You have no business without customers. Although this is painfully obvious, many companies are still focusing more on other things, such as their products or services. This is simply WRONG. Your customers should always be at the center of your business! 🎯 How you treat – or mistreat – customers will determine whether they convert and how long they remain loyal customers.
How can your company win customers' hearts? What do they want?
Customers today want and expect personalization ... and the statistics have proven that! 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.
What happens if you fail to meet this expectation? 71% of customers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal. Worse still, 63% of consumers will stop buying from brands that use poor personalization tactics.
Based on experience in the e-commerce industry for 10+ years and expertise from working directly with 2500+ e-commerce stores, we boiled down 6 top personalization strategies that will help you win the hearts of your customers and increase conversions:
- Make online shopping easier with an intelligent search engine
- Guide customers' product discovery with personalized recommendations
- Use a CDP to understand each customer's needs and behaviors
- Get personal in email marketing
- Mind your manners in communications
- Get personalization right by letting AI take over
Let’s kick things off with strategy #1 😎💪
1. Make online shopping easier for customers
Online shopping can be a daunting task for many customers. Because customers get easily overwhelmed by the vast amount of product options, feel frustrated by the unorganized categories and site structure, and on top of that, have no personal assistance to turn to.
But don't worry, a well-functioned site search engine can quickly resolve these issues. Natural Baby Shower, an online retailer of baby products in the UK, leverages Clerk’s intelligent search engine to help customers find what they’re looking for. By providing customers with more relevant, instantaneous research results, the brand's e-commerce website immediately became much faster and easier to shop on. As a result, customers are 4.7x more likely to convert and complete a purchase after using the site search.
📹 Watch the video below to unlock more secrets to Natural Baby Shower's success:
📚 You can also read the complete case study right here.
2. Guide customers' product discovery just like a personal shopping assistant
A truly personalized online shopping experience cannot be completed without relevant, personalized product recommendations.
A powerful recommendation engine, like Clerk Recommendations, is smart enough to meet customers' needs and demands, just like a real personal shopping assistant. For instance, Clerk's Recommendations engine allows you to dynamically present customers with alternative product options, popular & trending products, personalized product suggestions based on their order history and click history, best cross-selling products, and many more! Doing so ensures relevance and hyper-personalization across the customer's entire shopping journey.
Vitarock, a Canadian-based online wellness store, uses Clerk's personalized recommendations to help customers navigate the webshop and discover relevant products. Here's an example of what product recommendations are shown when a customer views the product page for a Dry Shampoo:
Does it work for Vitarock?
YES, very well. 🤩 On average, Vitarock sees a 32% increase in basket sizes, and 1.87 more products are added to each order.
Still having doubts?
Personalized product recommendations are estimated to account for more than 35% of purchases on Amazon. In general, product recommendations can account for up to 31% of e-commerce revenues.
3. Understand each customer’s needs and behaviors to make them feel special
Each customer is unique. Your customers are individuals who have their own needs, specific demands, and particular behaviors. Moreover, modern consumers often interact with your business through a million touchpoints, such as Facebook Ads, the e-commerce site, physical stores, Google search results, marketing emails, and so on.
You can put the pieces of the puzzle together by leveraging a CDP (customer data platform). A CDP can give you a single, unified 360° view of each customer by collecting, aggregating, and organizing historical and real-time customer data from all sources (online and offline channels) into centralized, individual customer profiles.
If you want to be a pro e-commerce gamer, you should choose Clerk Audience - because it is more than a basic CDP. 😎
🤓 Learn more: What is a Customer Data Platform? The Definitive Guide to CDPs (2022).
4. Get personal in email marketing
Did you know that personalized emails generate 6x higher transaction rates and revenue?
Email personalization is statistically proven to be effective in keeping customers engaged and increasing conversions. 🥰🛍 For instance, personalized emails can improve CTR (click-through rates) by an average of 14% and conversion rates by 10%.
For example, Barefoot Junkie uses Clerk’s email personalization tools to send out automated emails to customers who are currently slipping away (as they haven’t bought anything from the brand in a while):
After interacting with Clerk's personalized emails, Barefoot Junkie's customers are 3.83x more likely to convert.
Another pro tip? Personalize the subject line! Because in comparison to emails with non-personalized subject lines, consumers open emails with personalized subject lines at a 50% higher rate.
5. Mind your manners in communications
Manners cost nothing but mean everything. 😉 So the saying goes, and it is an essential but often neglected principle.
To add a polite touch in communications with your customers, you can include welcome and thank you templates in your automated email flows. Even still, don’t forget to keep it casual and simple. We aren't robots, and we shouldn't be speaking like them either.
See how Food52 takes the game to the next level by adding a welcome coupon offer and showing the faces behind the brand:
6. Get personalization right by letting AI take over
There are many ways that you can consider implementing each or every one of these strategies. But the most efficient and effective way is to utilize the right personalization technology to help you implement and automate these practices.
As popular choices, neural networks and collaborative filtering are two traditional personalization technologies that have been around for decades. Comparatively, ClerkCore™ is a new technology and an innovative solution for e-commerce personalization. As the table below summarizes, ClerkCore is a better personalization technology than neural networks and collaborative filtering since ClerkCore embraced all their strengths 🤝 while overcoming all their drawbacks 💪:
📚 To see a comprehensive review of these 3 technological solutions, check out this article:
Implementing these customer-centric strategies will effectively offer a human touch to your business. Want some help and more advice to get started? Talk to one of our personalization experts today.
