The primary goal of any business is to satisfy its customers and gain the profit with the same. You can’t, and even you should never underestimate the customer’s perspective when interacting with your business. It’s the truth that all of your website visitors will not be your customers, but you can’t be biased about handling each of these prospective customers.
E-tail is keeping up with the customers too well, but the personal touch is the only thing that holds some businesses behind. For all such sufferers of the situation, personalization is an ointment.
What is personalization?
In layman’s terms, personalization is giving individualistic experience as per the need and requirement of the user. For an ecommerce store, personalization is a real-time and dynamic change in displaying the products and services to maintain the interest and improvise your sales.
Each visitor on your website will have preferences for products and services. With the help of big data and its collaboration with trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence based on Machine Learning (ML), you will be able to fetch the browsing history, previous orders, demographics of the customer, interest of the niche, and a lot more. Leveraging all this data, you will be able to understand your users in a much better way and refine the customer experience.
By adding segmentation, building omnichannel customer engagement, the adaption of new languages, price automation, retargeting, and several other ideas, you can personalize your store for each of your customer and to-be customers.
Are personalization and customization the same?
The terms personalization and customization are often interchangeably used, but they hold different meanings for your ecommerce store, given the context for which it is used.
Customization of an ecommerce store implies changing the design layout and data representation of the theme of your store. Here, you try to pour the story of your brand and establish a connection with your audience. You try to add the personal touch in the content, graphics, animation, other media elements, and so on.
On the other hand, personalization of your store talks about offering a personalized experience to all the visitors. There can be numerous ideas to bridge the gap of distance between you and your customers. You can try for several mediums to interact with your customers; likewise, social media is often used these days.
Now, there is another term named as product customization or personalization. Here, we are talking about changing the products that customers chose to purchase. But, the customer is looking for specific attribute-based changes like color, the theme of the product, the material used, and so on. The option of product customization adds a personal and unique touch. By enabling such an option at your store (if your business niche allows), you can add more chances to please your customers.
Why is personalization important for ecommerce?
We would like to ask a counter-question here.
Do you like to be called by your name or a common salutation?
Of course, by your name.
Your name is the identity of yours. And, that’s what is the same for everyone. When someone calls you by the name, you feel that you are known to them and essential as well.
Similarly, when you know your customers and value their preferences, you create a bond with the customer. Usually, this bond is created when we interact with any individual. Store personalization helps in building this bond between your business and the customer.
Personalization makes the customer feel more privileged and valued. It’s simple that if you are getting everything you want in one place and within your budget, why would you move to another store?
According to the research by SalesForce on 7000 customers, the simple trick of content personalization and educating customers doesn’t work that well. This implies that you need to think ahead of pleasing customers. You need to understand the needs and find a way of fulfilling those demands.
The more you interact with people, the more you know about them. And, that’s why businesses build omnichannel presence to not leave a vent for blocking conversation with any of the prospects. This will improve your understanding of the market demand and use it to refine customer’s shopping journey.
Types of personalization that you must know
Personalization for the customers and the business depends on so many factors. Before going ahead with the details, you must know a few of its types. It can be categorized as Prescriptive personalization and Adaptive personalization.
Now, let us tell you what they mean.
Prescriptive personalization is the rule-based action. You will be playing with the algorithm, but only if the condition fulfills. It involves the segmentation of visitors in different categories to give them aptest offers. Further, prescriptive personalization can be implicit as well as explicit. Implicit personalization ideas trace user activity and present content accordingly. Whereas, the explicit personalization fetch ideas from the user’s profile and give recommendations.
Adaptive personalization gives real-time updates and experiences to the customers. As the name suggests, it is adaptive, so there are no set rules. Also, there is no segmentation; it is simply the user activity that gains knowledge from direct or indirect interaction with your business. Since there are no preconceived notions about the customer and their journey, you can unfold many possibilities by analyzing user data.
Best use cases of personalization on your store
- Product recommendation: Product recommendation is one of the most widely used ideas of personalization. With the help of cookie policies, it is easier to track the previous activity of the customer in your store. Based on those previous searches, the algorithm updates the list of products that can be shown to the customer. The related product section is now added to all ecommerce themes below the product detail page. From the backend, you can manage the products as per the product category. Recommendations can be shared with the customer on their registered mail, and re-marketing ads on different platforms increase the chance for customer interaction.
- Extend your cart size: If you want to increase your profit, you have to work on the increment of cart size. You can upsell the products or better create the package. Don’t you remember that “People often buy these products together” section with discounted rates on Amazon? Well, that’s the same thing that you can update for your ecommerce store as well.When customers get all the required products in their budget, they won’t mind opting for that deal. This will automatically improve the ROI of your business and make you count profit sooner than later.
- Improvisation of customer support: You have a distinct relationship with each visitor of your site, and it’s your responsibility to help them with the required product or service. To serve each of your customers the right way, you can add a live chat tool to your store to give real-time assistance to your customers. By helping your customers at the right time with the aptest solution, you will be able to make your customer happy. As you already know that a happy customer is like an asset, as they are known to spread the message.You can leverage chatbots to communicate with your customers in your absence and keep track of business leads with whom you can communicate later. It’s better to use the bot to connect and answer your customer than leave them unattended anytime.
- Content personalization: With the improvement in algorithms of search engines from time to time, the quality content is winning the race. Keep in mind that you are writing for ‘real people,’ and no one is looking for the same robotic and monotonous thing. With content personalization, you can try the creative approach for:
- Blogs: You can share blogs that relate to your business niche. It can be how-to tutorials, talking about the benefits of your product, the impact on users, and even an interview with any of your industry influencers and what they say about your products. Blogs are not only resources, but they can help you connect with more like-minded people.
- Email marketing: Though email marketing is in trend, does every type of mail convert? No, it doesn’t! The reason is, the highest click to open rate was 22.15% in 2019 across the world for the communication sector. When there are at least 20 promotional emails in every mailbox, you need to be creative in your approach to creating the mailers. You can always start with templates to take an idea of the format, but don’t only write to the market. Your motto should be to build a connection. Don’t be crappy or sound wannabe with your dialogues.
- Promotions: Everyone loves the coupon codes and free buy links, but no one adores the typical sales pitch. When you are promoting your products, with every ad of yours, you need to be creative in your approach to delivering your content. When you are promoting your products and services on social media platforms or anywhere, don’t market rather share a message that can excite customers to interact with you or your business.
If you add catchy lines and phrases to your marketing campaigns like ‘Share a Coke’ started by Coca Cola in 2014, you will deliver a message that can stick for long. Such content shares the values of your brand. It is known to bring a long-term impact on the market. That’s where people link your cause and start promoting you willingly.
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- Manage POS: Personalization of the orders is not a new concept; rather, it’s an age-old concept. Don’t you have a fixed general store near to your location where you give the list of products and have it delivered? After a few visits, that store owner already knows all those brands that you prefer to shop and will migrate you to the right section. In the traditional store, it is challenging to keep a mental note of everyone’s requirements. With the help of personalization of your ecommerce store, you can manage the demand of POS customers. You can enable the QR or customer ID to check with your previous customers and centralize their orders. With the help of smart devices, the sales associates at your store can help you share new offers with the customers. With the push notifications, you can share greetings and recommendations directly to the customer. In this way, you can reduce the customer’s searching time, and they will prefer to shop at your store.
- Earn loyal customers: Everyone of us enjoys our comfort zone, and the same is true for customers. Once we have a good experience using the products of a certain brand, we hardly like to make any change within our range. Most people scroll through the same shopping apps that they have been using for ages.
When you think about your customers, the customers will think about you. If you don’t believe in it, then think about Amazon, who is known for its customer-centric policies. It always thrives at offering a personalized experience to its customers by enabling scan image search, sharing best buys, showing price variation in the same products from different sellers and promotional offers, and keeping you covered against digital fraud. By helping your customers make the right choice about product selection, you can help them and earn their trust to stay loyal over time.
The idea of personalization for e-commerce stores can never be static; it varies from business to business. Something that works best for other businesses may not have the same impact on your store. Based on your end goal, you can try different store personalization tactics and move ahead with the ones that work best.
