Why the personalization in the online shopping matters?

business tools, consumer behaviour, e-commerce

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Personalization in online shopping has a rapidly growing importance in digital marketing. The major efforts of digital marketers are now put on customer engagement on their websites or online shops.

Keep your clients! Don’t lose them!

In 2014, we started cooperating with Quarticon, the customized product recommendation tool for online shopping. Since then, I have noticed many new tools and solutions. More and more online shops think and introduce the personalization of their offer, promotions, and coupons. They go into Amazon’s direction that personalizes everything – even categories, product recommendations, category recommendations, and emails. I started to analyze the available solutions for my clients, which I found currently on the market (updated on Feb. 25, 2019). All of them present great numbers of growing conversion rates. I don’t want to go deeper into it. Let’s come back to the purchasing process:

how it looks like, and
why content personalization is one of the tools available for online shops and websites.
Next, I will briefly present the most popular personalization tools.

The purchasing process

The online purchasing path should be very similar for all shops. There are a couple of ways you can direct your potential customers to your website: via online search, paid search, price comparison services, referrals, or directly if they already know your brand, products, and website. Next, you build your website with all SEO, usability, IT, and marketing best practices. Your potential customer has only three clicks to buy. And you don’t understand why they don’t buy. The answer is more complicated than you think and used to be in the past. It can be:

your competition that has better prices or product offer
your online website issues that somebody cannot buy because of errors or wrong links
And finally, the changes in customer habits:
- They buy after visiting your website 4-5 times and watching your product pages many times.

- Your most loyal customers are coming from SEO:) And most valuable from emails and newsletters:)

Now you start to see why the personalization tools can collect more customers:

If you know:
1. your customer habits,
2. what they are looking for,
3. what they are,
4. where they come from – SEO, Adwords, etc.
5. if they visited your website previously,
6. if they bought previously and what
you can start to work on changing your offer to fulfill their needs better and get the next purchase.

The most comprehensive view of possible elements of personalization you can start:

A/B testing of your pages – small changes and check it in Google Analytics if it worked
Landing page optimization – a deeper analysis of your page that includes SEO, your page speed optimization, usability, and A/B testing
Product recommendation – you can start from what you have built in your online shop engine.
Social proof – simply script of sharing to social media or your social media activity shared in your online shop:) People like it.
Find your best sellers and newest products and start presenting them. Customers love it.
Mobile presence – it is an exciting topic. The simplest solution is to build a responsive theme, but having a mobile application can help you add many other features that could be difficult on the website: product configurators can be much more advanced via a mobile application. Some shops exist only via a web application.

The personalization in online shopping and websites:

Adobe Marketing Cloud – proposes individual visitor targeting via personalized content based on a person’s past, current, and changing interests. It is a self-learning target engine that automatically makes associations with various events and differences between predicted and observed responses.
Maxymiser automatically builds a unique customer profile for every online visitor based on in-session data, behavioral data, industry and client-specific data, historical data, CRM data, DMP, and other 3rd party data. Their revolutionary automated personalization algorithms mine visitor and behavioral data and allow you to target the optimal journeys precisely and offer to every prospect and customer with a simple press on a button. The unified nature of Maxymiser’s platform enables clients to seamlessly leverage the results and insight from testing to deliver the most relevant one-to-one experiences possible to drive tangible increases in business performance, not just the theoretical uplift in some arbitrary conversion rate common with so many ‘personalization’ efforts.
Baynote provides personalized customer experience solutions for multi-channel retailers. With Baynote, you understand what buyers are looking for and engage them in the most relevant way – at the moment. Whether a customer interacts with your brand on an eCommerce website, a smartphone, a tablet, or through a digitally enabled in-store sales associate, Baynote delivers personalized shopping experiences across all channels.
Salesforce is the leading provider of personalized recommendations for multi-channel retailers.
Barilliance helps eCommerce sites of any size to increase sales and conversion rates by providing visitors with a personalized shopping experience every step of the purchase journey with real-time website personalization, cart abandonment emails, and personalized product recommendations.
Certona uses 1:1 personalization that combines real-time context with unmatched customer profiling and dynamic merchandising, enabling you to deliver individualized product recommendations, content, and offers that deeply engage customers and enhance experiences to match your business goals. And others very similar:
Monetate
Optimizely
Qubit
RichRelevance
SiteSpect
Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is only for A/B testing but is very powerful.
Madrill and Mailchimp also have simple personalization tools for small shops.

You can see from these tools that personalization in online shopping is more than just surfacing product recommendations; it is your entire site experience. These tools will help you foster a positive customer relationship and improve your conversion rates. All these tools help to boost your business. Previously, they were so expensive that only huge shops were able to afford them. Now, due to huge competition and better technology, the cost of implementation and operations is lower and lower. I missed one factor in all offers: the multichannel personalization. Recently I receive more and more questions about it. Maybe it is the next step for all of them. Let’s see. I noticed one startup that is trying to take care of it. Once I get more information, I will let you know.

Check our similar posts.

February 25, 2019/by Urszula Urban

Email Marketing in eCommerce: personalization wins the game

e-commerce, marketing, marketing automation, SEM

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Email Marketing in eCommerce: personalization wins the game

is the best way to boost eCommerce revenue, as well as the potential for big profit. Depending on the market age and share that the online store operates in, an eCommerce business owner can expect to at least double their income through the utilization of email marketing strategies.

If your eCommerce isn’t already integrated with an email marketing platform, you haven’t unlocked the full potential for great profits online.

Email marketing is essentially a funnel for billions of internet users that are likely to buy from you. And it is my pleasure to share with you how to scale your eCommerce website.

Let’s break it down.

An email delivers the value and conversion

According to a June report from OneSpot, U.S. marketing executives said was email attributed to 21 percent of the total revenues in Q2 2017, up 17 percent year over year. EMarketer’s 2017 email marketing Benchmark set the median email marketing ROI at 122 percent, four times higher than any other digital marketing channel.

Improve and improve

As Demand Metrics/Return Path’s recent survey suggests, less than half of the respondents are seeing email performance improvements. eConsultancy’s 2018 email marketing census agrees, with its top finding that email continues to be the most effective marketing channel, though fewer marketers report stellar performance.

24% of customers would like to get more personalized offers. There are a few tools to help you get such personalization:

your online shop can track what your customer bought, viewed and added to the cart
your marketing automation tools like Salesmanago, can collect and simply let you build an email in a very simple way to do follow-ups, abandoned carts or any other activities
you can simply create segmentation, assign scores and use them for personalized offers and emails. You can do it yourself or use Artificial Intelligence bots or tools in your CRM or marketing automation software, like Agile CRM or MailChimp.
you can use email marketing for training, teaching your audience, and any non-profit activities to build your brand image.

Master the numbers

Get to know the core KPIs: sent, bounced, received, opened, converted, unsubscribed, removed. Spend some time understanding where you are on each of these measures and the “leakage” from each stage to the next. Google Analytics can help to track your campaigns data.

Include an email KPI dashboard in regular marketing meetings. Then determine targets and strategies to improve important areas, including simple tweaks like subject lines, timing and

Use ads for the lead generation

With the advancement of software technology and billions of active monthly users, social media networks are the go-to for generating quality email leads. We now have to employ our social media marketing skills to obtain a solid email marketing list.

The most notable traffic sources are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

During the initial stages of building a subscriber list, we can expect to spend about 4 dollars per lead while anticipating a full return when consumers purchase from the store. The more people that stay on our list, the more items will be bought and the higher our revenue grows. Of course, this greatly depends on our ad budget in addition to the average amount that customers spend in the store.

Integrate into the strategy

While most email campaigns focus on short-term objectives, there is a huge opportunity for companies to enhance long-term relationships through multi-step campaigns.

For example, you can boost your old customers’ activity by sending them a birthday card or an email with a discount for his/her next purchase.

You can create the workflows and rules for keeping your customers or prospects active and move them to your sales process.

The marketing automation tools can help here – Zoho CRM, Campaign and Page sense, Agile CRM or Mailchimp – all of them have many possibilities to help you in getting more customers.

Create a sending schedule

You are looking for your Subscribers to think about your business when they are in need. Keep top of mind with email. Try to mail at least one time per month or better once a week.

I see that many online shops send emails every day with different offers. Personally, I am overwhelmed and I always cancel such subscriptions.

Per Coschedule post:

The average respondent sent around two emails per week. This marked a decline from 2016 to 2017.
Which corresponded with a 3.3% increase in opens and a .4% increase in unique opens. However, unique clicks and clicks overall declined.

What does this tell us? We can make a few educated guesses:

Consumers are overwhelmed with information overload. Not just in their inboxes, but all over the web. So, reducing email may be an effort to reduce content shock.
So, sending slightly less email can potentially improve results. It makes each email appear more valuable (at least initially) if they’re received less often.
But, that email needs to be engaging to get clicks. The fact that clicks went down somewhat is slightly concerning, even if CTRs didn’t drop precipitously.

According to the DMA – companies send emails:

Once Per Month: 18% (B2B), 3% (B2C)
2-3 Times Per Month: 37% for both B2B and B2C
4-5 Times Per Month: 25% (B2B), 30% (B2C)
6-8 Times Per Month: 7% (B2B), 11% (B2C)
More Than 8 Times Per Month: 5% (B2B), 14% (B2C)
Don’t Know (???): 7% (B2B), 5% (B2C)

B2B versus B2C

Generally speaking, B2C brands should be sending email to their lists more than once a month. This may be due to people expecting offers and deals from consumer brands more frequently.
B2C brands are more comfortable erring toward sending more email, not less. According to the DMA, “Close to two-thirds of organizations (62%) either don’t have a policy about the maximum number of contacts per month or don’t know.” That seems to imply these brands are sending email as long as its getting results, rather than sticking to a formula.
B2B brands are more conscious of not oversaturating their lists. This makes sense, since B2B companies may be more mindful about taking professional’s time to entertain sales offers. Their email sends might also be optimized around key buying cycles, especially for big-ticket purchases.

Summarizing email marketing in ecommerce is one of the best tools to boost your sales in quite cheap and easy way.