You wake up in the morning with your phone in hand. What’s the catchy thing? There are a bunch of notifications. Regardless of your one, you will get pushups, marketing mail, and queries from anonymous E-commerce sites and specific brands.
These sites or brands are those that you have either explored, shopped from, or searched for relevant products, and you get their attention. E-commerce businesses have made shopping easy and more customer-oriented.
Until today, it’s progressing to grab more customers rather than the ordinary “brick and mortar” shops. Eventually, they are successful. Consumer protection or simply making the customers happy is the ultimate goal of running the business on e-commerce sites or your brand online.
That makes sense and gifts you with impulsive purchases. Here e-commerce sites work on two basic customer-grabbing techniques.
One is personalization, and the other is customization. How do these two work for your business or how are customers enjoying the services, are they different from each other?
You might think of many questions now. To get the answers, stay tuned with this read, and you will flourish everything about e-commerce personalization and customization. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.
What is Personalization?
It’s an implicit customer service that the company will do on its own. Of course, there will be a shuffle of the product’s manufacturing. But it will not be for any individual customer. The company will engage itself in the market survey-
- Look for how customers are reacting to a certain types of products
- If they are giving feedback, or liking or disliking anything about it
- Then most of the information of the customers, or simply utilizing their thoughts
- Finally, come up with the modification.
So, personalization is all about upgrading your product for more business. It’s like gathering customer data from each line through which they go for the purchase. The E-commerce business has so many steps to deal with.
Customers’ search recommendation, their location, previous buying history, and different customer groups can help the e-business generate data. This data will help them to build a context of what to do or what not to do with the products/services and then apply. This is mainly building the personal relationship with all the customers not with a single one
How Can You Get to Know Your Customers Better?
- Make a personal relationship with the customers. For example pop-up with marketing mail.
- Ask them to give feedback.
- Rating systems on how much they like the new modification of the products.
- Engaging them with new content
- And now gather all the overloaded info.
Well, the personalized prototype is a common thing in the Business2 Consumer(B2C) e-commerce type. Why is it so? Because most of the customers of B2C want a personalized experience and love to get different modifications of the products. In statistics, it is shown that around 26% of USA and European e-customers love to get personalized/relevant notifications from B2C sites.
What are the AI/Technological Steps You Need to Align With Personalization?
Doing personalization manually is not possible. But personalization is something similar to seeking what our customers opt for. For this reason, there is no second thought about AI, machine learning, and website analytics.
- Start from scratch and compete for the puzzle of the customer database. Your customer can be a new one, an existing one. Get their age, sex, using the device, and locations for further use. Use of statistical software can be beneficial.
- Make a living customer profile for them and make sure they feel secure about it.
- Make the best use of the micro-moments while creating customer segmentation. Know their choice of preferences.
- Once you segment the customers, you can deal with them easily through machine learning and gather the data for personalization.
Example of Personalization
For instance, you have a boutique shop and want to personalize your e-business. First, you need to track the customers. Like from where they are coming, social media platforms, or how they search for dresses and come to your e-business website. Machine learning can take this on its shoulders.
Optimizing the personal search of your customers. Use the seamless intelligent search engine options to recognize the keywords/context of your customer’s search. If a female customer is looking for t-shirts, gowns, or sweaters then personalized content will be related to this stuff. Also, the different times of the year can change the preference.
Try to recommend to your buyers what is good for them, and what others are picking, and simply know their mood. Finally, accumulating all day and standing out in personalization along with CRM.
What is Product Customization?
It takes e-commerce to the ultimate next level. Where personalization was an implicit approach, customization is an explicit one. Because the companies value what their customers are directly conveying to them.
It makes the e-commerce competition a tough battle nowadays. Customers want their products to be in their way. For instance, if you need a wooden couch for your living room, you would want that to be a unique piece.
So, the wooden brands that have customization options will be on your priority list. Well, what are the amenities of customizing your E-commerce?
- Customers will feel more privileged
- Their willingness to pay will increase as they are more likely to get wonderful customization services.
- The brand will not be equivocal. That means it will stand out from the crowd.
- Generating more data and product design by analyzing individual customer choices/customizations.
- Of course, increased ROI for your business.
How to Start The Customization in Your E-commerce?
- Put the option for customization on the landing page of your website.
- Leave customers with different options. For example-color choosing, customized sizes, and lengths of different commodities.
- Build connections with the customers who want customization. Like personal messages, how they want this to be, etc
- Make the best options for their carts from previous purchasing history,
- Brands need to use visual context, AI, and machine learning to make customization easier. For example, you employ a bot and it knows how to answer and how to hand over the conversation to a customer representative.
- Providing different tactics to implement the customization successfully. You can ask your customers what types of products they mostly need these days and see how they react to specific types of advertisements.
- Get a blend of personalization and customization to a greater extent
Example of Customization
Many elite brands as well as small markets provide the customization service. For example, if you need a pair of shoes, if there is a customization service then you can choose the color, design, sole, etc. Some of the world’s best brands offer customization. Like Starbucks, Burberry, Niki, and many other popular brands.
Frequently Ask Questions
What Are The Two Methods of Personalization?
Two key methods are -algorithm/machine learning-based personalization and other is rule-based personalization. In machine learning, businesses can provide an individual experience to each shopper.
You don’t need to segment a group of customers. It provides the most dynamic and scalable way to offer e-customers the relevant types of products/experiences. On the other hand, the rule-based interface renders the experience to different types of customers.
It’s not a one to one experience. It’s like rules set for different groups of shoppers. If you are a new shopper to a marketer, for you the rules are of one kind and for those who are regular, their personalization would be of another kind.
What’s The Value of Customization?
Well, a business becomes more trustworthy to the shoppers, and the shoppers will get more indulged in your business any time. So, customization is a need for any business. But the shoppers must be conscious of their inputs otherwise the final outlook will not be as expected. Also, the customized products can be a bit costlier as it’s made just for one and takes longer time to process.
Final Word
From small players to high-rank e-commerce sites all are leaning toward personalization and customization. To date, customers are not willing to fill their carts with lots of stuff. They want to customize the product for themselves, and I want more than just a product. Customers think- “what’s the next big thing?”. So, now there is no “no” to business upgrades with personalization and customization in e-commerce.
