It is now universally accepted that personalisation will, without question, deliver the highest ROI in marketing, and for our purposes specifically ecommerce marketing. Not only does it open up new ways to boost revenue and conversions, and to both acquire and retain customers, but it delivers phenomenally more return from your marketing spend. 

There isn’t anything it doesn’t effect. It reverses abandoned cart rates, app uninstalls, reverses churn, kills soaring CAC (customer acquisition costs), obliterates bounce rates, reverses declining traffic – the list goes on.

Much has been written on ways to approach personalisation application, but the bottom-line is to understand how your users behave, and ensure what you offer them as marketing is tailored to their experience accordingly.

Personalisation has come along as the universal panacea for all these woes. So beware those with skills in malfeasance who obfuscates reality from fiction, as lame applications confuse reality from fact to ensure unworthy solutions still get a look in.

Personalisation ROI, the proof

All-day, across all channels, consumers are being served experiences that are precision-targeted to meet their needs and preferences. Some of those experiences might be being served by your competitors. If you’re not personalising experiences for your visitors, you’re leaving money on the table.

Personalisation means automatically delivering the most relevant experience to an individual customer at any stage of their journey, on any channel. The possibilities are virtually endless. But this, you might say, is merely scratching the surface, predictive personalisation is an AI driver machine learning algorithm that identifies exactly what each individual consumer wants, needs or desires at the precise moment.

Think about that. If through the data being captured by your site enables you to know, even before the consumer did, exactly what they wanted to buy and when, not only have you got a massive head start over your competition, but you have obliterated the need for the cost to get it in front of them.

It is fair to say that it is the perfect vehicle to drive success, beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Smaller independent retailers need to appreciate what it brings to the party and grab it with both hands!

if it such great news for the big retail players already executing a personalisation strategy, already enjoying the distinction, but we appreciate why it is tricky for SMEs to evaluate the ROI if you’ve never seen it in action.

Personalisation drives digital growth via Acquisition to Activation, Retention, and Revenue (AARR)

Let’s take a look at where personalisation can fit into each stage of the customer lifecycle, and how some retailers are driving digital growth.

Acquisition

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) can be exorbitant. It’s very easy to waste valuable advertising budget by targeting people who will never convert. You can avoid this so-called ‘leaky bucket’ phenomenon by targeting only those users who have a high likelihood of converting.

How? By using predictive personalisation solutions (PPS) utilising AI and Machine Learning technology. PPS, powered by AI technology, uses individual consumer data to drive their predicted future behaviour (i.e. Likelihood to Purchase, Discount Affinity, Likelihood to Churn).

You can target users in these individuals at exactly the right time, with the right products, to optimise the efficiency of your marketing budget. It automatically serves personalised product content to each person as appropriate, and uses the ration to that offering to refine, progress and advance future selections for perpetual data cleansing, or specifically improvement.

It later retargets the same individual with product generated content emails, and more. This is just one of the many ways in which personalisation can help you get more out of your marketing budget.

Activation

Once you’ve got your visitors where you want them – on your app, or website, for example – you want to activate them to overcome the one-time buyer problem. Going forward, you will then need to delight them with meaningful, seamless experiences at every interaction.

You might assume to do this effectively, you need to understand what they want, and how they behave. the reality is that PPS is an autonomous solution, meaning it requires zero human involvement whatsoever. Which in turns directly goes to the bottom-line delivering unprecedented savings of staff, and their inherent foibles. See – How much do your staff really cost?

Revenue

Personalisation can help you increase the value of each visit. By presenting customers with products, offers, and content that you know matches their interests, you smooth the path to conversion.

Use personalised content to increase your Average Order Value (AOV), build loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and more. Here are some of the ways in which personalisation can drive growth for your business. You can:

• Identify users with a high discount affinity and present them with personalised offers.
• Deliver real-time, targeted content or product recommendations.
• Offer product comparison widgets and/or gamified experiences.
• Present visitors with personalised page layouts and navigation.

Retention

Increasing your users’ lifetime customer value (LCV/LTCV) is a surefire way to boost your bottom line. Delivering highly tailored, delightful experiences to your visitors helps to build long-lasting relationships that will continue to provide value, both to the user and your business. 

Personalisation will help you understand what your users want, enabling you to deliver meaningful experiences that will keep them coming back for more. After all, retaining those users that you’ve acquired and activated is the key to achieving growth. With personalisation, you can:

• Learn about user preferences through surveys to further optimize your customer experience.
• Enrich your visitor profiles with lead generation, making it easy to keep in touch.
• Retarget customers with highly personalised messaging that matches their likelihood to convert.
• Offer personalised incentives to loyal customers to make them feel valued.

Conclusion

Personalisation is the panacea for all your ecommerce woes. As the black thunder-clouds of recession hover, there are means to prosper utilising this the greatest solution ever seen. It is an extremely cost-effective solution, that can be installed immediately.

Not only does it make the greatest difference to your ROI, but remember if you install it before your competitors you have an enormous advantage, that they don’t even know about yet.

SwiftERM offer a free trial of PPS for a month to establish viability. SwiftERM is a Microsoft Solution partner.