Appreciating the benefits of consumer personalisation in ecommerce, how do you effectively engage your customers? One way to make sure you’re maximising your reach is to increase personalisation – whether that’s on your ecommerce store itself or in your marketing activity. With so many options for personalisation available to you as a merchant, it can be daunting to know which channel to focus on first.

What Is Personalisation?

On a very basic level, personalisation is pulling data in, specific to your customer. It has long since been as simple as having their first name and birthday in your database so you can tailor marketing copy and special offers, nowadays the more advanced option of tracking their purchase history, browsing habits and previous interactions with your store to dynamically deliver content and product recommendations.

When you’re starting to implement personalisation into your content and marketing strategy, it’s important that you get the basics right. That’s because most consumers expect some level of personalisation from brands.

Why you should be using consumer personalisation in ecommerce

Which leads us onto our next point – those shopping online expect you to understand what they want. The growth of ecommerce means that now more than ever, competition is fierce. Customers are less likely to be loyal to brands simply because they’ve shopped with them on a previous occasion; now, there are so many factors that come into play when it comes to repeat custom – from free delivery, simple returns processes and lower, comparable prices to loyalty schemes and frequent discounts.

eBut if you’ve got all of these boxes ticked, personalising your customers’ experience could be the thing that ultimately keeps them coming back. A recent survey by Segment found that:

• 52% of consumers would share personal data in exchange for product recommendations
• 53% of consumers would do the same for personalised shopping experiences
• 57% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalised offers or discounts

,Although constraints on how data is processed and stored are tighter than ever, it pays to make sure you’re using the data your customers have chosen to share with you, effectively and efficiently.

Getting Personalisation Right

If you’d like to increase your personalisation with your marketing strategy, it’s important to understand which channels you can maximise and how you’re currently using them. For example, email marketing is a perfect opportunity to really dig down into your customers habits and needs but it will require a different strategy to a personalised homepage on your ecommerce site.

Create a list of the ways in which you’d like to explore personalisation so a detailed, individual approach can be formulated for each avenue – group marketing and content into one column and website changes into another, and then break them down further based on the strengths of the platform you’re wo

How to take personalisation to your customers 

It’s widely appreciated that personalising pages on your ecommerce site encourage a great deal more custom, loyalty, and AOV as an immediate benefit, but then for some strange reason they then leave it at that. What is less appreciated is that stopping there is the same as sitting on a park bench, as long as you sit there someone is bound to happen by at some point. This translates into waiting for customers to come to you. Why?

Roll back the years and the phenomena most talked about, which is now engrained in all successful ecommerce businesses marketing is email marketing.  So combining the two you would think would be the natural step. 

Sadly something went horribly wrong, in that the email marketing software houses (email software providers ESP) didn’t cotton to the change, and still to this day offer software that doesn’t personalise at all. To substantiate this, simply Cmd F their website and you’ll see the word segment. Because lumping a load of people in a category together always works – not. The equivalent of you sending an email to everyone who bought a red item, or a XL size, is painful when you measure the effect. Segmenting is marketing marginalisation.

The solution is predictive personalisation software (PPS). One such example is SwiftERM, which use data captured from each individual consumer as they visit your site, including what they look at, return to most often, etc. It then aligns this with both that individual’s buying history and their perpetual purchases, to rank every SKU on your site by the greatest likelihood of imminent purchase. Instead of waiting to convince that person to buy a specific product, (this season’s stock for example) it uses a predictive analytics algorithm to work out what has been achieved already, and simply capitalise on it.

Both Statista and McKinsey readily verify that this type of personalisation far and away out-performs static page personalisation on your site, and literally obliterates the generic email marketing that 99% of ecommerce merchants employ. This is not a clarion call to stop, but rather to be aware of what is needed to add to the mix to keep performing at the top of your game. It goes to your consumer, thereby often negating product price or indeed alternate supplier comparison. What’s more it goes significantly further out-performing, triggered personalisation, omni-channel marketing and promotional email marketing combined. Thereby delivering the greatest possible ROI in ecommerce today.