One of the biggest things that genuinely separate physical stores from ecommerce would be that human touch, specifically that tailored experience.
When you shop in-store, you get assistance; in some stores (like a boutique), you can even get someone to assist you in the entire shopping experience. You don’t get that with e-commerce. Honestly, it’s not needed either. Most websites have a search function so people can find what they want through filters; even chatbots can help with that, too.
So technically, the human touch isn’t even needed for ecommerce. Regardless, your business needs to do what it can to kill competition, and giving a more personalized and tailored experience can be one of the best ways to do this. But how? Well, here’s what you need to know!
Start By Understanding Your Customers
Alright, this one is self-explanatory, but it will still help to go back and reevaluate all of this. In general, the foundation of personalization lies in understanding your customers – their preferences, behaviors, and purchasing patterns. You need to know anything and everything that you can. Do you have analytics tools? What about customer data?
Both will help you gain insights into demographics, browsing history, past purchases, and engagement metrics from your customers and the general customers you want to keep attracting. This will help you tailor your offerings and marketing efforts to meet their needs more effectively.
Start Implementing Product Recommendations
If you’re not doing this, then get to it ASAP! This is one of the most effective ways to personalize the shopping experience. So, by all means, ensure you’re going with some product recommendations. It will depend on the website you’re using and what’s available. You can look into an indexer API key or some plugin. But by all means, you’re going to want to start leveraging data-driven algorithms, and you’re also going to want to start implementing machine learning techniques, too.
Both will help suggest relevant products based on customers’ browsing and purchase history. Most sites are doing this, so you’re losing money if you don’t do this. You can usually implement these recommendations through widgets on the product, cart, and checkout pages to guide customers toward complementary or related items.
Customized Content and Messaging
This is a newer concept, but you will want to remember it. So, you will want to tailor your website content, product descriptions, and marketing messages to resonate with your target audience. You can deliver personalized emails and promotions thanks to technology and constant advancements.
This is more than just using the code [Name] on a newsletter (that’s not very personalized either). But you can use dynamic content blocks to make customized recommendations, such as in email campaigns, so this can be tailored per person instead of a one-size-fits-all for email campaigns.
