Personalisation is becoming more and more important in every part of the digital marketing and retail industries. Shoppers are telling us that they want personalised experiences with brands, whether online or in a physical store.
Personalisation is often linked to trust and a sense of feeling like brands care about consumers, and brands who fail to meet expectations could be losing billions in lost revenue.
As you’d imagine, personalisation is absolutely crucial in e-commerce. According to a prediction by world-leading research organisation Gartner, businesses taking e-commerce personalisation seriously could see a boost of up to 15% in profits by 2020.
Here are just a few tips to help you get started with optimising your e-commerce strategy to capture more sales:
Capture lost custom by following up on abandoned carts
It’s relatively easy to automate an email following up on an abandoned shopping cart, but many brands don’t do it. Just a simple reminder of what’s in their shopping basket could be all it takes to get a customer to complete checkout. You can also offer a sweetener in the form of a small discount or free delivery to help a hesitant customer over the finishing line.
Make good use of product recommendations
It’s so important to carefully plan your strategy with regards to product recommendations. Get it wrong, and you could be driving customers away. According to Smart Insights, 74% of consumers hate being shown irrelevant content.
On the other side of the coin, certain types of product recommendations can provide a significant boost to sales revenue. The most successful way of providing recommendations during the shopping journey is through ‘customers who viewed this also viewed’, which is possibly more persuasive due to the connection with real customers and what they’re actually buying.
Provided that the recommendations are relevant and drawn from actual customer data, this method can be really effective. In fact, it was shown to account for 68% of eCommerce revenue according to the Smart Insights research.
Data from McKinsey also showed that around 35% of Amazon’s sales come from ‘frequently bought together’, ‘compare to similar items’ and ‘recommended for you’ features during the e-commerce experience.
Tailor your website and checkout to the customer
Making your website and the checkout process as easy to use as possible is bound to increase e-commerce revenue. But is there more you could be doing? Making use of customer data such as location and previous purchase history, you can personalise aspects of the shopping experience. For example, automatically displaying shipping information to the customer’s location or providing a one-click way to sign in or checkout.
If a customer feels you remember them or there’s a sense of familiarity with using the site, these can all significantly improve their experience and feelings towards your brand.
For more help and advice for improving your e-commerce strategy, get in touch with the experts here at Ambos Digital. We have a specialist e-commerce team on-hand to offer whatever assistance you need, whether it’s starting from scratch or optimising what you’ve already built.
