Intelligent Shopping: Using Data to Deliver Unique Shopping Experiences
*Partner content from Nosto*
With advancements in AI and machine learning, the world of retail can now leverage data to understand consumers like never before. This means brands can now foster completely unique experiences for every single shopper who lands on their online store: from what products to offer both onsite and across multiple touchpoints, to the content promoted across their website.
But in order for AI-powered personalization to yield the strongest results, focusing on data — and the quality of that data — is key.
In this post, we’ll uncover the role of data in powering ecommerce personalization, plus the importance of offering these data-driven shopping experiences online to deliver the personal experiences customers have grown to expect from brands.
The Role of Data in Personalization
Many companies analyze data on a transactional level to deliver some form of personalization on their website. However, our research over the past 7 years has shown that transactional data, typically old data reflecting a customer’s historical preferences, only accounts for 1.6% of the data captured in a webstore.
What happens to that 98% of data? Well, it often goes unused — and it’s also where your most valuable information is hiding. This 98% is behavioral data.
Our research has also revealed that…
- On average, it takes 3 visits for a shopper to make a purchase (and 5 visits from the first purchase to make a second one).
- Only 20% of repeat customers order products from the same product category of their initial order.
This means using transactional data to deliver personalization is relevant to only one fifth of customers.
The solution? Gather your data in real-time — as your customer browses through your store and interacts with your products. Using real-time data allows you to update the pages that a shopper sees during that same session. The result? Delivering only the most relevant shopping experiences to increase conversions.
Transactional and Real-Time Behavioral Data
At Nosto, we leverage a combination of transactional and behavioral data in real-time to create AI-generated segments completely unique to the customer funnel.
Instead of assuming that every store shares the same type of shopping funnel and segmenting according to that, our Ecommerce Intelligence Engine gathers the data on how users interact with each specific store. Then, it extracts a personalized funnel unique to that store, which we can then use to precisely define where shoppers are in a store’s particular funnel and personalize according to that.
By using real-time behavioral data, sports apparel brand Ellesee automatically recommends comparable products at checkout. Based on Nosto data, this strategy contributes to an increase in AOV of up to 18%.
Personalization Isn’t Only Limited to Products
By leveraging data to personalize your product offering, not only are you able to deliver more relevant recommendations, but you can also use that data to tailor every aspect of the buying journey. This is known as Onsite Content Personalization, and it enables brands to tailor the finer details of the onsite experience: from the navigation bar, to banner imagery, brand logos, videos and blog posts.
Sports gear retailer Function18 creates AI-powered customer segments (both custom and automated) to better understand who their customers are and what they buy. As a result, they’re able to completely personalize what each customer sees as they navigate the store. Above, you’ll find an example of what a page on their store would look like for one shopper interested in Nike shoes vs. another shopper interested in Adidas shoes.
Connecting the Dots with AI-Powered Personalization
When it comes to transforming the retail experience with AI-powered personalization, your webstore is only the tip of the iceberg. Eager to discover how you can leverage data to connect the dots across all touchpoints and channels and tailor the customer experience? Get in touch with the Nosto team for a 1:1 demo and see first-hand how it’s done.
About Nosto
Nosto enables online retailers to deliver their customers personalized shopping experiences at every touch point, across every device. A powerful personalization platform designed for ease of use, Nosto empowers retailers to build, launch and optimize 1:1 multichannel marketing campaigns without the need for dedicated IT resources. Leading retail brands in over 100 countries use Nosto to grow their business and delight their customers. Nosto supports its retailers from its offices in Helsinki, Berlin, Stockholm, London, New York, Los Angeles and Paris. To learn more visit www.nosto.com.
- Want more personalization? Trollweb invited Nosto to Load.18 to talk about their new features. Watch the video here!
