Most people simply don’t want to be sold a product. The thing is that they want to have personalized shopping experiences that fit their unique lifestyle.
This is the kind of e-commerce world we live in. Consumers expect that all the items they see in their e-commerce store up to the email communication are precisely tailored to their wants and needs. So when you create an e-commerce website, you need to come up with a thoughtful and innovative approach to engage your customers.
You can start by creating a more personalized e-commerce shopping experience. That said, we have listed down eight tips that can help you personalize your customers’ online shopping experience:
Create buyer personas
Before you can deliver a personalized shopping experience, you need to know first who your customers are and what they want.
The best way to do this is by creating buyer personas. These are outlines of your target audience’s demographic information such as location, gender, income, and job. This also applies to their lifestyle and interests, like media preferences, use of technology, marital status, and the likes.
Your buyer personas will also describe what your target audience is looking for, as well as what’s the best way for you to reach them.
Offer tailored recommendations
There are a lot of better indications of your ideal customers’ tastes and preferences than what they previously thought. Therefore, purchase histories are one of the most important data that you can get.
The best way you can use purchase history to your advantage is to offer tailored recommendations in the form of ads, promotions, and emails.
You can accomplish this by utilizing one of the many services that are dedicated to this particular practice.
Implement geolocation practices
Geolocation is another way you can create a more personalized customer experience by getting rid of any extraneous data and pointing the user to the most important information.
For instance, geolocation could let you show a customer the closest store or shipping location. It could also allow a lead to get in touch with a salesperson in that particular area, or show them the most relevant products.
Imagine this, a retailer that sells sporting goods might want to show surfboards to consumers that shop online in Hawaii than they would for people living in Colorado.
Retargeting
If you shop online, then there’s a high chance you’ve seen ads from a retailer after visiting their site. This process is called retargeting (also known as remarketing) and is a highly efficient personalization technique.
Retargeting can either work by list or by pixel. Retargeting that’s pixel-based usually utilizes cookies to track someone who visited your e-commerce store and will retarget you with ads on Twitter and Facebook.
Third-party services can also be utilized to incorporate pixel-based retargeting into your personalized campaigns. On the other hand, you can use list-based retargeting if you have a list of your customers’ contact details.
Use the right customer data
Placing all your customer data into a single database will provide your marketing team the insight they need to build a personalization strategy. This can then result in customer loyalty and growing your sales.
Utilizing this data in real-time will provide you with compelling, personalized offers that will satisfy the demand of today’s shopper. In fact, more than 40% of consumers have spent more than what they’ve initially planned because the whole experience is more personalized.
Segment your email lists
Gathering email addresses should be one of your business’ top priorities. If you want to personalize the whole customer experience, then you have to ensure that you’re delivering the right content to your audience’s inboxes.
The best way that you can accomplish this is to segment your email list.
Although everyone who signs up in your newsletter is interested in your brand, they don’t have the same wants and needs. Once you group your subscribers into separate lists, you’re sure that they won’t be receiving any irrelevant information. There also is an option to get use of Virtual Assistant Services that are gaining popularity.
Make sure to offer phone support
Try to include effective interactive voice response as it will improve routing and cut costs with automation.
Send out personalized emails
After segmenting your email lists, it’s time to send out emails!
As a retailer, you should strike a delicate balance on how you manage your communications on email marketing. Don’t spam your readers with unwanted emails or overwhelming campaigns. Timing is key here.
Ideally, you should be utilizing consumer browsing, as well as shopping data to drive more personalized online shopping experiences.
Offer customer-centered support
The final step is to re-organize your process and technology based on the needs of your customers per channel. Impeccable customer service is a critical ingredient.
You can empower your employees to inform your customers if there are additional stocks available in the store. You can also offer to deliver the product directly to their door or a store near them for pick up.
It’s also enabling your customers to shop or purchase through their smartphones and other mobile devices.
Over to You
As you may have learned from this post, there are lots of ways you can implement personalization to your online store.
No matter where you’re located or no matter what you’re selling, we’re betting that there’s more room for personalization in your strategy this 2020 and beyond.
