The highest ROI in ecommerce marketing is the ideal point to start an assessment of all the tools you have in your war chest, to maximise the greatest return possible for your efforts. If you never stop to look at the performance capabilities of other solutions, how do you know the performance of the ones you do use are the best?

Good tacticians want to avoid the day when a little known, pissant company, overtakes you in both marketshare and or profitability. There have been plenty of egos burst along the way, reflecting that someone didn’t do enough to counter potential threats well enough, by checking alternatives. No one wants a competitor to blindside them without prior knowledge, and have to say “I never saw it coming“.

According to the world’s leading research companies McKinsey, Forrester, Bain and Statista readily proclaim predictive personalisation software (PPS) for ecommerce now out-performs all other solution 20-fold, specifically omni-channel marketing and email marketing combined.

So what is predictive personalisation?

PPS software communicates directly with each consumer, utilising all the data captured about them, to refine product offerings, that they are most likely to buy next or at a precise time, to an amazingly high degree of accuracy. An artificial intelligence algorithm uses all the captured data on your site, not only on what people have bought, but their navigation and actions and impressions on the site too, which identifies patterns that lead to purchases.

It is machine learning too, so as time progresses, it perpetuates this refinement on an individual consumer basis. The more knowledge it has about each individual the more accurate the product selection. This in turn delivers the effects intended including a higher average order value, which naturally means greater customer lifetime value.

But if you’re offering people what they want, rather then products they might buy on a whim – perhaps merely satiating a need to shop, then the rate of return drops through the floor too. As the CMO, you enjoy the double -whammy of making more profit, as well a saving on costs.

The cherry on the top of course, is that PPS software in entirely autonomous. While you’re running every other aspect of your marketing with their inherent costs, PPS requires zero staff – whatsoever, meaning the GP is all yours.

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.

Is this the highest ROI in ecommerce marketing?

These are the month-to-view stats for a Hair and Beauty website. Total customer database is 5551, predictive personalised emails sent were 10666. The black line is emails sending dates. The orange line are the verified attributed sales, the yellow line CTR – 4.85%.

Cost for use of the application to a database of under 20k is £100.

ROI calculations, based on a 50% GP = £2,518.54, delivers an ROI of 2419%.

This scales proportionately to whatever the size of company, providing it is serving sites with products consumers interact with frequently – Grocery, Wines, Fashion, Cycles, Chandlery, Saddlery, Fragrances, Books, Music and of course Beauty and Cosmetics, indeed anything where receiving a email a couple of times each month would be appropriate, and therefore yield the desired result.

It doesn’t compete with ERP software either, and this loyalty building solution is selecting products unique to each individual without the annoyance of promotional offer or incentive blurb. Precisely because there is no razzmatazz-hullabaloo on the emails the rate of suppressions is a trifle in comparison. One ESP partners were amazed that PPS “unsubscribe” rate was 0.003% pa compared to their 18%.

If you’d like to take a free, 30-day trial of PPS software simply click here. It installs as a SaaS plugin, and has been verified compatible with your platform versions, passing their scrutiny before release to their marketplace.

SwiftERM are a Microsoft Partner company.

Article Classification: