What exactly is ecommerce personalization? It’s precisely what the name implies: to tailor a perfect fit for every single user. If you browse the topic on the internet, you probably know more about it than you realize. Personalized marketing requires collection and analysis of user data for the purpose of displaying relevant offers and content to them. It can entail recommendations, discounts, specific e-mail follow-ups and more.
The most visible and simplest personalized marketing example is when an ad on Facebook shows up in your feed for a humidifier, for example, that you’ve been thinking of buying, but have not yet decided to buy. Maybe it has been sitting for awhile in your cart.
Perhaps you’ve been looking at different humidifiers, but you’ve come back to this particular one. Maybe you have questions about ease of cleaning or price and are doing research. Even though this is one of the most visible examples, it also seems creepy to consumers.
When conducted openly, personalization is a critical method to build stronger consumer connections. Ecommerce personalization gives sellers a way to offer what they have found to be relevant to each unique customer in a useful and interesting way.
This process, in turn, helps improve the customers’ shopping experiences and creates more return customers. Let’s examine the larger extent of these benefits. Why do businesses use ecommerce personalization? Although viewed as a recent phenomenon, personalization benefits in ecommerce have been tracked closely and–for a few decades–shared among companies.
Amazon is recognized as a pioneer in this practice, and their involvement can be traced back as far as 1998. However, besides significant recorded sales increases as a result of personalized marketing, what’s the appeal of using these methods?
The appeal is that each user experiences a unique curated experience created specifically for them. Personalization helps ecommerce to emulate in-person shopping experiences. For example, an on-line shop does not have the capability to have a salesperson bring a customer items in their size and price range that they might like. Personalization assists in translating that personal experience for the digital realm.
You might see personalization in e-commerce embraced nearly universally since it works. Displaying related products, options for you may like, more like these, etc. are ways that help consumers more easily find similar items to ones they are viewing currently or have viewed previously.
Personalization is the present reality and common practice of the e-commerce sphere. It improves user experience since relevant content offers an experience which is far better than would random content.
