Ecommerce Personalization: Worth it for Your Brand?
What is Ecommerce Personalization?
Ecommerce personalization is the process of customizing a brand’s products, services, and marketing messages based on a consumer’s profile, interests, and behaviors. This can include customizing the shopping experience, product recommendations, remarketing campaigns, and special offers.
How are Brands Using Ecommerce Personalization?
Brands are using ecommerce personalization to create a more personalized shopping experience for their customers. This can include recommending specific products based on customer interests, offering personalized discounts and rewards, and creating tailored email marketing messages. Overall, brands are leveraging ecommerce personalization to drive more engagement, gain more customers, and create loyalty.
What does Ecommerce Personalization Require?
In order to use ecommerce personalization, brands need to gather customer data from a variety of sources, including profiling customers based on their website activity, social media interactions, and purchase history. This data can then be used to create personalized marketing messages, product recommendations, and campaigns. Often these services are provided either by your ecommerce platform or by dedicated personalization services that tie into your ecommerce platform. These services can range in cost from very inexpensive monthly services to enterprise-scale services with enterprise-scale pricing!
Is Ecommerce Personalization Worth it For Your Brand?
The answer to this question depends on the goals of your brand and the resources available to implement personalization. Ecommerce personalization can be a powerful tool for driving customer engagement and loyalty, but requires a significant investment of time and resources. So, it is important to weigh the costs and benefits to decide whether or not ecommerce personalization is the right approach for your business.
A few questions to think through when deciding if ecommerce personalization is worth it for your brand are:
Do you have a simple product assortment that appeals to all of your customers, or do you have different product lines that are targeted at different people? The more complex and varied your product assortment, the more likely you are to benefit from personalization.
Is the traffic to your site from similar customers, or do you have multiple distinct personas in your existing site traffic? The more diverse your customer base, the more likely you are to benefit from personalization.
Have you already optimized the low-hanging fruit on your site such as performance and basic usability and accessibility? Fast, usable non-personalized sites can generate more revenue than slow, hard to use personalized sites.
Do you have a large number of possible persona/product line combinations? If you only have a few combinations, it may be more cost effective for marketing to manually build out those combinations as landing pages and then allow customers to self-select by displaying them in your site’s navigation.
Do you have the budget and ecommerce personnel to benefit from advanced personalization efforts? While some options are more turn-key than others, all will require spending time and money to tune for your unique product and persona combinations.
