Blog Post

Personalisation- The Secret Ingredient to eCommerce Success!

Tuesday, 30 October 2018

With the abundance of choices available, eCommerce companies need to rise up to the occasion and add in touches of Personalisation to elevate the shopping experience.

We are all drowning in a sea of irrelevant choices.

In the world around us, the one thing in abundance is choice. While the freedom to choose is indeed a blessing, how do we navigate the space when choice itself pulls us in different directions? 

One of the reasons why eCommerce prospered and grew at the pace it did has got to do with choice. Until the rise of eCommerce, consumers had to remain contented with the limited brick and mortar options. Today the world is their oyster, almost everything can be purchased online. From groceries to hardware, to luxury goods, you name it, you will find it. 

With the abundance of choices available, eCommerce companies need to rise up to the occasion and add in touches of Personalisation to elevate the shopping experience. 

Personalisation – what is it?

eCommerce Personalisation rejects the ‘one size fits all’ approach and focuses on delivering customised experiences and interactions. As shopping experiences move beyond cohort segmentation and behavioural insights, Personalisation helps in creating a bespoke shopping experience using different data points as context. This helps companies to understand what works best for their customers in real-time. 

Personalisation in eCommerce is that secret ingredient that provides the gentle nudge to make a purchase. Gartner estimates that “by 2020, smart Personalisation engines used to recognize customer intent will allow digital businesses increase profits by 15%”. 

However, Personalisation is more than providing a customised shopping experience based on buying behaviour, or demographics. It is that but a whole lot more. Personalisation can be navigational, predictive, based on third-party segmentation, content, messaging, offers…the list goes on. 

Navigational Personalisation

In this kind of Personalisation, eTailers can customise how a user navigates through the eCommerce site based on a user’s browsing history. If a user accesses a website, browses through a particular category, say party dress, for example, but does not actually purchase one. The next time the person logs in, navigational Personalisation will place the party dress category amongst the prioritised items to be displayed to the user. 

Personalised Messaging  

74% of consumers get frustrated when content has nothing to do with them (Janrain).

Personalisation is also about showing the right advertisements to the right usres at the right time. Marketers can tap on data provided by social media sites and search engine platforms to show their ads to specific groups of people who match their target audience. 

Retargeting is often utilised to reach out to users who left their site without purchasing anything and converting them into customers. This is done by showing them relevant ads while they are browsing other sites, so they do not forget about your brand.

Remarketing is effective because it targets users who are already familiar with your brand and have demonstrated some form of interest in your products.

Keep in mind that showing them the same banner ad around different sites might put them into a state of annoyance. Other customer data like CRM data and onsite behaviour data should be utilised to personalise the messaging of the ad. 

Predictive Recommendations  

One type of Personalisation “visitors who viewed this also viewed”, can generate 68% of eCommerce revenue (Smart Insights).

Using behaviour data collected from eCommerce retailers, predictive recommendation engines on the eCommerce website can foretell what products an individual might be interested in buying next. 

Using this data, eTailers can intelligently personalise content based on the customer’s interaction with the online store or brand. With these insights, eTailers can reach customers with targeted branding and messaging. The impact of newsletters or email campaigns can be significantly improved by adding customised product recommendations. Predictive recommendations can also drive repurchase campaigns and can create better cross-selling and upselling opportunities by placing the relevant products alongside the items left behind in the shopping cart.

Offer Customisations

84% of consumers say that being treated as an individual, rather than just “another customer,” is the key for a brand to make a sale (Salesforce – State of the Connected Customer).

Personalisation can drive real-time offers. By understanding customer behavior on the website, eTailers can send out real-time offers to their potential customers. This can be based on factors such as how many times the customer visited the website, the source through which they logged in, their preferred device choice, their social media connect etc. Customised real-time offers can be sent to the customers to persuade them to make that purchase.

Frictionless Experiences

Personalisation also creates frictionless experiences. Allowing the customer to view the prices of items in their home currency reduces cart abandonment rates because it makes the shopping experience more convenient for them. Taking localisation into consideration when driving personalised experiences brings the customer closer to the brand and removes all distractions that can impede a purchase. 

So Who Got It Right?

A study from Infosys shows that 59% of consumers say that Personalisation significantly influenced what they purchased. 

Amazon is an excellent example of Personalisation done right. By placing customers at the heart of everything almost every single element on the website is personalised according to the customer data obtained from their profile and past purchase history. Their website also supports a variety of popular operating systems and devices. By making Personalisation a 360-degree experience, they managed to develop a loyal customer base.

UK-based, multi-brand online retailer, Very.co.uk launched fully personalised home pages to make shopping an incredibly personal experience. By doing this, the company, which is also a part of Shop Direct, can deliver an estimated 3.5 million versions of the website to shoppers. 

Crew Clothing Company used segmentation to improve their Personalisation capabilities. By segmenting their email database based on purchasing history, they were able to increase their customer base by 20%, reduced lapsed user rates by 25% and increased open rates by 75%.

ASOS is winning at the cross-selling and upselling game by delivering personalised experiences. They invite their customers to ‘complete the look’ by providing relevant suggestions with additional items. This works well to increase a customer’s potential order amount.

A report from Econsultancy shows that 93% of companies witness an increase in conversion rates by employing Personalisation. However, Personalisation is no longer limited to online channels alone. Today, it is imperative to provide consistent, personalised experiences across all channels and mediums. By incorporating Personalisation into omnichannel, eTailers can reach out to customers in new ways that create meaningful, immersive and engaging experiences. These experiences will translate into more conversions and ultimately increase revenue.

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Read the other blogposts:

10 eCommerce Marketing Trends you must know to Maximize Sales During the Holiday Season

Part 2- Customer focused marketing strategies