Online retailers build websites and mobile apps that guide shoppers from point A (the intention to buy something) to point B (finding and eventually purchasing what they need). This necessarily involves a fast and easy user interface, attractive product pages, smooth checkout processes, and more.
These elements guide your customers to find exactly what they are searching for and encourage greater discovery (extending their original intentions) through to customer loyalty. The goal is to ensure the shopping experience resonates with the buyer and keeps them engaged until they 'add to the cart' and eventually 'checkout'.
Equally important to retail is to personalize the online shopping experience.
You can achieve even greater revenue and loyalty by offering products and a user experience that speak directly to your consumers’ preferences and needs.
Personalized Recommendations Works:
- 37% Shoppers who placed an online order after clicking a recommendation
- 12.9 Minutes Shoppers who clicked on a recommendation spent an average of 12.9 minutes on the site, compared with just 2.9 minutes for those who didn’t
- 4.2 Times Greater conversions for mobile shoppers who searched and chose a recommendation
Automating a personal experience
Capitalizing on these benefits requires automation. In order to provide an experience based on an individualized and non-invasive understanding of customer needs, such automation comes from collecting data that feeds machine learning (ML) to develop artificial intelligence (AI) models.
In this ebook, you’ll learn:
When you personalize recommendations, customers engage at every touchpoint.
This leads to:
- 150% increase in order rate
- 20% increase in add to basket
- 24% increase in overall site conversion
- 13% lower bounce rate
A successful strategy for personalization balances three factors:
- Providing real value to the customer
- Offering powerful insights and control to the business
- Respecting the privacy expectations of the customer
These factors are not at odds with each other. As you’ll see, there is a win-win approach to providing machine-driven recommendations and personalized navigations that also respect privacy.
Think of it like a funnel in which two lines converge: one line is the customer’s satisfaction, the other is the business’s control. Privacy enables these lines to continuously move towards each other in the most rewarding way for both the customers and the business. While this perfect balance may be unique for every business, industry, and customer base, getting it right can make or break a company’s online success.
Piyush Patel
Chief Biz Dev. Strat. Officer for Algolia
The numbers illustrate how providing personalized shopping increases discovery, where a customer arrives on a site to buy one item and finishes with a cart full of products. The numbers also demonstrate the increased customer belief that your business is their go-to shop.
Personalizing recommendations creates a one-stop shopping experience with a future value as well – because tailoring your products and website to a customer’s personal intentions (as detected by their past search and buying activities) will sharpen and fine-tune their long-term buying decision-making.
There’s no turning back from the trust built when the customer feels understood by its preferred business
Today’s consumers want personalized recommendations.
83% of consumers expect personalization within moments and during their whole buying journey.
Source: Forbes
Finding the right balance. Powerful use cases.
A combined pharmacy and superstore may suggest shampoos and other items based on a customer’s past medical prescriptions. For example, their prescriptions may indicate allergies incompatible with certain shampoos. Going one step further, the store may start recommending items for a customer’s whole family based on similar private information.
Another real-world example is a grocery store that proposes a healthy diet based on a customer’s food-buying and pharmaceutical history. While medical histories might be too much for some customers to reveal, other customers might welcome the opportunity – given the health and efficiency benefits. But would those same customers be happy if, every time they pass this grocery store, they receive a text message telling them about a promotion on their favorite items?
There are many powerful retail scenarios to consider as you explore the right balance for your business. In these examples you can see what's at stake – great, useful information based on gathering and processing personal data.
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