A run-down on how implementing personalisation to your ecommerce site could help to increase the average spend per customer.
What is Personalisation?
Amazon, eBay and Tesco are among some of the ecommerce websites that use Personalisation in order to create tailored content for particular customers. Preferences will be used to develop a bank of products that may be of interest to that individual, in order to increase conversion rates and improve the customer’s online experience. Personalisation is the perfect way to help companies reach out to customers with relevant information just as they would in physical stores; this method of customer interaction has closed the gap between online and in-store experience.
With people accessing online retailers from multiple devices nowadays, collecting personalised data from so many platforms could be perceived as a very difficult task indeed. On the contrary, having multiple devices means that there is much more information available at our fingertips, enabling the personalisation campaign to be more informed and more successful. It’s similar to buying presents for a friend – the better you know them, the easier it is to find something they might like.
An advanced and intelligent central database allow companies to collect information and data from consumers across all devices and platforms. This then builds a clearer picture of a specific customer’s wants and interests, allowing for personalised content in the form of landing pages, email campaigns and website suggestions.
Quality content management systems such as Sitefinity CMS offer website personalisation functions including content targeting, persona profiling and segmentation that can be used immediately. The first step to delivering a personalised customer experience is to segment your visitors so you can present them with what’s most relevant to them.
How is the information collected?
Cookies have been a fundamental part of collecting data for marketing purposes. Thanks to recent EU legislation, customers in the European Union have the choice of whether they are happy for companies to place a cookie on a browser or not. Some consumers are not comfortable with certain companies tracking their preferences and see it as a privacy breach, which is why the authorities felt it was important that companies introduce the option to disallow cookies. These cookies help track a particular person’s shopping online – using geolocation, companies can find out where you are, and in some cases even have limited access to your browser history.
Cookies along with content management systems such as Sitefinity aid the personalisation campaign in that they can help to determine which information customers would like to see at their fingertips. Ultimately, the use of a CMS should encourage higher conversion rates because it offers customers a much more useful and efficient online experience.
Changing Online Shopping
As many as 60% of consumers in the UK shop online every single week, with the majority of them understanding the concept of personalisation and having a positive attitude towards it. Ecommerce websites that do not employ personalisation are seriously missing out on offering their customers the best online experience possible. Some content management systems will allow you to achieve all kinds of things with an ecommerce site, Sitefinity allows you to segment your audience, personalise their experience, see and understand how your site is presented to them depending on what device customers are accessing your site, and most importantly, see the results. The results will show your conversion rates and all kinds of other useful information that you can use to improve the customer experience.
Consumers are demanding more and more from their online shopping experience, which is why it is important to implement features such as personalisation to ensure you are offering each one of your customers a reason for them to purchase from you rather than your competition. Something as simple as ensuring that your websites is mobile-friendly and can be used across all platforms is also an important part of the user experience. According to a recent survey, a huge 42% of UK consumers admitted to abandoning a purchase because the process was too complicated on a mobile device.
The moral of this story is that if you want to boost conversion rates on an ecommerce site, it’s not only important to invest in a platform that works well across all devices – you also need to ensure you’re using personalisation effectively by employing quality content management systems.
