Following the herd, is part of the human nature. Once trends evolve, it’s only a matter of time until you will encounter them, and in many cases become a part of them.
Some recent trends popping to my mind while writing these lines include: Bitcoin, Game of Thrones, Billions and Justin Bieber.
If you are in E-Commerce, a “trend” you’ve probably heard about is Site Personalization. Like many opportunities on your table it sounds like a good idea, but deep inside you probably wonder: What does it really do? Will it really help my business grow? How much time, efforts and resources would I need to invest in it?
Web Personalization isn’t a trend any more. It’s here to stay and already influence many aspects of our digital lives, inc. targeted ads on facebook, retargeting, personalized emails and so on. And this strategy help marketers shape more relevant messages to their audiences, and reach out to them in a more accurately. If it’s working across the board why shouldn’t it work on your website?
Not only that it’s working, helping thousands of website drive faster and more significant growth, it’s used widely – from Amazon via mid-market retailers up to smaller organizations. Here’s why:
- Scalability — Whether you are a startup company with a marketing team of one, or a larger organization, you always want to optimize your efficiency. Using Commerce Sciences, it doesn’t matter if you need to create 1 or 20 campaigns – you can clone & apply successful campaigns, as many as needed, and on whatever device needed (e.g. Mobile vs. Desktop) with just a few clicks. Your team is not setting up campaigns from scratch each time, nor need your developers to be involved time and again.
- Reporting — Everyone cares about return on marketing investment. Having the ability to track ROI in real-time for each channel and each of your campaigns is essential, allowing you to take meaningful insights back to your team & management, as well as to evaluate your entire marketing programs and their performance.
Some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) we recommend to look at on an ongoing basis are: Conversion Rate, Average Order Value and Micro-Conversions (which reflects other activities, e.g. small commitments, you encourage your visitors to take even if not ready to commit for a purchase yet). Using Commerce Sciences, it’s easy to pull this data. This means that you can quickly change the course of action on programs that lose you money and further optimize promising programs that doubles your normal KPIs. Assisting you in making informed decisions on where to invest.
- Alignment with overall company goals — Companies that thrive to grow define aggressive goals each quarter and every year. Obviously, there’s no only one way to make this happen. But our natural tendency is to focus on bringing more traffic. Not only that acquisition costs won’t go down, they would usually go up (when meeting the roof of your current channels), and makes your strategy fragile and dependent on other external sources, no matter if we are talking about SEO (Google’s algorithms) or paid ads (Your competitors bids) and so on. With Website Personalization, you can decrease that dependency by taking a lead on your destiny, and increasing the revenue per visitor.
- Communicating in a personal way — No one likes getting the same offer or even recommendation as others, in some cases it will be completely irrelevant, in other cases presented at the wrong timing. As marketers, we all understand that concept — but acting on it can be a lot more challenging. By using Site Personalization, you can leverage anonymous information (e.g. visitor’s location), shopping intent and real-time behavior (e.g. added item to cart) to target each visitor with the most relevant message/offer, at the right timing, before they even leave your website.
Through Commerce Sciences personalization capabilities, not only that you can segment your visitors and target them in real-time, but you can also personalize the actual message to make it hyper relevant. For example, rather than having a generic U.S. Shipping Over $75. If someone from Chicago added items worth $65 an appropriate message could be “Spend $10 more and get it all shipped to Chicago today!”.
- Running programs across multiple channels — Many of us are using multiple channels to communicate with our audiences. The trick is coordinating (with consistent messaging and experiences) and measuring these efforts. With Commerce Sciences, you have the ability to run a multi-channel campaign consistent with the on-site experience, and then can also measure the entire effort. Not less important, with web personalization you can treat visitors using different devices (e.g. desktop vs. mobile) differently as usually they would act differently, have different level of intent and ability to purchase.
For example, typically at least once a week you are changing your site home page banners. Do you have any idea how many clicks does it get vs. the previous version? How did it affect conversions from your E-Mail campaign efforts? How did it affect mobile visitors? Using Website Personalization, you can test & measure the performance of these elements on each channel, allowing you to: 1) set up the entire campaign per channel quickly, and 2) Review immediate impact, and make informed decisions.
As most of you are super busy, I hope you found the time you just spent on reading this valuable. If you’re interested in learning more about website personalizatoin, our Beginners Guide to E-Commerce Personalization is a good place to start.