5 Best Practices in eCommerce Personalization

Have you considered personalizing your customers’ eCommerce experience? Personalization techniques can enrich your customers’ interactions with your brand — which helps create more relevant and enjoyable encounters. 

For example, you could use personalization methods to show your customers what they want to see and communicate with them in the way they prefer. This, in turn, can significantly increase your eCommerce sales. 

Today, we’re going through the benefits and best practices of eCommerce personalization. 

What is eCommerce personalization?

eCommerce personalization is the practice of creating a personalized shopping experience for each of your customers and potential customers who interact with you. This is a powerful marketing strategy that shows your customers the products and content that interest them. 

According to a survey conducted by Statista in 2022, just 12% of U.S. consumers claimed that personalized experiences did not increase the likelihood of shopping with retailers in the future. This means the remaining 88% were positively influenced by eCommerce personalization.

eCommerce personalization is based on consumer interest, and previous product and content views and interactions. You can recommend products on the homepage, and personalize aspects like live chat, promotional emails, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Benefits of eCommerce personalization

Personalization doesn’t just benefit your eCommerce business – it improves the customer experience, too.

Benefits for eCommerce stores

eCommerce stores that personalize their content with recommendations are likely to see higher conversions and more loyal customers. They can stop guessing what their customers want and start presenting them with relevant content based on data they’ve gathered. This relevancy helps encourage a loyal fanbase. 

Imagine that your customers have previously looked at one of your products — you can place that on their homepage to give them a gentle nudge to convert. 

Personalizing the customer experience can also save a business time and money with customer support. A personalized live chat feature, for example, provides the information the customer needs quickly — which lessens the agent workload and makes managing call center operations easier.

Benefits for customers

When you personalize the eCommerce experience, you’re communicating to consumers that you understand what they want and present it to them without them having to look for it. This essentially makes the whole buying process easier and hassle-free.

Personalized recommended products on the homepage also act as inspiration. It can be exciting to see new products to pique your interest and products you didn’t even know existed. 

Additionally, customers may have their eye on a specific product but decide it doesn’t quite meet their specifications. By showing them alternative options, they might find exactly what they’re looking for. 

eCommerce personalization best practices

Familiarize yourself with the types of personalization

Your first eCommerce personalization best practice is to learn what you can personalize. Let’s take a look:

• Personalized homepage: Amazon is an example of an eCommerce store that personalizes customers’ homepages with relevant products. It gathers data from a variety of sources, such as previous searches, and automatically displays products based on that data. With the right tools, you can do this for your website visitors and scale your online business.  

• Similar products: Although products can be recommended on the homepage, they can also be recommended elsewhere on the website. For example, you can display similar products on a product page. This might also come under a heading like “Customers also viewed.” 

• PPC ads: The ability to personalize PPC ads is a powerful tactic for eCommerce sellers. Advertising products that customers have already shown interest in can jog their memory and persuade them to give the purchase further consideration. 

• Live chat: You may already be reaping the benefits of using a call center on a cloud, but how about personalizing the eCommerce experience further with live chat? One example is establishing live chat triggers which make your chatbot pop up with a personalized message when a customer takes a certain action on your site. 

• Abandoned cart recovery: If customers have added a product to their cart, likely, they were strongly considering buying it. If they abandon the cart before making the purchase, your job is to figure out why and entice them back to finish what they started. You can do this by sending a personalized email like “Where did you go?” or “Did you forget something?” You can also ask if they need any help. 

Collect data

Data is at the core of eCommerce personalization. The bulk of this is done with tools and software. For example, live chatbots, cookies, Google Analytics, and more collect data. You can also use legacy application modernization to collect and store data. 

Another way of collecting data is through polls and surveys. You can run social media polls to ask questions relevant to your products. Your customers can then share their main pain points when doing something or what factor they value most when making a purchase (price, quality, capabilities, and so on). 

Gathering data is invaluable when launching your eCommerce store. And with the correct PC remote login solution in place, your remote sales staff will be able to contribute to this, too.

Segment your customers

Segmenting your customers is the next best practice for eCommerce personalization. This allows you to get to know your customers and create buyer personas. You should refine your segments as much as possible so that each segment gets personalized treatment. The more data you can collect, the better you can define your customers and segments.

Here are some ways you can segment your audience:

• Returning customers: These customers have bought something from you in the past. 
• Purchase history: What products have these customers bought? Is there a theme to their purchases? 
• Demographics: This includes age, gender, geographical location, and the language customers speak. 
• Communication: Have these customers reached out to you? If they have, consider what method they’ve used to identify their preferred method of communication (this includes VoIP numbers, too, for which you may want to consult Vonage’s guide on VoIP numbers).
• Interests: Segment your audience based on interests. For example, if customers purchase golf clubs from you and read your golfing blog, they’re probably interested in golf. 

These are just a handful of factors to define your audience segmentation. Your customers will likely fit into multiple segmentation categories. In this case, the profiling will be even more refined.

Take a look at the Venn diagram below:

When segmenting your audience, each circle will represent a characteristic. One might represent customers aged between 30 and 40, another might represent customers with an interest in golf, and the other might represent returning customers. 

If a customer falls into all three of these categories, they’ll be in the middle of the diagram. You’ll have the most information for those who appear in an overlap section of the diagram — and you can provide these customers with a more thorough personalized experience. 

Take an omnichannel approach

Although a lot of the eCommerce experience happens on your website, you need to provide a consistent personalized experience across all your communication channels. From that initial point of searching your OnlyDomains domain name, all the way through to a purchase. 

This means your social media channels, emails, PPC ads, and eCommerce stores should all be in sync. Every touchpoint needs to be considered to take your customers on a complete and personalized journey as seamlessly as possible. 

For example, you might recommend the same products to your customers through email and your PPC ads. Showing different products could distract your customer from the product they were most interested in and it won’t have the same impact as if they saw the same product repeatedly. 

Use AI

AI has been very prominent in the business world of late. Companies are finding ever more adventurous and creative ways of using AI in their conversion optimization and marketing strategies, including eCommerce personalization. You can use AI to create customer journeys, workflows, and customer segments. 

AI gets to the heart of your customers’ behaviors. It can recommend products and communicate at exactly the time customers are most likely to convert. AI helps immensely with retargeting tactics in eCommerce too, so you can advertise products that your customers have shown an interest in or turn existing customers into loyal ones. 

Additionally, technologies like AI chatbots use natural language processing to communicate with customers in a human-like way. These tools learn from their conversations so their communications, answers, and responses improve over time. 

If you’re wondering whether AI is right for your eCommerce business, consider this statistic from Business DIT: 84% of eCommerce businesses are either actively incorporating AI into their processes or consider it a top priority to do so. 

In short, AI is now intertwined with the shopping experience and an essential component of eCommerce personalization. It helps to deliver a unique experience to every individual customer based on previous behavior and intelligent predictions. 

Are you ready for eCommerce personalization?

The benefits of eCommerce personalization are far-reaching and apply to both businesses and consumers. When you adopt personalization tactics, customers get shown products they actually want, which can drive conversions and customer loyalty. 

Follow our above best practices for a smooth transition to eCommerce personalization.