Key features putting e-commerce personalization at the top of the retail agenda

Many businesses, despite spending a huge amount on driving new traffic to their websites are still experiencing poor conversion rates and lack of insight into their visitors requirements

The growth in consumer demand for real-time personalization is at an all-time high. It’s a fact, customers are not only becoming more connected they are also becoming more informed, demanding and unpredictable.

Given the wide range of options consumers have online, retailers are finding that the key to converting their visitors into loyal long-term customers is real-time AI-driven e-commerce personalization.

Through the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, intelligent e-commerce personalization platforms are able to analyze customers’ behavior, learning their habits and enabling retailers to deliver automated, personalized recommenders within search results, promotional and personalized banners and on-page recommendations in real-time.

Why should e-commerce personalization be the main agenda point?

1. Provides each customer with a relevant and personal experience
2. Increases customer loyalty and lifetime value
3. Increases online conversion and average order value
4. Retailers start seeing results from day one – the AI automation never sleeps
5. Works without any intervention- the AI gets to work straight away to deliver the best results
6. The AI works with both huge and sparse data sets

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What are the key features needed for effective e-commerce personalization?

Advanced AI real-time recommenders

Intelligent e-commerce personalization platforms use the AI Engine to profile visitors’ current and past behavior and chooses the most appropriate and relevant recommender type to show to the individual. The AI is aware of the context in which it places recommenders, so it’s able to optimize recommendations so duplicate content is not shown.

• Continuously learns and adapt itself flexibly to new user behavior.
• Much more powerful in the art of conversion and increasing average order value.
• Based on the true needs and behavior of the individual and not the performance of the website as many standard recommenders do.
• Real-time recommendations adapt in real-time and evolves with every click the visitor makes.

Enriched personalized campaigns

The fully automated artificial intelligence-based recommenders will deliver a level of personalization to retailers’ customers. However, for the full experience e-commerce personalization platforms should allow businesses to enrich with targeted promotional and awareness banners and recommenders with personalized campaigns based on their visitors’ onsite & offsite behavior.

For those times when businesses want to push specific products, brands & categories to targeted groups of customers should allow retailers to override the AI and show tailored manual recommenders.  Some of the key benefits of overlaying enriched personalized campaigns:

• Spotlight relevant products, categories & brands that visitors have previously searched on or expressed an interest in
• Targeted promotions that are relevant
• Upsell & cross-sell opportunities based on individual’s predictive likes
• Re-enforced loyalty
• Improved awareness
• Higher incentivize to purchase

Advanced campaign rules

It’s important for retailers to be able to deliver advanced personalization using real-time, dynamic segmentation. Creating personalized campaigns based on where your visitors are located, how they found your site, what time it is, what device they are on and even what the weather is like is highly effective. Visitors no longer feel like a statistic. They feel welcomed and valued by the retail brand and bring with that a higher propensity to buy.

In addition to creating 'off-site' campaign rules, e-commerce personalization enables retailers to automatically fine-tune each visitor’s experience based on the products they have added to their basket, the value of those items, what they have searched for on your site or what pages they have viewed.

With intelligent e-commerce personalization, there should be no limit to the number of campaign rules that can be applied and they should be completely tailored to the retailer’s business needs.

The results? Improved customer experience, online revenue and lifetime value.

The ability to personalize any area of your website

E-commerce personalization should not be limited to the online conversion funnel of a website. Even though the buying cycle will be the main area for conversion there will also be other pages that benefit from e-commerce personalization. Retailers should consider the importance of bespoke landing pages that are being created for their Adwords and Email campaigns.

The personalized and tailored experience should start from the moment a visitor arrives on the website regardless of where their entry point is.

E-commerce personalization platforms, such as PureClarity, enable retailers to place personalized merchandising zones featuring recommenders, banner images, carousels or HTML throughout the entire user journey on the website including Home Page, Product Pages, Category Pages and many more.

Personalization within search

There are several e-commerce personalization businesses in the market that offer the option of completely taking over a retailer’s website search function. A website search requires specialist software that enables predictive text, allows for misspells and has an excellent degree of accuracy. True e-commerce personalization platforms understand the importance of integrating with a retailers existing search so that the two software solutions work in harmony focusing on what they specialize in.

E-commerce personalization software can intelligently assess what people are looking for and can present either automated product/brand recommendations within retailer’s search bar results and on their search results pages. There should also be the opportunity to override the AI with product and brand recommendations and even present personalized campaign banners of the retailer’s choice.

• Search is the primary area that visitors will use to find what they are looking for on a website.
• The AI will present back recommendations both within the search results bar and on the search results page.
• Proven to increase click-through rate and conversion.
• AI Recommenders within search should be relevant to the term searched for and provide product suggestions with the context of the user’s behaviour.
• Fully automated and adapts in real-time with every action.
• Cross-sell, upsell, promote products, brands and categories with spotlight banners based on the current search term, customer segment and many other conditions.

Personalization within email

As with the case for personalization within search, the same principle applies to personalization within email. E-commerce personalization software platforms do not specialize in email marketing but should be able to seamlessly integrate the retailer's email marketing platform of choice. Emails that retailers sent out that contain a degree of personalization outside of the salutation are proven to be four times more likely to convert than those with only a personalized name.

• Include highly personalized product recommendations within email campaigns that are sent out.
• Customers want recommendations that are personal and relevant to them.
• Integrate with your preferred email service provider.
• Emails that contain personalized recommendations are four times more likely to convert.
• Triggered personalized emails for an abandoned basket, after purchase follow up and customer reactivation.

If you are interested to find out how and by how much PureClarity can increase your revenue and online conversion rates, book a demo.