Offering the right product at the right moment to the right person is the art of commerce. In your online store, this can be provided by e-commerce personalization strategies. They are helpful for boosting sales, raising the usability of e-commerce websites, and much more. See more details about e-commerce personalization in our blog post.
What is e-commerce personalization?
E-commerce personalization is a set of techniques to show individualized offers to different users. This includes inline content, pop-ups, information bars, off-site marketing, and more.
The difference in the offers is based on the implicitly or explicitly collected information about the user:
- history of purchased goods
- history of viewed goods
- abandoned shopping carts
- time on site
- first or recurrent visits
- personal data (e.g. name, gender, age, birthday)
- geolocation/IP address
- the referral source, or the channel of their arrival
- specific contextual factors (e.g. weather in the user’s location)
- the behavior of other users
and more.
Why is e-commerce personalization necessary?
When applied right, with a maximum of respect and a minimum of intrusion, e-commerce personalization does a lot of good things for your business. Among them:
- Your conversions and revenues grow thanks to better-tailored offers.
- Personalization enhances the user experience by letting your customers quickly find the products relevant to them in the ocean of others.
- An individual approach makes your customers feel appreciated and increases their loyalty to your brand.
- Personalization increases your average session duration, which, among other things, is beneficial for SEO.
Popular e-commerce personalization strategies
Personalizing based on geography
Using your customer’s location, you can:
- invite them to a particular country or language version of your site
- display the prices in the relevant currency (or offer to switch to it)
- show the delivery time for their country
- convert the product sizes into the country-specific ones
- show the most popular products for their location on top
and so on.
An even smarter e-commerce personalization strategy is to use factors like the weather to offer relevant goods. This can be accompanied by phrases like “Hey, we know it’s raining in London, but we’ve got nice umbrellas and raincoats for you.”. During the rain, customers will be thinking about these goods.
Displaying recently viewed products
It’s a common situation when customers view products, like them, but are not yet ready to buy. Their buying decision can be encouraged by a second glance at the viewed items. It is handy to not have to search again for something you once liked.
Example: the multi-domain e-commerce website JYSK created by our team:
Offering related products
Another set of interesting e-commerce personalization techniques deals with recommending other products to your customers. They may be:
- from the same category as the ones viewed
- from the same collection
- matching in colors and styles
- going well together based on functionality
and so on.
Depending on the price category of the previously viewed goods, you could also try up-selling, or offering products a little higher in price than the ones viewed.
Showing the choices of the crowd
Customers feel more confident about shopping when they know what others choose. There are many options here. You can show:
- what other customers also viewed
- what they are viewing now
- what they ultimately purchased
- how many users are viewing the product now
- how many items are left because of the product’s popularity
- the bestsellers in the category
and so on.
Offering coupons to first-time visitors
It’s great to encourage new visitors by showing them coupons with discounts on their first purchase. In return, you can ask for their email, get a chance to collect more information and expand your mailing list.
Showing personalized greetings to sign-in users
This is a very simple but powerful e-commerce personalization technique. Users feel more welcome with personalized greetings with their first names. This may be accompanied by greetings and discounts on holidays and the customers’ birthdays.
Sending abandoned cart emails
Shopping cart abandonment is a frequent phenomenon, but there is always a chance that the purchase will be finalized. So one of the popular off-site e-commerce personalization techniques is sending e-mails in the “You left something in your shopping cart” style. Friendly, intrusive, or creative messages have more chances for success.
Try e-commerce personalization with our development team
To have all these and many other e-commerce personalization strategies used on your website, all you need to do is hire Drupal ecommerce developers. Our development team is ready to do it using the best practices and smart personalization tools where necessary. Let the personalization begin!