E-commerce Marketing: how to personalize the shopping experience

Some people love it and consider it the best therapy; others loathe it – e-commerce shopping splits the crowd. When it comes to purchasing new items online, the main drawback for people seems to be the time spent looking through a huge variety of choices. What would be the best choice to fix this issue? In an ideal world, one would walk into a retail store, and the staff would already know the likes and dislikes of a client. They would present them with a few tailored options that perfectly suit their tastes. It would make for an exclusive shopping experience, letting the client feel cherished.

What if we were to tell you that such an idea is not too far fetched when it comes to the e-commerce industry? It is where the benefits of e-commerce shopping come to shine. Nowadays, technology is advanced enough to provide a fairly advanced level of e-commerce personalization without costing a lot. It can be a way to help your client find the buried treasure of purchase, that can be so hard to locate throughout the vast world of choices that e-commerce provides.

Personalization – Implementing Innovative Ecommerce Marketing Tools 

 1. A Personalized E-commerce Homepage  

Your e-commerce homepage is one of the main ways to communicate branding and your company’s worldview to potential customers. It enables you to differentiate yourself in the huge landscape of the internet. The homepage can be made to be dynamic and different for each visitor with the help of cookies. Exact eCommerce website visitation data can be collected and used to your benefit via this function. Say your potential client has a liking for three particular categories on your website. With the collection of cookie data, you can smartly tailor what your customer sees when he visits your main homepage the next time. Instead of viewing the generic categories, you have the opportunity to redirect a customer to new additions that might interest him, related to his recorded activity. It will likely be highly appreciated by your customers and will translate into more e-commerce sales. In fact, according to a report done by Accenture, 91% of consumers are inclined to purchase from companies who remember them and present personalized offers. Additionally, 83% are fine with sharing their personal information in exchange for a personalized experience – fantastic news for e-commerce marketing!

2. A Personalized E-commerce Shopping Guide

Another great addition to your e-commerce strategies is offering clients personalized shopping guides. By employing very simple methods, such as establishing quizzes and budgets for your clients to fill in, you will be able to provide personalized product recommendations. After your client takes a short amount of time to fill in information about his taste preferences, algorithms can perform the job of customizing complete combinations of items accordingly. In the world of clothing retail, this would mean presenting the recommendation for a completely customized outfit. Large brands that are already using such methods are Zara and Asos – their success speaks for themselves. Such personalization techniques can be shaped to complement any online e-commerce models, not merely the retail industry.

Additionally, by offering a mailing list service, you can continue to suggest new outfits, fitted to the tastes of a customer. It is an excellent way to stay relevant and engaging in the eyes of your client. After all, with the countless e-commerce stores operating, continuous attention is arguably the highest currency to establish your brand.

3. Recently Viewed Items

Often online shopping binges turn into dozens of opened tabs opened in hopes of finding the best available option. In the throes of all the choices, it is much to ask of a client to remember something particular he liked from your site. You can easily help out by establishing a specialized bar of recently viewed items. It can help your customer pick up from where he left the last session, thereby saving much effort in finding his liked items. As it is known, ease and effortlessness of the shopping experience are the main things that turn into e-commerce sales. As trivial as various toolbars may seem, a pleasant shopping experience adds up one detail at a time. A list of recently viewed items is one of the simple but important factors to raise the quality of your e-commerce business. It could be the differentiator between a client forgetting about particular items which he liked, or rekindling a love for options he was on the fence about previously. 

All in all, personalization is a technologically, simple, but incredibly effective way to change the definition of e-commerce and expand its functionality. There are many psychological and user-experience enhancing aspects of providing potential clients with specialized choices. These will increase the benefits of e-commerce to customers by adding a touch of care. To ease the treasure hunt that an online shopping spree can turn into, It is a little effort that frequently makes or breaks a successful e-commerce business.

If you have any experience, tips, and tricks related to e-commerce personalization, we would love to know about them. Please leave your comments below, as we highly appreciate your opinions!

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(Featured image by PhotoMIX Company via Pexels)

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