Guest Post: How to Personalize Your E-Commerce Website to Boost Your Sales

(Image Source: Skubana)

Global pandemic and fast digitalization of the world have changed the world of business a lot and made it move almost fully online.  Clients also changed their way of shopping–most of them now prefer to do it online.

Due to this, retailers had to change their usual working way and move to e-commerce and create online stores to be able to continue doing business. Such digitalization increased the competition between the online shops and changed the way customers choose the stores to shop in. They now prefer stores with the best user and shopping experience and can easily leave the website if they don’t get what they want.

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Due to this, the personalization of the e-commerce store and smooth user experience has become one of the most prominent parts of creating an e-commerce website and attracting users to the shop. What are the best ways to personalize your e-commerce website, why it is important, and how to do it better? Let’s see.

The Importance of a Personalized E-Commerce Store

With moving to online shopping, people now have a lot more choices of online stores, and they often may already have some preferences and expectations, which means online stores should try harder now to keep their business competitive. There are many statistics that can prove that if you personalize your e-commerce website, it can help to attract new customers and keep the regular ones.

• 90% of US customers think that personalized websites are more attractive to shop there.

• 65% of customersused product personalization at least once.

• 45% of customerswill shop elsewhere if the website is not personalized.

• More than 60% of consumers would likely become repeat customers if the website is personalized.

• 57% of users will share their personal data if it helps to provide a more personalized experience.

The stats above show how important personalized e-commerce stores are for online shoppers. It’s clear that e-commerce websites can only benefit from e-commerce personalization. And here is what your clients will benefit from: 

• Better customer experience.

   Personalization allows users to get a good e-commerce customer experience as they can find what they need quickly based on their previous searches.

• Relevant recommendations.

   It provides users with targeted offers and recommendations that are based on customer behavior and searching history on the website.

• Customer loyalty.

   Analyzing the behavior and providing customers with exactly what they need helps customers feel treated individually, increasing their loyalty and trust in the website.

• Higher engagement.

  Personalization of the website helps customers to stay longer on the website as they get a better user experience. It also can help to make decisions faster due to highly-personalized content.

How to Personalize your E-Commerce website

There are many ways to personalize your e-commerce website that you can use. If you have created your e-commerce website on an e-commerce platform such as Magento or Shopify, they often have many e-commerce personalization features included. Although, if you need something specific, you can simply apply to get exactly what you want. In case you create a custom e-commerce website, you can ask your development team to create a more personalized website.  But which features are important to have and how to use them? Let’s read below.

Personalized Homepage

The homepage is what the customer sees when they first visit your website, so why not increase website usability? For online shops, it is quite simple to make even after the first visit to the site. We talk about cookies. Collecting cookies allows the website to know more about the customer, their likes and dislikes, searching history, and behavior. Then why not use it to increase the e-commerce customer experience?

One of the good ways to use it is to offer the customer personalized promotions, even after their first visit. Moreover, knowing the users’ behavior, based on their searching history and preferred items on the e-commerce website, you can redirect them from the homepage right to the category they are interested in to reduce the searching time and improve customer satisfaction with the site.

In addition, homepage personalization can be done in other ways, such as depending on the location (people from different countries are interested in different items, what you can use to offer a personalized homepage for different people), countries’ holidays (to promote specific products and offer promotions dedicated to this very holiday), age, and even device.

Intelligent Product Recommendations

Intelligent product recommendations are another great feature to use in website personalization as such an option creates a unique experience for each customer who visits the site. Customers would likely return to websites that pay attention to their preferences as it allows them to feel special and caring by the business.

To implement intelligent product recommendations, you can again use cookies which can help to track customers’ shopping behavior and what items they search for the most to create the list of recommendations. If the user visits the site for the first time, they can see the recommendation list of what other users liked, who could have the same preferences. Another good thing to add is the list of best-sellers that can help the user to see the most popular products and look through them.

Recently Viewed Products

Recently viewed products is a feature that allows users who were interested in the product but left the page to easily find it again without any inconvenience of time-wasting searching around the website.

A list of recently viewed items with call-to-action signs reminds the customers about their last searching session and item they have found interesting. It would create a continuous shopping process even if the customer visited the site some time ago, which also helps to increase the e-commerce customer experience as clients will see that the site cares about them and their preferences.

Product Customization

Product customization in e-commerce allows the customers to get customized products depending on their preferences. Customization has many advantages, such as increased customer loyalty to the product (which they are responsible for as they are the ones who choose materials, color, size, etc.), to the brand that allows such kind of customization, and also increases sales as such strategy attracts new people who prefer their ideas over the regular items.

Such brand as Nike offers their users to get customized shoes (size, color, material, etc.). Skullcandy provides services of customization, such as adding business logos to their products. Blue Sky allows customizing the planners by uploading users’ own images or choosing from available to create their planners. Solid Surface is another online shop that provides the ability to customize its product by setting different options (color, material, width, depth, and sink quantity).

Another good option is that customization in e-commerce allows getting a deeper understanding of customers’ preferences, dislikes, and behavior over a particular item for later providing more specific products.

Personalization Based on Location

Personalization based on the location is another good feature to implement when you personalize your e-commerce website. This information helps to provide relevant information, such as appropriate criteria of sizes, currency, and shipping options. Apart from this, you can use information from tracking cookies to suggest items that are popular in the customers’ area. It has a positive user experience in e-commerce as they get recommendations for what they may need right now.

You also can use this information to offer special promotions based on the county’s holidays or events. Such attention can positively affect the site’s rates and attract new users as customers will see that they are important to this website, which will lead them to come back to it and make new purchases.

Personalization Based on User Behavior

When you need to attract new customers and keep the old ones, you can try e-commerce personalization based on user behavior. Such a feature uses website cookies to track users’ behavior, what items they looked through, and their likes and dislikes. This information allows you to provide users with personal promotions, discounts if it is first-time visitors, or simply to personalize greetings for your clients.

What Else Should You Do to Increase Your Sales?

After learning about the main features you can use to personalize your e-commerce website, it is time to find out how to implement them better to get a positive e-commerce customer experience and attract new customers.

Creative Pop Ups

Popups are widely used in e-commerce websites, and the reason is that such messages often have information relevant to the customers (for example, personalized discounts for first-time visitors). These pop ups are often call-to-action, so putting relevant information can increase the chances of buying items. Sometimes too many popups can hurt the user experience. It is recommended to create pop-ups with exit-intent technology, so the pop-up will appear when a visitor tries to leave the website 

Special Offers for Previous Clients

If you want to attract the attention of the previous customers, you can use special offers for items they were interested in but didn’t have a chance to buy. You can do it in the following ways: make discounts depending on the day of the week, make special deals for the most popular products, or provide discounts for the most active customers.

Personalized Email Marketing

Websites can use clients’ tracking cookies in one more way–to send personalized emails based on customers’ recent activity on the website. If you think personalized emails don’t work, you may be wrong, as many customers can wait for such action anyway.

You can send an email if the customer looked through the shopping images, selected anything but didn’t buy yet. With such an email, you can remind them about their unfinished purchase. Personalized emails also can include the collection of relative to the selected or bought items that also can increase the converse on the website.

Summary

Personalization of the e-commerce website is the most important thing now as it doesn’t only helps to attract new customers but also helps you retain and engage the regular clients, allowing them to get exactly what they want, which in turn helps your website to increase the engagement and user experience in e-commerce.

Don’t neglect the website personalization, and it will help your business to grow, get new customers and engage regular ones to buy new items, differentiate you from others, and increase your clients’ loyalty.

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