3 benefits of using personalisation in eCommerce

benefits of using personalisation in eCommerce

Personalisation in retail is nothing new. Retailers and brands have been treating their customers as individuals well before the advent of online shopping, and for good reason. Personalisation works. Personalisation helps stores anticipate their customers’ needs, save them time, and provide offers that resonate with them. In fact, research from Fresh Relevance shows that almost half of shoppers (41%) would drop a retailer who sends irrelevant offers and one in four actively want to be sent offers and recommendations based on previous purchases.

 

But what exactly is eCommerce personalisation?

Ecommerce personalisation is when eCommerce stores deliver personalised and relevant experiences throughout their website and across email, through dynamic content and product recommendations based on shopper data, such as location and past purchases.

Fresh Relevance partners with UniFida to deepen the level of personalisation based on the UniFida Customer Data Platform. UniFida provides identity resolution to build a single view of a customer and deeper insight and targeting such as customer value, dormancy, or responsive to price reductions.

This provides real-time behaviour and insight combined with the power to act on it and enable cross-channel personalisation.

Read on to learn about three key benefits of personalisation in eCommerce.

 

1. Personalisation increases conversions

In today’s crowded digital landscape, competition is fierce and keeping shoppers’ attention is becoming increasingly vital. Personalisation helps eCommerce stores create seamless, tailored experiences that reduce bounce rate and friction and ultimately boost conversions.

The average Fresh Relevance client doing web personalisation sees an 8% increase in sales. What’s more, research from Epsilon shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalised experiences. In fact, 74% of consumers actively feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalised.

Here are some conversion-boosting personalisation tactics for eCommerce.

Geotargeting

A shopper’s physical location has a big influence on their interests and needs when engaging with an eCommerce store. So, it makes sense to treat customers differently based on where they are located and use geotargeting tactics to ensure that they see offers most relevant to their current context.

Try adding details of the shopper’s nearest store for click and collect options on the cart page. Or display weather-based dynamic banners on your website and in emails to showcase appropriate products.

Product recommendations based on personification

Every shopper has different tastes and preferences. So eCommerce stores should take note and treat each visitor to their site accordingly to ensure they resonate with everyone.

To convert visitors into customers, try displaying ‘people like you buy’ product recommendations. This type of recommendation looks at the shopper’s past browse or purchase history and compares it with other shoppers who have viewed those products, using a machine learning algorithm to recommend the most likely eventual purchases. It appeals to the shopper’s desire to follow the wisdom of the crowd, putting their purchase decision into the capable hands of their shopping predecessors.

Shoppers can also have different preferences when it comes to price. A tool like Fresh Relevance’s Price Affinity Predictor uses AI to predict the price level that will appeal to each new website visitor, helping you recommend the most relevantly priced products and keep visitors on your website.

Triggered emails

Triggered emails are an effective way to deliver personalised, real-time content to shoppers at the moment they are most likely to convert.

Two types of triggered emails to add to your email marketing toolkit are cart and browse abandonment emails. These messages are triggered when a shopper abandons a browsing session or their shopping basket without making a purchase. The average Fresh Relevance client doing both cart and browse abandonment emails sees a sales uplift of 16%.

Other types of triggered emails proven to boost conversions include price drop and back in stock alerts.

 

2. Personalisation improves customer loyalty

Consumers have come to expect a personalised experience from retailers and brands, and are more likely to return to stores that fulfil this expectation. According to Salesforce, 70% of consumers say a company’s understanding of their personal needs influences their loyalty.

With a wealth of browse and past purchase data available at the average eCommerce store’s fingertips, it has never been more possible to foster customer loyalty through personalisation.

Here are some eCommerce personalisation tactics that improve customer loyalty.

Product recommendations based on behavioural data

Ecommerce stores can start their loyalty campaigns straight after a customer has made a purchase, with post-purchase emails containing product recommendations that complement the item they’ve just bought.

Making recommendations based on the customer’s frequently browsed and purchased product categories is another effective way to foster loyalty and resonate with existing customers. Including these types of recommendations in your email newsletters helps bring customers back to your website, and displaying them on the homepage encourages customers to keep browsing and make a purchase.

Welcome back popover

Ecommerce stores can help customers pick up where they left off when they return to the website by including a popover to remind visitors of their last viewed product. Customers will appreciate the gesture, as they do not have to waste time finding the product they searched for last time.

Replenishment emails

For customers who have purchased perishable products that will need replacing, such as medicine or cosmetics, triggered replenishment emails serve as a useful reminder that the time to reorder is approaching. This type of triggered email helps boost customer loyalty and increases the likelihood of repeat purchases.

 

3. Personalisation encourages customer advocacy

Personalised experiences lead to happy customers, and happy customers often feel compelled to recommend brands and retailers they love to their network. A study by Forrester found that 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalised service or experience.

Beyond customers becoming advocates without any prompting thanks to a fantastic, personalised experience, eCommerce stores can use personalised post-purchase campaigns to encourage customer advocacy.

Try adding user-generated content (UGC) to your post-purchase emails to give customers inspiration on how to use or wear their new product, and let them know how to share their own UGC by telling them which social media channel to use and the relevant hashtag.

Post-purchase emails are also an effective way to gather reviews and ratings. Frequent buyers are an ideal source for positive reviews and ratings, so be sure to encourage them to share their experience by sending review requests.

 

Final thoughts

The eCommerce space is becoming increasingly competitive, and shoppers can switch to another brand at the click of a button. To convert and retain today’s consumers, providing personalised experiences isn’t a nice-to-have, it is essential.

A real-time personalisation and optimisation platform like Fresh Relevance helps digital marketers and eCommerce professionals drive revenue and customer loyalty. Combined with UniFida this enables identity resolution, single customer view and enhanced insights to enable cross-channel personalisation.

Download Fresh Relevance’s free eBook to learn more about building personalised experiences for your customers with Fresh Relevance.

This guest post was written by Fresh Relevance, a personalisation and optimisation platform for digital marketers.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed. Our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

How marketers can use data technology creatively

“Follow your own lamp”. This famous quotation from Buddha is as pertinent in today’s marketing world as it was in India in the 5th Century BCE.

We marketers get so much advice about how to go about our marketing from companies like the distinguished McKinsey down to blogs on LinkedIn that we need at times to take a step sideways and consider what our own lamp is telling us.

My personal experience from being at the receiving end of marketing communications is that thousands of them often merge into a uniform blur, with very little to take away at the end.

This has been caused by so many marketers not following their own lamps, but rather slavishly following the paths that have been specified for them by the great marketing consensus.

So how can marketers follow their own lamp and use data technology creatively?

One of our clients called Muck Munchers sells bacteria that you can put down your loo if you want to keep a clean flowing septic tank. They have never failed to ‘follow their own lamp’, and their business is growing at an admirable rate.

creative marketing by muck munchers

Read their whole quirky blog here: Muck Munchers Blog

A large part of a marketer’s individuality must certainly be expressed by the creativity they put into their advertising content. However we should not forget that there is also room for considerable creativity in the way we use our technology.

Let me provide a few examples:

– Customers like to be recognised for what they really are, rather than what they have done in the last five seconds on your website; so a dormant customer who after a long absence suddenly appears would be delighted by a ‘welcome back Mr Smith, and we have been saving something special for you’.

– A small amount of customer analysis can tell us who is and who is not a bargain hunter, so why not restrict your sales catalogues to those who are, and leave the rest to carry on happily paying the full price?

– Customers can be frustrated by going right through your website to find the one item they want, only to be told that it’s out of stock; so browsers who leave your website soon after finding this out will be delighted by an email telling them that if it’s not too late the item is now available.

– And there are triggers when it comes to automating communications. Think garden center; the original purchase of a plant could be followed up by plants that go well with the original purchase with weeding tools, with pest control and even with appropriate winter plant protection.

So please do keep your own lamp lit, and don’t feel the need to follow the herd!

And do come and talk to us if you want to discuss how to use marketing technology creatively.

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Why we’re reselling Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities

Why are we now reselling Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities alongside UniFida’s customer data platform?

fresh relevance

One of the key uses of a customer data platform is to ensure that decisions made about how and what to communicate with each individual customer across any channel are based on one consistent single customer view.

UniFida’s customer data platform provides the single customer view, combining both online and offline data, and we have partnered with Fresh Relevance to use their personalisation capabilities for website and email personalisation.

So, what does this mean in practice?

Let us provide some quite simplistic examples (we are sure that you will be capable of creating some much better ones):

One of your dormant customers, Mr Smith, is browsing your website and we recognise him from his cookie ID, or because he provides an email address; Fresh Relevance has already been provided by UniFida with detailed information about Mr Smith’s past purchases, and can use that to remind him that he often prefers category ABC. And it does this in combination with a valuable offer should he decide to reactivate himself after not ordering for so many months.

Another customer Mrs Cook has filled her basket on several occasions but never gone as far as making a purchase online. UniFida knows that Mrs Cook is in reality a good customer who normally orders by phone. The website, powered by Fresh Relevance, then offers Mrs Cook the opportunity to chat to an agent, and to turn her basket into an order having discussed her potential purchase with one of your agents, who understands when chatting to her what she has liked to purchase in the past.

In a third case you decide to reward previously loyal customers who have not so far ordered this season. UniFida knows how much Mr Jones usually spends at this time of year, so Fresh Relevance can personalise an email that gives Mr Jones a discount based on his previous season’s spend. In this way the loyalty bonus is only offered to customers who have not ordered, and not wasted on those who have done already.

In reality there are thousands of different ways in which Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities can work with a customer data platform like UniFida. The only limitation could be your fertile imagination’s capacity to come up with much smarter ideas.

What we like to do is to put these tools in your hands, so that you can experiment and find out what really works best for your customers. One thing we do know is that personalisation, when truly relevant to an individual customer, works wonders for your sales.

If you would like to talk more about personalisation and how to implement it for your business, please get in touch!

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

53% of marketers don’t have a cohesive strategy for Martech

A study conducted by technology-focused marketing consultancy, Demand Lab, reveals that 53% of marketers don’t have a cohesive Martech strategy, and if they do, then only 20% are implementing one!

It may be an exaggeration, but there is some truth here. Many B to C marketers have made their decisions about purchasing Martech in a very piecemeal way, and ended up with an extensive but uncoordinated marketing toolkit.

Each technology item has been purchased on its own, to do a specific job, without adhering to an overall strategy.

And their difficulties are compounded by the way that the Martech vendors usually present themselves:

– Confusing websites that don’t explain fully what the technology does
– Opaque pricing arrangements
– Features, not solutions focused descriptions
– Little explanation about how the systems are to be configured
– Or what level of internal IT support you need to make them work

We believe that the overall Martech strategy for most medium sized companies does not need to be over complicated.

There are some core components that should be the foundation of any Martech strategy, such as these:

components of a cohesive strategy for martech

We have marked some of these boxes yellow because most marketers have these already; the problem often is that they don’t naturally join together.

The email service provider may not know what is going on in the website. The call centre doesn’t know what the mailing house has sent out to Mrs Smith when she calls in. The retailers don’t know what kind of customers they are dealing with.

This explains why we decided to go into the customer data platform (CDP) business. To integrate all this customer information and build a comprehensive picture of every customer you are in contact with.

A CDP works best when it’s set up in conjunction with, or has built in, personalisation technology that automates individual messaging via your website and your email service provider.

The personalisation has much more meaning when it is based on knowing what type of customer you have been in the past. Not just on what you have looked at on the website in the last few seconds.

The CDP can then also segment the customer base so that the offline mailing house or call centre send out relevant targeted messages.

But the CDP does much more as well. Having all your customer data in one place, you can measure the effectiveness of every marketing activity as well as track how your customers are performing in terms of value and loyalty over time.

It can inform your recruitment strategy by showing you how different channels bring different types of customer. Show you how they are working in combination. That way you can escape from last click order attribution and attribute the correct value to the role each channel performs.

Every company is at a different point in their journey to getting the Martech that is right for them.  If you would like to chat to us about where on your journey you are now, and where you need to go, we are here to help at no cost to you.

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Can marketers ignore AI and thrive?

Can marketers ignore AI and still thrive in today’s competitive market?

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is that activity devoted to making machines intelligent, and intelligence is that quality that enables an entity to function appropriately and with foresight in its environment.”

Without wanting in any way to dismiss AI, which can be incredibly useful in many different arenas like driverless cars, we believe that its role for marketers has been exaggerated. Indeed most of what we need is barely within the spectrum of technology normally defined as AI.

For most cases where marketers want to execute one to one personalisation, the area where AI could most appropriately be applied, the conventional propensity model is all that is required.

What is most often meant by personalisation is the means to carry out selections of customers for communications based on their expected response or their particular needs.

Here are some examples where personalisation is often used:

– Targeting apparently dormant customers (e.g. those who in fact have a high probability of being reactivated) with offers to reactivate them
– Making a relevant offer (e.g. based on customer characteristics that imply a higher than average probability of purchasing in a particular product category) of a specific item
– Responding to risk (e.g. predicting which customers are likely to cancel policies or stop ordering) so that they can be presented with good reasons not to abandon their policy or purchase

In each case a conventional predictive model can be built, using an historic set of customer data, where a target customer population can be distinguished from the remainder who have not evidenced reactivation, response, or reduced risk of lapsing.

The key point is that we are not asking for this kind of model to be adaptive to rapidly changing circumstances; instead it relies on past customer behaviour to inform what is likely to happen in the present or near future. And this is because human behaviour in most situations where we are reacting to propositions put to us by marketers tends to remain reasonably constant.

We have even tested propensity models on historic data going back four years and found them to work well.

propensity model on historic data

However, to build and apply these conventional propensity models there are some essential requirements:

– a single customer view to provide the greatest possible depth of customer data
– the ability to update model scores each time new data about an individual arrives
– the availability of data scientists armed with tools like R, SPSS, or SAS

A typical predictive model will take the form of an algorithm which will attribute a probability score to each member of a customer base; we judge the success of these models by the extent to which these scores are differentiated from random in the way they can be used to predict customers’ behaviour.

Looking at a recent model we built for the reactivation of dormant customers, the top customer decile had an index of 330, compared to the bottom decile’s 17.

In another case, a model for product category preference had a top decile index of 601 and bottom decile index of 11.

For most of us marketers these results will be seen as providing a huge improvement on random and quite fit for purpose. However, the methodology used does not in our opinion qualify the models to be correctly described as AI.

If you would like to talk to us about developing propensity models for you, or providing the technology for a single customer view, then please do email us back

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Personalisation in digital marketing: how personal do you want to get?

There is a lot of interest amongst marketers in personalisation in digital marketing. And yes, we all like to be recognised for what we are. But we suspect that people are becoming wary of trivial personalisation or ‘personalisation lite’.

For example, recognising what I last looked at on a website is reminding me of the blindingly obvious.

However, telling me about a local retail event in the near future that is connected to what I was looking at on a website is much more likely to catch my attention.

And, for a full version of personalisation, understanding that I am a longstanding and loyal customer, rewarding me for my loyalty, and telling me about something that is actually of interest to acquire, really does hit the spot.

So, what is required to make this deeper level of personalisation actually work in practice for digital marketers?

Well, the first item needed is an effective personalisation engine. A tool that decides what kind of personal experience I should receive based on the information it knows about me. These engines work by the marketer setting rules or conditions which if satisfied mean that the customer will be sent a specific version of an email, or see a particular image, or offer on a website.

But next you will need to have joined together the online and offline data worlds. That allows the personalisation engine to know both that you are a loyal customer and that you are interested in a particular kind of merchandise or customer experience.

Most personalisation engines deliver ‘personalisation light’ because they ignore the history of your relationship with the company and just focus on what you have been browsing in the last 24 hours or so.

We have teamed up with Fresh Relevance (see www.freshrelevance.com) as our personalisation engine partner to allow you to give your customers full personalisation.

We manage this by sending Fresh Relevance a nightly feed of customers’ characteristics – factors like loyalty, spend, and long-term merchandise category purchases, so that these can be used in combination with their immediate online activities and behavioural triggers.

UniFida and Fresh Relevance can deliver in combination personalisation that really makes a difference.

To find out more, please email us suggesting a time that would be good for you to have a chat.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Are you losing customers to your competitors?

Are you leaving the competition an open door through which they can capture your best customers? Most organisations will protest that they are not losing customers to competitors, but a sizeable proportion of these will be wrong!

The reason is the gap that often exists between how customers expect that they should be treated, and the reality of what actually happens.

5 examples why we think some organisations are losing customers to their competition

  1. We know of one company that sends its entire customer file an identical email a hundred times a year
  2. A second company takes at least a month between recruiting a new customer and sending them a welcome catalogue
  3. Whilst a third company gives up on customers who have not been active in the last two years
  4. And a fourth can’t distinguish between a currently dormant but previously valuable customer who is browsing on their website, and an unknown punter
  5. Finally, a fifth company doesn’t understand the longer-term value provided by customers from different recruitment channels

To start to put things right we usually find that all areas of the organisation that have responsibility for some aspect or another of looking after customers need to put their hands up, and agree that things are not going as well as they might.

At this point, with luck, a consensus will start to emerge that something needs to be done to fix the problem; this will usually involve introducing some kind of technology that takes a holistic view of customers and how they are interacting with you.

 

Discover UniFida for Free

If you feel the need to mobilise your organisation in this direction and make it properly customer-centric, then we are here to help. For a start we can offer you a choice of three complimentary services to help you better understand your requirements and explore the benefits of using CDP technology.

  1. Data duplication testing: Identify how many duplicate customer records you have. Understand the impact of wasted spend on marketing.
  2. Suppressions run report: Identify and suppress individuals who have moved away or deceased.
  3. Business casing exercise: Identify and develop use cases and financial evaluation. See the opportunities and map out the ROI prior to any commitment.

Contact us to find out more about our free services and how UniFida’s Customer Data Platform could add value to your business.

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.