How to Personalize Buyers’ Online Shopping Experiences?
Even my 10 years old nephew gets over the moon while browsing a digital fashion eCommerce app on his tablet. Why? The reason is a personalized experience and similar product recommendations that take a buyer’s experience to the next level.
The “New Normal” Favors Online Shopping
The eCommerce industry has been rising over the last decade with constant growth. Moreover, due to a pandemic and post-pandemic era, there has been a paradigm shift in the work-life balance of the people.
We live in times where Work from Home (WFH) has become a new normal and ordering everything online has become a habit.
Apparently, we have adapted to the new normal way of working from home. This has resulted in a huge uplift in eCommerce app usage and online engagement, more than ever.
The expectation of our generation is to get everything by ordering online and gain the best possible experiences in doing so.
A million-dollar question is
Does the ever-rising demand guarantee success for brick-and-mortar online stores and other eCommerce development companies?
The blunt answer is NO. There is unprecedented competition in the eCommerce industry and many businesses are failing to keep up with the evolving market trends and the expectations of the buyers.
Why Personalizing an Online Buyer’s Journey is the Key?
Now, envision this scenario: You are a regular customer of a retail showroom of cosmetics and beauty products where everyone knows you and greet you by your name.
The staff knows your likes, dislikes, top preferences, and Wishlist to have in near future. Moreover, they know what suits your hair, and skin, and will only recommend the best products based on your request.
In short, they know you pretty well to make your overall buying experience as smooth as silk. It would be an ultimate and classic shopping experience in real life, right? Well in the eCommerce world, you can make it possible to treat every single customer of yours with a touch of class, a touch of personalization to make them feel like one of your own.
eCommerce Owners Need to Notice This
Your company’s ability to personalize the customer’s brand experience will largely come down to the quality of your eCommerce platform, product offerings, and the effective implementation of innovative features leveraging cutting-edge technologies like AI & ML.
This article is everything about it. And you can deliver a handful of goodies to elevate customers’ experience through a custom eCommerce store or a full-fledged eCommerce marketplace application.
5 Ways to Personalize Buyers’ Online Shopping Experiences
Offering personalization in the eCommerce domain demands finding the right balance between technology-based innovations and the emotional intelligence of marketers.
1. Create personalized Home pages
It is the most trending strategy for online retailers to implement into their online storefronts, especially targeting the existing visitors or anyone who is visiting for even the second time.
When a customer hops into the eCommerce app, you can deliver a welcome message, highlight time-sensitive offers, and showcase similar items they might have an interest in based on their browsing history.
You can also display ‘Pick Up Where You Left Off’ for the individual users. This could be a driving factor to encourage users to perform checks on those items once again and pushes them to add items to the cart.
Credit to the cookies of your eCommerce web application development as they help you get a close look at the behavior of your consumers, unlike physical stores. It is even possible to land the repeated visitors to a specific category based on their recent surf history.
This is a good practice to avoid distractions, multiple clicks, or taps to land a user on a page he or she was looking for.
This results in a good feeling among customers that the platform knows their preferences, saves time, and trust — which drives patronage.
2. Personalized Wardrobe & On-site Assistance
Imagine having a personal guide every time you go online on your favorite eCommerce web app or a mobile app. It would be amazing, right? Brainstorm a bit and provide a quiz to your customer base to get details about their taste, style, preferences, budget, etc. depending on the product categories.
Once the customers provide the details, you can craft and present a personalized online wardrobe when they land on your eCommerce app.
Now, it’s time to play with it and present the most exclusive and personalized product recommendations that meet the budget, size, style, and preferences. You can also showcase ‘Recently Viewed Items’.
Regularly update the new products and new brands users may love, and also send notifications via Email or personalized messages. It gives a unique feeling to individual users that the app is just made for each one of them.
This automatically increases customer loyalty and satisfaction. They are more inclined to buy something from their own personalized wardrobe instead of browsing a never-ending list of items.
3. Location-based Personalized Offerings
Location data is absolutely priceless if you plan to target global customers. There are two ways to get the location data, by asking the customers or through web cookies.
Having the location data will help you relay precise product information, shipping details, and prices.
It happens with me and you that we move away from the website if we find the product prices in another currency. That would be my first reaction before looking into the further details of the product and shipping.
No visitor would enjoy it as the size guides also vary when putting just the USA & UK in the frame. Trust me, it hampers the experience when I am forced to refer to the size chart.
Location-based personalization will help online shoppers to find the relevant products and details. For instance, Scandinavian countries would be cold in April, while the Indians would be suffering from scorching summer.
There is no point in putting jackets on the home page for Indian customers during this period.
Leveraging geo-targeting, relevant campaigns also can be created and run for the targeted users based on their countries. The key is that eCommerce owners and marketers need to keep cultural and seasonal aspects in mind.
4. Customized Campaigns Based on User Behavior
Even our fingers are not the same. So why would your customers be alike? Your existing users and new e-store visitors would have different expectations and priorities on their minds.
Especially for the new visitors, you have to grab that opportunity while they are there on your online to turn them into your customers. And this is exactly why you should be offering personalized on-site messages to them. Why show them the same content you have made for your existing customers?
Using personalization in on-site messages, you can offer handsome rewards to new visitors to make them register, sign up for a newsletter, etc. Even you can offer instant coupons or time-sensitive discounts to drive them for exploring something and buy it.
The catch is that you need to address among the new visitors as well. You cannot show a sign-up form to a visitor who has already subscribed to your platform. Instead, showcase your best product categories based on bio information, offers, new arrivals, and promotions.
When the customers are about to leave, a personalized action can be used to convince them to take an action. This action could be to make a purchase or sign-up for Emails about updates and promotions.
5. Personalized Emails/SMS
Undoubtedly, the best way to directly engage with your customers and make them feel about your brand, especially when they are away from your platform.
While Email marketing takes the major share in generating revenue for eCommerce marketing channels, personalized SMS messages also help to stay connected and convert visitors into customers.
You can personalize your Emails in the following ways:
Personalized subject lines are extremely important in this competitive world to attract the recipients for clicking and opening your Emails. For that, think of a catchy or attention-grabbing line that could be based on their last actions on your eCommerce web app or mobile app.
For example:
“Lizzie, is this the T-shirt you’ve been waiting for?”
“Josh, your Hero would love this Sweater on him.”
The first line shows the mail about a product that Lizzie might have had in her search history or wishlist. The second is the subject line of the mail to a father who had been looking for a sweater for his 4-Year old kid a couple of weeks back.
In both cases, it immediately creates a sense of curiosity and good vibes all around.
Personalized wishes through Emails/messages on birthdays or anniversaries with handsome treats and offers can boost conversions. A personalized wish makes every
customer feel special on such occasions. You can force them to check out the “Things We Feel You’ll Love”.
You also need to be intelligent while sending an Email to an inactive customer or a customer who just had an awful experience with your eCommerce store.
The Bottomline
Personalization always makes us feel super special and it shall be used wisely. Form a connection with your customers, nurture it, and ultimately grow your sales and revenue.
Read the blog: https://medium.com/@alydamartha/how-to-personalize-buyers-online-shoppingexperiences-6690a857ef89