Personalization makes for a great customer experience. Besides customer experience are there any real benefits to eCommerce personalization? To simply answer that question, yes there are amazing benefits to eCommerce personalization. The customer and the merchant both benefit from eCommerce personalization. Let’s look at eCommerce personalization and its benefits.
E-commerce Personalization
Ecommerce personalization means giving a personal experience on merchant websites. This is done by showing content, products, and offers based on collected data. This data could be purchase history, browsing history, and habits as well as other things.
Personalization is important for merchants, e-commerce personalization drives sales by engaging shoppers. This increases the amount of time, money, and repeat purchases that are made on a merchant site. So a little bit of personalization can be the difference between 1 sale and 1 million sales. Let’s see some methods used to create personalization in eCommerce.
How to Create Ecommerce Personalization
There are many ways to create ecommerce personalization. Let’s look at some of the most common ways to create ecommerce personalization.
Cart Abandonment
Oftentimes when people are shopping online they will leave items in their cart for one reason or another. They sometimes get sidetracked, other times they check other places to see if there is a better deal available and sometimes they just want to watch it and see if it goes on sale. In this case merchants will send out emails with a buy it now or last chance offer. Sometimes they simply send out offers on products of interest to encourage the shopper to come back and shop with them again.
On Site Personalized Content
Many merchants will create onsite personalized content. They will collect data from many avenues such as purchase history, browsing history and demographics. They then use this information to create content on their home page or a list of suggested products personalized to each shopper.
Quick Quizzes
Some merchants have quick quizzes on their homepage, or require you to sign up for an account and have quizzes in the sign up process. Having these quizzes allows them to automatically build a personalized showroom of suggested products based on your interest and budget. This is a great way to personalize an ecommerce experience for the consumer. This method is most commonly used when signing up for an account.
These are just a few common methods used to create a personalized ecommerce experience. As you can see merchants want to create easy and enjoyable experiences for their customers to retain them and encourage repeat shopping. The merchant invests time and money into creating these experiences for shoppers, is there a benefit to the investment?
Benefits to Personalization in Ecommerce
As the world turns online shopping is becoming more and more popular. Merchants are keeping up with the trend and trying to capture consumer loyalty. To do so they are using personalization methods to create personalized experiences for their shoppers. While the list of benefits may not be long they are definitely rewarding.
Increase in Sales
Merchants are seeing a significant increase in sales by personalizing the experience for their shoppers. Many consumers have stated that they will actually pay extra for a product from a merchant who has taken the time to personalize their experience. So essentially with increased sales they are getting a return on their investment.
Customer Retention
Merchants are also seeing an increase of repeat customers. Consumers have said they would rather shop with someone that is going to give them a personalized experience, by giving them a showroom of their recently searched products, or even suggesting items associated with previous purchases. Customer retention is huge to a merchant, it shows loyalty and satisfaction.
As mentioned there isn’t a long list of benefits but the benefits that are there are extremely rewarding to the merchant. In turn it also allows merchants to offer discounts and promotions to their customers.
In the End
At the end of the day we may not be able to make a laundry list of benefits, but we can say the benefits that we can list are rewarding to the merchant and oftentimes can be rewarding for the consumer as well. Consumers want to feel important whether they are online or in person shopping. So when merchants can personalize their online experience they are rewarded with loyalty, word of mouth advertising and monetarily. So overall I would say there are great benefits to personalizing the ecommerce experience.
