To better understand these concepts and create a personalization strategy, it is very helpful to examine the various ways it’s used for e-commerce. The examples below highlight strategies for personalization for various media such as apps, email marketing, desktop, and touch, and how they interact.
1. Personalized Home Pages
Homepages are excellent examples of personalization. They provide an opportunity for presenting content to customers that may interest them based on past browsing habits, purchase trends, location, and many other factors.
Homepage personalization obviously is a great choice as far as streaming services. It’s a far more user-friendly spin on a guide section for cable providers. Personalized homepages allow users to use the homepage as their basis. What does that mean? Say I preview or consider something on the site, but I always end up going back to the homepage because it’s where everything I need is located. Therefore, this setup is particularly useful for e-commerce sites having one product type (social network, video streaming, news subscription sites). Netflix’s homepage has almost everything you possibly could be seeking: recommendations based on past viewing, genre categories, the most popular shows worldwide or for my location, a continue watching option, etc. It absolutely feels like I have arrived home. It feels almost too personal for taking a screenshot of it.
Your current location influences what you are looking for. Although geolocation varies in relevance depending on the e-commerce site, it is absolutely a useful tool. Following is an example from Airbnb: If I’m planning for an escape, it’s certainly useful to explore nearby locations before distant locales. But this is not the sole helpful aspect of geo-targeting. Websites can determine where you’re located and adjust currency, options for shipping, and personalize what’s available for you through cookies. The recently viewed feature is a way to reconnect with customers and give them the experience of picking up where they left off.
2. Feature Recently Viewed
Sometimes buyers are ready to purchase an item but worry about the price or get distracted before completing the transaction. It’s definitely beneficial for sites to make it easy for users to return and complete their purchases.
The recently viewed feature promotes continuity for e-commerce relationships. The consumer might go ahead and purchase something shown or see an item that they had considered, but are glad they did not buy. It is a helpful feature for almost any type of e-commerce business.
Her is an example of how a personalization tool for browsing history can be useful for on-line workout or educational classes. Alo Moves is a brand and Alo Yoga’s website has a subscription service for on-line work-out classes. Their section: “Jump Back In,” is very useful. The user has the opportunity to finish a class they started or to revisit classes they have completed and might have enjoyed. It’s possible to even further personalize the page according to interest level. Products (for example, classes) could be presented by most frequency, first.
