Tag: personal stores

The problem with showing your customers generic product results is that you run the risk of pushing your customers towards decision paralysis – a significant portion of your visitors become frustrated that they cannot find what they’re looking for.

That’s exactly the problem that personalization helps to address. Personalization in eCommerce refers to the customization of a buyer’s retail journey to ensure that he/she finds only the most relevant product to choose from. Through personalized merchandising, you can use a user’s data and their previous behavior on your site to show them products relevant to their interests.

With the future of retail stores and online retail heavily depending on personalization, here are a few personalized merchandising strategies that you can follow to improve your Click Through Rates (CTRs), and therefore your sales.

1. Emailers

Companies that do not employ a personalized email strategy risk exposing their customers to generic products which may be of no interest to them. This can actually do more harm than not sending your customers any email at all.

A great way to ensure that your users keep coming back to your store is to send them personalized and relevant emails tailored to their interests. Engagement via email can include simple follow-up messages or can introduce products the customer might be interested in, relevant offers and more.

2. Recommendations

With brick and mortar stores and early eCommerce stores, customers didn’t have the luxury of an exclusive display of their favorite products, for obvious reasons. A “generic” experience rarely results in high customer satisfaction, as most stores discovered.

Today, online retailers have the capability to provide personalized recommendations on every page of your store, and even to sort search results to suit each of your customers’ unique tastes and requirements.

In addition to showing your users filters and sort options based on time of product arrival, cost, rating, and brands, you can go one step further by showing them products they are more likely to find useful. By using this simple technique, you can help your users make faster and easier buying decisions.

3. Personal Stores

With most companies, personalization starts and ends with showing recommended products as described above. But to break the clutter and bring a whole new dimension to personalization, several leading eCommerce stores now offer their customers their own online store.

A personal store typically consists of a dedicated page for individual users, displaying products they have previously viewed, and additionally, other products that are likely to be of interest to the user. This completely eliminates the virtual labor that your customers have to go through to find their way to the products that they are most likely to buy. Since time is of the essence to your customers, you are also helping them save time by making it easy for them to browse their favorite products. Amazon’s ‘My Store’ displays products each user has viewed and ones they may be interested in, in an exclusive personal page.

While setting up a personal store might seem like a daunting task, you can use powerful tools like Tagalys’ Personalized Product Sorting, which will help you automate the entire process. The tool uses machine learning to constantly improve its output and ensure that the personal store you create for your customers remains truly personal and highly relevant.

4. Notifications

Before push notifications, companies had to rely on newsletters and messages to catch their customers’ attention – both ineffective ways to get a user to re-engage with an online store after they have exited it.

With push notifications, you can give your customers a nudge about a new product in-store, a limited period special offer, or a seasonal item that could sell out soon. The right products and offers can encourage your users to make immediate purchases – if your users know they exist.

Use available data to create user segments that work and push smart custom notifications, on smartphones or desktop, to increase their purchase intent. When personalization, notifications, and offers come together in the right way, they create a great sense of immediacy.

The easier you make product selection for your users, the more likely they are to come back for more! Investing in intelligent solutions that can automate the personalization process for you – in emails, recommendations, personal stores, and notification – can go a long way in helping you improve customer retention, and in turn, sales.

At Tagalys, we are all about helping you get to the point where your eCommerce store becomes the preferred destination for your buyers. To know more about our solutions and their features, get in touch with us now.