With increasing competition for online spending, brands are seeing hyper-personalisation as more crucial than ever. The fashion industry, with its many sizes, collections, and styles, is a lot more complicated and overwhelming to consumers than most other retail categories. With all these complexities of the industry, it is no surprise that conventional approaches to personalisation are falling short.
The Importance of Hyper-personalisation in Fashion Ecommerce
Customers’ expectations of digital shopping are at an all-time high. COVID-19 has meant there’s more ecommerce traffic than ever before and there’s also a huge amount of choice. So by using an AI machine learning hyper-personalisation solution, of which there are many distinctive alternatives, you’re removing the complexity of decision-making for the customer and the complexity of manually guessing and updating, making it a two-fold benefit.
Retailers like ASOS do it well and are market leaders in it. But a lot of other retailers, including some big names, are struggling with the basics.
Successful ecommerce brands must understand that providing a seamless experience is key and that means empowering the customer and helping them navigate their online shopping journey. A seamless user experience is essential to e-commerce success in a post-pandemic world, but it’s the shopper journey that determines how successful the purchase experience will be.
Data, AI, Marketing Automation and Hyper-personalisation
An essential component of any successful marketing campaign is data, and most ecommerce platforms have a wealth of data at their disposal. Without proper oversight, this can be a ticking timebomb for brands. Recent surveys indicate that 90% of retailers have implemented some form of hyper-personalisation strategy, however many are lacking the technology to make tracking customer preferences and behaviours truly seamless and it falls short of being an autonomous process.
Out of those retailers who have installed a hyper-personalisation solution, almost half (44%) are already recommending products based on a customer profile sadly many of these still use segmenting which is not personalisation, and over a third (36%) are personalising the product search functionality on their websites. This is helping to enhance the experience, not just for mainstream consumers, but also for more diverse customer groups with different needs and shopping behaviours.
Meanwhile, data-driven dynamic content is being used by 37% of retailers to actively target and influence browsers as they shop online.
A key part of this is the use of AI (35%) to help identify preferences and trends, whilst marketing automation flows (31%) turn insight into effective communications and campaigns, using advanced technologies like the top 30, the distinctions between which are listed here.
A third (34%) of retailers are switching to the fact that using tech to obtain a single view of the customer is central to delivering personal experiences seamlessly across channels.
Retailers must ensure that consumers have the content and experiences they want as part of their journey through the purchase funnel, ensuring the right information is being provided at the right time. Brands also need to make sure that they are capturing this data in a standardised way across channels and locations.
How to apply hyper-personalisation in ecommerce?
Ecommerce marketers need to identify current challenges and start with data. Your ecommerce platform should be able to tap into the rich streams of first-party data at your fingertips. Use your database to segment and manage your consumers.
Data should be used to your advantage, to help you identify your top shoppers, reach them with relevant offers and hyper-personalise experiences. Imagine being able to automatically deliver the exact products that are most likely to be bought by each consumer on your database to them in an email every month.
The returns are phenomenal and significantly higher than any other Martech solution. The strategy you choose to implement will have an impact on where shoppers see you, so make sure you’re engaging with your audiences in the best way possible.
Un-intrusive and natural-feeling product recommendations, serving similarities within product pages and personalised bespoke merchandising are key to retaining, gaining and upselling to the new-age consumer.
Conclusion
Technology is critical in enabling personalised experiences, especially collecting the correct data on your customers and using it at the crucial moment of the shopper journey. But the key thing to remember about personalisation is to be as customer-focused as possible.
Retailers should strive to get more value out of their investment by ensuring customer-facing options are more closely aligned to audiences, their behaviours and needs. Ecommerce platforms that offer 360-degree marketing can help plug gaps and ensure AI, autonomous marketing and hyper-personalisation work in harmony.
As hyper-personalisation is becoming more important every day, brands need to pay attention if they want to be successful. If your customer experiences have been uninspired and underwhelming, it’s time to get personal.
