Personalization has quickly become the X factor for online retailers looking to stay competitive and maximize their potential. It’s not just a fancy buzzword; it’s a game-changer that can make or break businesses. When customers feel like a company “gets” them, magic happens. That’s where product personalization and customization come into play. These aren’t just add-ons; they’re the secret sauce to creating meaningful connections.
When you walk into a store and the salesperson remembers your name and preferences, it feels good, right? Well, the same principle applies online. Tailoring experiences to suit each customer’s unique tastes isn’t just a nice touch; it’s a strategic move that pays off big time. It’s like saying, “Hey, we see you, and we’re here to make your shopping experience awesome.”
But it’s overwhelming to begin using personalization software and tactics. It’s an art form that requires finesse and know-how. We’ve compiled our go-to ten ecommerce personalization best practices to help you level up your online experience.
By mastering these best practices, you can use your customer data to create compelling shopping journeys that boost your bottom line. We’re talking about increased customer retention, juicier average order values (AOV), and die-hard brand loyalty. It’s not just about making sales; it’s about building a devoted audience of repeat shoppers and natural brand ambassadors.
So, whether you’re a small boutique or a big-name retailer, it’s time to hop on the personalization bandwagon. Trust us; your customers will thank you for it!
Creating an online shopping experience that is both intuitive and personalized is paramount. Invest in personalization tools that can segment shoppers or utilize customer data to ensure that your offerings are precisely tailored to each visitor’s preferences.
Tools like Nosto use a dynamic interface that adapts to user interactions, delivering customized content, product recommendations, and engaging pop-ups, all of which contribute to a unique and individually tailored shopping journey.
Keep it simple. Shoppers should easily be able to make quick purchases, redeem offers, and find the products they want. Any convoluted obstacles on your site will instantly skyrocket bounce rates and lose sales. Embrace an iterative design process, guided by regular customer feedback and A/B testing to find what’s working and what needs to change.
Two easy best practices to improve your online buying experience are prioritizing mobile optimization and tailoring product offerings. 55.4% of internet users leverage mobile phones to buy online, so delivering a flawless mobile shopping experience is a must.
You also don’t want to give shoppers endless possibilities but deliver each prospect a tailored offering. In a 2016 study by Accenture, 39% reported leaving a business’ website and purchasing goods elsewhere because they were overwhelmed by an excessive number of options. Use personalization software and customer data to remove products that don’t convert from your catalog and deliver specific promotions that resonate with each shopper.
Great product photography, visualizers, and AR technology will help get visitors excited about your goods and more confident to add to their cart. Offer real-time, dynamic previews of designs in real-time and highlight creative designs from past customers so shoppers can get inspired.
Personalized-to-consumer (P2C) technology lets customers see previews of their personalized products, enhanced with custom embroidery, engravings, or prints. Shoppers can play with different colors or fonts and even include a custom greeting card in purchases. It’s one of the best ways brands can offer seamless product personalization without headaches.
A great tactic is encouraging customers to share their custom designs and tag your brand on social media. Integrate these testimonials on your site to add credibility and heightened appeal.
If you want to take it to the next level and start emulating big retailers like Amazon, augmented reality (AR) is the move. Tools like Threekit will allow visitors to visualize their designs in three dimensions and see how the product fits in a room at scale.
Ultimately, you want visitors to feel like they’re in-person shoppers. Product visualizers, AR, or simply adding zoom and rotate functions to products will make a huge difference.
It is important to be able to provide a wide range of personalization options so your shoppers have the flexibility to create their ideal product. Whether it’s the variety of materials or choosing the right font or color, make sure to try to give the widest range of choices for shoppers to personalize. However, you should steer your shoppers in the right direction.
42%
of customers who are interested in customized products would rather be led by brands and choose from a selection of options
Deloitte research found that 42% of surveyed customers who are interested in customized products would still rather be led by brands and choose from a selection of options. As you begin to test a product personalization offering, analyze your sales and test different options to find what your target market most wants.
While your customers are busy creating their perfectly personalized products, start to introduce complementary products at checkout to increase average order values and conversions. For example, if a customer is personalizing a polo golf shirt with their initials, that would be the perfect time to show them a hat with the same personalizing to pair with their shirt.
Also, staying on top of seasonal trends will help you capitalize on buzzing events and craft targeted campaigns. For instance, you could sell green blazers emulating the golf Master’s jackets and allow shoppers to customize it with their initials or a logo. Piggybacking on seasonal events or holidays will help you target more specific shoppers, increasing return on ad spend and conversions.
As shoppers begin personalizing their products, setting clear expectations through well-defined guidelines is important. These not only ensure that customers’ creations are feasible but also help in managing their expectations, leading to higher satisfaction. Limitations might encompass character counts or designated design areas.
Verify uploaded customer designs are compatible with your personalization software for direct-to-object printing. This alignment avoids the risk of proposing designs that cannot be realized, maintaining a seamless customization experience.
Visual guidelines play a pivotal role as well. By illustrating what works best through examples of effective and less effective designs, customers can navigate toward choices that promise the most aesthetically pleasing outcomes. It’s about balancing the technical possibilities with aesthetic advisability, showing that while more characters or elements could be added, restraint often leads to a more refined final product.
Help users create quick personalized products with template options. For those seeking simplicity or a starting point, templates offer a structured yet customizable pathway, simplifying the design process. Conversely, they also cater to those desiring deeper engagement with the design process, providing a foundation on which to build a more personalized end product.
Integrating real-time feedback mechanisms within your customization interface is another best practice. This system alerts customers to potential issues with their designs, like legibility problems with small text, ensuring that final products meet expectations. Real-time feedback acts as a built-in quality control, enhancing customer confidence in their design choices and ultimately leading to a more positive product personalization experience.
Prioritizing quality assurance and responsive customer support is crucial in maintaining the integrity of your product personalization offerings. After equipping your customers with the freedom to design customized products, ensuring the final products align with the quality promised is essential.
Regular quality checks help guarantee that products meet customer expectations, reinforcing the trust your customers place in your brand will help you generate consistently favorable reviews. The first five reviews for your product have the highest conversion impact and displaying favorable reviews drastically improves the likelihood of a sale. Online products with at least five reviews experienced four times the purchase likelihood as product pages without, translating to 270% more conversions.
Despite robust quality control measures, issues may occasionally arise. Responsive and effective customer support becomes key in addressing any concerns and resolving problems swiftly to maintain high customer satisfaction. Send follow-up messages to confirm customer satisfaction in the post-purchase cycle. This extra effort will show your shoppers your commitment to quality and provide valuable insights into ways to improve your business in the future.
To uphold high-quality standards, conduct regular spot checks on personalized orders before they are shipped. This practice allows for the maintenance of quality standards across all orders, verifying products meet customer expectations. If shoppers need assistance, ensure your customer support team is well-trained and ready to provide meaningful assistance to resolve any issue. Poor customer service interactions can quickly hurt a brand’s reputation and perceived value so opt for call center services with US-based agents to guarantee optimal customer support.
Ecommerce personalization is an ongoing process. As you collect data, run tests, and analyze marketing efforts, you can refine your efforts to improve performance. It’s important to track relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify improvement areas and establish benchmarks of success. Some of the best KPIs to track for personalization efforts include:
Personalization Impact Analysis: Another important area to compare is the performance of personalized vs. non-personalized products in terms of sales, returns, and customer satisfaction.
Ensuring a consistent personalization experience across all channels is key to a superior customer journey. Use omnichannel data to gain insights from every customer interaction across your business to gain a comprehensive view of your personalization approach. Create unified user profiles across all platforms by compiling customer preferences, attributes, and purchase history.
Use this rich consumer data to fuel your marketing efforts across your website, social media, email, and beyond. Furthermore, adopting an omnichannel fulfillment service approach will help improve client support, allowing for easy customer data integration. An order fulfillment company that offers call center support is the best combination for seamless integration and superior customer support.
It’s worth mentioning that by expanding to three or more channels, companies can boost their order rate by a substantial 494%. This becomes even more important when you consider, for instance, that 98% of Americans switch between devices on the same day and expect the same experience from the brand each time. Omnichannel customer service is a worthwhile investment to deliver optimal support for your shoppers.
AI and machine learning are revolutionizing ecommerce. They are the backbone of ecommerce personalization software and can help businesses segment audiences based on shared interests, deploy custom offers, or deliver effective product recommendations. For instance, Dynamic Yield is a tool that matches content, products and offers to each customer’s preferences, creating personalized shopping experiences for each shopper.
Personalization efforts only improve over time by using machine learning and AI to automatically allocate more resources to what works and ditch what isn’t. Guiding each customer to products that align with their interests and giving them relevant offers will not only boost engagement but also sales.
Surveys and studies show that 86% of consumers indicate personalization plays a significant role in their purchasing decisions. For online shoppers, 45% are more likely to shop on a site offering personalized recommendations; and 56% are more likely to return to a site offering product recommendations.
80%
of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences
Matching your customers to their preferences is important, but it will not be effective unless the content is displayed in a clear and engaging way. Content should align with customer profiles and offers should align with shopper behavior. For instance, send a compelling discount offer for first-time shoppers to turn them into customers and begin nurturing the relationship through future email communication. 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences and 52% of customers even expect personalized offers.
Incorporating personalized offers and content is an excellent way to improve conversions but adding social proof is another effective tactic. Using a simple phrase like “Customers like you also bought” enhances the credibility of personalized recommendations and builds trust in your business. Research shows that social proof is vital to growing any brand, with 92% of users trusting a recommendation from someone they know, like a friend or family member, 70% believing what they see in online reviews, and 40% trusting paid ads.
Encouraging existing customers in your CRM is much easier and cheaper than acquiring new shoppers. Nurture your audience with email marketing. You can use customer data to forecast purchasing behaviors and craft messages that align with their profile.
Streamline your personalized email campaigns using segmentation and automation. Segmentation divides your customer base into manageable groups with similar needs or behaviors, allowing for more targeted messaging. Automation then tailors these messages to individual preferences, so each customer receives a unique and relevant email. This combination maximizes efficiency while maintaining a personal touch.
Behavior-based triggers further refine this strategy by sending emails at moments when they’re most impactful. For example, a reminder email about an abandoned cart, coupled with a prompt shipping incentive, can effectively nudge the customer toward a purchase.
Going beyond mere name personalization, leveraging insights from past purchases and browsing habits allows for even deeper personalization. This method distinguishes your brand by offering content that truly matters to the individual.
Finally, continually refining your email strategy through A/B testing is crucial. You can discover what resonates best with each customer segment by experimenting with different subject lines, content, and timing. This not only optimizes your campaign’s effectiveness but also ensures it evolves with your audience’s preferences, keeping your strategy as effective as possible and always a step ahead.
Ecommerce personalization is relatively new and evolving quickly. Stay on top of the latest trends by subscribing to relevant ecommerce newsletters. It’s easy to fall behind and there is new research and tools that can help guide your personalization efforts or improve your online shopping experience.
Also, checking with your customers will give you direct feedback on how to elevate your storefront. Prompt customers to complete a survey and include a comment section for shoppers to speak freely. Encourage customers to leave reviews to add credibility and social proof.
One of the main advantages of personalization tools is built-in machine learning. As your tools process new streams of data, machine learning will adapt and learn the best tactics to convert visitors. AI and ML are expected to generate $360.36 billion in revenue by 2028, so beginning to use these tools sooner rather than later is always best.
Get in touch with us to schedule a call with one of our personalization experts. We can help you uncover more effective approaches to fulfillment that will save you money on each order or improve shipping speeds. We also discuss integrating out free P2C technology with your store so you can begin to offer seamless product personalization. Get in touch with us and we hope to chat with you soon!
Fulfillment costs are based on three criteria: size, weight and delivery time.
OWD offers five service levels: economy (7-10 days); Standard (5-7 days), 2-Day, Overnight and International.
Example Weight: 1 ounce
Fulfillment | Postage | Total |
|---|---|---|
$1.75 | $3.64 | $5.39 |
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DDU means Delivery Duty Unpaid – where the buyer pays for all of the import fees at delivery.
Unexpected import fees give buyers sticker shock – not good. When they refuse to pay, you’ve lost a sale and must pay to return your product, or abandon it.
DDU is an old idea whose time has passed. For these reasons and more, OWD doesn’t recommend DDU for e-com sellers.
DDP is an acronym for Delivery Duty Paid. DDP means that the seller pays for all the duties and import fees.
With DDP, your customers won’t be surprised with unexpected customs charges – good!
With OWD’s landed cost calculator, your foreign customers will know exactly what their various VAT, customers and duties will cost. No unhappy surprises.
For large-scale operations needing a full solution in Europe, there’s OWD Europe, based in Amsterdam.
OWD handles phone calls, e-mails and web chat eighteen hours a day from our own state-of-the-art facility.
We’ll handle your inbound sales and customer service contacts.
You get career agents who speak American English and know how to sell.
$99 gets you 200 calls, e-mails or chats handled every week.
You get your own phone number and custom e-mail.
We do a lot more. Call for details.
The Voice of Your Brand
OWD’s all-inclusive Returns service provides simplicity and high-end customer service. OWD includes a pre-printed return label as part of your packing slip. Your customer need only drop it in the mail.
What’s included: packaging slip with return label, QC inspection, re-bag, re-tag and return to stock. What’s excluded: postage cost, poly bags and any special packaging.
