Greeting your customers with a personalized experience is not only going to improve the first impression but will also set your eCommerce store apart from the competitors. Adding personalization to the business website is part of enhancing the level of customer experience that has become one of the top priorities for store owners because it is something that acts as a differentiator in this competitive eCommerce industry. Even little details can make a big difference in terms of how customers feel about products and the company. There are several ways to personalize the experience of your customers such as:
Personalized emails
Personalizing the emails can drastically increase your open and click-through rates. If you are using an eCommerce platform like nopCommerce, it allows you to add personalization to message templates in a very user-friendly way.
According to Experian Marketing Services, personalized mailings can drastically increase engagement and transaction rates.
- Personalized promotional mailings have 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent higher unique click rates than non-personalized mailings
- Personalized, triggered mailings have similar lifts, with 25 percent higher unique open rates and 51 percent higher unique click rates
- For promotional mailings, personalized emails generate transaction rates and revenue per email that is more than six times higher than non-personalized emails
- Personalized, trigger campaigns result in more than double the transaction rates of non-personalized, trigger mailings
Using customer’s geographical location
If you have been doing email marketing for your online business for quite a while, you already know that certain times of a day prove to be better than others in terms of open and click through rates. Some of your customers may prefer to open an email at 2pm while other may like to receive an email around 8am.
Chances are not all your customers are from one location or time zone. When you are communicating with customers / online shoppers that are scattered around the world in different time zones, it becomes quite important to capture their geographical location and send your emails / campaigns at the best times. Now, the question is, how to determine what the best time is? Well, you can always do an A/B testing on your email campaigns and see the trends.
Taking customer’s geographical location into consideration can also help you in offering a different kind of promotions to your customers. For example, if you have a lot of customers from India, you can offer a discounts or promotion according to the Indian calendar on different festivals and occasions that are unique to Indian customers only while you can target all customers around Christmas or New Year as those are universal. This will help you in creating a personalized experiencing for your customers.
Tip: Please take a look at this case study by Marketingsherpa on how send frequency impacts on read rate.
Triggering events based on customer’s actions and previous order history
Amazon has perfected this strategy by sending out emails according to all kinds of behavior like last viewed, item in cart and similar / recommended items based on last purchase. Amazon says 35 percent of product sales result from recommendations. Similar email marketing strategy can make your customers spend more time on your website and increases repeat orders as customers will be reminded by your triggered emails based on their actions and previous order history on your store site.
Shopping cart abandonment type triggered emails are quite common and many eCommerce stores follow this kind of email strategy. This kind of email reminds your customers to return to the store site and finish the order process. Every business owner’s target is to get better conversions, more sales and reduce shopping cart abandonment and these kind of triggered emails are beneficial to retailers as it decreases the shopping cart abandonment.
At first, the concept of personalization may sound like a lot of work (or overwhelming) but in reality, it is not a very difficult task. Once you have all the systems in place, you can easily automate most of the processes and this kind of personalized approach will help you in building loyalty.
Author: Lavish Kumar