Personalization is the key to a positive customer experience. That drum doesn’t have to be banged any louder. So today, we’re getting to get tactical. Here are the simplest 9 ways you’ll implement personalization in your online store.
We’ve broken them into three main categories:
- Visitor personalization: personalizations supported the precise visitor
- User personalization: personalizations supported the precise person
- AI / aggregate personalization: personalizations that are a best guess of what a selected person wants, supported aggregate analysis of what other customers and users did.
Visitor Personalization
- Personalize offers supported location
Show visitors what’s currently available near them supporting their IP address or self-selected location. you’ll also show visitors what’s trending near them, or personalize your offering supported where they’re in other ways, like showing products associated with the weather, a sporting event, etc…
- Personalize supported previous visits
Have they visited your web store before? If so, you’ll tailor both how your web store functions and what they see first. For instance , are you able to highlight products they were watching before but didn’t purchase? Or are you able to highlight not those self same products but comparable products or product alternatives? For instance, if they were watching a pair of trainers, maybe you’ll show them running socks.
- Personalize your remarketing
If you’ve got a visitor to your site, are you able to cookie them and retarget them with personalized ads? Are you able to show price drops around the product category they were watching , product alternatives, or other relevant offers in other channels like social media?
User Personalization
These personalizations are for once you know the particular customer who’s in your store — e.g. they’ve logged in, or given their email and you recognize who they’re.
- Personalize supported previous shopping patterns
Do you sell a product that gets purchased cyclically (e.g. consumable products like food or makeup). If so, then are you able to track a customer’s buying cycle and personalize your offer around their needs?
- Personalize additional product recommendations
Taking an equivalent dataset as above (e.g. their purchase history) and offer specific products that pair well with what they’ve bought. For instance, if you were a grocery, you would possibly offer a reduction on salsa to people that purchased tortilla chips.
- Personalize future product supported who they’re
As you learn more about your user, you’ll start to know them beyond your own store. Are there life events you’ll predict, or other forces that might drive buying behaviour? If so, then you’ll leverage that information to supply the proper product and message at the right time.
- Personalize your channel communication to match the buying stage
This one may be a little complex. First, we’d like to know there are different levels of buyer engagement, usually aligned to awareness, consideration, and evaluation. Now, if you understand a selected user’s path to get, then you’ll customize your channel communication to a specific user in order that messages within the channel match the extent of buyer engagement.
For example, say that you simply have a customer who always purchases through your email newsletter. meaning the stage of engagement for email for that person is evaluation — when they’re reading the email, they’re already primed to shop for it . So you ought to focus their version of the e-mail on late-stage offers — discounts, BOGOs, etc…
Other channels that this person engages with shouldn’t include those offers, since they’re clearly not what this person is brooding about . As an example, if you’re serving them Instagram ads, you ought to aim to create product and catalogue awareness, instead of convincing them to shop for that product from that channel (since it hasn’t worked within the past).