It’s time to get real personal with your customers if you want to boost e-commerce sales and increase revenue this holiday season! In case you’re not sure what I mean, I’m talking about personalisation.
Today’s online shoppers demand a frictionless end-to-end shopping experience. By creating a personalised shopping experience for each of your customers, you would be more likely to clinch the sale than your competition.
Whether you run a six-figure e-commerce website or a small home-based business with a simple Shopify store hawking your handmade wares, I’m sure you want to claim a nice chunk of the revenue pie this holiday season. In the US alone, that pie is predicted to be worth over $124.1 BILLION from November to December 2018 alone, to be exact. Here in Australia, Aussies spent more than $21 billion dollars on online shopping in 2017 and this figure is expected to grow exponentially over the coming years.
According to Australia Post’s 2017 report on online shopping, Australians still spent over $267 billion in traditional retail stores. This tells us that most people still prefer the personal touch they get when shopping in a brick-and-mortar store. To win these shoppers over to shop online, give them the royal treatment with a well-integrated eco-system that makes them feel like you understand them well.
Increase your customer lifetime value with personalised product recommendations
At Bumper Leads, we love integrating Active Campaign into our clients’ eco-systems for many good reasons. But there are other alternatives out there such as Ontraport, Infusionsoft, or even MailChimp. The software you choose ultimately depends on your needs and your budget.
With Active Campaign, you can tag your customers based on their past purchases, products they’ve looked at, and use that data to provide them with personalised product recommendations. These can be either alternatives to what they’ve shown interest in or complementary to those they’ve purchased.
A customer bought a skirt from your basic collection? Great! Now subtly nudge them towards buying a matching top and the perfect pair of peep-toe pumps to complete the look for the new season. You can do that with an automated email that showcases how well these items work together, then follow that up with a unique offer code for those items to encourage purchase. Doing this successfully will ultimately increase your customer’s lifetime value from $(cost of one skirt) to $(cost of skirt + top + pumps). See where I’m going with this?
This can be applied to anything from food to fashion, gifts to homewares, electronics to furniture. The sky’s the limit!
Attract repeat customers and boost e-commerce sales with personalised deals and offers
If you’ve been a regular shopper at Woolworth’s supermarket here in Australia and are registered to their Everyday Rewards program, you might have received emails such as these in your email:
They’ve used their point-of-sale data to identify my favourite products and offered me attractive incentives to buy from them again.
This sure beats receiving a generic email with a list of all their weekly specials – I might not even read that because I’m not necessarily interested in other products.
Without this personalised email offer, I might not have bothered to purchase these particular items when I went into the shops. But with it, I ended up buying a couple of these items and stocking them up in my pantry just to take advantage of the offer. Because… why not?
This is easily done with a well-planned automation sequence – for example, asking your customer for their date of birth will allow you to send them birthday offers.
A quick survey on their interests will allow you to send them targeted offers and information that are relevant to their interests.
Your job here is to cut out the white noise and distractions and give them exactly what they want so they, in turn, want to go back to your store for their next purchase.
The case for delivering personalised shopping experiences to boost e-commerce sales
Source: https://www.websitemagazine.com/blog/consumers-demand-personalized-shopping-experiences
As you can see, it is clear that for e-commerce stores to continue attracting shoppers and their dollars, you have to consider the importance of personalisation. Here are a few more ideas:
Reverse shopping cart abandonment
You know those customers who browse your website and add a whole bunch of stuff to their shopping cart, then get distracted and forgot about it, or saw the final tally at the bottom of the page and decided to drop the cart like a hot potato? I plead my guilt but I also know I’m not alone! Reversing these abandonments can do wonders for your revenue. All you have to do is to follow up with a series of emails or retargeted advertisements on Facebook to remind them that they’ve left their carts full of goodies but haven’t yet checked out. Follow up in a few days with a time-sensitive discount offer or freebie to further sweeten the pot. Even if only 1 out of 10 abandoned carts gets reversed, your efforts would have been worthwhile already!
Bring personalisation to your website
We all know that consistent customer experience is crucial to conversion and loyalty, so retailers should leverage multiple customer behaviours to tie the email and website experiences together. For example, if someone browses a category on your site and then abandons, they should receive a follow-up email featuring the products they browsed with additional potential products of interest. Clicking on links on that email through to your website should take them to unique landing pages that reflect the content of that email rather than just sending them to the generic home page. It’s the little things but tying these experiences together can really help increase your customer value.
Don’t lose out on your chunk of the Christmas shopping pie and up your e-commerce game now! Even if you’re too late for this year’s holiday shopping season, it’s still the perfect time to set this all up for next year. It’s never too late to eat more pie and make more money, we say!
Our team of automation experts are on standby – check out our e-commerce automation package here and get started.