I was recently on Ecommerce Marketing Podcast hosted by Arlen Robinson from OSI Affiliate to discuss personalization and it helps ecommerce merchants, of any size, increase sales and conversion.
You can listen to the podcast below. A shout out to Arlen for having me on his show.
To make it easier for you to benefit from personalization right away, we've summarized the important points below.
What is personalization and DataCue?
Personalization is the ability of a website to intelligently predict what each visitor wants based on their activities and show the content they are most likely to interact with or purchase. Think about websites that you use daily like Youtube and Netflix, your recommendations are totally different from your friends or someone in your family because you have different tastes and browsing history.
Now that's clear, you're probably thinking that you've seen this many times before. You must be thinking of product recommendation carousels , similar to 'People who bought X also bought Y'. So what's new about personalization and in particular, DataCue?
At DataCue, we believe that personalization should go beyond product recommendations. Think about your conversion funnel. Product recommendations are great at increasing the cart size but the journey often starts from the banners on your homepage. Our mission is to create a complete personalized experience for your visitors, from showing the right banners, product recommendations and notifications.
DataCue is an ecommerce personalization solution that is native on the world's biggest ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop and VTEX. This means unlike most personalization solutions, any ecommerce marketer can start personalizing their website with advanced features that are traditionally available only to enterprise within just 15 minutes. With DataCue, any ecommerce business can start delivering personalized content and recommendations to all their visitors across the entire purchase journey. Read this to understand why personalization is not just product recommendations.
Is personalization for you?
While personalization is one of the most effective ways of improving conversion and growing sales, not every brand and online business needs personalization. If your brand is selling less than 50 SKUs, the benefit of personalization will be small as you can show most of the products on the homepage.
Remember that personalization is all about curation. It's about showing a subset of products that each of your customers will like best and therefore decluttering your homepage. On top of product diversity, you also need to have sizeable customer activities. We recommend our clients to have at least 10,000 sessions in monthly traffic with previous transaction history. The orders and traffic are the main ingredients of the recommendation algorithm.
Advice for getting started with personalization
First, we recommend styling the look&feel of recommendation carousels according to your brand identity from our dashboard.
Next, look into choosing the banner layout which will be used to show to your visitors. You maybe used to showing banners as a slider but research shows that grid layout is much better at engaging visitors. After selecting a layout, consider uploading at least 5 banners on the DataCue dashboard. DataCue will automatically match the right banners to each visitor's interest. When you look at your conversion funnel, banners are at the top. They are very good at engaging visitors and get them to view product or category pages.
Don't forget to customize the notification icon. DataCue only shows notifications to visitors based on their personal browsing history. For example, if I was looking at a pair of shoes 3 days ago and today when I came back to the website, there's a new update on stock or discount, I will get a notification from DataCue. It's great at creating an urgency to buy compared to blasting the same promotion to everyone.
Personalization examples
Giani Dafirenze is a successful Shopify footwear brand that has been using DataCue since 2018. They use DataCue to dynamically change banners on the website to keep their homepage relevant and there improve customer experience.
They also show personalized product recommendations on homepage, product page and category page to better serve unique interests of each visitor.
Notifications are great at creating purchase urgency. All notifications are personalized, meaning that they are specific to each visitor's browsing interest. This reduces spam and shows your customers that you care about them.
Since implementing personalization on their website, they have seen an increase of 27% in conversion. Click here for the full case study.
I hope this podcast has been helpful at getting you started with personalization. Give us a shout if you have any question or if you're interested in trying DataCue on your website with 30-day money back guarantee.
