a 7% increase in its website conversions by using Netcore’s advanced personalization solution.
4. Recommendations across the user journey through various channels:
Apart from site personalization, Netcore’s AI engine also provides personalization across other touch points in the user journey by offering recommendations through emails, push notifications, searches, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.
These are means of offline engagement. When the users are not active on your website or app, you can nudge them to come back to the web/app to check products, complete checkouts, etc. Here are some personalization examples around app push notifications.
How can Rule-Based Personalization Help?
Ecommerce personalization can also be achieved through rule-based personalization, where demographic parameters like location, time, and device type are utilized to create tailored experiences for each user or user segment throughout their journey. This approach is not fuelled by AI & ML, but you control all the parameters end-to-end. Here are some ways you can personalize the website experience:
Personalized Home Page banner: If you show a personalized home page to your users, uniquely crafted for each of them as per their interests, you increase the likelihood of them coming back to your website, by many times. A plain vanilla homepage does not appeal to users.
Here is an example how a bank’s website displays personalized homepage banners to its repeat visitors:
Text on the website: You can personalize the text on your website based on when the users visit the website. For instance, a first-time user sees a different version of the home page while a returning visitor sees another version. Once you define these parameters at the very start, what the users see is always in sync with their stage in the user journey. Relevant product recommendations in the home page nudge the users towards conversions.
Personalization based on time of day/season/location: Based on the time of the day, day of the week (at which users visit your website), the ongoing season, and the geographic location, you can personalize the content. Doing this ensures that the experience you offer is as
per the time zone and geography to which your user belongs.
Integrating Netcore’s Personalization Module
Netcore offers AI/ML driven as well as rule-based personalization solutions to many leading brands across industries. To ensure quick and easy implementation, we have designed the module in such a way that it takes less than 15 minutes to integrate the module to your website or app. You need to integrate:
- JS Snippet on the Header
- JS Snippet on the Thank You Page
- Content Feed
Note that if you already use Netcore’s Automation Suite, you can activate Rule-based Personalization immediately at the click of a button.
Concluding Thoughts
Ecommerce personalization is going to be the game-changer going forward. With super-intelligent technologies coming in, more and more ecommerce players are jumping into the pool of personalization to offer hyper-personalized recommendations and customer experiences to their users across the journey.
Related read: How to Reinvent E-Commerce Personalization in 2022
Brands that are still taking time to realize the significance of personalization might soon be out of the race. If you still haven’t crafted your strategy, we are here to help.
Please get in touch with us today to to understand in detail how to craft your marketing strategy, keeping personalization at its core.
