A personalized e-commerce experience means tailoring online customer experience to each visitor. Customers expect this and get frustrated when not offered it.
But personalization in itself doesn’t guarantee success. Rushing into creating a personalized experience for users can be detrimental. It needs to be done in the right way and at the right time.
Different types of personalization
Personalization can be carried out in different ways. Yet its fundamental principle had been there long before the internet. It says, the more you know about your audience and the better you can serve them, the more you sell.
It may be as simple as inserting a visitor’s personal name into an email greeting. It may be using a visitor’s prior actions to predict interests and serving up pages that reflect those. If someone is looking at certain products for two days in a row, that’s valuable information too.
Personalization software may be able to make suggestions about other similar products or a special offer to convince a customer to buy. This will allow you to make differentiated offers to your visitors, for example, depending on their location. When it’s summer in Australia, you want to sell your Australian customers summer products, not winter ones.
When thinking about all the types of personalization – location-based messaging, real-time offers, predictive personalization and much more – it becomes clear that it’s a complex issue that needs some careful consideration.
Prioritizing the essentials
When personalization is done well, it increases customer satisfaction, encourages their purchases and fosters their loyalty. It’s not surprising then that it is regarded highly. The problem is that it only works well when certain basic building blocks are already in place.
The very first building block is service accessibility. For instance, is your website responsive to mobile screens? Personalization is not going to matter at all if users wait too long for your website to load on their mobile devices or can’t figure out its content because of poor compatibility.
The next aspect to address its relevance. If your content is not engaging, personalization will matter little. Also, customers should be able to find the information and products they want without too much effort. Does your website cater to an individual user’s specific needs and is the content persuasive enough?
Ultimately, users want more than just personalization. Focusing on personalization only while overlooking such essentials is like putting the cart before the horse.
Keeping it relevant and respectful
Many websites ask users to create an account trying to personalize their experiences. This is not always necessary, especially if users don’t make purchases that often. Users are often allergic to providing unnecessary data, not so much because of privacy but because they don’t see the point if it doesn’t improve their experience eventually. Every effort has to be justified. They need to be clear as to why the information is needed.
Next, recommendations can go awry if they lack context. You may buy a Lego set for a nephew’s birthday and continue to receive lego recommendations for the next few months.
Users want to feel in control. If recommendations are wrong, they should be able to correct them or opt out altogether. If they don’t have these options, personalization can backfire. Attempts to engage customers may end up being intrusive and irritating.
Finding the right scope
It’s common to think that personalization is one of the best ways to spend your budget because it surely increases conversion. In fact, you may receive more value for money by investing in other areas if your budget is limited.
There is no point in investing in a complex personalization solution while failing to provide great product descriptions and images in the catalog. Personalization on a budget can work as long as you’re very clear about what you need to personalize and about the technology that can accomplish this.
Segmenting an email database, for instance, is one of the first steps a small company can take towards personalization. It means differentiating your offers to each particular segment based on these customers’ history.
E-commerce development companies can help you to avoid the pitfalls of personalization. For example, the e-commerce developers from Iflexion will tailor the project scope, technology stack and deliverables to your business goals and capabilities.
Offering tailored, engaging user experience
E-commerce websites need to be personalized to stay competitive. Before addressing personalization, though, it’s necessary to maintain accessibility, relevance, and usability as the essential components of customer experience.
Find out what your customers’ expectations are of a good service and see how personalization can improve their experience. Otherwise, if they can’t see the benefit in your offer, they will simply ignore it, leaving you with missed revenue.
If you do personalization the right way and at the right time, it has a great potential to transform your customers’ perception of your brand and thus increase your sales. Today, consumers expect a simple, engaging and dynamic experience. If you aren’t offering it to them, your competitors will do that for you.
About the Author: Having more than 8 years of writing experience, Smridhi Malhotra is a professional tech, health and travel blogger. She loves to gather and share her profound knowledge about latest developments in technology. Smridhi is a management graduate and visual graphics artist and is currently pursuing masters in behavioral psychology. Her hobbies are practicing mindfulness, counseling children and traveling (a special love for Africa).
