Personalization Is Simple

Personalization technology allows an ecommerce website to dynamically insert, customize or suggest relevant content to individual users.

Using personalization techniques, a web-based merchant, as an example, can display a tennis-oriented banner for a returning tennis supplies buyer.  Or, the site can suggest specific items to a customer, featuring sales on tennis racquets or tennis shoes.

For more than a decade, we’ve been hearing about the vast potential of personalized marketing. A scene from the 2002 movie, “Minority Report,” gave us a glimpse of the future of personalization. Yet, although the technology to make that scene possible is available now, using personalization to increase online sales has been very difficult.

Enterprise-level marketing organizations have teams of people dealing with analytics, social media optimization, targeting, web experience management, cross-channel campaign management, IT integration and other activities to learn more about customers, personalize the user experience, and increase conversion.

But let’s face it, most of us don’t have all of the expertise or time needed for effective data mining, customer profiling, testing, targeting and more. Furthermore, the loading, configuring and personalization of dynamic content and features can be daunting.

According to Amanda Myers, product marketing manager at BigCommerce, “Making it quick and easy for customers to find, and purchase, what they’re looking for is at the heart of personalization”. [1]

So why can’t the process of personalization be easy for ecommerce merchants, too?

Well, it can.

“More Items to Consider” and “Related to Items You’ve Viewed” widgets, such as those found on Amazon, can be easily added to most sites as a way to suggest products based on recent navigation. These types of widgets are simple to install and are readily available from vendors such as Amazon, GrowCart, Linkcious and OnTheGoSystems, to name a few.

As another example of personalization, Netflix classifies most products with plot details (“animated comedy,” “murder mystery,” etc.), adding more data to empower recommendations. By contributing their expert knowledge, Netflix’s recommendation engine becomes “smarter.” For other types of ecommerce sites, the Personal Shopping Assistant Application (PSAA) from BestMatch offers something similar, which can be implemented by adding a single line of code to most web pages.

Regardless of the widgets or PSAA that you choose to use for your site, personalization can be easily incorporated to help you to engage your customers and drive more sales.

[1] http://www.bigcommerce.com/ecommerce-blog/improve-customer-experience-personalization/

 

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