How to Win Your Customers’ Hearts With eCommerce Personalization (and How the Right MarTech Stack Can Help You)

eCommerce personalization doesn’t have to be hard work, despite the huge benefits it brings to businesses. However, to implement it properly, you need to truly understand how marketing technology can improve customer personalization. When you truly start to understand the benefits of improved personalization, it will come as no surprise to learn that 89% of businesses are investing in it as a critical part of their marketing strategy.

Personalized marketing technology: Benefits and examples

Other than being in high demand from a majority of consumers (71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal), personalized marketing has multiple benefits which can increase customer retention and improve customer relations:

1. Conversion: Using artificial intelligence and automated page tracking, your business can increase conversion rates by reaching out to customers with the right message at the right time. This improves the chance that a prospective customer could be made into an actual customer.
2. Customer feedback: Customers who provide feedback to companies also provide valuable data such as their name, gender and other crucial demographic data. You can automate the collection and storage of this data to use at a later point to improve the personalization of their user experience.
3. Understanding customer data: When a customer visits your website, you have access to all of their data while they’re there. From what they click on to what they type into the search bar, all of this can be fed through to artificial intelligence and automatically used to improve product recommendations. In fact, a recent survey from Deloitte found that 49% of ecommerce businesses relied on analytics to make better decisions.

Experiments and A/B testing

In a recent report conducted by Havas, it was found that customers believed that if 75% of the brands they shopped with disappeared, they could be easily replaced. In an increasingly cynical world, it takes more than a good deal to get customers to care about your brand. Your marketing solutions should reflect this, and provide you with the ability to tailor unique content to each customer.

• You can use analytical insights to produce predictive data. Using first-party data allows your organisation to connect with customers on a personal level. Having the ability to use customer’s names, birthdays and personal preferences is ideal when it comes to ecommerce personalization.
• Creating the optimal web experience for users doesn’t have to take weeks. Testing ideas at scale and iterating quickly should allow you to transform your web page appearances quickly and easily.
• A/B testing tools provide information about websites needed to make data-driven decisions about anything and everything ecommerce related. Additionally, an A/B testing tool with automated winner distribution would be ideal.
• Marketing technology should also allow you to display unique content to each customer. This provides a truly personalized experience, increases customer retention and ultimately drives revenue for your company.

Personalized email campaigns

One of the best ways to implement increased personalization for your customers and reap the rewards of doing so is by using personalized email campaigns. Tracking user data from when they visit your site and combining it with volunteered information such as birthdays, names and preferences allows you to create hyper-personalized emails and improve click-through rates.

Personalized emails are great for a number of reasons:

1. Relevancy: People’s inboxes can be cluttered. Often, these emails already address the user by name so your email personalization needs to go further in order to catch their attention. Your content has to impact the customer and relate to their previous activity on your site.
2. Timely: When you have enough information about a customer, you’ll be able to understand exactly which part of the purchase journey they’ve reached. You can use this information - such as when they’ve searched for a particular topic - to send them a timely email prompt.
3. Personal: Rather than sending the email from your business, try putting a friendly name and face at the end of the email. Personalizing your end of the email helps people feel like they’re receiving an email from a human being rather than a sophisticated AI.

Relying less on IT

It’s a fact of business life that working with IT isn’t always easy. Your expertise is in totally different areas, neither has much to do with the other and questions that may seem complicated to you are positively trivial for them. Working largely independently of IT can be a huge boost to both your confidence and your overall efficiency.

Tech stacks which aren’t complex and can be used by people with minimal technical backgrounds are ideal for these situations. This takes a huge weight off the shoulders of the CTO since it increases efficiency within the marketing team, freeing up time for creative campaigns to foster brand loyalty.

Bloomreach Engagement: A marketer’s golden ticket

Whether it’s personalized email campaigns, relying less on IT or improved marketing technology solutions, creating individual personalization for your customers is the number one way to foster loyalty towards your brand in an increasingly cynical age.

Bloomreach Engagement is the ideal platform to achieve these end goals. It is a marketing automation and personalization solution that combines the power of a customer data platform (CDP) with native artificial intelligence, an email service provider, marketing automation, and web personalization so you can create marketing campaigns across channels that drive revenue.

There’s never been a better time to increase your company’s flexibility and efficiency.

Interested in learning more? Watch our short video to learn exactly how Bloomreach Engagement functions and how it is specifically designed to help digital commerce companies drive revenue.