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.


Developing use cases for a customer data platform

How can developing use cases for a customer data platform deliver what your business needs? Here we discuss how use cases came about and introduce key stages to successfully implement valuable marketing technology.

jigsaw puzzle

In praise of use cases… or ‘anvandningsfall’ as they were originally termed

Back in 1987 a Swede called Ivar Jacobson presented the first known article on use cases as a means for capturing and specifying requirements for computer systems. He didn’t much like their original long Swedish name and eventually settled on ‘use case’ which has since been universally adopted.

So why are we singing their praises?

Developing use cases for a customer data platform does not require technical knowledge, they allow your teams to collaborate on the desired business outcomes and uncover gaps. One of the key things with a use case is it ensures your stakeholders have defined the business need and, how the activity will be measured.

Developing use cases for a customer data platform

An example of a marketing use case is “Use data to deliver relevant, personalised omni-channel campaigns in order to increase revenue and reduce marketing costs”. The use case is pretty straight forward. The brand wants to communicate with their customers across multiple channels in order to generate revenue and potentially reduce wasted marketing spend.

Many businesses fail to develop core use cases to solve a problem or deliver on a strategy. By developing core use cases, which are prioritised based on the business goals and can be measured, it will give you the north star to focus on and deliver against your goals.

We see at least three stages in the process of successfully introducing marketing technology where they are of crucial importance.

Articulate and Document Use Cases

First by going through the discipline of articulating and documenting use cases a business can clarify exactly what they want this nebulous item, a marketing system, to actually do.

It provides a non-techy way for the requirements to be mapped out so that the user community can articulate step by step what both it and the system are expected to do, and what the outputs should look like.

It also allows for consideration of time. When and how quickly should processing happen including volume. Thus, allowing the system providers to get a handle on whether for instance they are dealing with ten thousand or a million customers.

Given that nowadays almost all martech is purchased off-the-shelf rather than being built inhouse, the combined use cases can help start the process of vendor selection. Rather than being told a long list of the glossy features that can be delivered by the martech salesperson, most of which you don’t want in the first place, the company can factually check whether the system being proposed can actually do what you require.

Develop the Business Case

Next, the use cases can feed directly into developing the business case. If for instance you are going to be able to do A that you couldn’t do before, how much customer value are you going to be able to generate compared to where you are now. Or alternatively how much staff time will be saved using the new tool to deliver B more quickly?

We find that business cases for martech generally span across four key areas:
1 The incremental revenue generated by being able to do something that was not possible before.
2 The cost of time saved by using a better tool to deliver something more quickly.
3 Reduction in technical debt by streamlining and unifying data and platforms.
4 Reducing reputational risk by having clear GDPR measures in place

Once past the business casing stage, many organisations will want to start with a live proof of concept or POC. If you select a few areas where the new technology should add value, and where it can be set up and configured quickly (please note I am not writing LHF!) then a POC can be put in place.

There is no better way to finally confirm that everything works from the technology to the customers responding to it. In addition, a live POC that works, gets quick buy in from all levels in an organisation. The POC will also pick up on what is not working and enable you to put it right.

Set Up, Configure and Deliver with the Use Case Specification

And finally, when the full martech needs to be set up and configured, the developers can take the use cases as the specification against which they are going to have to deliver. The company can sign off the configuration as done when the use cases work.

At UniFida we like to help our clients with developing their use cases at the start of the process of introducing a customer data platform. We do this for all the reasons articulated above, and incidentally it helps us understand quickly whether we can in reality deliver what you need.  Having developed several client use cases, we can help stimulate your thinking around what they might provide.

Our offer! We have made a decision not to charge for this kind of consultancy as it helps you understand what you need the technology to do, and for us to understand what we may be called on to deliver.

Please do get in touch if help with developing use cases for a customer data platform is what you are looking for.


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.


Do you really know whether your company should install a customer data platform?

data from a customer data platform

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are taking the marketing world by storm – the Customer Data Platform Institute projects that marketers will spend $1.3 billion on them in 2020.

But the important question for your company is whether you would really benefit from having one?

So, what do CDPs really do? At a very high level they:
– ingest all available sources of online and offline customer data and build a deduplicated single customer view
– provide the capability to profile and segment customers
– enable personalised and consistent communications to take place across all channels by connecting your marketing technology
– support you in visualising customer performance

Do you really know whether your company should install a customer data platform? We have devised a simple 10-point questionnaire to help you understand whether your company could benefit from a CDP. It won’t be telling you whether should definitely should have one, as you will need a business case for that, but it will tell you whether CDPs are worth investigating.

QUESTIONNAIRE

If you want to start to find out more about what a CDP could do for your company then please order our free e-book CLICK


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.


Do customer data platforms suck?

Are CDP’s worth the investment or do customer data platforms suck?

Well, you can paint a very bad picture of them from a bean-counter’s perspective. The technology costs money, they add another item to the marketing technology stack, they have to be set up to receive data from many different sources, they then have to store all that data, and have to keep on being fed with it. Someone even has to hit a few keys for something to come out of them.

We think there is a bright side, which is not surprising to hear from people who are intrepid enough to actually build and sell CDPs.

Obviously, in themselves CDPs are worthless; the value only comes when you start to do something useful with that data. But as an enabler today’s CDPs can be something quite special.

The big picture view is that if you don’t have everything known about each customer structured and held in one place then you have no chance of meeting the customers’ expectations. And this holds true for every occasion when you are interacting with customers.

However below this Olympian vision there are a growing number of applications that are either made possible, or made to work better, when they can be powered by a customer data platform.

Here is a checklist we have made or current uses that our clients have been making of a CDP:

Outbound marketing

  • targeted and personalised direct mail
  • segmented email campaigns
  • triggered email campaigns
  • SMS push notifications

GDPR/Call center support

  • consent storage
  • privacy portal for SARs
  • customer recent activity search

Dashboards

  • customer and sales performance
  • linked to web browsing activity

Digital advertising

  • website personalisation (segmented and one-to-one)

Technical/ analytical

  • includes browsing history in the SCV
  • bespoke engineered data fields based on the SCV
  • SCV data exports for analysis

For those not entirely immersed in the jargon, what we now call a CDP we used to call a customer database, and after that a customer data warehouse, and then a single customer view. One of the differences between now and then is that in the now we expect data to come in from far more sources, and these include on-line browsing as much as off-line transactions.

Customer Data Platform timeline diagram
Customer Data Platform evolution timeline

 


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.