Warm Welcomes: Using Personalization to Make an Impact & Drive Sales

My husband is not an impulse shopper. His purchases are weighed out carefully and deliberately, usually weeks or even months before he dusts off his rarely-used credit card. So when he went to Macy’s last month to pick out a new tie for an upcoming wedding, I was more surprised than anyone when he came home with not just the tie, but also a $500 Ralph Lauren suit. When explaining the spontaneous spending, he didn’t point out the suit’s impeccable fit or fine wool fabric. Instead, he said the sales guy was the same one who’d helped him pick out my birthday present last month, announcing “He remembered my name!”

The power of recognition has been influencing the direction of shopping dollars for hundreds of years, so it’s no surprise it’s one of the top initiatives of today’s successful eCommerce sites. Just as you’re more likely to get your lunch from the hot-dog vendor who asks after your family and remembers how much mustard you like, the website that goes above and beyond to personalize your browsing experience enjoys longer and more profitable shopping sessions. E-tailers who have jumped on the “welcome wagon” have reported such benefits as increase in average order size, lower cart abandonment rates, positive feedback from satisfied customers, and greater levels of customer retention over time.

Some Strategies for eCommerce Personalization

Once considered an unnecessary extravagance, personalization has become more the rule rather than the exception for thriving eCommerce sites. Even if your budget doesn’t allow you to roll out an expensive suite of personalization tools all at once, there are small, subtle tactics you can employ to foster increased intimacy with customers.

• Welcome Back! One of the simplest—and, arguably, most effective—methods of personalization is to greet the user by name on the Home page, using the customer’s stored cookie and website account information.
• May We Suggest… Amazon is a heavy-hitter example of an eCommerce engine making effective use of personalized cross-selling. By tracking user shopping behaviors and recently viewed items, they’re able to offer intelligent product recommendations that match a particular consumers’ tastes and interests.
• You Tell Us. By providing the consumer with a means of feeding their personal information and preferences to the website, the site can more intelligently serve up products, promotions, and content specially tailored for them. The benefits of this strategy go both ways: the customer enjoys the feeling of being in control of their own customized website and is less likely to feel that their privacy is being invaded, and you’ll enjoy the increased revenue that comes with presenting options the customer has (directly or indirectly) requested.
• Hey, We’ve Got Your Stuff. A highly effective method some sites are using is to send email reminders to prospective consumers who have added items to their shopping cart and then abandoned their session. Reintroducing the items and reinforcing their initial interest with images, selling text, and maybe even a potential discount can serve as the friendly nudge they need to complete their purchase.
• So, What Do You Think? After the consumer has made a purchase, a follow-up email requesting their feedback can be an effective tool in cross-sell merchandising. For instance, if Jack Lovitz bought some outdoor teak patio furniture last month, you might send a subtle email thanking him for his purchase, asking him to answer a few quick questions, providing some tips on teak maintenance, and offering 10% off a set of furniture covers to protect his investment.

Where’s it Come From?

No level of personalization can occur unless at least some level of data is collected. Depending on how fancy you want to get with it, you’ll need to amass such information as buying history, recently viewed pages, click paths, most recently entered keyword terms, shopping cart activity, user preferences, user profile details, and more. You can then build business rules around the data to determine what will be presented to the user. Easier said than done, of course—implementing advanced levels of personalization usually calls for a third-party solution, a hefty monetary investment, and man hours for future maintenance.
Perhaps the most critical component of implementing personalization effectively is gathering and acting on real-time data. If you find out Minnie Troy of Denver, Colorado was clicking around for a hand-held vacuum two days ago, it could very well be too late—she’s likely already found what she was looking for somewhere else. Ideally, you need a solution that acts immediately, while the consumer is poised to make a purchase.

There are a wide variety of personalization tools available to help you capture, analyze, and act on your consumers’ behaviors, information, and preferences. Research the latest technologies, pricing structures, and methods of implementation before choosing one. It’s wise to request a list of past clients willing to serve as references for the company. Introducing this level of intelligence is a big step for any website, and it deserves the same level of discovery and research that you’d devote to a graphic redesign or checkout overhaul.

Risk vs. Reward

Like any new technology, advanced personalization techniques introduce their own unique risks. There’s always the chance of putting off consumers who feel threatened by evidence of tracked behavior or data manipulation, piquing suspicions that their every move is being analyzed and passed on to other companies. To introduce personalization without intruding on your consumers’ privacy, keep these basic guidelines in mind:

• Identify your target consumer group and establish some specific target goals. This information is crucial to measuring the success of your personalization strategies.
• Make sure your website’s posted privacy policy is current and in line with the laws of your state.
• When gathering data, collect only the general information required to formulate intelligent merchandising suggestions. Try to avoid requesting personal information.
• Always give consumers the chance to opt-out of receiving personalized correspondence or web content.
• Never sell consumer information or profiles to third-party companies unless the consumer has provided explicit permission to do so.

When implemented intelligently and respectfully, personalization can help take your eCommerce business to the next level. By serving up targeted content the consumer has specifically sought out or requested, personalization technologies can make their shopping experience quicker, more enjoyable, and—for you—more profitable.