Ecommerce Personalization: Products They Want to Buy

Ecommerce personalization is the ongoing customization of a customer’s shopping experience based on top KPIs including demographics, browsing behavior, and previous actions.

Ecommerce Personalization Improves Engagement and Overall Conversions

Poor personalization contributed to U.S. companies losing $756 billion in 2018, with 41% of consumers switching companies to get a more personalized experience. An ecommerce website lacking personalization can push consumers away by presenting them with irrelevant content or simply flooding them with too many products. Personalization ensures that your potential customers are viewing highly relevant offers that they are highly likely to purchase.

Ecommerce personalization can be broken down into four main categories: website personalization, product recommendations, social proof notifications, and triggered emails.

1. Website Personalization

Website personalization shows dynamic content, messages, and offers for each individual shopper. This method of personalization focuses most on increasing average session duration, product engagement, and customer conversion rate. Let’s walk through the four most effective ways you can optimize your website:

1. Offers: Customize the product itself, the price, or the supporting visuals. You can also impose a custom time limit or the copy associated with the offer.
2. Inline content: Change which featured products, blog posts, downloadable content, and images are shown to each customer.
3. Pop-ups: If your prospect is about to leave, show them a pop-up with custom content and offers to keep them from abandoning.
4. Information bars: Alter your call-outs to maximize value by showing different shipping rates or prices based on demographic information.

2. Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are extremely common. Still, when used effectively, they can increase average number of items in the cart by 68.14%. There are countless ways to segment your product listings or display your recommendations, but here are the three methods that will have the most impact:

1. Best-sellers: As we see with customer product review videos, customers trust their fellow consumers. Taking the crowd’s recommendation and personalizing it to customer needs makes it even more powerful.
2. You might also like…: By analyzing past purchase history, you can determine if you should attempt to upsell by showing higher-end alternatives, or downsell by showing lower-priced substitutes.
3. Cross-selling: This option allows you to offer complementary products that could add value to your customer’s current selection. This strategy aims to increase average order value (AOV).

3. Social Proof Notifications

Our 2020 Ecommerce Tech + Trends Brand Growth Guidebook provides insight on how brands are leveraging technology to enhance customer experience. Social proof notifications use new tracking technology to give real-time notifications to your customers based on both their past and current behavior. Here are three ways to use these notifications to increase sales:

1. Testimonials: Present customer reviews and testimonials in the chat window about the product that the customer is currently viewing.
2. Customer statistics: Let the customer see that they are part of a similar community. You can do this with a pop-up showing how many people are currently shopping, or send out a live notification every time a purchase is made. This also organically features popular products.
3. Urgency notifications: If a customer has a product in their cart, notify them if it is at risk of being sold out or with the number of customers who currently have the product in their cart. This creates a scarcity effect and will increase the likelihood of the customer finalizing their purchase.

4. Triggered Emails

A triggered email is sent based on a specific user action. The most common and simple type of triggered email is the “abandoned cart” recovery email. Understanding why a customer abandoned their cart without purchasing can give you clear direction on how to personalize your triggered email. Here are three ways to personalize your triggered email based on behavior and demographics:

1. Demographic trigger: Send an email based on demographic information such as location, age, or gender. Using the prospect name in the subject line will make the personalization more likely to stand out in their sea of emails.
2. Session information: Send an email after a shopping session and include a product that they interacted with in the subject of the email. By including product information and images in the email body, you ensure the email’s relevancy to your prospect.
3. Personalized recommendations: This method sends product recommendations based on products that they previously put into their cart. This creates another opportunity for you to upsell or downsell based on previous customer behavior.

For more information on how to leverage ecommerce personalization and other emerging technology trends, download our 2019 Ecommerce Paid Search Report.