Why You Need To Make Website Personalization Your Priority in 2019
How you can use personalization to give your customers what they’re demanding.
Many retail businesses, despite spending a huge amount on driving new traffic to their websites, are still experiencing poor conversion rates and lack of insight into their visitors requirements. Why?
The growth in consumer demand for real-time personalization is at an all-time high. It’s a fact: customers are not only becoming more connected, they are also becoming more informed, demanding and unpredictable.
Given the wide range of options consumers have online, retailers are finding that the key to converting their visitors into loyal long-term customers is real-time AI-driven ecommerce personalization.
Through the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, intelligent ecommerce personalization platforms are able to analyze customers’ behavior, learning their habits and enabling retailers to deliver automated personalized recommenders within search results, promotions, banners and on-page recommendations in real-time.
Why Should Ecommerce Personalization Be The Main Agenda Point?
- Provides each customer with a relevant and personal experience
- Increases customer loyalty and lifetime value
- Increases online conversion and average order value
- Retailers start seeing results from day one — the AI automation never sleeps
- Works without any intervention- the AI gets to work straight away to deliver the best results
- Works with both huge and sparse data sets
What Are the Key Features Needed for Effective Ecommerce Personalization?
1. Advanced AI Recommenders that change in real time.
Intelligent ecommerce personalization platforms use the AI Engine to profile visitors’ current and past behavior and chooses the most appropriate and relevant recommender type to show to the individual.
The AI is aware of the context in which it places recommenders, so it’s able to optimize recommendations so that duplicate content is not shown.
- Continuously learns and adapt itself flexibly to new user behavior.
- Much more powerful in the art of conversion and increasing average order value
- Based on the true needs and behavior of the individual and not the performance of the website as many standard recommenders do
- Real-time recommendations adapt in real-time and evolves with every click the visitor makes.
2. Enriched Personalized Campaigns
The fully automated artificial intelligence-based recommenders will deliver a level of personalization to retailers’ customers. However, for the full experience ecommerce personalization platforms should allow businesses to enrich with targeted promotional and awareness banners and recommenders with personalized campaigns based on their visitors’ onsite & offsite behavior.
For those times when businesses want to push specific products, brands & categories to targeted groups of customers should allow retailers to override the AI and show tailored manual recommenders. Some of the key benefits of over laying enriched personalized campaigns:
- Spotlight relevant products, categories & brands that visitors have previously searched on or expressed an interest in
- Targeted promotions that are relevant
- Upsell & cross-sell opportunities based on individual’s predictive likes
- Re-enforced loyalty
- Improved awareness
- Higher incentivize to purchase
3. Advanced Campaign Rules
It’s important for retailers to be able to deliver advanced personalization using real-time, dynamic segmentation. Creating personalized campaigns based on where your visitors are located, how they found your site, what time it is, what device they are on and even what the weather is like is highly effective. Visitors no longer feel like a statistic. They feel welcomed and valued by the retail brand and bring with that a higher propensity to buy.
In addition to creating ‘off-site’ Campaign Rules, ecommerce personalization enables retailers to automatically fine-tune each visitor’s experience based on the products they have added to their basket, the value of those items, what they have searched for on your site or which pages they have viewed.
With intelligent ecommerce personalization there should be no limit to the amount of campaign rules that can be applied and they should be completely tailored to the retailer’s business needs.
The results? Improved customer experience, online revenue and lifetime value.
4. The Ability to Personalize Any Area of Your Website
Ecommerce personalization should not be limited to the online conversion funnel of a website. Even though the buying cycle will be the main areas for conversion there will also be other pages that benefit from ecommerce personalization. Retailers should consider the importance of bespoke landing pages that are being created for their Adwords and Email campaigns.
The personalized and tailored experience should start from the moment a visitor arrives on the website regardless of where their entry point is.
Ecommerce personalization platforms such as PureClarity enables retailers to place personalized merchandising zones featuring recommenders, banner images, carousels or HTML throughout the entire user journey on the website including Home Page, Product Pages, Category Pages and many more.
5. Personalization within Search
There are several ecommerce personalization businesses in the market which offer the option of completely taking over a retailer’s website search function. A website search requires specialist software that enables predictive text, allows for misspells, and has an excellent degree of accuracy. True ecommerce personalization platforms understand the importance of integrating with a retailers existing search so that the two software solutions work in harmony focusing on what they specialize in.
Ecommerce personalization software can intelligently assess what people are looking for and can present either automated product / brand recommendations within retailer’s search bar results and on their search results pages. There should also be the opportunity to override the AI with product and brand recommendations and even present personalized campaign banners of the retailer’s choice.
- Search is the primary area that visitors will use to find what they are looking for on a website
- The AI will present back recommendations both within the search results bar and on the search results page.
- Proven to increase click-through rate and conversion
- AI Recommenders within search should be relevant to the term searched for and provide product suggestions with the context of the user’s behaviour.
- Fully automated and adapts in real-time with every
- Cross-sell, upsell, promote products, brands and categories with spotlight banners based on current search term, customer segment and many other conditions.
Personalization within Email
As with the case for personalization within search, the same principle applies to personalization within email. Ecommerce personalization software platforms do not specialise in email marketing but should be able to seamlessly integrate the retailers email marketing platform of choice. Emails that retailers sent out that contain a degree of personalization outside of the salutation are proven to be four times more likely to convert than those with only a personalized name.
- Include highly personalized product recommendations within email campaigns that are sent out.
- Customers want recommendations that are personal and relevant to them
- Integrates with you preferred email service provider
- Emails that contain personalized recommendations are four times more likely to convert
- Triggered personalized emails for abandoned basket, after purchase follow up and customer reactivation
So What Next?
If you are interested to find out how and by how much PureClarity can increase your revenue and online conversion rates, click here.
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