Which personalization tools work for e commerce and why

For instance, say a transportation service has an app offering public transportation directions. Algorithms could determine, based travel speed, if the user is walking, biking, or driving, and recalculate the journey with the appropriate timings. For organization who rely heavily on content, intelligence can help direct the creation of that content by identifying gaps in information that visitors are searching for.

Perhaps a financial company sees a rise in visitors searching for information around automating investments - information like this can help content creators prioritize the rising topics their actual customers are interested in.

Through natural language processing and machine learning these trending topics can be identified quickly, without the hours of manpower that would be required to read through thousands of search terms and pull out trends.

A major issue that digital business faces when discussing personalization is that there is no single tactic that defines it, and each class of technology comes with limitations. The below table contains some of the most common tactics used in both B2C and B2B eCommerce and each one of these technologies is on the spectrum of personalization.

The way forward is to combine each of these technologies to build a comprehensive intelligence around user intent. To get your visitors to their goal of the moment you need to understand them and tailor your experience across every level these technologies offers.

Satisfying that need takes a blend of the right technology and the knowledge of how to use it. If you identify that intent immediately, you can shorten their customer journey and enhance their experience. Did they come from an advertisement on social media? Did they look for a particular product or service on a search engine?

Did they find you from a press article? Thanks to digital experience platforms and machine learning you can take care of this at scale and ensure related content and products to your visitors.

The relative rarity of personalized search is a huge missed opportunity, as visitors using search convert at a 1. Unfortunately, many of the search functions on sites today may hurt as much as they help because they focus on keywords instead of the meaning of those words in context.

Search can be messy. Spelling mistakes, use of broad terms, differences in how people describe the same product can make accurate search results a struggle. Most marketing platforms still search for words alone, which is a recipe for failure.

But a keyword search may instead deliver a page of low-cost black accessories for a laptop. By comparison, an intelligent, semantic search considers the words in context, just as a human sales clerk would. Intelligent search with semantic understanding capabilities is a huge advantage when it comes to happy customers. Brands, manufacturers, retailers and distributors need to bring their business into the search engine to create guided, merchandising-driven selling experiences on their own.

This means sellers can deliver personalized experiences and recommendations to customers searching and browsing across landing pages — eliminating the need to combine disparate products from multiple software vendors. For example, if a user that has shown interest in female products e. The experience of each user is personalized in regard to the preferences that they have shown in the past. This is what Semantic Search has as its main goal: making it easy for your users to find what they're looking for.

Read this next: Semantic Search Explained in 5 Minutes [blog]. You can virtually accompany your visitors while they browse your site, just as a car salesman might walk with a customer around a showroom. All along the way, a good salesman picks up clues on what kind of car suits his customers, what color they like, what they can afford, and how soon they want the vehicle. A key to making this work is to let machine learning process all that information and match it against your inventory in real time.

If a clothing retailer knows that customers will soon be looking for festival wear. They create a landing page and add in the products they believe festival goers will be hunting for. The machine then gets to work, boosting items that are performing well, have more stock available, and align to the visitors preferences.

Additionally, content marketers might create targeted inspirational content around regional festivals and let the machine provide the right content based on IP locations.

It requires rapid data aggregation and analysis, cross-channel deployment, and machine learning optimization. Due to a lack of data, personalization can be challenging for a large majority of companies to do well. After you have established your most important segments, you want to deliver personalized experiences by serving each traffic segment with dynamic content.

So, from our traffic segmentation examples above, here are 6 ways to serve each segment dynamic content. For first time visitors and returning customers, you could serve them a modal with a coupon on their first order just as Chickidee has done here:.

Traffic sources can tell you a lot about a buyer, including intent, interests and industry, as well as how close they are to purchase. Traffic from Amazon ads might have more intent than traffic from Facebook, so customizing landing pages by adding 1-time coupon codes or free next day shipping might tip the balance for conversions.

Image source. The example below from TopMan. Another way of Geo-Location personalization based on IP address is by retrieving the current weather at the shoppers IP to make product recommendations like Burton has done in this example:. This level of personalization of new first time visitors is geared and optimized to onboard them as customers and members of their wine club.

Signed in visitors are also made to feel at home with personalized messages addressing them by first name on the home page.

On SportsShoes. UTM parameters help to define and segment traffic by referral sources, campaign name and content type. Landing pages can be personalized by any or a combination of these three parameters. With the dominant use of mobile devices, device based personalization is a fast-growing ecommerce trend. Mobile or tablet responsiveness or adaptive screens are now a given.

The next frontier really is content tailored to mobile devices in a bid to drive conversions. Here are few ways to serve custom ecommerce content to browsers on mobile devices :. The following CRO tools are able to segment traffic as well as serve dynamic content to each traffic segment. At the enterprise level, Amazon and Staples have in the past charged shoppers different prices due to real-time estimations of their incomes and geographic location. My findings show WiseDynamic by Wiser to be the only major solutions provider in the dynamic pricing space.

They cater for both enterprise and mid-tier e-tailers. Now that you have a full grasp of the fundamentals of personalization based on traffic segments, the next phase of personalization — which will be covered in part 2 of this article — aims to go more granular by recognizing each shopper in varying degrees of detail and offering each shopper a personalized experience. This involves getting to customize both on-site and off-site customer experiences for each of your customers.

The idea is to use on-site interactions as signals in order to provide user session context. The moment the context of the user is determined, behavioral targeting can be triggered. Behavioral targeting goes beyond traditional demographic targeting data i. Ecommerce personalization platforms utilize some or all of the above data points in order to predict and then trigger personalized recommendations and content. Machine learning and data mining are the most promising of AI technologies at the moment because they work at scale by processing big data efficiently, finding patterns in them and making smart decisions or suggestions.

AI is quickly shaping personalization in ecommerce and should be the core technology driving your personalization efforts. An AI driven personalization platform will generally work as follows,. Every new transaction enables AI personalization platforms to learn more about customers, thereby making recommendations presented to returning customers more and more relevant and accurate over time.

Although humans are able to make personal recommendations, it really is challenging at scale with hundreds or thousands of SKUs and thousands or even millions of customers. Your personalized marketing strategy should be broken into the following broad segments:. Dynamic content blocks are allocated areas within pages dedicated to replacing and adding content specific to groups or segments of visitors.

If I, however, browsed the same page in the U. If you have recently browsed a few ecommerce sites , you will most definitely have come across modal pop-up windows requesting for your email address in exchange for a one-off coupon or some sort of incentive. Every ecommerce website seems to be doing this nowadays but as they say, the devil is in the detail. Timing and action based triggers are of absolute importance when it comes to modal pop-ups with an email opt-in.

It has been intentionally placed at checkout to retrieve abandoned shopping and further email marketing. This is behavioral targeting in action because it is context and action based. Here are some other ways to trigger modal popups based on the personal circumstances of shoppers. Price matching when a product is just about to be added or has been added to a shopping basket.

Recognizing new shoppers or unregistered members and offering them a coupon in exchange for their email and sex for fashion retailers.

Here is how Laterooms added a layer of gamification into their messaging and creative in order to potentially drive up more email addresses. They are asking browsers to enter a competition in order to win a night at a hotel and event tickets. The objective is to get browsers on their list in order to send more personalized messages and sales. You could also only display vouchers to repeat logged in customers and registered members with at least one transaction under their belt.

Pop-under sliders have been typically used by online chat services and widgets such as the Google Trust Sites widget. Pop-under modal sliders are a vastly underutilized means of serving onsite targeted content in ecommerce.

It is definitely worth putting pop-under modals in the mix of your on-site targeting arsenal and to test them side-by-side pop over modals. The technology is simple: a box slides out on the lower left or right corner of pages displaying a bespoke offer. The swiftness of entry is key and the less intrusive their placement, the better. The third and most effective way to drive addition revenue through personalization is with personalized on-site product recommendations , which according to market research conducted by Barilliance and data based on 1.

The dynamic product recommendations are based on visitor data, behavior data and session history. The core objective of on-site personalized recommendations is to drive up the average order value of each shopping session. In other words, you want shoppers to add more items to their shopping cart with the hope that they checkout with as many if not all the items in their basket. We do this by utilizing up-selling and cross-selling strategies. The above is a classic cross-sell tactic implemented by e-tailer Net-a-Porter.

The first row below the main product in view is a collection of products that cross-sell and upsell the main product. They actually help me develop my style and discover new products based on my preferences and previous activities. Remember their choices and guide them better with personalized recommendations.

So at this point, I could use some help from the store. And the help I need came from Zalando :. Personalizing the homepage based on my previous sessions, the company helps me have an uninterrupted shopping experience.

Plus, they increase my likelihood of buying those products. Instead of only recommending similar products, they suggest me new brands to explore, based on my recent browsing activity. This way, they help me discover more items I can like from a wide range of product categories.

And it means more sales and more conversions for the company. Whether through cookies or by asking the visitors, most e-commerce sites know where their visitors are coming from or where they want the products to be shipped.

Customizing product pages based on location is a simple adjustment yet it improves the shopping experience. And there are many different ways you can use this information and be more relevant to your visitors. When you choose the US store from the top menu and visit a product page , this is what you see. This is a good example of location-based personalization because the company anticipates the problems of their visitors.

Keep the cultural or seasonal differences in mind. Users who land on your site for the first time and your returning visitors have different needs and questions in mind.

Why offer both of them the exact same thing, while you can easily personalize your on-site messages? So you can offer first-time visitors an incentive to sign up for your email list and help them visit you again. Like what you see? Load this high-converting template in our editor and customize it to the look and feel of your business. Want more popup examples? Browse Our Popup Gallery.

Not bad, huh? If a visitor is already a subscriber, you might want to personalize the message for them, instead of showing them another signup form. Exit-intent is another well-known example of behavior-based campaigns.

You can also personalize your on-site messages and display highly relevant campaigns. Hopefully, email is already a big part of your marketing strategy. Adding personalization into the mix, you can make even more out of your emails. So how do you get your emails opened in such a competitive arena?

Yep, you got it right: By personalizing your email subject lines. And what we mean here is getting on a first-name basis with your subscribers.