Hyper-personalisation has become a non-negotiable business strategy. In today’s digital-first world, it is, without a doubt, a non-negotiable business imperative. It has proved to be such a powerful tool to improve conversions, build brand perception, and boost revenue, that to omit is perceived as criminal.
- 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a brand that provides personalised experiences. – Epsilon
- 89% of digital businesses are investing in personalisation. – Forrester
- 80% of companies experienced a revenue uplift since implementing personalisation. – Econsultancy
In a time when online shoppers are spoiled for choice, brands that are not tailoring experiences face the risk of losing their relevance. But there’s a catch. Too much personalisation can come across as invasive to shoppers, create an echo chamber, and result in low conversion rates. So, how much is too much? The simple answer is — there is no silver bullet. You’d need to experiment and find what works for your business and markets. Then let’s look at an example to understand this better.
Miinto, a leading European online fashion marketplace with 800,000 products, uses hyper-personalisation software to deliver hyper-personalised experiences across the commerce lifecycle and the touchpoints of recommendations, content, search, and browsing.
In a recent conversation, they shared the results of their tests. The company carried out a series of A/B tests for one of their markets — gradually increasing the hyper-personalisation level of the product assortment on category pages — and monitored the impact on:
- Revenue Per Visit (RPV)
- Conversion Rate (CR)
- Average Order Value (AOV)
Hyper-personalisation test results:
In the first test, they increased the hyper-personalisation from 25% to 50%. This led to a 5% uplift in RPV, which was quite significant. Since there was an improvement in all KPIs, they were curious to see how far they could go.
Subsequently, they increased the level to 60%, 65%, and finally 70%. They found that at 70%, there was a sudden decline in all KPIs, as they realised that how they were implementing hyper-personalisation had become more creepy than helpful to shoppers. It needed a rethink of its purpose, and product relevancy above loyalty was appreciated as far more important than what Minto wanted to sell.
Choosing the perfect solution for their customer base became essential, and appreciation of the distinctions between hyper-personalisation software providers was imperative.
More businesses need to embrace a hyper-personalisation level that works best for their customers. After all, every vertical and market is different. Further, it is important to remember that for a shopper, relevance is certainly important, but so is the joy of discovering new products and categories. Therefore, businesses must ensure the right blend of enabling hyper-personalisation and allowing for discovery and exploration.
In the digital-first era, it is imperative to possess the technological capability that allows for rapid personalisation tests — an area where many retailers are still lagging. Brands also need to move beyond segmentation and treat each customer as an individual. The solution to this is to build real-time, individual shopper profiles and drive the optimum level of personalisation for not only product recommendations, but also search, browse, content, and promotions. This is the key to growing and retaining your customer base and accelerating growth in the intensely competitive ecommerce industry.
It’s widely appreciated that hyper-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, many 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. the smart move to hyper-personalising email marketing, taking the product to your customer, when they want to see them – send time optimisation.
It is important to appreciate many retailers get duped into believing segmentation is personalisation. Because lumping a load of people in a category together does not work. It is not personal, it is just a smaller group of diverse tastes and interests. Only when you segment down to 1:1 does it become personal. See article: Segmenting is marketing marginalisation.
Both Forbes, Bain, Deloitte and McKinsey readily verify that this type of personalisation out-performs static page personalisation on your site, and obliterates the generic email marketing that every ecommerce merchant employs. We are not suggesting you stop email marketing, merely present the evidence so you are aware of what additional facilities you should be adopting to capitalise by adding to your marketing mix, to keep performing at the the highest levels.
It sends unique hyper-personalised emails of individual product-selected products to each of your consumers. Often it negates product price or indeed alternate supplier comparison. What’s more, it goes significantly further out-performing, triggered personalisation, omnichannel marketing and promotional email marketing combined. Thereby delivering the highest possible ROI in ecommerce today.
