Learn about eCommerce hyper-personalization and why it is important.
Successful eCommerce brands are well-aware of the fact that personalization makes the shopping experience special for customers. It makes them feel a connection with the brand, increasing both sales and loyalty.
Almost 50% of online consumers claim that they are more likely to shop from eCommerce brands that offer personalization. Even more than 90% of marketers claim that adding personalization has significantly boosted the revenue of their online store.
But almost every eCommerce business knows the importance of personalization, and they are implementing it on a basic level.
So, personalization is nothing new in the eCommerce space. But as this strategy matures, we are entering a new era — the era of hyper-personalization.
Hyper-personalization is the difference between brands that you don’t remember and brands that are always in your mind.
In this blog, we’re going to dive deep into eCommerce hyper-personalization. We’ll share its importance, requirements, and how you can get started.
Hop in!
What Is eCommerce Hyper-personalization?
Jeff Besos, CEO of Amazon, says that they see their customers as invited guests to a party that Amazon is hosting. They make it their job to constantly deliver better customer experience. And hyper-personalization is one of the most effective tools for this job.
Hyper-personalization is mainly the concept of collecting real-time data on customers’ behavior for tailoring products, services, recommendations, and experiences according to their needs and interests.
To achieve this, brands need to have a complete understanding of their customers and the products that they have purchased or added to their cart. And then, they need to leverage data science, machine learning, and predictive analytics to create a customized strategy for making the experience more relevant for customers.
So, how is hyper-personalization different from just personalization? Let’s find out.
Difference Between eCommerce Personalization and Hyper-personalization
The focus areas of traditional personalization are personal and transaction information (like name, organization, purchase history, etc.). One of the most common examples of this would be including customers’ names in the email subject line. It does improve the open rate, but profiling and making assumptions can only take you so far.
Hyper-personalization, however, is a far more evolved technique. It focuses on real-time data such as on-site behavior, browsing behavior, and engagement data to interpret the intent of customers.
When brands understand the customers’ intent, the communication gets more contextualized, which leads to higher conversions.
For example, you can remove the unengaging sections from your eCommerce store and replace them with products that an individual customer is interested in. This will lead to more conversions.
A classic example of personalized communication is sending push notifications. But in hyper-personalization, you send the same push notification when the customer is most active.
Why Is eCommerce Hyper-personalization Important?
Here are some statistics and benefits showing the importance of hyper-personalization in retail:
Statistics Showing the Importance of Hyper-Personalization
- 80% of online customers prefer to shop from brands that provide personalized shopping experiences. They like to shop when the recommendations are relevant and there are discounts on their favorite products.
- Almost 70% of online shoppers say that the relevance of a brand’s message shapes their perception of that brand. The more relevant the message is, the more likely customers are to follow through.
- 81% of customers expect brands to understand them on a better level. This includes the understanding of when to reach out to customers and when to stay away.
- With user engagement going down by 60 percent due to information overload, it has become essential to target customers with content that’s tailor-made for them.
- According to a Deloitte study, when executed well, hyper-personalization can increase the ROI by 800 percent. It can also boost sales by at least 10 percent.
Benefits of eCommerce Hyper-Personalization
Here are some benefits of implementing hyper-personalization in your eCommerce business:
Increase in revenue
It’s probably one of the biggest benefits of hyper-personalization and one that matters most for eCommerce businesses. As mentioned in the statistics, customers are more likely to do business with eCommerce brands that provide a personalized experience.
Streamlined customer journey and experience
The more relevant your content and offers are, the less time customers will have to spend eliminating the product that they are not interested in. By doing this, you convey to your customers that you value them and their time as individuals, improving customer retention and word-of-mouth.
Adapt to changing customer behavior
Let’s say you’ve identified your customer persona and segments. Can you rely on it forever? Definitely not. The interest and behavior of customers change with time. And with hyper-personalization, you’ll be able to recognize those changes sooner than others. The sooner you adapt, the more you’ll sell.
Improving the quality of data
The foundation for hyper-personalization is clean and high-quality data. With hyper-personalization, your data will be unified, more organized, and easily available for your marketing strategies. You’ll be able to create a better connection among your data sources.
More meaningful conversations with customers
Talking to a segment of customers has produced good results over time. But as we shift to the new era of hyper-personalization, you get the ability to talk to customers on an individual level.
You have access to their purchase history, product pages they’ve visited, questions they’ve ever asked, and much more. All of this data can be used to tailor content that truly influences their purchase decision.
What Do You Need for eCommerce Hyper-personalization?
There are only two things you need to have to get started with hyper-personalization. One is consumer data (behavioral and personal), and the other is a personalization marketing tool.
Customer Data — Personal and Behavioural
It’s not possible to personalize your eCommerce store without a clear understanding of who your customers are and how they behave and interact with your store. So, the initial step is to segment your audience.
Although, audience segmentation alone won’t be enough because the ultimate goal is to develop a language that every individual customer understands and recognizes instantly. And you can achieve this by understanding your customer personas.
Here are some places you can dig through to create personas for marketing:
Social media research
Listening to your customers and prospects on social media can uncover a bunch of insights that you can use to create better customer personas.
Polls and surveys
You need to realize that you don’t know your customers better than themselves. When it comes to their experience, asking your customers is the best thing to do. Therefore, polls and surveys are an essential part of creating a buyer’s persona.
Going through website analytics
You should always keep an eye on your website analytics. It’ll help you identify where your customers are originating from, how they find you, and for how long they stay on your site. This will help you identify your target audience.
But website analytics will only tell you who your target audience is. What about your existing customers? After all, customer retention is far more important than new acquisition.
You can collect the personal information of your customers by setting up Flits customer account page on your eCommerce store. This page will ensure that you’ve access to everything that you need about a specific customer in one place.
Personalization Marketing Tools
One of the biggest challenges faced by marketers during the implementation of hyper-personalization is finding insights from the available data. This was even more challenging a decade ago, but now, with the developments in AI, ML, and data science, these concerns can be addressed easily.
Using deep learning technologies, you can use customer data as their voice to make better hyper-personalization decisions.
How Do You Set Up eCommerce Hyper-personalization?
Every eCommerce company that has leveraged hyper-personalization has witnessed positive results. Customers want stores to provide a shopping experience that’s only meant for them. And when they don’t get it, they feel frustrated.
Now, you might be thinking that setting up a personalized shopping experience will be a difficult task. To your surprise, it’s not! It is not difficult, but yes, it does take a lot of work.
Enable Customer Account Page on Your Shopify Store
You can use the basic information shared by customers (like age, gender, income, address, etc.) to segment them based on demographics. These segments can then be used for personalized marketing campaigns.
That said, let’s see how having a Shopify customer account page can help you in hyper-personalization:
Understand your customers better
We know that every customer is different. They behave differently, have different interests, and are completely unique. And the key to creating a hyper-personalized experience for them is to understand their unique aspects.
With Flits Shopify customer account page, you get all their data, information about their transaction with your store, their like-dislikes, and much more.
Use account page details for retargeting campaigns
Once you’ve understood the preferences of your customers, you know what they want or need by analyzing their wishlist, their recently viewed products, and their purchase history. You can use this information to retarget them with hyper-personalized products.
Drive more repeat purchases
You can analyze the order history of your customers to identify the type of products they want to buy from you. Once you’ve established a pattern, you can only show them the products that land in that specific category. This way, they’ll be more likely to purchase from you again.
Gather a Sufficient Amount of Data
The quality of the data you have determines how well your hyper-personalization strategy is going to work. You need to narrow your segmentation as much as you can so that only the customers who are interested in the product and can afford it at the same time receive the message.
You can segment customers based on what they’ve searched for. Most of them only search for products that they can afford. Hence, personalization will be more effective.
Yes, the data has to be highly specific. But if you do it too much, your brand can appear to be annoying or stalkerish to your customers. And you certainly don’t want this to happen. Therefore, you need to collect data in moderation.
Start Will Personalization on a Basic Level
It’s always a good practice to start small and simple. Starting with basic level personalization means you can send messages based on gender, age range, geographic location, etc.
You’ll have to do a lot of experimentation in the beginning. For instance, you might start by changing the banner images for male and female accounts and then monitor how changing the images impacts your sales.
You can also track and monitor what happens when you send age-relevant content to a specific age group. If it helps you convert more, then you might want to add and track another metric with age.
Collect Results From Your Initial Personalization Tactics
Your basic personalization tactics will give you enough data to get started with hyper-personalization. Here’s a list of things you need to do once you have the results of your initial personalization strategy:
- More personalized messages based on collected data
- Explore social media to learn more about customers
- Run surveys and polls to filter out this data
- Measure the engagement rate of your store during initial personalization
- Narrow down the audience segmentation even more
Start Automation of Processes
It’s extremely challenging to set up hyper-personalization manually. And if you have a large customer base, it’s almost impossible.
As an eCommerce business owner, there are a lot of things you need to take care of. There is tons of data to sort through — emails to screening, schedule, segment, and much more.
It is humanly impossible to monitor all these data and make changes. Sometimes human help is required, but alone it’s not enough. Therefore, it is essential to automate the hyper-personalization process using the right tools.
Final Words on eCommerce Hyper-Personalization
So, the major requirement for implementing hyper-personalization in your eCommerce store is knowing your customers. And the first thing you need to do to know your customers is set up a customer account page.
A customer account page holds almost every detail you will ever need about a customer. It helps in better segmentation and retargeting. You have access to everything from their order history to wishlist to recently viewed products which helps you identify their interest, intent, and purchase pattern.
