The events of the last two years have affected every one of us. Even before a global pandemic landed upon us, we were seeing more and more activity of online purchasing. More and more of us are working from home. Living through lockdowns, restricting our movement, we have turned more and more to buying online.
Competition is therefore fierce in the eCommerce world. Businesses need to get smart with attracting customers, and, more importantly keeping them. Attracting a new customer is difficult. Gaining the trust from a person to click that Buy button and then part with their hard-earned cash, is difficult. Businesses have recognised that retaining customers once they have bought once, is a little easier, however, to scale that activity requires an automated process.
There are now many off-the-shelf eCommerce personalization tools available to the website owner running their eCommerce business.
The activities available to these tools vary in sophistication and depth. They need to strike a balance between enhancing the shopping experience and annoying the customer.
Once a customer has purchased from the eCommerce platform, the business owner should smoothly and efficiently satisfy the customer by supplying the goods or service in a timely and expected manner. They need to then follow that sale up with carrots, dangled in front of the customer, in order to get them to buy something again.
Happy customers return and buy again. A typical hypothetical carrot would offer a discount to the customer on their next order. However, the business owner may want to get something else from the customer before offering that discount. How about asking for a review?
Studies have shown that positive reviews on an eCommerce site, often drive more sales. Why not offer a discount after a review is posted? This gives the customer something, as well as the business, gets something extra too.
The emergence of eCommerce personalization tools has allowed eCommerce business owners to automate the functions so that perhaps orders over a certain value get a follow-up email offering the discount. Orders that fall below a set value, perhaps, just get the request for a review.
Other eCommerce personalization tools options could be to then follow up a week later with an offer to refer a friend, supplying a code. If the friend signs up for the eCommerce platform via referral request, both parties get a discount.
Another component of many eCommerce personalization tools is to deal with abandoned shopping carts. The tools can collect metadata that can be made available to the site owner so that they can understand where the loss of sales occurred. Perhaps the shipping cost is too high. Often the eCommerce personalization tools will allow the customer to be automatically followed up with an automated email offering deal sweeteners, enticing the customer to come back and buy.
The prevalence of eCommerce personalization tools is now with us and allows a more efficient sales process for eCommerce owners and a more fulfilling experience for the shopper.
