When we talk about optimising an e-Commerce store for conversion, we have to start with the user journey. You can improve the user journey in several ways, including improving the design, the speed of your site and implementing trust signals.

While improving all of these will increase your conversion rates, if the products and placement isn’t right, the customer won’t buy. This is where personalisation comes in. In this article we’re going to discuss exactly what eCommerce personalisation is. We’ll also look at how to successfully implement it and why it’s more than recommending products.

What is Personalised eCommerce?

Personalised eCommerce is the ability to collect data about your site visitors and use that data to offer a personalised user experience. This can be in the form of personalised product recommendations, product categories or even personalising design elements of the site. By picking out data points throughout the users journey you can set certain criteria for personalisation. Some of the basic data points include:

• User Pre-Browsing Data Points
• • Device Type – mobile, desktop, tablet
  • Browser – Chrome, IE, Firefox etc
  • Time, day and location
  • Acquisition – referral from social, organic search, email etc.
• User Behaviour Data Points
  • Recently view products
  • Recently view categories
  • Recently view content (and time spent on that content)
  • Time spent on site
  • Abandoned carts and abandoned browsing
• Historic Data Points
  • Churn risk
  • Order history
  • Site visit history
  • Historic email interactions
  • Loyalty

There are literally thousands of data points that personalisation AI based programs pick up on. As the research and development into AI personalisation increases, these data points will improve and the success of personalisation will improve.
Personalisation as a stand alone strategy is very powerful. However, when you introduce personalisation into existing marketing strategies it can improve conversion rates massively.

Personalisation eCommerce Marketing

Introducing personalisation into an eCommerce marketing plan will help improve the shopping experience on your online store. With anything in marketing, planning and testing is key to any success and personalisation is no different. Using A/B testing across the personalisation implementations will help improve the efficiency and conversion values.

For a completely seamless personalisation integration across all your marketing channels, you’ll want to create integrations across the platforms you use. Thankfully, Nosto integrates seamlessly across marketing channels, and eCommerce tech stacks.

On Site Personalisation

The basics of personalisation in eCommerce is personalise the actual online shop. This means dynamically changing product, category and content placements throughout the site. Using A/B testing allows you to create audience profiles that can be used to change the sites content.
Personalising the design and layout of the product page based on the audience and segmentation type can help improve conversions. You can improve this further by personalising the call to action.

Personalised Email Marketing

Integrating personalisation into your email marketing is relatively easy. Collect as much data about the customer as possible. This let’s you segment correctly and then enrol them into automated email flows. There’s a direct integration between Nosto and Klaviyo allowing you to quickly link the 2 platforms together. There’s also a direct integration between DotDigital and Nosto.

Use personalised product recommendations in content based email marketing, to increase the CTR on those products. This is an effective way to put the right product in front of the right customer at the right time. You can personalise the content in your email based on the data you’ve collected about them.

This could be addressing them by their name in the email “Hello John”. Or you could change the entire format of the email based on their segmentation.

Subject lines are obviously important to encourage a higher open rate. By personalising subject lines, you will increase the open rates and engagement of the email. If you combine that with personalising the email content, you’ll increase the overall click through rate and conversion values.

It’s important that you keep on top of your email list. In every email you should give your subscribers the option to update their information. This way you’ll always be providing relevant information to the right segmentation.

Personalising emails requires you to know all the information about a user, such as their name. If there is missing data, make sure there is default text to fall back on. Otherwise you’ll end up with something like “hello {first_name}”, which looks messy.

Personalised Pop-Ups

Pop-ups can be annoying, especially if a site is relentlessly bombarding you with them. By default, we’ve learnt to instantly click off the pop-up. If we personalise these pop-ups, we can grab the attention of the user before they close it.
Pop-ups can be a great way to inform users of promotions, direct them to content types and collect more data. Collecting more data points allows you to personalise their experience even further. You can use personalised segmentations to hand out offers based on their loyalty and churn risk.

Personalised Social Ads

Integrating your personalisation campaign with your social media ads will help you retarget and up-sell better. Not only will this help increase your conversion rates but it will improve your ROI.

Online retailers using Nosto see on average a 7x return on investment when implemented correctly.

Within your social advertising campaign you can also use the audience and segmentation type to create look-alike audiences. This can help you find new audiences and customers which in turn will improve the accuracy of the look-alike audience.

Cross-Device Personalisation

Often customers will discover a product on one device but actually purchase on another, this is called the halo effect. Offering personalisation across these devices will help you maintain an improved conversion rate.

You can use signals across different logins and cookies to create something called concurrent sessions. While this is a relatively untapped process, it’s an integral part of most personalisation strategies. Without it, your users will be getting an inconsistent user experience.

Omni-Channel Personalisation

Similar to a cross-device strategy, personalisation doesn’t stop at your online channels. An omni-channel marketing strategy will require some level of personalisation.

Perhaps you have a brick and mortar store as well as a series of eCommerce sites. You’ll want to be able to offer in-store product recommendations based on the customers experience online. With Nosto, you can send your personalisation data to POS systems. This allows your in-store customers to receive the same experience in person as they do online.

If you’re looking at creating a personalised marketing strategy across your channels, then get in touch today. We can help you build out a roadmap of personalisation integrations that will increase your loyalty, trust and conversion values.