E-commerce is a highly competitive domain where small things are capable of making big differences. Sellers in this domain, thus, always look to identify these small elements to improve their revenues and reputation. While one requires a high-performance e-commerce store for selling the products, there is also a need to deliver unmatched services to the customers. Personalization is one of the key elements that drive success for such businesses as people always prefer to shop where they get exactly what they want.
A sound personalization strategy is, therefore, as crucial as investing in quality e-commerce development to elevate your online presence. Here, it becomes important to connect with the potential customers through technology and drive them to convert and generate ROI for your business. Advanced technologies such as Big Data and business analytics are to be adopted as the core of an effective personalization strategy. Here are a few steps you can take to personalize the shopping experiences and take your e-commerce business a notch higher.
Step 1: Aggregate usable information
Rich user data and information makes the foundation of personalization strategy in e-commerce. The data has to be relevant and usable so that it can be explored, processed and analyzed to create a strategy that is geared towards extending the reach and ROI of the business by enhancing the shopping experiences. To begin with, you must be sure that you get reliable and adequate user data that serves a good deal of useful information.
Step 2: Employ advanced segmentation
The next significant step of tailoring personalized experiences is to employ advanced segmentation on the basis of the user data that you collect. The success of the strategy greatly depends on the granularity of data being used for segmentation. The main types of data segmentation used includes:
- Demographic that uses gender, race, and ethnicity
- Geographic that uses city, country, and continent
- Psychographic that uses interests, lifestyle, and status
- Behavioral that uses product use frequency, reason for purchase, and desired discounts
Advanced segmentation enables the creation of laser-focused promotions and takes the personalization strategy to the next level.
Step 3: Tailor personalized recommendations
A smart seller has to think beyond providing the conventional personalized recommendations and get more technical while using the data to tailor them for fetching conversions. Online marketing specialists today are using sophisticated recommendation engines that use algorithms to calculate the products that are most likely to interest the potential customers on the basis of the data collected for them. Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence are the technologies that drive these engines, which can be integrated into the e-commerce stores to provide reliable recommendations.
Step 4: Think beyond online
The personalization techniques should go beyond online and should utilize offline channels too. It begins with personalizing the actual product delivered by the business and encompasses improving the delivery parameters such as packaging for attracting the shoppers.
Step 5: Personalize the prices too
Pricing personalization is another unique idea to provide a better shopping experience and improve conversions for the business. Offering blanket discounts can do more harm than good as they eventually devalue the products offered by the business. On the other hand, personalized pricing based on customer segmentation is a better way to entice the potential customers.
Step 6: Incentivize the purchases
Incentives serve as a potent tool when it comes to adopting personalization marketing strategy. You can offer incentives for the first-time registrations to expand the customer base. On the other hand, exclusive deals for the regular customers enables you to maintain the customer base. Both ways, the incentives have to be personalized according to the type of customers and their browsing behavior.
Conclusion
Advanced techniques and technologies are effectively resolving the challenges of personalized marketing to a considerable extent. These include trending technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data, and more. The complexities of these technologies, however, stand in the way of their adoption as a part of personalization strategy. For this reason, it is better to take help of a professional team to leverage them and use them to your advantage.
Team Orange Mantra has expertise in business intelligence technologies such as AI and big data and analytics, which makes them reliable e-commerce development partners. You can avail their expertise to create a result-oriented personalized marketing strategy for your online business.