In today's highly competitive e-commerce landscape, personalization has emerged as a critical strategy for retailers looking to differentiate themselves and capture the attention of increasingly discerning customers. Online shopping personalization is all about creating a tailored experience that caters to individual preferences, interests, and shopping behaviors, leading to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this blog post, we will explore the key benefits of online shopping personalization, its essential components, and practical tips for implementing it effectively to boost your sales and elevate your customers' shopping journey. Stay tuned to discover how you can leverage personalization to unlock the full potential of your e-commerce business.
What Is Online Shopping Personalization?
Online shopping personalization refers to the process of tailoring a user's online shopping experience based on their individual preferences, interests, and behavior. This customization aims to enhance customer satisfaction, increase sales, and improve overall engagement by delivering relevant product recommendations, offers, and content.
Key components of online shopping personalization include data collection, analysis, and application, which are used to create a unique and curated experience for each shopper. By understanding user preferences and patterns, online retailers can better target marketing efforts, streamline search results, and ultimately, foster stronger relationships with their customers.
An Online Shopping Personalization Example
One example of a personalized online shopping experience is Amazon, which appeals to many of its customers through the use of personalization. Amazon recommends products based on users' interests and purchase history. The Amazon website and app both learn about users and tailor the shopping experience to them, continually improving with each new piece of data collected. This is largely why Amazon dominates the eCommerce space as it establishes a direct connection with consumers.
How Personalization Benefits Your Online Store
Personalization offers numerous advantages that make it worth implementing for eCommerce websites and mobile apps. With the right approach, online shopping personalization can satisfy users and increase engagement across platforms.
Recent statistics illustrate the demand for personalization among consumers. According to one study from McKinsey and Shopify, 71% of surveyed online shoppers expect personalization when shopping online. This makes personalization crucial when attracting shoppers who anticipate this experience when connecting with eCommerce brands and platforms.
By appealing to shoppers who expect a personalized experience, you'll likely see a significant boost in user engagement and loyalty.
If you're wondering about the specific benefits you can enjoy with effective personalization for online shopping, the following are some examples:
Increase User Loyalty
One of the main advantages of personalization is the ability to increase the loyalty of your users. Today's online shoppers want to see a fully personalized shopping experience from their favorite brands. Once they've begun building a footprint on your app or website and developed a profile that provides them with a personalized user experience, they'll be more inclined to stick around. This will particularly be the case if you manage to satisfy your users repeatedly with relevant product recommendations and high-quality offerings.
Increase Conversion Rate
Connecting with online shoppers through personalization will facilitate higher conversion rates (CR). If you can direct new customers to the products they want when they want them, you'll convert more of them into satisfied repeat customers. You'll also be able to convert more prospects into leads if you make it clear they can benefit from a personalized experience as soon as they interact with your brand.
Increase User (Customer) Engagement
If your website and app users encounter a personalized shopping experience, they'll likely spend more time browsing and exploring your platform. They'll be able to look through multiple product recommendations and develop their own customized experience that helps them get the most from your site or app.
Increase Average Order Value
Through personalized recommendations, you can more easily upsell while giving customers what they want. People will be able to find what they're looking for more quickly, encouraging them to buy multiple products at once in the same order. Based on the items they add to their cart, you can then recommend other products and accessories that are along the same lines as the base purchase. The result is a higher average order value, which will help maximize revenue.
Increase Revenue Growth
More personalization means more income as you boost sales, maximize cart value, and get returning customers to buy more based on additional recommendations.
Helps Users to Get a Better Deal
Using parameters such as price range and budget, you can personalize the shopping experience according to pricing. You'll be able to connect users with products that fall within their budget while staying within their interests. You may also offer discounts on certain orders that keep your customers coming back to you. For instance, if a customer hasn't engaged with you in a while, you could send them a promo code for a discount on a product they're likely to buy.
Helps Users to Save Some Time
Without personalization, users may spend a long time looking for what they want on eCommerce platforms. If they don't find the right products in time, they may simply leave the platform in search of a more efficient experience. Using personalization, you'll help users save more time searching and move them more efficiently toward their next purchase.
Stats About Benefits of Personalization on Users’ Online Shopping Behavior
If you're still unsure about the benefits you can expect to see with personalized online shopping, there are plenty of statistics out there that demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy.
According to Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase more products when sites and apps offer personalized experiences. That same study found that 90% of those surveyed found personalization appealing.
Also, according to Kibocommerce, brands offering end-to-end personalization can expect to see an ROI that's three times greater than they would without it. Further demonstrating the need for personalization, one survey from McKinsey found that 76% of respondents get frustrated when they don't see personalization during the user journey.
Personalized messaging is one of the best ways to increase engagement, as one SmarterHQ study found. According to this study, 72% of customers will only engage with personalized messaging from brands.
These and many other statistics show how necessary personalization is in today's eCommerce environment. If you're not using personalization to connect with consumers, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to increase engagement, sales, and loyalty. Consider the fact that 89% of brands today are investing in personalization. If you're among the 11% not using it, the time to get into it is now.
Online Shopping Personalization With Storyly
If you're looking to implement personalization for your website or app, there are plenty of tools available to help you get started. One of these solutions is Storyly, which uses the power of engaging and interactive Stories that build direct connections with online shoppers.
Using Storyly, you can seamlessly integrate full-screen interactive Stories into the online shopping experience. These go beyond simply pushing personalized messages and images, instead creating fully personalized experiences that engage and convert. You can use these stories to connect with shoppers at every step of the user journey.
Some of the Stories you can develop and publish include product carousels with personalized recommendations, shoppable videos that include a convenient "Buy Now" button, polls or surveys that tailor the user's experience based on their unique wants, and more.
When used in combination with other invaluable tools, you'll be able to deliver the perfect personalized experience that sets you apart from competitors.
Best Practices of Online Shopping personalization
As you begin implementing personalization to build stronger relationships with customers, the following are some best practices to help you achieve the best results with your strategy.
Segment Your Audiences
You can start by segmenting your audiences to establish different types of customer personas that speak to all users. Take the time to learn more about your users' different demographics, psychographics, lifestyles, and other characteristics. Dividing your users into unique identifiable groups will help you reach individuals within these segments more effectively. These personas will guide your visuals and messaging to make your content more resonant as you promote your brand and offerings.
Develop Personalized Homepages
On your website and in your app, you should create personalized homepages that give customers the best introduction to your brand and products. Although third-party cookies will soon be gone, you can still use them at this time to collect data about your customers and develop a homepage that's uniquely theirs. You can also use first- and zero-party data that collects information straight from your website and other platforms to inform homepage designs and layouts.
Use Email Marketing
Another effective solution you can use to establish a relationship with customers through personalization is email. By developing strong email campaigns, you can significantly increase user engagement, conversions, and sales while supplementing other marketing efforts. Millions of people use email regularly, and these campaigns are highly efficient. They offer you a great way to make personalized product recommendations, bring people back to your app or website to complete purchases, or encourage other desired actions for those not actively using other platforms.
Show Users Some of the Products They Viewed Recently
In many cases, online shoppers may browse and consider purchasing one or more products on your app or website, only to abandon the process. To remind people of these products and inspire them to complete a purchase, including recently viewed products on your platforms.
Give Your Users Personalized Guidance
In addition to a generally personalized shopping experience, online shoppers love personalized assistance. This is something that brick-and-mortar stores often offer but online stores lack, giving you a chance to stand out with personalized guides.
For instance, you can offer 24/7 live chat to connect users with agents who help them find what they're looking for based on their specific needs. Chatbots could also answer basic questions and help ensure customers find what they want.
You can also introduce new customers to your website with some questions about their interests. As an example, an eCommerce platform that sells clothing may ask what kind of style the customer wants and the specific items they're looking for online. The guide could then direct the customer to several products or personalized collections according to their inputs.
Additionally, you can even ask what customers thought of previous orders. If the customer likes a certain product, you can lead them to other similar products in your inventory they might not have found. Conversely, if the customer wasn't particularly fond of a certain product, you can use this information to avoid recommending the same or similar product in the future.
In the process, you'll perfect the online shopping experience for each user, increasing engagement and loyalty more easily.
Customize the Shopping Experience Based on the Location
When selling to customers all over the country or across the globe, you can customize product pages according to location. There are several ways this can benefit your customers.
Let's say you have customers located in the U.S. and the U.K. Customers accessing your app or website in the U.S. would see pricing in the form of USD, while customers in the U.K. would see pounds in place of dollars. Measurements could also change from imperial to metric and vice versa based on location. Shipping information could also change depending on where each customer is located, making it important to reflect that in the final cost during checkout.
Depending on the product, you could also recommend products based on what's popular in a specific location, giving shoppers an idea of what's trending in their area.
Give Your Customers the Best Online Shopping Experience With Personalization
By making full use of personalization for your eCommerce brand, you'll differentiate yourself from competitors and get the results you want from your efforts. Over time, with the right approach to your personalization strategy, you'll attract new customers, bring existing ones back, and increase sales. In turn, you'll see real growth as your brand builds better customer relationships and continues to appeal to each person's needs.
With the help of innovative marketing solutions like Storyly, you'll be able to succeed with personalization across all platforms. Want to learn more about what Storyly and its customization capabilities can do for your personalization efforts? Sign up for Storyly free today to get started.
