The fast growth of e-commerce is old news. With the expected global retail sales of $4.88 billion by 2021, e-commerce is one of the most propulsive branches of the global economy.

If you’re on the selling side of this field, you know that things are heating up. Both the number of retailers and the number of shoppers are growing. As a result, e-commerce merchants need to go the extra mile in delivering highly personalized offers to their target audiences.

In this article, we’re going to cover the following features of webshop customer personalization:

Campaigns
Customer groups
Content Slots
Coupons and promotions
A/B testing

Hold The Reins of Online Campaigns

When you’re starting an e-commerce campaign, it’s important to set the goals and target audiences in advance. For instance, the goal of your campaign can be the increase in the number of potential customers via social media or generating more visitors to your e-store. It’s recommended to avoid too many goals per single campaign. In the ideal scenario, you’d be able to attribute one large goal to each campaign.

What’s also important before you launch the campaign is to set the time span within which the campaign will be active. Most contemporary platforms, such as Salesforce, Magento, and Drupal Commerce, allow its users to enter the start and end dates of each and every campaign. This is a handy feature for e-commerce merchants who want to automate their marketing efforts.

Regarding the target audience(s) you’re targeting with your campaign, you can go for a higher or lower extent of personalization. To cut the long story short, marketers usually focus on a wide range of customers when they want to sell a large number of mass products. In this case, the particularization of the chosen market share is smaller.

As opposed to that, you’ll need to fine-tune the personalization features when dealing with exclusive products that only a limited number of customers can afford.

Customer Groups for Shopping Loops

In the previous paragraph, we have already pointed out that merchants have to set the parameters for certain customer groups. These parameters can vary from simple ones to those that result in a higher differentiation of customers.

The former are the features such as customers’ birthdays, their registration status or gender. For instance, you can create a supergroup that will include all the registered female customers born on July 4. This is a practical option when you want to send them all a special birthday coupon.

As for the more complex criteria regarding customer groups, you can group your customers in accordance with their expenditure on your website. For that purpose, you’ll need to introduce a loyalty program. After that, you can set several different categories, such as gold, silver, etc., and prepare special offers for each segment.

Also, when it comes to your rock-star customers, you can create tailor-made offers for those individuals. By doing so, you’ll show them how much you respect their loyalty and nudge them in the direction of new purchases.

Finally, you can also differentiate your customers by their location. For instance, the customers in less developed areas can be offered lower prices or more frequent sales to increase their shopping volume.

Implementing different features of customer grouping will ensure seamless cash flow for your business. In other words, you’ll create continuous shopping loops and yield higher revenues for your business.

Content Slots for Big Shots

Some e-commerce platforms, like SCCD, contain content slots. These are pre-defined segments that merchants can use to fill them with content bits relevant to their campaigns.

You can place different elements into those slots, from static text to products, recommendations, and much more.

For example, you can add different banners to these empty spaces and schedule them for different seasons. That way, one banner can be displayed to your customers during the summer sales. Logically, it should promote one or more items you want to sell during that season. What’s more, you can add other banners and configure their activation at a certain point. Their main goal will be to micro-target a certain audience with selected products for a limited period of time.

Apart from that, content slots can be used for further personalization with the use of recommendations. In a nutshell, when a customer buys an item from a certain category, you can offer them to get a complimentary product at an affordable price.

A similar but more advanced option is to use Einstein recommendation scenarios to target your customers with a wide scope of features.

Coupons and Belonging Promotions

Coupons are a valuable marketing tool for many different purposes.

If you want to add a certain number of new products to your e-commerce assortment, you can use coupons to get things rolling. Let’s say that the goal of a certain campaign is to make customers buy these items. If they’re produced by a new brand on the market (the items, not the customers), you’ll probably have to cut the price a bit and make those products more competitive.

Now you have to choose the target audience. More often than not, such items aim at a wider audience. Only when customers become familiar with the brand and its products should you narrow down its target audience.

By setting all these features, you’ll personalize the offer for certain customers or customer groups.

On the other hand, coupons can also be used to enhance a campaign that’s threatening to become a fail. You simply calculate the number of products you want to sell as fast as possible and set the lowers profitable price for them. Then you send away coupons promoting those discounts to the chosen audience.

The ABCs of A/B Testing in eCommerce

When it comes to e-commerce and customer personalization, the term A/B testing usually refers to user experience and its effect on customers.

In other words, you prepare two different versions of a particular part of your e-store and test it on a certain number of users. Sometimes you can test the entire website at once, however, this is recommended to smaller webshops only. Otherwise, you might need to correct too many things at the same time, which is an expensive thing to do.

As for the elements of A/B testing on an e-commerce website, you can test literally everything. Still, if you’d like to focus on the vital aspects, focus on the shopping cart and the search bar, as well as the images vs. videos. Furthermore, take good care of the checkout page because that’s a soft spot of every purchase. It’s also clever not to get too aggressive with popups and registration forms.

In addition to these testing features, you can have a look at some additional ideas discussed in the A/B testing guide on Conversion XL.com.

Conclusion

As you can see, personalization in e-commerce doesn’t only mean adapting your offers to individuals. Different people share the same shopping preferences, regardless of their gender, age, or location. Therefore, you can address them in the same way if they’re the proper target audience for certain products.

By creating customer groups on the basis of one or more elements, it’s possible to target a large number of potential buyers with considerably customized offers. Of course, you need to properly set the goals of your e-commerce campaigns, as well as the elements of A/B testing and the use of coupons. Together with the wisely populated content slots, you can come up with impactful, personalized campaigns that will ensure steady sales and increasing revenues.

Also, we’ve prepared a concise guide to the Einstein AI software, which is a valuable assistant in providing your customers with as personalized offers as possible. You can check out the guide on this link.

Bringing eCommerce Personalization to Life - Five Key Features

Nikola Gorjanac

CTO