Onsite personalisation is becoming the norm for more and more retailers, with a true customer focus now central to most ecommerce strategies. Customers have also shifted their expectations, now demanding an experience more akin to shopping instore, where helpful sales assistants can tailor the experience to the individual’s tastes, likes and dislikes.
Retailers are now working towards bridging the gap between instore and online shopping by creating a smarter online shop – one that can cater to a million different faces.
In order to do this, they must capture and draw insights from the information they have – but what do retailers need to know about their customers to make each shopping experience truly individual?
What have your customers told you about themselves?
Customer data forms the basis of any solid personalisation strategy, and the first place for retailers to start looking for insight is on a customer’s shopping account, which contains a certain set of personal data as well as preferences they have selected.
This data can give a good initial picture of the kind of service they want from a retailer; for example, do they wish to be sent current offers or contacted by email? If so, this opens a new avenue for delivering personalised content.
Knowing a customer’s age, gender and location are the bare essentials for getting the basics of their personalised experience right.
What are your customers liking or sharing on social media?
Never before have retailers had more of an insight into the personal tastes and interests of their customers than they do now – social media is a data point that must be taken advantage of in order to really get to know customers.
Social networks are full of the kinds of content which, in the past, would need to be obtained using costly and time-consuming market research. However, customers today are actively volunteering this valuable information about their lives which can be used to build up a detailed picture.
What’s more, data gathered from social media activity is more ‘organic’ than the information retailers collect in surveys or questionnaires, and so is more likely to reflect the customer’s true nature, giving retailers the best chance of showing them content that really appeals to them.
Which devices are your customers using?
Paying attention to how customers prefer to shop is a vital element of any personalisation strategy, but retailers must bear in mind how different audiences interact with different devices in their everyday lives.
It may be that the younger demographic performs most of its shopping activity on a smartphone while older, more financially stable consumers tend to shop on tablets or laptops. Retailers must take stock of who their core audience is, and invest in the appropriate technology.
It is widely accepted that every retailer should have optimised its website for mobile and tablet users to an acceptable level by now – but further steps can be taken if customers prefer to shop in less traditional ways, such as introducing transactional mobile apps.
What are your customers searching for?
The search box is an excellent opportunity for retailers to display personalised content to customers. If a retailer knows what colours, styles, brands or sizes a customer tends to purchase, it can filter results automatically to show only the most relevant content when a search query is entered.
Filtering the results in this way means less work for the customer, which makes it more likely they will find what they want quickly and make a purchase.
What are your customers doing right now?
This is perhaps the most important, yet most often overlooked aspect of the personalisation journey – onsite personalisation must be dynamically updated and adapted to get the most accurate picture of what a customer is likely to be looking for in the present moment, rather than what they might have been looking for at some point in the past. Even the most sophisticated personalised ecommerce experiences have a number of glitches here which have yet to be resolved.
Being aware of which stage of their ‘life-cycles’ customers are in can avoid unfortunate product recommendations such as showing someone a car battery a week after they have purchased a car battery, or suggesting they buy nappies based on a purchase from 12 months ago, when in fact it is unlikely their child requires them anymore.
This is where personalisation gets a little more nuanced and complex, but putting the effort in can bring great rewards in the long term. Retailers must invest more time in formulating accurate and sophisticated methods of behavioural targeting which encompass a multitude of variables in a consumer’s life that can alter the sorts of products they purchase, in order to truly understand them.
