How to Personalized Your Customer’s eCommerce Experience

The surge of remote working has resulted in a significant increase in online engagement. eCommerce sales experienced an impressive growth of 27.6% in 2020 alone, resulting in total revenue of $4.3 trillion. This provides businesses with the chance to exploit the potential of eCommerce to expand their consumer base and boost sales. However, there lies the struggle to distinguish oneself as competition gets harsher. It is crucial to provide an incomparable customer experience to ensure you stand out.

Recent surveys also reveal that 54% of consumers expect their experiences to be personalized when interacting with businesses; and about 90% are willing to spend more money with brands that can offer the personalization they desire.

This article will discuss how you can customize your customer’s eCommerce experience and how great product imagery, engaging copy, and tailored product recommendations can help you deliver a unique and memorable shopping experience.

In this guide:

• What is Personalization in eCommerce?
  • Factors to Consider in eCommerce Personalization
• How Do you Customize eCommerce Customer Experience?
• Where Does Product Photography Fit in Providing Customer Experience?

What is Personalization in eCommerce?

Crafting a personalized shopping experience for customers is of the utmost importance when it comes to a successful eCommerce marketing strategy. We are talking about delivering a personalized buying journey based on their behavior, preferences, and past interactions with your brand.

When you try personalizing your services and products, potential customers will be more likely to engage with your business. This increase in engagement allows you to gain valuable insights so that you can further customize their experience. The outcome? A highly interactive journey for users which not only raises satisfaction levels but also drives the desired outcomes from your company.

Personalization programs can increase customer satisfaction by up to 20% while also triggering a 10-15% boost in sales conversion rates. On top of that, highly relevant content ensures that you don’t waste resources on marketing material they won’t find interesting.

Factors to Consider in eCommerce Personalization

Before launching an eCommerce personalization strategy, you will need to do the following:

• Gather data on your ideal customers and website visitors, such as online behavior, demographics, interests, and purchase history. However, you must be mindful of data privacy laws and gather data as ethically as possible.
• Once you’ve collected data, you need to analyze them. From there, you can develop buyer personas based on your gathered data. This will help you better understand your customers and their needs.
• A way to deliver an experience to each segment effectively. You can segment your customers and create an individualized experience for each. Use technology to automate the personalized delivery of content, emails, and messaging. This way, you don’t have to adjust customer experiences whenever they visit your website manually.

After determining your targeting standards, you can create conditions in your marketing software to customize content suited to those criteria. For example, if you have customers who are inactive for some time, you can send out a special offer to try and encourage them to make a purchase.

If you’re looking for an effective implementation solution, consider machine learning and AI technology. These advancements make large-scale tasks like individual personalization much simpler than ever before.

How Do you Customize eCommerce Customer Experience?

Now that you understand the concept of eCommerce personalization, it’s time to explore ways to customize your customers’ experience. Here are five things to consider when crafting a unique and memorable customer journey:

1. Create personalized homepages

Delivering personalized welcome pages for existing customers is an effective way to show them relevant offers and content. This can be done by displaying recently browsed items or products that customers have purchased in the past. These can help encourage customers to move through your eCommerce sales funnel, which leads to increased customer loyalty and higher sales revenue.

This is where product photos, videos, reviews, product descriptions, and other pieces of content can be used to create a more engaging and personalized experience.

2. Display recently viewed items

When customers visit your eCommerce site multiple times, why not remind them gently of items they’ve already shown interest in? With this simple prompt, you may be able to encourage more users to go back and complete their purchase.

For example, if you’re an online shop for clothes and shoes, and you have customers who have looked at various items but have not completed the purchase, you can show them the same products or related items on their next visit.

You can take it up a notch by providing discounts on products recently viewed. This way, shoppers are more likely to purchase than leave them behind. And if you want to encourage your customers further to add items to their cart, offer shipping as an incentive. Create urgency on your offer and trigger the offer during a certain timeframe.

You can choose to display recently viewed items on the homepage or a landing page you’ve linked from an email marketing campaign. These items can also be displayed at the bottom of all pages in your online store. This ensures that customers are reminded of their interest in them whenever they access your website.

3. Customize your offer per location

Make your business stand out by personalizing eCommerce feeds for each market and location, such as displaying products in their local currency and language. Enterprise eCommerce platforms are tailored to fit your unique business requirements and can effectively handle a high influx of customers.

Personalization can also be directed regionally. For example, clothing brands can offer different items based on the season. This way, customers in different climates can view the most relevant products.

4. Develop special campaigns based on user behavior

Your customers’ needs are unique. Why would you offer the same items to each and every customer? Developing a special campaign based on user behavior is an effective way to offer personalized product recommendations and increase sales.

For example, if you’re a pet store that sells food for cats and dogs, create campaigns based on pet owners’ buying habits, such as their breed or the type of product they usually buy. This could include discounts on certain items or special deals tailored to their pets’ needs.

This strategy works wonders for both existing and new customers. You can entice first-time visitors to join your email list or loyalty program with an incentive. If a loyal customer just bought something from you, why not encourage them to leave a review?

5. Make product recommendations

Product recommendations bring in 31% of eCommerce site revenues—an impressive figure that business owners shouldn’t ignore. If your store offers a substantial number of products, your customer may get bored scrolling and lose interest before they find something they’d want to purchase.

Providing personalized recommendations act as a guide and filter customers’ choices, leading them to the products they’re most interested in. You can also use customer data to display products similar to items they’ve previously purchased or even show complementary items that would complete their purchase. For example, if a customer bought a computer, you could offer them accessories like mouses, keyboards, or monitor stands.

One of the best ways to offer product recommendations is through an AI-driven search engine or a personalized email program. This way, customers can get tailored suggestions, enhancing their shopping experience.

Where Does Product Photography Fit in Providing Customer Experience?

Product photography can make or break customers’ shopping experiences. A bad photo can lead to a poor customer experience and high return rates. High-quality images, on the other hand, provide potential customers with a vivid idea of a product’s overall look and feel before they buy it. This, in turn, results in higher conversion rates and a more satisfied customer base.

According to research conducted in 2007, potential customers are significantly more likely to convert to websites with high-quality visuals that can be zoomed into compared to those of lesser quality. Additionally, a separate study further revealed that superior images contribute significantly towards generating trust among online buyers.

Product photography is a vital aspect of customer experience. When done right, it can help customers make informed purchasing decisions and increase business sales. Therefore, you must invest in quality product photography to create the best customer experiences on your eCommerce website.

However, there are alternative ways to achieve stunning visuals for your products for startup eCommerce brands who don’t have the luxury to schedule and conduct multiple professional photo shoots. You can outsource your photo editing needs to a reliable service like Pixel by Hand to help you touch up existing photos and make them look professional and high-quality.

At Pixel by Hand, we specialize in providing professional and cost-effective product photography solutions to businesses of all sizes. We have a team of experienced editors who can edit your existing product photos, create clipping paths, change backgrounds, and more—all with quick turnaround times.

So if you’re looking for an affordable and high-quality solution to help improve the customer experience on your eCommerce website, look no further than Pixel by Hand. Reach out to us today and get started on creating stunning product visuals for your business!