Among the multiple variables involved in building a thriving ecommerce brand, delivering a personalized shopping experience makes it among the top.
A personalized shopping experience is a proven way to make your customers feel special, resulting in high customer retention and loyalty.
But when your brand offers a wide range of products, it becomes increasingly difficult for customers to find the right fit based on their preferences.
How would you extend a personalized shopping experience that makes customers care? This is where ecommerce personalization changes the game. It is a way to recommend the right products to the right customers, leading to more purchases and, of course, better revenue.
Ecommerce personalization strategies are no longer expensive in-house solutions only reserved for the bigger market players.
Start-ups and small businesses, too, can easily access the tools to create a personalized shopping experience for their customers and make them feel understood. At its core, personalization helps your brand connect with your customers, making them more likely to engage with (and buy from) you.
But what exactly is ecommerce personalization?
What is ecommerce personalization?
Ecommerce personalization is about creating a rich, tailor-made experience for your audience and customers.
It’s critical to note that personalization is not limited to one point in marketing and sales. Instead, it is applicable across the various stages of a customer’s journey and interaction with your ecommerce brand.
To understand ecommerce personalization in-depth, let’s first rule out the most common misconception that plagues it. Ecommerce personalization is not just about random recommendations shown to every website visitor that you think your customer will appreciate.
Instead, a whole range of data input and analysis goes into personalizing your ecommerce website so that your customers can get contextual recommendations and relevant products.
A customer’s purchase history, region, age, gender, personal preferences, interactions with the products on your website and different social media platforms, and transaction value are some of the inputs that are roped in while creating a personalization strategy.
All these variables and parameters might seem overwhelming at a glance. You might think that one needs extensive knowledge about machine learning and AI to develop these strategies. Well, this holds true when you consider creating an in-house team.
What is the importance of a personalized shopping experience for your customers?
A personalized shopping experience is critical for your brand and even more for your customers. Non-personalized websites are less adept at converting and retaining customers. In fact, 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers them personalized experiences.
Having a strategic approach to ecommerce personalization is no longer a luxury but now a standard expectation by customers to stand out at all touchpoints. This will also boost your brand’s bottom line, which is why ecommerce personalization will be critical for business success.
And now, with the availability of proficient AI-powered personalization platforms that make personalization precise and hassle-free, there’s no reason why any ecommerce brand should risk its profitability.
Let’s see why we say ecommerce personalization is a game-changer.
1. Meeting customer expectations
The importance of personalization from a customer’s point of view cannot be understated.
A research survey revealed that 44% of the participants were willing to revisit their ecommerce retailers if they offered a personalized shopping experience. Not just that, more than 70% of the customers were displeased when a website lacked these features.
In addition, customers are more likely to lose interest while shopping and drop off if they are unable to find the right product. Personalization strategies, as we see, have a direct (and significant) impact on customer retention rates.
91% of customers prefer to shop from brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations. Non-personalized ecommerce websites, on the other hand, are a perfect recipe for turning your customers away, more often than not, to your competitors.
2. Reduced product returns
Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, the return of products bought from an ecommerce website can be a hassle for both the retailer and the customer. Often, customers may be unsatisfied with the product after impulsively buying it during the sale.
However, a personalized sales strategy improves the customer’s shopping experience and satisfaction levels.
What are the benefits of ecommerce personalization?
Ecommerce personalization is no longer nice to have. It has very well catapulted into a necessity. Your customers are looking for a personalized experience, and there’s enough data to prove that the absence of personalization can drive them away.
The result? Cart abandonment, low customer conversion and retention rate, high customer churn rate, low customer lifetime value, and more.
On the contrary, ecommerce personalization can result in the opposite. Let’s see how.
1. Increase in average order value (AOV)
Ecommerce personalization = more purchases. How?
Personalized recommendations and offers significantly increase the average order size (AOV) and cart value. In a survey, more than 49% of the participants bought a product that they had not planned to buy due to personalized recommendations.
Delivering contextual recommendations based on behavioral data helps cross-sell and upsell complementary products and may lead to more purchases.
You can also send personalized offers and discounts to your customers to keep cart abandonment in check and reward loyal customers. These offers and discounts also enhance customer engagement and translate into more purchases.
2. Increased customer loyalty
E-commerce personalization is a surefire way of increasing customer loyalty. This is because customers only become loyal to a brand they completely trust.
80% of customers say they are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers personalized experiences. They trust a brand when they feel it cares for its customers and understands their preferences.
As a brand, you must also reward your customers for their prolonged loyalty by providing them with special access and limited-time offers. The gamification of the action and reward system helps you retain your customers in the long run.
3. Better lifetime value (LTV)
Increased customer loyalty directly equates to more regular purchases and revisits to your website. Members from loyalty programs generate 12% to 18% more incremental revenue. Due to a higher retention rate, the lifetime value of your customers also increases significantly.
These customers create a fixed inflow of cash. In addition, your loyal customers are more likely to recommend your product to close friends and family, increasing your reach.
4. Distinguishing your brand
In a crowded market like ecommerce, your brand is the ultimate differentiator. What will differentiate your brand from the rest are the personalized experiences that are crafted for customers.
Brands that go the extra mile to cater to customer preferences are the ones that stand apart and get noticed. This helps in better brand recall and word-of-mouth recommendations that enhance trust in the minds of customers.
What are the methods of ecommerce personalization to use?
1. AI-driven personalization
The number of ecommerce websites has increased exponentially over the years.
With high competition and higher customer expectations, it isn’t feasible for marketers to manually create segments, analyze, set triggers, and recommend products by going through hundreds, if not thousands, of data points. The great news is that AI eliminates this need for manual efforts and helps ace ecommerce personalization.
And that’s precisely what Netcore’s ecommerce marketing platform offers.
AI and neural network technologies can easily collate large amounts of data and find patterns in a customer’s behavior in a way that easily supersedes manual human abilities. AI then curates and extends a personalized experience based on this data.
The data includes purchase history, interaction with the website and social media channels, transactions, and the behavioral history of the customers.
Some might think that AI-powered personalized recommendations might not work for first-time customers.
However, this is not the case, as the interaction history of customers is also collected from various social media platforms. The AI system can make suggestions based on those. Platforms like Netcore effortlessly implement such scalable AI integration.
To help you gauge the power of AI-driven personalization, let’s see an overview of what Netcore’s Co-marketer AI engine does.
First, it thoroughly understands each customer’s wants by analyzing large sets of historical and real-time data. In addition, its image recognition capability helps it learn from each user’s search, browsing, and purchase behavior. The result? Hyper-contextual recommendations that convert.
2. Omnichannel personalization
The first rule to effective ecommerce omnichannel personalization is to understand that it doesn’t end at your website.
However, personalized touchpoints are offered by less than half of the retail brands. Personalization works best when your entire channel mix is optimized to deliver personalized recommendations.
When done right, omnichannel personalization can increase CTRs by 30-60% and add-to-cart rates by 6-9%, among other success metrics.
Many other channels can be personalized, such as the following:
a. Personalized emails
Even though email marketing has been around for a long time, marketers recognize its importance. Email marketing yields one of the highest ROIs compared to other marketing channels.
The personalization and segmentation that email marketing can achieve is often not possible with other channels. Personalized emails help you engage existing and dormant customers, prevent cart abandonment with triggered emails, and accomplish a lot more.
b. Personalized app and web push notifications
App push notifications are responsible for generating significant traffic in your mobile app as they keep bringing the users back to the app.
The push notifications focus more on igniting the customer’s curiosity with a well-written punchline. The push notification will contain a personalized offer to incentivize the customer to open the app.
These are relevant recommendations based on the user’s search, viewing, or purchase behavior. Zomato, for example, uses quirky and witty push notifications to grab the attention of customers.
Similarly, you can reach your customers through personalized and contextual web push notifications when they aren’t browsing your website. These notifications can be viewed across desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
c. Personalized in-app and web messages
Web messages on in-app messages that often appear when the user is about to leave your website can also be personalized to recommend relevant products and offer special discount coupon codes at the right time.
Similarly, personalized in-app messages can be leveraged to engage real-time app users. This personalization relies on the user’s attributes, preferences, and actions.
3. Abandon cart campaigns
Send abandon cart reminders to customers on their preferred communication channel. Personalizing the message that is being delivered, such as their names and the items they left on the cart, goes a long way in delivering a good experience. You can further incentivize them to complete the purchase by offering discounts or free shipping and delivery charges.
4. Website personalization
Customize the website experience for customers based on their past interactions, purchases and behavior to improve the chances of conversion.
While 67% of retailers claim they excel in personalizing their online website, only 34% of consumers would agree to this point. This is a leading indicator for brands to capitalize on this opportunity as customers are looking to be served with personalized experiences in their shopping journey.
7 ecommerce personalization examples
Brands can practice ecommerce personalization in a multitude of ways. With a robust ecommerce marketing platform, brands can implement personalization strategies that will launch them significantly ahead in the game. Here are 7 examples.
Each one of these examples is backed by data and a thorough problem-solving approach. Let’s dive in.
1. Chumbak’s Recommendation widget with personalized products
A recommendation widget is a widget that shows up with recommended products while browsing. The widget is useful for upselling, down-selling, and cross-selling products to your customers across their journey.
Chumbak offered a wide range of products available on its platform. However, customers found it hard to navigate and find their desired products.
Implementing Netcore’s personalization platform powered by AI helped Chumbak show more personalized recommendations across the home, product listing, and product display pages.
Find out how Netcore helped Chumbak increase cart contribution rate by 18%
2. Woodland’s personalized web messages
Web messages are smart messages that strategically appear on the screen when customers browse your website. They act like an attention-grabbing reminder that encourages the customer to try out a new line of products, check out an exciting offer, or try a new feature of your website.
Woodland had high traffic on their website, but conversion to actual paying customers wasn’t enough. Not finding the right products also led to some customers dropping off even after signing up.
To solve this problem, Woodland worked with Netcore to implement smart web messages on their web pages. Netcore calculated the average time a visitor spent on the website before dropping off and programmed the web message to appear exactly during that time to encourage engagement.
Learn how Woodland achieved a 100% increase in purchase rate on PLP and 117% increase in add to cart rate.
Overall, 14X marketing ROI was generated.
3. Personalized boutique page implemented by Once Upon a Trunk
A personalized boutique page shows a custom storefront to each customer based on past and real-time behavior. Since these products are chosen to match shoppers’ tastes and interests, brands will see up to a 150% increase in CTR and a subsequent boost in revenue.
Leveraging Netcore’s personalization suite, Once Upon a Trunk was able to understand their customers and show them personalized recommendations. AI-led personalized product recommendation was deployed across the customer’s journey using a 1:1 recommendation strategy based on the customer’s past behaviors.
Learn the secrets to how Once Upon a Trunk achieving 28% increase in revenue within 90 days with Netcore
4. Jack & Jone’s Web notifications with personalized offers
Even though they sound similar, web notifications are not the same as web messages. Web notifications are a marketing channel that requires the user’s permission.
The opt-in prompt is usually shown by the user’s web browser. These are browser-level prompts that can appear anytime you’re connected to the internet, even while browsing other websites.
Jack & Jones intended to increase customer engagement and conversion rates on their website and wanted to extend a personalized shopping experience.
Netcore integrated web notifications in their website, which resulted in a 3.9% contribution to total products added to the cart, 2.6% contribution to total revenue through personalization, and a 25% increase in the add-to-cart rate in PLP.
5. Nykaa’s cart abandonment emails with a personalized offer
Cart abandonment emails are part of an email marketing automation strategy and are triggered when the customer abandons their cart. The system sends an email to the customer to complete their check-out process and incentivizes them by providing a limited-time personalized offer.
Even though Nykaa tried to optimize its email marketing strategies, it was not hitting the required benchmarks. Nykaa collaborated with Netcore to solve this problem. Leveraging the Raman AI engine, Netcore analyzed each active customer’s historical interaction, identified their preferred time to engage, and optimized the send times of email campaigns.
The result? Netcore helped Nykaa Fashion improve email open rates by 36%.
6. Vero Moda sending personalized SMS with offers
SMS offers are one of the more elementary forms of marketing without much personalization. But nowadays, with the advent of analytics, SMS offers can also be personalized to a greater extent.
Netcore helped Vero Moda set up its multi-channel marketing strategy and increase engagement across multiple channels, including SMS. The right SMS with the right offers resulted in a 6.7% contribution to the total revenue, a 159% increase in add-to-cart rate on PLP, and a 121% increase in purchase rate on PLP.
7. Borosil’s In-app messages
In-app messages pop up while the user is using your app. Unlike push notifications, which invite users to launch the app, in-app messages target the users during their current browsing session.
Borosil intended to increase the total number of sign-ups on their website. They worked with Netcore to implement in-app messages on their webpage. After calculating the average time a visitor spent on the website before dropping off, Netcore strategically timed the in-app message to drive sign-ups. The result? Netcore helped Borosil increase the total number of sign-ups by five times or 400%.
Conclusion
While personalization powered by AI and machine learning seems daunting, it is easily doable when you employ proficient solutions such as Netcore Cloud.
As already evident, Netcore’s multifaceted platform can help you ace omnichannel personalization, deploy AI, and leverage data analytics to figure out the best solutions for you.
Easy to say, irrespective of the size of the brand, Netcore can help you deliver personalized ecommerce experiences and improve your customer’s shopping experience while increasing your revenue.
To truly scale your marketing efforts, consider leveraging a robust ecommerce marketing platform. Book a demo today to discover how it can transform your business.
