Implementing the following 7 strategies for e-commerce personalization can be one of the most cost-beneficial decisions you can make towards increasing your online revenue, improving your online conversion and building a loyal and happy customer base.

Many businesses are finding it difficult to overcome certain pain points when trying to improve their online customer experience. Issues such as high bounce rate, poor search click through, low average order value, high basket abandonment rate, low repeat visitor numbers, low propensity to engage with offers and promotions, are to name but a few.

 1. Improve your website conversion and customer loyalty

If your analytics is telling you that your homepage or digital marketing campaign landing pages have a high bounce rate and very low repeat visitors, then there is evidently a gap between what the visitor was expecting to see and what they have been presented. A website that presents irrelevant products and promotions, without dynamic and…

It is one of the most significant parts of the business world in today’s era. But, it is usually tough to predict the future of the e-commerce market

But, still, experts have predicted recently that 2018 is going to be a great year for e-commerce. They have proposed some trends which are definitely going to work in the upcoming months of the year.

[si_guide_block id="38757" title="Download our Premium Resource – E-commerce design Pattern Guide " description="Retailers - use our e-commerce design bible to review and improve your site experience and conversion."/]

Just have a look!

1. The Material Design

Material design is nothing but the ultimate concept of building such websites which are entirely based on rich contents that are vibrant, trendy, and serves all the needs of any business. Moreover, this trend has already reached up to the peak and thus it is expected that it will get a high rise in the…

A quick look at the ways personalization should be implemented into your website

Jeff Bezos’s vision for personalizing customers online experience back in 1998 has become a reality for many e-commerce sites and is fast becoming a game changer for online retailers. We have not seen personalization be adopted by many of the non-retail web which is interesting. Many businesses still believe that their homepage only needs a ‘one version fits all’ approach, regardless of the fact that it is the main doorway to their business. Businesses spend vast amounts of money trying to market to their customers on a 1-2-1 level but overlook or misinterpret this approach on their website. This shows there is a massive opportunity being missed “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word-of-mouth is very powerful.” - Jeff Bezos

So why personalize?

To understand why personalization is so important, take a look at how…

Powerful digital sales strategies to ensure you make the most of your e-commerce site’s traffic

Research by Big Commerce shows 51% of people prefer shopping online and 95% shop online at least once a year. It is a trillion-dollar market. This popularity has catalysed the rise of more than 12 million e-commerce stores. But only around 650,000 of them generate more than $1000 in revenue annually. [si_guide_block id="122131" title="Digital marketing plan example – e-commerce/retail company" description="Struggling to put together a digital marketing strategy for your company? Use our e-commerce example plan and learn how to create a roadmap for retail growth."/] When e-commerce stores struggle with generating revenue, they assume that it is a traffic problem only. Hence, they invest more into ads and SEO. But before they rush in and purchase ads they should implement a digital sales strategy that converts more of the traffic driven. A conversion optimized e-commerce site…

What do new chatbots look like? What role will they play in online commerce?

When do you think the first chatbot was invented? Most people would guess that it hit the market sometime around the turn-of-the-century. They would be wrong. Chatbots have actually been around for over 50 years, which is far older than the World Wide Web. Of course, the chatbots of today barely resemble their older counterparts. Newer chatbots are making a huge splash online. A new generation of these tools are going to have a profound effect on the future of UX in ecommerce and other online applications. In his post Chatbots — One of the hottest UX trend in 2017, Guobin Ng, a user experience researcher for UXarmy, states that chatbots are being used for many industries and purposes. They have been around for a while, but have really started to become popular in 2017, largely due…

"Work smarter, not harder" - that’s always been my mantra (but ironically, only said after I end up doing a helluva lot of hard work!)

When it comes to e-commerce merchandising, we now have the technology and tactics we could have only dreamed of only five years ago. With the advent of richer analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), we can now personalize user experiences in real-time. As a result, your prospects feel more understood than ever before, which makes them more likely to become paying customers.

How can I optimize? Let me count the ways

The most common optimization methods used as of early 2018 include: Using smart product recommendations Adding up-sells and cross-sells to your offers Offering intent-based collections Tailoring the user experience by customer segment Tailoring the user experience with real-time analytics

Using smart product recommendations

Amazon.com has set the standard for product recommendations. Their website seems to ‘read your mind’ and know…

Learn the value of chat interactions for your business

Here’s the first thing to know about chat, and online communication in general: direct, real-time human interaction improves brand engagement. Granted, people who know the exact product or service they want don’t need help. But these people are the minority. Most people either need considerable help or want ‘just in time’ assistance - the answer to a quick question or concern that, once addressed, will increase their confidence and likelihood to buy. A second reason why having chat is essential in an e-commerce context: chat usage lifts conversions and revenues. In my experience consulting on over a dozen mid-sized and larger e-commerce websites that do and don’t offer chat, I’ve found that visitors who chatted converted at roughly 12 - 15%, while visitors didn’t chat converted in the 1.5 - 2.0% range. That’s roughly an 8X increase,…

Legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi said it best: ‘Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.’

If you’re running around like crazy - doing redesigns, running split tests, and adding new technologies - but don’t know the best practices needed to define the ‘most likely to succeed’ designs and tests - you’re definitely not practicing perfectly. And you’re leaving a lot of potential revenues on the table. Don’t succumb to constant guessing: plan and execute your online merchandising tactics based on proven best practices.

Types of best practices

Best practices in e-commerce certainly cover a wide spectrum. In this post, I will focus on the user experience design tactics most likely to lift your core metrics: add-to-carts, conversion rates, and revenues. The best practices you should be implementing right now include: Optimizing product findability Optimizing your category pages Optimizing your product pages [si_guide_block id="119482" title="Implementing e-commerce merchandising best practices" description="Learn more about each of…

Ecommerce strategies that will set your business apart from competitors

Traditional retail is dead. Or perhaps it is experiencing a slow death due to the rise of the Ecommerce industry. Many experts will say that the retail apocalypse has been greatly exaggerated but the truth is, more and more brick and mortar stores are gearing towards operating their business online.

[si_guide_block id="23586" title="Download Premium Resource – Google Analytics for Ecommerce template" description="This template acts as your structured guide based on an approach used by two Expert users of Google Analytics who have defined processes for reviewing all the opportunities to increase sales and making recommendations on where to prioritise.."/]

Even big brands such as Macy's, Bebe, Guess and Payless have closed dozens - or even hundreds of stores in 2017. Big names such as KMart, Sears and Toys R Us have also declared bankruptcy…

"Almost all members of Generation Z prefer to shop in bricks-and-mortar stores" - IBM & National Retail Federation

Online sales continue to grow in importance, as shown by our compilation of ecommerce growth trends. But for many businesses, the days of double-digit, year-on-year growth in online sales are over. We are now in the era of ecommerce optimization where, to maintain growth, businesses are having to innovate their growth strategy, for making their online experiences engaging and persuasive.

As the world of digital continues to transform, with different generational segments of the population adapting to technology at their own distinct pace, marketers keep a close eye on retail ecommerce trends and developments. With artificial intelligence being hot topic for the future of marketing, trends like conversational commerce, using chatbots and voice search have been closely associated to widely-adopted online shopping habits amongst millennials as…