A Beginner's Guide to E-Commerce Personalization

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A Beginner's Guide to

E-Commerce Personalization

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Introduction

97% of online store visitors will leave the website without buying.

As most of them never visited the site before nor will ever get back again, there’s no second chance for first impression.

Imagine being able to assign every person who walked in your store an incredibly skilled personal shopper - ones who instantly knew each

customer’s preferences and traits.

What would that do for their initial shopping experience with you?

What would that level of in-store personalization do for your sales?

Online retailers have a massive edge over their brick and mortar

counterparts, thanks to online personalization technologies. Each visitor can feel as though the web store was designed just for them; that each offer and message they encounter is relevant and timely. Shoppers have come to expect that personalized web store experience, too.

Are you meeting your site visitors’ expectations?

Nearly 74% of online consumers report they feel frustrated when the web content they are presented with isn’t

related to their interests.

2013 Online Personalization Study

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If you’re not in the

personalization game yet, it’s the perfect time to start. In a recent Deloitte and

ExactTarget study, 50% of CMOs said they will soon implement personalization strategies.

Online retailers of all sizes and stripes are developing personalization strategies to help increase conversion, upsell and boost average order value, and foster loyalty, giving customer lifetime value a bump.

Are you?

Join us as we explore the different methods by which online retailers bring 1-on-1 personalization to hundreds - and even thousands - of their customers each day.

These important considerations will help you prepare a personalization strategy built to scale as you grow your business.

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Real-Time Offers &

Website Personalization

You probably consider the majority of your website visitors anonymous, as you have no previous data about them.

In addition, once they will leave your site (and that will happen sooner than you think), you have no way to communicate with them unless they’ve converted to subscribe for your email list. If you want to get in front of them and bring them back, you’ll need to spend more of your budget on retargeting ads.

Website Personalization tools like Commerce Sciences give you an alternative, enabling you to maximize each interaction to increase your ROI.

Where does personalization data come from? Marketers can track user behavior, traits and history from a number of sources. Check out these opportunities to glean insight into your customers wants and needs:

Navigational personalization

Even a first-time site visitor can enjoy a personalized shopping experience, with messaging and offers based on the behavior that brought them to your site, as well as their on-site activity. Where the individual came from and how they were referred to your site (ads, search, social, etc. and for which keyword terms) help inform

navigational personalization.

Third-party data

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Data aggregators are the most common source of third-party data, which provides your higher level, huge volume audience insights. Third-party data is great for contextual, behavioral and demographic targeting; it isn’t exclusive to you, but it can tell you a great deal more about various

audience segments.

Predictive personalization

With enough customer data at your disposal, you can begin to actually predict what your audience may want next. Well, you’re not predicting it, of course - there’s no such thing as an e-commerce crystal ball. Yet by tracking explicit behavior, the likelihood of future behavior becomes apparent.

Personal preferences

Returning visitors and customers have a great deal of insight for you.

Customer preferences, on-site browsing history, purchase history and more can inform new messages and offers that will appeal to their unique interests. This first-party data - information gleaned from a person’s direct interactions with your business - is incredibly valuable.

It’s in the layering of these different types of data that personalization becomes incredibly powerful. Combining the insights from navigation (what brought you here?), demographics (who are you?), and order history, for example, gives you a much more comprehensive view.

This is far more valuable than typical analytics information; it allows you to speak directly to their needs through your content and web

experience.

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Creative Messaging That Really Matters

With all of these insights and these triggers to get

messaging in front of the right online shopper at the right time, just what is it that you’re going to say?

There are unlimited options for creative messaging and ideas you could test.

Let’s take a quick look at various proven effective personalized campaigns:

Real-Time Offers

Do you have a coupon strategy in place or you just spray coupons and pray? Real-Time offers is a proven way to increase conversion rate, by offering limited discounts to valued customers (or potential customers) only.

For example: Offer a 5% off coupon on first purchase to visitors coming from your PPC campaigns or for repeat customers, to increase loyalty.

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Micro Conversions

You spend a lot of money on customer acquisition but when a visitor finally lands on your site, they are likely to bounce very quickly.

Sound familiar? This is where your micro conversion strategy should take place. Instead of trying to get them all to purchase from you on the spot, get a minimal commitment from each visitor and nurture them toward larger revenue goals in future.

Contextual Messaging

Those of you who run Google Adwords campaigns probably experienced the effectiveness of Dynamic Keyword Insertion capabilities, meaning that instead of showing the visitor the Ad text you previously created, you left a spot which dynamically changes based on the visitor’s search terms.

Why not to do the same on-site? For example, you can easily target visitors based on the keywords they searched on Google and provide them with contextual messaging on your site, e.g.:

“Looking for Nike Shoes? We provide the best selection and lowest prices guaranteed.”

Obviously, Nike Shoes could be replaced with any relevant keywords that are associated with this on-site campaign, and the statement with your company’s most relevant one.

Another great example of a smart use of contextual messaging is

targeting visitors that land on a low-converting product page with the top popular one in the same category. That way you can increase the

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Do you offer shipping to the U.S? Do you offer worldwide shipping? Why not to let every shopper feel special by announcing your shipping policy to their exact location, e.g.: Mention to New York-area visitors that you ship to New York area, but for a shopper from Germany, mention your great shipping rates to Germany. If you have a significant amount of traffic from Germany, you can take it one step further and promote your shipping policy in German for those visitors only.

Behavioral Messaging

In “Six Principles of Influence,” Prof. Robert Cialdini mentions scarcity as one of his persuasive behavioral triggers. In our minds, things seem more attractive when their availability is limited or when we are about lose out on an opportunity like acquiring a product on favorable terms.

Combine those strategies into your marketing strategies. For example, you can limit the number of coupons available and emphasize that only a few are left. Or, if you have limited availability on a specific item in stock, be sure to stress that as well.

Social Proof

Another principle discussed by Prof. Cialdini is social proof. People tend to assume that if a lot of other people are doing something, it must be the right thing to do. Unleash the power of social proof by promoting what other people are doing on your site.

For example, when someone visits one of your best selling products, let them know how many of that item you sold in the past day, or simply mention that this is your top-selling product in that category.

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Drawing Your Visitor’s Attention

Your CMS may already provide some basic personalization capabilities, but you might want to consider a platform to

help you match the right display mode for the best shopping experience.

Will dynamically changing the main banner on your homepage help you convert visitors who never see your homepage? Definitely not.

Moreover, shoppers’ attention span is limited and most are banner blind at this point. Dynamic overlays are a compelling and convincing alternative.

Modal: Having one clear call-to-action is best practice in providing a good user experience and helps ensure visitors take the desired action.

A nice modal in the center of the screen, with one clear call-to-action while the background is temporarily blocked, makes a really compelling argument to take the prescribed action. Modals are usually used for email subscription purposes, but can be highly useful for driving traffic from one place to another; for example, from your blog to your e-

commerce site.

Floating bar: This is ideal for branding purposes and when you want a

Typically, about 70% of an e-commerce site's

traffic lands on specific product

pages or

categories.

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It can be a great place to emphasize your great policies around free shipping, or your 100% money back guarantee.

Slide-outs: Squared layers that pop-in from the side of the screen are a common dynamic overlay option. If done correctly and customized to fit the site’s look and feel, this can draw your visitors’ attention and will not be feel to the user like an intrusive act.

After optimizing the on-site experience to help reach your sales goals, it’s time to do the same for your remarketing campaigns. You may be sending emails to thousands of your subscribers and promotions as part of your newsletter, but are they as effective as they could be?

Now let's talk about post-abandonment strategies to recapture as many sales as possible.

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Personalizing Email

There are many aspects in email campaign that can be personalized, from segmenting your lists to customizing email content for efficiency.

Email List Segmentation

As a first step, you could separate your existing customers from those who subscribed to your newsletter or registered for any promotion that you offered, but never ended up buying from you. You want to

emphasize the benefits of being a loyal customer either by running a loyalty program or simply mentioning that the promotion you are sending via the newsletter is reserved for customers only.

Those who were not convinced to purchase from you prior may be more receptive to different messaging. Try a case study or customer reviews to increase confidence in your brand, or offer a first-time buyer offer.

Personalized Subject Line

Personalizing the subject line by simple adding the recipient’s first name can increase open rates by 29% and give your campaign efficacy a huge boost.

Previous Interests

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purchased (or left behind when abandoned their carts). Understanding their interests enables you to promote similar products on sale, or offer complementary ones to give them a good reason to come back for more.

Personalized Retargeting

Many companies offer retargeting ads, which allow you to continue

advertising to visitors who have already visited your website. These ads appear on other websites, in search results, and on popular services like YouTube, email programs and more.

Tailoring your messaging to the visitor's on-site behavior makes your ads relevant when and

wherever the user is in the comings days and weeks.

Recent items: Use retargeting ads to promote the last items the shopper viewed before leaving your site.

Time-based retargeting: Target visitors who didn’t get back to your site after several days, or simply adjust to seasonality like ProFlowers did in their remarketing campaign.

Location-based retargeting: Segment your visitors based on their location and emphasize the unique values per their location, or mention their location in the retargeting ad, just like you would personalize the on-site experience with the floating bar example.

Retargeting options are extensive; test constantly to find your winning targeting and messaging combinations.

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Retargeting image: Google Support

Evaluating Your Success

Testing tells you whether your efforts are working, but also guides your future optimizations and strategy. A/B testing - testing one variation against another - is a great way to evaluate and compare the

effectiveness of a few slightly different messaging, targeting and offer variants.

Which variation brings the best results? What causes more clicks and a higher conversion rate?

Beware common A/B testing pitfalls that can lead you astray. Some website personalization platforms include built-in capabilities to allow you to A/B test without any further coding or additional tools.

To get started (especially if you are not running a $100 million online store), measure top of funnel KPIs like CTR, bounce rate, and

engagement for your targeted

campaigns. This helps ensure you’re on the right track before you invest too much time and effort in a specific experiment. At the end of the day, only 2% of your traffic converts, so seeing statistically significant results could take a few weeks.

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It is highly important to define, prior to starting a test, your main thesis.

Calculate the amount of traffic required for that experiment so you have an exact date the experiment should be stopped. You could use an A/B testing calculator for doing so.

Getting Started with

Personalization Strategy

All of this may seem like information overload. However, personalization platforms save so much time and improve conversion so dramatically that their systematic integration in your work process should be

unquestionable.

At first, it does require an investment of time and effort to get up to speed on personalization and begin practicing it in your e-commerce store. The sooner you get started on it, the better, because getting the results you see will quickly justify your efforts. Eventually, maintenance will become part of your routine.

Personalization will become second nature to you, like sending newsletters or changing the promotion on your homepage - but in a

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much more sophisticated way that will demonstrate serious effect on your bottom line.

In today’s competitive market (you’ve heard of Amazon, right?), one cannot afford to stay behind, practicing a blanket strategy with

consumers who expect a more nuances, personal shopping experience.

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A Beginner's Guide to E-Commerce Personalization