In a recent survey, 81% of online shoppers responded that they had noted an increase in personalized marketing messages over the past 5 years. And for good reason – personalization works. For example, display ads that are personalized have a 10-times higher click-through rate (CTR) than those that aren’t. If you’re not personalizing, you’re not competitive at all in the current market.
Let’s take a look at just 10 of the ways you can incorporate personalization into your online customer experience.
Personalized Homepages
The gateway to your products, your homepage is simultaneously important and often overlooked when it comes to personalization. Conventional wisdom suggests that when someone comes to your homepage you don’t know much about what they want or need, so you can only show them a range of generic, best-selling products.
In fact, with a dynamic personalization platform like DataCue, you can personalize every page of your site, including the homepage. If the customer has visited the website before, this will be tracked, and the types of products they’ve shown interest in in the past will be front and center. Distractions that we know they won’t be interested in are minimized or removed completely.
Celebrate Customers’ Personal Milestones
What’s more personal than showing a customer you remember their birthday? Offering a voucher to long-standing customers when their special day comes around can make for some great goodwill.
You don’t have to stick to their birthday; consider milestones such as being a customer for a number of years or milestones that highlight how much your services have helped them over the years.
Personalized Email Subject Lines
Email marketing is the most effective form of marketing online, with an estimated $38 being returned for each $1 spent.
Personalizing the email subject line has been shown to increase email opening rate by around 25%. Using the customer’s first name in inventive ways in the email subject line can work wonders for engagement.
Personalized Guides
An on-site assistance tool that helps visitors find the products that best suit them works well, similar to a personal shopping assistant in real life. We can also use all of the information they enter to personalize the shopping experience in the future, such as showing products they are likely to be interested in, automatically filling in clothing size choices, etc.
Emails Based on Customer Behavior
Consider adding follow-up emails that target specific people. You can always follow everything visitors do on your site and send emails triggered by specific things they do. If you notice someone’s viewed a video but didn’t take the next step to sign up, you can send them a personalized email that discusses some more of the benefits of the product or service. Add in some urgency and scarcity, and you might entice them to move further.
Personalizing by Location
Even when we haven’t yet been able to garner a lot of data on a visitor, there are things their web browser will let us know. One thing we know is each visitor’s approximate location, and we can use that to customize their experience and make shopping easy for them.
For example, we can automatically set the prices to be in the currency the visitor most likely uses. We can switch between metric and imperial measurements. We can even consider different products to show based on previous trends in that country or area.
If you have physical stores, you can customize information based on geolocation, pointing the visitor to their closest stores and discussing local events relevant to them.
Personalized Campaigns
Sale seasons are so passé – start considering offering personalized discounts to visitors based on their behavior. New visitors you’re hoping to build into customers can be offered a small discount to sign up for the email newsletter. Capture those who are looking to leave their basket by offering a one-time discount. Look for customer behaviors that are losing you money and find ways to focus on those customers and plug the gaps.
Recently Viewed Items
A simple form of personalization is showing customers the products they’ve recently viewed. It works particularly well when a customer is returning to the website after a break, as they may have simply been thinking about the purchase for a while or browsing competitors’ sites for a price check. When they return, you’ve made it easy for them to continue down the sales funnel.
Personalized Product Recommendations
Product recommendations are a staple, and personalized product recommendations have a significant effect on conversion rates. Suggesting similar or complementary products is expected, but you can go further by making personalized recommendations in your marketing email newsletters, notifications, and abandoned cart emails.
Re-Engage with Inactive Leads
Emails can be triggered by customer inaction as much as they are by customer action. We can use personalized emails to reengage with those who haven’t been to our site, bought a product, or interacted with our brand in a while. These can be last-ditch attempts to get a visitor excited in your brand again, so asking if you’ve done something wrong, showing how things have improved, and offering a time-limited offer can all be valuable options from which to choose.
Personalize every aspect of the online experience for your visitors and they’ll appreciate that you’re doing everything you can to make your store perfect for them. Brand loyalty will soar, as will your profits.
Cover photo by Jonathan Francisca on Unsplash.
