Create a personalized online experience for your customers

There's a lot of competition in the eCommerce world, and while you can avoid it, we'd like to emphasize that competition isn't necessarily a bad thing. You have every opportunity to outperform your competitors, especially when you're in the right niche where you're willing to give it your all! There are steps you can take to get to the top, and what we'd like to discuss in this article is called personalization. Today, simply building an online store and stocking it with attractive products at competitive prices may no longer be enough to attract the attention and build long-term loyalty among your customers. You need to define your target market and know what they want. A thorough understanding of your audience's needs and desires is essential to your success as a business. One way you can address these needs is to create a personalized experience for your customers. This article is here to explain what you can do for your customers to offer them a great online shopping experience through personalization. Read on to identify some strategies you're already implementing for your online store and some new methods you might want to incorporate.

What is personalization?

The future of a successful e-commerce business lies in a brand's ability to connect by creating a unique and meaningful experience for its audience. And what better way to connect with your audience than with a personal touch? Online retailers use e-commerce personalization to collect customer data, such as previous actions they've taken in your store. This data allows your store to provide special and targeted offers, product recommendations, personal messages, and share other relevant content. It also means creating a unique experience, tailored to a unique customer. E-commerce businesses can greatly benefit from personalization, which is an important optimization method you should utilize on your store. You can think of e-commerce personalization as being based on these two factors:

• Context: This may include the time of day, customer location, device used, and referral source.
• Behavior: This includes recently viewed products, items in your cart, recent and past purchases, and past email interactions.

There are dozens of other factors to consider, but to keep it simple, we'll stick to context and behavior when determining what will work for your online store and your customers. Now let's look at how creating a personal experience for your customers can benefit your e-commerce store.

1) Increase conversions

Offering your customers a personalized experience is proven to increase your store's conversions, simply because you're using customer data to offer something of real value to your audience.

2) Increase customer engagement

Because you're better equipped to offer your customers what they want based on their interests, your customers will want to spend more time on your website and social media pages, viewing and interacting with your content. The more engaged they are with your store, the more likely they are to make a purchase immediately and return for more in the future.

3) More precise product recommendations

The best thing about e-commerce personalization is that you'll be able to predict and generate accurate results from your data collection tool based on your customer's behavior. This leads to precise matching of your potential buyer's interest in the targeted products your store recommends.

4) Develop customer loyalty

Personalization leads to better customer loyalty by helping you provide intuitive service that adds value to the shopping experience, giving your customers a reason to stay loyal to your e-commerce site and do more business with you. Now that we've discussed personalization and its relevance to your e-commerce business, let's talk about how to implement personalization on your site.

1) Product recommendations

Product recommendations are key to cross-selling and upselling your store's products. The basic purpose and goal of product recommendations is to offer customers similar or complementary products to those they're currently viewing. This is great because when your customer visits your site, they might be looking to purchase just one specific product. Product recommendations increase the likelihood that they'll also purchase free items and spend more than they originally planned. Product recommendations aren't a new idea. Amazon has been using this tactic for many years, inspiring many other online retailers to implement it to improve conversation rates and increase their customers' average order size. Here are seven different types of product recommendations:

• Frequently Bought Together: This is a recommendation for items that are commonly purchased together by customers who have made similar purchases.
• Store Bestsellers: Recommend your store's best-selling items to your customers.
• Category Bestsellers: Recommend items in the category your customer last purchased.
• Previously viewed items: People don't typically purchase after viewing an item for the first time. Offering a previously viewed section will help customers return to what they were previously interested in.
• Similar Products: This is a great way to sell your products, and it also encourages your customers to continue browsing your store's collection and make a purchase.
• Trending Products: This involves having a list of product features that are currently trending.
• New Arrivals: This will be great for your regular customers and people who are excited about new releases.

2) Continue the purchase function

If you use Netflix, you're probably familiar with their "Continue Watching" feature, which helps us return to where we left off. Well, Netflix's amazing feature has helped revolutionize personalization for e-commerce businesses, as well as offering users a better, more personalized shopping experience. You can now implement the "continue shopping" feature on your website. This method is useful for your customers as it remembers your visitor's previous actions and preferences from previous shopping sessions. This makes it easier for them to return to what they were recently doing. This feature is especially useful for shoppers who are returning to your site. For example, if you own an online home accessories store and your customer came to your store to view your linen sheets and then left, it would be very helpful for them to be greeted with the "Continue Shopping" feature.

3) Personalized emails

Your relationship or interactions with your customers shouldn't end as soon as they leave your online store or after a successful transaction. One way e-commerce giants like Amazon continue to market to their customers even after they leave your site is through email campaigns. Sites like Amazon send follow-up emails to their customers and potential customers offering them new and attractive deals on products they've shown interest in. This acts as a little nudge for your customers, helping you convince them to finally complete their purchase with a sweet new offer. Email marketing isn't something you should brush aside from your store's marketing campaign, as it's still considered one of the best ways to reach and share your marketing message with your customers and offer them special, personalized offers.

4) Retarget during the session

Traditionally, retargeting is considered the practice of using targeted ads or emails to users who visited your website but left without making a purchase. People also use retargeting to upsell and cross-sell to their existing customers. However, you don't have to wait for your customers to leave your site before going on the retargeting offensive. Instead, do it on-site with some relevant, behaviorally triggered offers. For example, you can offer your first-time visitors a special discount on their first purchase. Another way to retarget your customers during their session is to offer them a special discount or free shipping if their purchase reaches a certain price threshold. There's no limit to the level of creativity you can get when designing these pop-ups to offer enticing offers. You can redirect your customers during the session:

• Offering a buy one get 2
• Offering free delivery
• Special discounts
• Freebies for a specific purchase
• Loyalty points
• Packages

You can leverage these offers and more, depending on what you think is best for your store and your users. Using these targeting methods will increase sales, boost customer engagement, and increase customer loyalty.

5) Allow customers to choose delivery dates

While there are many conveniences to online shopping compared to shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, one area where online shopping may have a disadvantage is the lack of instant gratification since the purchased items still need to be shipped. Shipping is something your customers consider very carefully. They want affordable and timely delivery. Another thing you might consider adding to the cart page is a calendar that allows customers to specify a delivery date for their order. Most online shoppers are concerned about the product delivery date and whether they can receive their orders on that date. What if you allowed your customer to choose a convenient delivery date for their order? You can do this by adding a calendar to the cart page where shoppers can select a preferred date. This is especially useful for those who might be out of town or at work on the specified delivery date. It will also help you avoid customer disappointment when they couldn't receive their orders because they were out or busy at the time of delivery.

6) Geolocation

Geolocation is a technology that allows your website to know where your visitor is located via their IP address. This type of technology allows your website to know which country, state, and city your customer is in. This is especially useful if you ship to customers from various locations, and it will also help you provide a more personalized experience. Here's how geolocation can help you and your customers:

• Provides an approximation of item delivery
• Offers several shipping options
• Offers options for preferred language
• Corresponds to the currency
• Corresponds to the measurement system
• Runs several campaigns in different regions
• Weather-sensitive customization

As you can see, using geolocation for your online store is a powerful personalization tool that your customers will find very useful and engaging. This makes purchasing much easier for them, as their options are customized based on where they are in the world.

Conclusion

Offering your customers a personalized experience through your online store is a way to show them that you care and that you can tailor your services to their wants and needs. It's also a great way to convert store visitors by providing them with meaningful and valuable product suggestions.

Contact us

What do you think of this article? Are you looking to implement ways to personalize your customers' online shopping experiences? If so, let us know. At Yastime, our passion is helping online entrepreneurs succeed in their eCommerce and dropshipping efforts. Contact us today and together we'll build a better and more successful eCommerce site.