E-Commerce Personalization: Benefits for Your Brand and Customer Journey

In today’s market, e-commerce personalization is the key to success. Personalization is a way for e-commerce sites to tailor their online store experience according to the preferences of each individual user. 

By leveraging personalization tactics, e-commerce companies can provide customers with more relevant product recommendations and create a more personalized experience overall. But personalization isn’t just about making your customers feel special. It’s also about understanding browsing behavior and purchase history, increasing conversion rates, retaining loyal customers, capturing new customers, and more. The list goes on! 

In this article, we’re giving you ways to optimize your customer journey with personalization, examples to show you how it works, and tips to get started today.

What Is E-Commerce Personalization?   

E-commerce personalization is a way of improving the online shopping experience for people within your customer base through personalized shopping experiences designed to meet the individual customer’s needs. Personalization goes beyond just suggesting items. Retailers use zero-party data — data that customers actively provide — to tailor product recommendations, content, communications, and more to individual shoppers. 

Having zero-party data unlocks a whole new world for online retailers. It enables brands to retarget existing customers with products they want and need so that the retailer can boost numbers of returning visitors.

E-commerce website personalization can be based on many factors, including a user's demographic information, browsing history, and past purchases.

What Are the Benefits of E-Commerce Personalization?

E-commerce personalization can help you better understand customer needs and preferences — as well as customer behavior — so that you can build meaningful relationships with shoppers. This leads to lots of big benefits:

• Increased customer retention: Sixty percent of consumers say that they’ll come back to brands that offer personalized product recommendations.
• Higher conversion rates: Customers may be unsure what they’re looking for, but you can offer enticing options based on their browsing history, previous purchases, and other factors.
• Brand advocacy: Creating an overall great e-commerce experience helps build the kind of loyalty that encourages customers to recommend your brand to others.
• Increased customer engagement: Personalized experiences are key to providing shoppers with the most relevant content and products, which creates a more engaging experience.
• Higher average order values (AOVs): Personalized recommendations for both returning customers and first-time visitors represent a chance to cross-sell and upsell items related to those the customer has added to their cart.

Personalization unlocks a world of opportunities for e-commerce brands. Not only do customers get a better, more tailored shopping experience, but businesses benefit from being able to increase conversions and AOVs while building customer loyalty and engagement. Personalization can help e-commerce stores stand out from the competition by offering an unparalleled user experience that keeps customers coming back.

How to Optimize Customer Journeys With Personalization

E-commerce personalization is all about optimizing customer journeys. E-commerce businesses accomplish this through collecting and analyzing customer data. Once you’ve done that, you can try some of the following tactics to create a better customer journey.

1. Use Product Detail Page (PDP) Recommendations

Whenever you’re on Amazon, you’ve probably noticed that product pages usually have “Products Recently Viewed,” “Customers Also Like,” or “Similar Products” sections. These are product detail page recommendations — and they’re a powerful type of personalized content that can make browsing easier and more enjoyable for customers while increasing your own profitability. 

PDP recommendations rely on browsing history and behavioral data to make smart recommendations in real time that align with what a particular shopper has expressed interest in. It’s a great way to expose customers to new products, inspire them, and motivate them to make a purchase.

2. Leverage Smart Shopping Carts

On average, just over 70% of shopping carts end up abandoned. Why? Reasons can vary. 

For example, during the checkout process, almost half of abandoned carts are left behind because customers find that shipping, taxes, or other fees are too high. 

However, when people abandon carts prior to the checkout process, one reason why is that they’re still in the consideration stage of the customer journey. They’re thinking about purchasing the products they added to the cart — but they want to consider some other options before going through the checkout process.

Add functionality to your online store to save users’ shopping carts and make the customer journey easier. Customers can pick up shopping right where they left off instead of starting over from scratch.

Because the shopping cart and checkout process is an important touchpoint along the customer journey, you can also use this as an opportunity for even more personalization. It’s a good time to cross-sell or upsell with recommendations for items or upgrades that complement the items the user has in their cart.

3. Create Dynamic Bestseller Lists

Your store’s homepage is the perfect place to add some automation in the form of dynamic bestseller lists. These lists highlight popular products — and you can use customer data to customize them for people in different locations or who have expressed interest in different types of products.

These lists don’t necessarily have to be all-time bestsellers, either. Try creating lists of top-reviewed items, popular items in particular categories, or another type of list.

4. Try Automated Email Marketing

On-site personalization is a powerful tool — but how do you reach customers with personalized messaging when they’re not on your site? Simple! Develop automated email marketing assets that you can send out when users take certain actions. For example:

• Send abandoned cart emails to encourage customers to make a purchase when they’ve left items in their shopping cart.
• If a shopper hasn’t been back in a while, send out a “we miss you” email that features personalized product recommendations based on their prior purchases — plus a discount for further encouragement.
• To encourage repeat purchases, try sending out order follow-ups featuring recommendations based on their prior orders.

How to Collect the Right Data for E-Commerce Personalization

To create an intuitive personalized experience, you’ll need a couple of things: data and a way to handle that data. Consider investing in a personalization platform, personalization engine, or customer relationship management platform. Any of these solutions will help you gather data from multiple sources — your website, social media, and elsewhere — so that you can effectively analyze it.

Next, let’s look at two ways you can collect zero- and first-party data for e-commerce personalization.

Website Analytics

Website analytics are a key way to gather first-party data for e-commerce personalization. Make sure that your site is tracking the following for each user:

• Pages viewed
• Time spent on site
• Items added to carts
• Items added to wishlists
• Past purchases

That’s a basic list of metrics to get you started — and you can add more as time goes on.

Crucially, you should also make sure that customers can opt in to data collection. For example, if you’re using first-party cookies on your site to collect browsing data, include a pop-up notification for first-time visitors that explains what data you’re collecting and how you will use it — and then make sure that the notification gives them the ability to opt out of data collection if they so desire.

Not only does this help you maintain compliance with data collection and security regulations, but it also helps you build trust with customers.

Create Quizzes and Other Engaging Experiences

Quizzes, lookbooks, and other online experiences not only engage customers but also allow you to collect data. You can learn a lot about customer preferences based on the answers they provide — and you can also receive contact information in exchange for quiz results so that you can send out personalized marketing messages via email.

With Jebbit, you can create a variety of engaging experiences. Here are some examples:

• Product Match Quizzes: The most popular option, Product Match Quizzes offer a personalized recommendation, saving consumers from doing research or option-weighing. This way, you become the buyer’s personal shopper and unearth the “why” behind the buy for your brand.
• Personality Quizzes: Personality Quizzes are a fun, playful way for consumers to learn about themselves. Capture consumer preferences on topics that are both core to your brand and also helpful in painting a full picture of who they truly are as a person so you can build strong, one-on-one relationships. For example, Jebbit created a personality quiz for DraftKings.
• Interactive Lookbooks: Interactive Lookbooks turn traditional product catalogs into beautiful digital displays that showcase your collections, gift ideas, and more. They can then drive customers to specific pages on your site based on their preferences.

Build and design fun, engaging customer experiences with speed and control, all while capturing customer preferences as zero-party data.

P.S.: Jebbit also offers more than 50 pre-built templates to help you get started!

By understanding what customers like and dislike and what they’re interested in, you can create these personalized experiences that turn first-time, new customers into loyal customers that keep coming back.

Once a retailer has collected customer data, they can then use this information to personalize their e-commerce website content, product recommendations, email campaigns, marketing campaigns, and more to cater to their customers needs.

Ultimately, this helps e-commerce brands differentiate themselves from the competition and stay ahead of the game.

What Is an Example of E-Commerce Personalization?   

Let’s take a look at an e-commerce personalization example. 

If a customer is looking at a certain type of product on your e-commerce platform, you can offer them personalized recommendations for other items in the same category. You can also use personalization to upsell or cross-sell by suggesting similar products that go well with what the website visitor is currently viewing.

Here is an example of a customer quiz question from a candle company: “What scent are you looking for?”

The answer options could be something like:

1. Fruity
2. Woody
3. Sweet

The site visitor will choose which scent they are most interested in. Then, the quiz will generate all of the products that cater to the scent they picked. The shopper will then most likely place that personalized item into their shopping cart. This strategy also allows for less cart abandonment.

Once you’re armed with personal data that you obtained straight from the consumer, the next step is to make sure that it gets put to good use. By leveraging personalization tools and technologies, e-commerce businesses can deliver relevant product recommendations, tailored messaging, and dynamic content experiences that resonate with their customer base in a way no other brand can.

An E-Commerce Personalization Strategy Is the Key to Success for Any Retailer

Personalization efforts can help set e-commerce stores apart, allowing them to stand out in an increasingly competitive market. Now is the time to capitalize on creating personalized customer experiences to build customer loyalty, brand engagement, and increased conversion rates. Now that you know what it is, the ways it will benefit your business, and how to get started, what are you waiting for? 

To start on your personalization journey, schedule a strategy call today to speak with a Jebbit expert.