5 Ecommerce personalization strategies to boost customer engagement and sales

A survey of 1,000 US adults by Epsilon and GBH Insights found that most respondents (80 percent) want personalization from retailers. Personalized experiences lead to better customer engagement and significant improvement in sales and conversations. As a leading E-commerce Software Development Company, we empower our e-commerce clients to craft more innovative and personalized experiences using our deep domain knowledge and a full suite of Ecommerce software development solutions. 

In this blog post, we’re sharing five of our best strategies for e-commerce companies that they can adopt to personalize their customers’ buying journeys and instantly drive greater customer engagement and sales.

E-commerce personalization strategies to boost customer engagement and sales

Strategy #1 - Homepage Personalization  

Customizing a homepage  is such a crucial personalization strategy that even the world's most renowned E-commerce companies, such as Amazon, employ this strategy. And everyone knows the kind of growth Amazon registers every hour, every single year.  For those who may not know, Amazon’s sales averages more than $17 million per hour!

Any E-commerce store can show a highly targeted homepage to its customers by leveraging data from the customer’s previous visits and purchases, browning history, wish lists, etc. It can also take advantage of the cookies, local and session storage, URL parameters, customers’ devices, and  demographics. 

Furthermore, eCommerce stores or companies can enhance their customer experiences by recognizing their customers by their names, and offering them highly targeted offers right on the home page based on their past purchases and on important milestones in their lives such as their anniversaries and birthdays.

“56% of shoppers are more likely to buy again when a merchant recognizes them by name.”

Strategy #2 - Show Continuous Shopping for Returning Customers

Though the ‘Continuous Shopping’ feature can be a part of our home page customization strategy, it is such a massive E-commerce tactic that we have to mention it separately. 

Netflix was probably the first one to introduce a similar tactic called ‘Continue Watching.’ The purpose was to lessen the consumer’s frustration while confronting the wealth of video content that Netflix offers, and help them quickly reconnect to their favorite shows. 

E-commerce marketers can also leverage this tactic by helping their customers pick up right where they had left off. By reminding customers of the products they browsed or showed interest in, E-commerce stores can achieve a better CX and sales. 

Strategy #3 - Personalize Your Messaging

Email generates $42 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 4,200% ROI, making it one of the most effective options available. 

E-commerce stores can further enhance the impact of their email marketing programs by personalizing them. Segmenting the email list by demographics, preferences, and purchase history is a very effective email personalization tactic. Mobile-friendly emailing is another way to ensure that the customer experience does not suffer if the emails are opened and read on mobile devices. In addition to this, the e-commerce teams can also match personalized emails with customized landing pages whenever possible to enhance their customer experience and increase overall revenues.
 

The e-commerce companies can truly accelerate the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns by developing a mechanism that enables them to automate and respond to what their customers do and what they have done in the past. Broadly speaking, customers are more likely to make a purchase when they are approached using all or any of the following ways.  

• When your customer reaches a personal milestone; it could be his/her birthday, anniversary, his/her Xth purchase on the app, etc. 
         
• Recommendation emails influenced by his/her recent visits, items left abandoned in the cart, products / services that were searched 
          
• Follow-ups and requests for feedback on the recent purchases
         
• Replenishment emails - these emails are designed to encourage customers to indulge in repeat purchases of the previous items they bought which are about to run out. 
         
• Alert emails - when the items in their wish lists are on available on sale or during sitewide flash sale

To get the most out of your email marketing, you might also need some help from a professional E-commerce Software Development Company that can help you build a custom and scalable email marketing ecosystem together.

Strategy #4 -  Personalized Product Recommendations 

Personalized product recommendation strategies can multiply profits for e-commerce stores. We’ve already discussed a few such strategies such as recommending relevant product offers right on the homepage. However, smart sellers can employ product recommendation strategies throughout a customer’s standard buying journey. 

Category recommendations, for instance, are a great way to engage and convert customers. By leveraging this particular form of personalized product recommendations, sellers recommend the most relevant offers from the category or categories the customer is more interested in, or has bought from in the recent past. 

Sellers can also leverage product page recommendations to increase their average order value (AOV) and overall customer satisfaction. When product pages are customized for every customer based on their data, sellers can see a hike of over 411% in their conversions and an increase of over 6.5% in their revenues. To further bolster customer engagement and sales, retailers can also offer customized product recommendations in the advanced stages of a customer’s buying journey, primarily the ‘shopping cart’ and ‘order confirmation’ stages. 

Strategy #5 - Drive Sales with Smart Retargeting Marketing  

About 96% of the people that visit a website for the first time are not ready to buy. And even long-time customers don’t always buy every time they visit their favorite online stores. But this doesn't mean they can’t be convinced and converted. 

By tapping into social retargeting capabilities, E-commerce marketers can reach out to these customers across all popular social media platforms and gently nudge them towards their stores. 

By combining the right strategy with great execution, retailers can achieve:

• Improved Campaign ROI     
• Reduced cost per impression   
• Increased brand awareness 
      
      Studies also reveal that retargeting ads are about 76% more likely to generate a click when compared to display ads and enable sellers to move up to 50% more merchandise.  
      
      It is also important to note that experience personalization strategies and tactics wouldn’t yield the desired results unless the E-commerce store has a robust online presence in the form of a highly responsive, highly available, and highly scalable app and website. This is where Kellton, a leading custom Ecommerce Development Services provider, comes into the picture. 

E-commerce App Development Services by Kellton 

Kellton is a global digital transformation enablement company and a leading provider of E-commerce software development services. Our roadmap for E-commerce entails prototyping, piloting, Proof-of-Concept (PoC), and implementing dynamic pricing engines to help achieve sustainable and consistent growth along with thoughtful capability building. To learn more about our E-commerce solutions and how we help E-commerce businesses like yours, please get in touch.