Personalised Ecommerce

Personalization is key to boost sales and improve customer experience online.
After all customers have always preferred shopping where they feel valued and at home. Warm friendly staff are key to instore personalisation.
That warm fuzzy feeling customers get when feeling valued and thought about can be carried into the online arena and done well.

A survey conducted by 'Sate of Retailing Online 2011' showed that when ecommerce personalisation was carried out 65% of merchants reported an increase in conversion rates and 53% of retailers reported increase in returning shoppers.

Common forms of personalisation

 

Post-order email texts - 77%
Shopping cart page - 52%
PRoduct page - 44%
Homepage - 41%
Category page - 21%
Search results - 175

The most successful tactics according to e-retailers are:

1. shopping cart abondonment emails - 26%

2. recommendations by email - 14%

3. recommendations in product pages - 12%

4. retargeting - 11%

5. recommendations in shopping cart - 6%
(this one I'm a bit wary of, for the 6% that it works for, what percent get distracted from their purchase?)

Customer perception of personalisation

 

52% - who experienced personalisation liked it
77% - find recommendations extremely useful
33% - have purchased recommended products

Abondoned Cart Emails

Shopping cart abandonment emails are relatively easy to set up and the returns are well worth it.  Just look at the figures below to see how effective this type of personalisation can be.

 

Shopping cart abandonment emails are relatively easy to set up.
Below are 3 great plugins that can help you salvage those easily distracted shoppers.

http://www.barilliance.com/shopping_cart_abandonment?gclid=CP35hdGTn7oCFco5pgodaXUAkw
http://abandonaid.com/?utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=cpc&
http://www.cloud-iq.com.au/cartrecovery-au?kw=abandoned%20cart%20email&gclid=CO3U37yUn7oCFSdgpgodwlcAkw

Ecommerce Ideas to make your cash register ring even faster

Tell them if you ship to their location

You may not be a large international company like asos, but you may still ship to a select few countries. If so then let those potential customers know immediately that you do.
There's no point paying for SEO in a particular country if the liklihood is that customers immediately leave your site under the assumption your products are unavailable to them.

 

Give your users live chat assistance

A Forrester Research Study noted the below:
Many online consumers want help from a live person while they are shopping online; in fact, 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a Web site can offer. Proactive chat can provide this type of customer support, ultimately achieving multiple business goals for eBusiness professionals, including reducing abandonment, improving conversions, and driving customer satisfaction. 

Create Urgency

The time is running out. Whether the clock is ticking on a fabulous sale opportunity, free delivery offered, or just delivery before the weekend... the psychological impact of a countdown really does work.
See how the timer is used by Express Watches on their product page to create urgency:

Price Match Guarantee

If your selling products available at multiple online stores then price matching might just be the tipping point for a lot of you customers.
However caution needs to be followed here. Note how Robby Ingham advertises it prominantly, but then protects himself on the follow through.

Security Reassurance

An excellent way to engender trust is by purchasing security software and uploading the security seals on your websites.

 

If you do not want to pay for pricey security seals, you can also try adding some reassurance text. See how Wiltshirefarmfoods.com pulls this off perfectly in the image below (saving all costs on security seals)

 

If you don't provide free shipping, reveal the shipping price on the product page

We all know charging for shipping is a big conversion killer. But we all have our financial constraints. If you charge for shipping, mention that cost upfront. Even better move a step ahead and provide a shipping calculator on your product page.

Post purchase social share

You know if  Amazon is doing it then it must be good. After all you don't become the world leaders of ecommerce conversion by accident. Any new method they try will have been user tested and monitored to within an inch of its life.
So share buttons on your confirmation page are a goer. People like to feel good about their purchases, and one way to do that is to let their friends know. Word of mouth is still the cheapest form of advertising... so make it super easy for your customers to spread the word.

Important design trends of ecommerce checkouts

230 Ecommerce businesses were surveyed to discover what cart page features convert the most users. Open up your current shopping cart page and see if it matches up with the below features.

How coherent and user friendly is the cart page layout?
Is the cart page branded to match the rest of the site?
Does the design of the cart page look sloppy compared to the rest of the site?

Are product images displayed in the cart?

Is there a continue shopping button in the cart page?

Does the site have a clear return policy in the cart page?

Does the site provide privacy assurances in the cart page?

Does the site use cross-sells & upsells in the cart?

Does the site provide live assistance via phone in the cart page?

Does the cart display promotion/coupon boxes?

If free shipping is offered, is this displayed in the cart?

Designer Eboutique demo site

Does the site provide multiple shipping options?

Does the site provide estimated delivery times for different shipping options on the same page?

Does the site allow for Guest checkout?

 

If your noticing that a lot of users are exiting your site from the cart page then its time to think about a redesign of your cart page.
It can be one of the most difficult pages to get right and still look beautiful. So many elements need to be taken into account as well as demonstrating an understanding for the limited patience of the user and the absolute necessity of leading them through the process to the end.

Promoted Pins on Pinterest

Good news for retailers when Pinterest CEO Ben Sibermann announced via blog that pinterest would begin experimenting with promoting certain pins from a select group of businesses.

"I know some of you may be thinking, 'Oh great ... here come the banner ads,'" he wrote, "but we're determined to not let that happen."

Sibermann has promised that the ads will be ‘tasteful with no flashy banners or popup ads’. The ads will be transparent and will also be relevant – that is they will be marketing products the viewer is actually interested in.

Pinterest is now rolling out just a few promotions in search results and category feeds, he said -- but no company is paying for any placement yet.

Edison Research claims 27% of pinterest users have made a purchase based on a pin they’ve seen. As long as pinterest work the ads into the pinboard in an appropriate way they should be very successful at their advertising program.

For retailers and fashion brands that already use pinterest to drive interest in their products, advertising is going to be a great extension of their efforts.

Pinterest are hoping their slow approach to advertising should address the concerns of its users who are used to an ad free environment. 

So the promoting of pins in search results, rather than straight out ad banners will ensure pinterest’s community come to trust its advertising efforts as a means of building and monetizing pinterest.

How to make pinterest work for you.

To really be successful with content marketing on Pinterest, your material needs to focus on one of these 10 subject areas, Pinterest’s audience is affluent women:Food

• Fashion
• Fitness
• Beauty
• Décor
• Crafts
• Babies
• Kids
• Pets
• Travel

If your brand falls into one of those categories, you have the odds in your favor to win on Pinterest. Women are using Pinterest to capture ideas, inspiration and potential projects around these subjects. Pinterest is far and away the leading way people are discovering the content in those areas. So, success with Pinterest is closely tied to the overall success of your content marketing.

Clicks and conversion

Unlike its social predecessors Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest is not a walled garden. Clicks on content a marketer pins will leave Pinterest, driving traffic back to their website. That click-through is the moment of truth for Pinterest marketing.

To maximize the chances for success, think about the experience users will have when they land on your site from a pinned item. You may want to specifically great visitors who come through from Pinterest with either a dedicated landing page or some other unique greeting.

Brand Engagement

Interestingly Pinterest followers tend to be seven times more engaged than Facebook followers. Based on that number, if you have to decide whether to spend a dollar to get more Facebook followers or a dollar to get more Pinterest followers — if you’re going to get 7X more engagement with Pinterest followers, it’s pretty easy to see where to invest.