Why eCommerce Personalization Wins and How to Start Today

What if your eCommerce store knows what your customers want the moment they land on your website? Would not they feel like magic? Whether it’s possible searches, product recommendations, or personalized offers; you are giving exactly what the user is looking for— no guesswork required.

The shoppers will think that the brand has read their minds. They will develop an invisible feeling with that brand. That’s what the magic of eCommerce personalization is – giving special treatment to everybody.

Now, what’s the payoff?

— driving engagement, slashing cart abandonment, and boosting your bottom line.

That’s why eCommerce personalization has grabbed millions of entrepreneurs’ attention and no one is ready to miss the option to make the extra profit margin.

Let’s dive into this blog and explore the opportunities that come with eCommerce personalization.

What is eCommerce personalization

eCommerce personalization is like having a personal assistant for every visitor on your site. It uses smart technology to tailor the shopping experience to each individual’s preferences and behaviors—think custom product recommendations, targeted offers, and search results that match their needs. For customers, it feels like your store was designed just for them.

For brands, it’s about segmenting the users into groups. Shoppers of a particular customer behavior find it a bespoke shopping experience.

Why eCommerce personalization matters

How you treat the customers portrays your brand value. Focus on users’ lifestyles, preferences, and necessities keeps you prepared to serve the users better every time.

A personalized eCommerce shopping experience tunes the shopping experience, making a user feel like a guest, a friend, and a special person, establishing a positive mindset toward the brand.

No one would like to visit where customers don’t feel welcome.

It’s about treating every shopper like a VIP—showing them you understand their needs and value their business. Here’s why eCommerce personalization is a game-changer:

Satisfactory user experience

No wonder 38% of millennials prefer tailored search results instantly.

Personalized eCommerce shopping makes a user easily choose what they require. This presents a tailored user experience for every customer.

eCommerce personalization, resulting from analyzing customer data, abandoned carts, and surveys, helps you reduce pointless efforts and introduce useful features. From this, customers get engaged with your brand more and make fast buying decisions..

Higher average order value

Average order value (AOV) is the equation of total revenue and total order. It means how much on average a shopper spends per order.

eCommerce personalization techniques include options shoppers can’t resist in one visit. This harnesses the shoppers’ preference, which eventually convinces the shopper to buy more at once rather than purchasing frequently but in small amounts.

Suppose, you are recommending a shopper buy a pair of socks and knee braces just after purchasing a pair of sports shoes. If the shopper gets convinced by the recommendation and buys those socks and braces, the range of the cost regarding the order will increase, which will increase the AOV. This personal touch builds trust, turning one-time shoppers into loyal fans.

Increased conversion rate

eCommerce personalization helps you build an ecosystem that creates attraction, empowers customer engagement, and improves conversion. 

If the number of website visitors increases consistently but the ROI remains the same, there’s a problem with your conversion rate.

eCommerce personalization reduces the chance of a customer leaving a site without being satisfied with whatever the offers are. 

Relevant recommendation process

Spot-on recommendation keeps new visitors browsing. At a point of staying longer, they might consider purchasing.

The new users don’t even know what they will do in a few minutes. Spot-on relevant recommendations from your site can excite them to stay a few more minutes in your store and consider purchasing. 

The better the recommendation engine is, the higher the chances that shoppers will consider buying the products.

Improved brand trust and loyalty

Brand trust is that asset you can earn at once and need to protect daily. Still, there are chances the trust may disappear anytime if something dissatisfies the customers.

Where does the brand trust reside?

It’s in the support email, product information, product quality, and every promise you make to customers. Brand trust can’t be earned through what you say or show. It’s up to the customers and how they engage with your brand.

Personalized shopping experience testifies the brand trust and loyalty. It works like a parameter through which your customers can assess how you respond regarding an individual’s demand.

User engagement and retention

Those days are gone when users simply used to come, see, and purchase instantly. Now, in this competitive arena of omnichannel eCommerce marketing, you need to engage your customers in every possible way.

If you somehow fail to engage your audience at any specific point of the customer journey, your competitors will grab the chance to steal your customers. 

Decreased cart abandonment

Analyze the abandoned carts, and respond one by one to increase the chance of succeeding in abandoned cart recovery.  Apply abandoned cart recovery strategies, including personalized notifications, discounts, chat, etc.

Analyzing abandoned carts and fixing the problems will help you give your customers a better personalized eCommerce shopping experience they will crave again and again. Personalized reminders—like an email with a discount on items left behind—nudge customers to complete their purchase, cutting abandonment rates.

Scopes to implement eCommerce personalization

Thanks to the implementation of AI, automation, and machine learning, massive opportunities in eCommerce personalization have been introduced.

Here, you will find several of the most practical ones you can implement in your running strategies.

Personalized search results

Personalized search results can be generated depending on the user’s location, demographics, interests, or previous search histories.

The user’s perspective defines their search intent. Two people can use the same search keywords to look for two different things. In that case, AI or Machine learning will tailor the search results by analyzing the data and maintaining the algorithm. 

Personalized product recommendations

Personalized product recommendation is an outcome of the combination of purchase history, customer preference, mostly purchased combo, etc. Your recommendation engine will show customers what they might want based on their previous history and their click data on your eCommerce store. Adapt your approach to customer habits. Show limited-time offers to impulse buyers, detailed guides to info-seekers, or discounts to bargain hunters—matching their triggers keeps them engaged.

How recommendation engines work:

• Uses location to show nearby stocks and delivery aspects
• Uses demographics to match the trends based on age and gender
• Follows the interests while suggesting based on personal preference

User-specific retention strategy

Every customer doesn’t have the same reason to come and purchase from your website. To convince your customers to go back to your store, you need to analyze the reasons behind their purchases. Sometimes, these are the common ones and most of the time, buyers have unique reasons.

If the analysis gets closer to why a customer purchases from your site, you can experiment with user-focused retention strategies.

Custom product bundles

Depending on the customer’s need, you can let them have a customized bundle, which might be packed with complementary goods, discounted items, or relevant ones. 

Suppose a customer adds a travel bag to the cart. And you suggested a bundle of a camping light and a water bottle along with the bag that has a 10% discount. The customer who had the intent of buying one product now has bought three. That’s an instant bump on sale from a custom product bundle.

This will work if you can manage customers’ relevant purposes and pricing. 

Shopping behavior-based marketing

Once you have categorized your customers into particular customer behaviors, you can segment the whole marketing presentation.

Show attractive products to impulse buyers, inform information seekers, offer discounts to discount-grabbers, and improve the overall user experience of your eCommerce site.

It’s all about balancing the rhythm with the particular customer base needs and following what they want and what they don’t want. What are their pain points? What triggers them to leave the site or what excites them to get more involved in shopping? 

In the end, it’s the one hook that you can use as a bridge to bring your target customer to the sales funnel.

Personalized rewards and discounts

Reward loyalty with tailored perks, like a 10% discount after five orders or a free gift after $500 spent. It’s a simple way to show appreciation and keep customers coming back.

Personalized rewards might be based on the total amount spent by the customer, the number of orders placed, or the total time of ordering; your customers have reasons to get specially treated.

Personalized retargeting ads

Customer segmentation and tracking user interests are the key takeaways to successfully implementing retargeting ads. 

Shoppers don’t buy random stuff. They are more likely to have particular interests whether they purchase instantly or keep in consideration for the next visit. 

Separate the group of visitors and fetch them with a strong proposition before your competitor takes over the chance. Your ad copy should be good quality to attract the right visitors, when they buy a product from you it will show relevant products another time. 

Ways you can apply for personalizing eCommerce experience

eCommerce personalization is a combination of technical and strategic aspects. Think of it as a high-energy salesperson tweaking his sales pitch for each customer. 

eCommerce personalization is a lot about thinking from the customer’s perspective. Here’s how you can bring a personalized eCommerce experience to your business – 

Gather and analyze data

Grab data from tons of shoppers through surveys, clicks, and carts, then analyze it deeply.

Once you have adequate data from your prospective customers, you can now analyze it specifically. Your customer analytics should answer some important questions.

What stops your customer from buying?

What makes your customers buy instantly?

What should your eCommerce store include or exclude?

Use tools like Google Analytics to spot trends like why customers abandon carts or which products sell best, then tweak your site accordingly.

Execute audience segmentation

Audience segmentation is the marketing strategy that can specify the target audience by separating them into subgroups. It might be maintained by considering age, location, profession, cultural diversity, purchasing history, etc.

It groups shoppers into different buckets where they have similar prospects. Applying a common strategy for one bucket can help you sell to many people. For example, send re-engagement emails with discounts to customers who haven’t bought in six months, bringing them back into your store.

Hear from the users

Whether it’s the reviews, complaints, support messages, social media comments, or user-generated content, users’ voices are crucial. 

To make sure you are connected to the users, you need to ensure there are some communication scopes such as omnichannel marketing, live chat, surveys, etc.

• Utilize the customer journey
• Ensure customer engagement through all media
• Reach out to hear from the users
• Respond cordially and take action regarding the complaints

Reviews, support chats, and social comments reveal what customers want. Act on it. If shipping complaints from customers pile up, work on it and highlight faster delivery options in your next marketing campaign.

Use tools like Fluent Forms, the fastest WordPress plugin to create a customer feedback form in a few clicks. Use these forms to collect customer data and analyze them for further strategy. Fluent Forms makes it easy to collect data using advanced features like conditional logic, numeric calculations, advanced form validation, and conversational forms.

Apply AI-powered personalization

Multi-step filtering is the key to implementing personalization in terms of eCommerce. AI-powered personalization helps fine-tune collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, and hybrid recommendation. 

AI evolves fast, speeding up workflows and allowing you to apply new selling tricks. 

The use of AI is ample and it includes these opportunities, but is not limited to:

• Personalized search
• Product recommendation
• Data analysis
• Product description creation
• Automated sales update

Establish dynamic content

The engagement in content shows the interest of your target customers. Fill up your marketing channels with a variety of helpful content and summarize customer’s preferences.

Suppose you have a spectacles brand. There are various types of glasses and frames containing various mindsets of fashion. You can pick the customer’s interest right there and separate the audience base through the content. Whoever likes wearing black glasses with a formal outfit will engage in visual content that shows that type of combination.

Wrap up

eCommerce personalization isn’t just a marketing strategy, it’s the future of online shopping. By using data, AI, and customer insights, you can create a tailored experience that drives customer loyalty and grows your revenue. 

Start with small experiments, test personalized recommendations in emails, or run ads targeting segmented audiences. Then, scale up as you see results on the go. Your customers will feel valued, and your business will thrive.