Benefits of personalisation for online stores
Before the explosion of digital commerce , customers simply walked into stores and found a friendly emoployee who helped them find what they were looking for.
Pretty simple, right?
Unfortunately, that kind of personal attention from consumers is still very rare in the digital arena. Even in the “age of the customer”, retailers, brands and B2B companies talk a lot about the need to personalise a customer experience.
We now, take another look at the benefits of personalisation for eCommerce businesses.
Check out these eCommerce personalisation statistics:
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- Marketers see an average revenue increase of 20% when using personalised experiences. ( Monetate)
- 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalised experiences. ( Epsilon )
- 44% of buyers say they are likely to buy again from a brand after a personalised shopping experience. ( Segment )
- 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended or paid for a brand that offers a personalised service or experience. ( Forrester )
- However, in another Forrester survey , 53% of digital knowledge professionals said they don’t have the right technology to personalise experiences.
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No customer left behind:
How to drive growth by putting personalisation at the center of your marketing
Successful personalisation requires four elements to work together. This is how marketing leaders build the operating model to make that happen.
Personalisation is ready for the moment. Technology and consumer expectations converge to drive personalisation – the process of using data to adjust the time, content, and design of each experience in real-time – from promise to reality.
Customization at scale can drive overall revenue growth of between 5 and 15 percent for various businesses. For example, a global retailer saw a three-year sale of its fashion items in just one year through a successful personalisation campaign.
Due to this reason, more than 90 percent of retailers say personalisation is their top priority. But only 15 percent of these companies believe they are doing it right. Consumers who faced irrelevant ads or bombarded by outdated offers would agree.
While many companies have had some success with their testing and personalisation initiatives, few know how to do this on a large and consistent scale across all channels. Most companies focus solely on data, analytics, and agile, while investing little in the organizational and operational complement needed for how people perform work.
Personalisation is still treated as a nice addition to an existing company’s marketing function. However, we believe that serving meaningful and sustainable growth through personalisation should be integrated into the marketing operations at all levels. To do this, companies must move beyond the initial impetus of “one-to-one marketing” and enter the terrifyingly empty but critical organizational change.
The core of personalisation is achieving goals. It is important that these goals are customer focused.
What should look like a personalisation strategy?
This is not just about delivering what your business wants, but also allowing each visitor to experience their favorite journey and helping them achieve their goals at every level.
Think about a company you do business with online – your favorite retail store, your bank, a vacation booking site – and think about the various goals you have achieved there.
The needs of your homeware store can vary greatly during the wedding season. You rely on your bank for new information when you buy a home, and your vacation options vary depending on whether you’re traveling alone or with the family.
Each visitor interacts with companies in different ways and a very powerful personalisation looks beyond who you are to what you are currently trying to achieve.
This is of course easier said than done. While personalisation is becoming an increasingly popular topic, most companies are still in the early stages of understanding how best to use it.
Three main questions that Personalisation boils down
When you start a new personalisation strategy, or updating an existing one, personalisation comes down to 3 important questions:
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- Where should personalisation take place in the user experience?
View all channels and hotspots your customers interact with. Where would a personal element help the most? Product recommendations, inspiring content, location-based services, site analysis, customer portals – map every minute that can benefit from a more contextual experience.
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- What information is needed?
What tools do you already have CRM, marketing automation, A/B testing, trading systems, that provide a wealth of information? Get your map where you want personalisation to happen, decide which current tools can support the micro-moments, and identify the gaps in data you need to fill in to achieve your vision.
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- How do you use technology and human insights to create this personalisation?
Now comes the fun part. How do you bring all your channels and data together to provide this contextual experience at scale? This is the biggest question of the 3, and one we’ll discuss in the following chapters.
eCommerce personalisation; technologies and tactics
A big problem for the eCommerce when discussing personalisation is that there is no single device that explains it, and all types of technology have limitations.
And there is no single mechanism that explains personalisation.
It’s not as simple as “We did an A/B test, and now we’re personalised.”
A full range of technologies are involved and creating your personalised roadmap means creating your own unique large format recipe or with just as little confidence in each recipe.
The table below summarizes some of the most commonly used tactics and how trust in one technology limits personalisation. Each of these technologies has a spectrum of personalisation, and the best way is to combine each of these technologies to build complete information around the consumer’s intent.
In order for your visitors to reach their current goal, you need to adapt your understanding and knowledge at all levels that these technologies provide.
