Traditional brands and commerce have always kept a secret to customers about products being sold and it’s business information. Sellers always had control over customers and the true product value was never revealed to the customer before the purchase. Even when purchasing a discounted product, customers were not so sure whether they are being sold at the same price or if they strike a deal.
However, since the evolution of technology, e-commerce trade and commerce have seen some changes.
Today, the modern-day customer has instant access to unlimited information about products, brands, and competitors through several online resources that help in validating their purchase.
E-commerce has not only put the customer in the front seat but has also proven the fact quality or higher discounts on products are not the only factors that help brands attain success.
The ever-evolving purchase style of the modern-day customer has outsmarted the traditional eCommerce experiences. Due to this eCommerce ventures have enhanced their store experiences to catch up with their customer expectations.
The Solution: Adaptive eCommerce
With purchases being made based on reviews and eCommerce experiences, an adaptive and personalized eCommerce experience is necessary for commerce. According to a prediction from Gartner analysts, by 2020 personalization engines used to recognize customer behaviour will enable digital businesses to boost up their profits by 15 per cent.
With this projection of customer expectations, e-commerce websites are expected to establish an emotional connection between the brand and the customer while providing a flawless purchase. It involves making your customers understand that you care about them.
To achieve adaptive eCommerce experience, brands need to provide a personal eCommerce experience. This will include the user interface that operates, the customer onboarding, product ordering, fulfilment as well as marketing.
However, to what extent can we expand the adaptiveness of an eCommerce experience?
How to execute an Adaptive eCommerce?
Adaptive eCommerce can only be implemented by gathering precise and curated data about your customers. This data is then selected as an input to set up an eCommerce store interface that personalizes eCommerce experiences for customers.
This process is also called “User modelling” where the adaptive eCommerce system consistently gathers and maintains user data. How adaptive and eCommerce systems can be, directly depends upon the extent of data being collected and the variety of data models being generated from that data.
The process of adaptive eCommerce is divided into two phases.
Phase 1: Understanding data modelling for adaptive eCommerce.
In the field of eCommerce, data is a very important term. With Google’s enhanced eCommerce analytics, you can set up virtually endless data points.
However, to convert such huge amounts of data into actionable metrics and deducing why a visitor is on your store, data analysts have segmented data into an implicit and explicit data type.
How to collect implicit data?
Whether a visitor has navigated to your website from a backlink, browsing from the product listing page to the product detail page, read the product description, or have watched a video about the product, you can implicitly track their interactions. If you’re able to track any user data without the knowledge of the user then it is implicit data.
Key facts about implicit data:
- The behaviour is tracked without the user’s knowledge.
- This data is utilized to enhance business knowledge and build a better user interface.
- This data can be generated through google analytics and tracking social media pixels.
- A non-intrusive approach is used to access implicit data.
- Some common data points include past order history, search queries, and user behaviour.
2. How to collect explicit data?
Explicit data involves methodically requesting information from the users about their preferences to provide them with personalized experiences. One of the most common examples is the “save our cookie” pop up.
Explicit data gathering involves offering a value proposition to the visitors by convincing them that the data being asked for will be used to make their experiences more secure, reliable, and personalized.
Key facts about implicit data
Data is explicitly collected from the user with his knowledge and the use of the data collected is kept transparent in the collection process. Surveys, reviews, contact forms, Feedback forms, Newsletters are used to generate explicit data. By collecting the right data at the time right time, eCommerce stores can deliver a truly personalized eCommerce experience.
Phase 2: Best Practices of Adaptive eCommerce
Once you have started accumulating data about your visitors, the best thing you can do it put them into good use. With the developments in technology, there are better ways of being introduced every day for making eCommerce stores adaptive.
Here are the two most essential aspects of adaptive eCommerce that must be personalized for delivering a user-centric eCommerce experience.
- Adaptive user interfaces
- Adaptive fulfilment and store management
- Adaptive e-commerce marketing
a) Adaptive User Interfaces
User interface personalization is one the top of the out list when it comes to personalization in eCommerce. The user interface plays an essential role in engaging a customer.
To make your user interfaces adaptive, an eCommerce store can be configured into various ways to provide a personalized experience.
Some of the key eCommerce UI factors that must be considered for implementing adaptiveness:
- Content delivery: The user interface design of the website should be all browser and device compatible to deliver the same design of website content on different platforms.
- Prospect engagement: Use cookies to track customer information, provide relevant product recommendations based on past visits, generate personalized emails, and finally dynamically create product listings based on the past history of customer behaviour.
- Gamification: Providing rewards such as loyalty points or credits system and comparing customer achievement such as while making purchases has proven to enhance the buyer engagement by many folds. By publicly releasing the reward listing and ranks of individual customers the retailers can generate a sense of competitiveness.
- Impulse purchase: Subtle actions that intensify the purchase impulse of a buyer such as personalized discounts, creating urgency, and providing social proof are a great way to enhance conversions. Another way to trigger impulse purchase is by setting up effective banners displaying the trending products in the store.
b) Adaptive fulfilment and store management
Implementing an adaptive eCommerce experience needs to be supported by an adaptive store management process. This usually involves order fulfilment and store management.
By highlighting business key performances and associating them with customer preferences, an eCommerce business automate back-end processes to deliver an adaptive eCommerce experience.
Some important fulfilment and store management factors to consider for implementing adaptiveness are:
- Customer support: Effective customer support is the lifeline of an eCommerce business. Deploying an actual support team is a great choice. Even if there are budget constraints you can utilize AI-based chatbots for your store to provide 24/7 support automatically.
- Stock management: Re-stocking and warehouse management is a big problem for retailers, especially for startups. A store needs to keep a calculated flow of inventory to avoid spoilage, deadstock, and reduce storage costs.
- Order management: Delivering orders at the right time is crucial for a business to survive. It is essential to manage orders as customers prefer vendors who can ship their orders with minimal delays and easy returns. If in case a product is out of stock, utilize back order ability to take orders from a customer and provide fulfilment as soon as the stocks are replenished.
- The process of adaptive order management goes hand in hand with proper checklist management.
- Retailers must consider a possible change in future customer behaviour and analyze past sales data to predict future demands and have stocks available when they are needed.
c) Adaptive e-commerce marketing
One of the most essential aspects of adaptive eCommerce is digital marketing. Luckily, with new and effective marketing automation services being launched, automating digital marketing is getting relatively easy. If these tools are utilized effectively it can help you provide personalizing marketing content for customers.
Here are a few important eCommerce marketing processes that must be considered for implementing adaptiveness:
- Lead/customer segmentation: It is essential to segment your leads and customers into specific groups before you decide on your market channels and content. CRM tools like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Infusionsoft can help you effectively synchronize your eCommerce database according to customer’s purchase rate, engagement rate, new leads, hot and cold leads, etc.
- Email marketing: Emails are the most prominent and successful communication channel for eCommerce businesses. According to MailChimp, An average email open rate is way greater than any other communication channel.
Follow the following email marketing strategy to get a hold of your customers:
- Acknowledge and appreciate the first customer order and include a reward along with it.
- Remind customers about their cart abandonment through emails.
- Implement automatic emails for the dynamic audience.
- Set-up automated emails for feedbacks and referrals post purchases to increase engagement and conversions for a business.
- Cross-channel messaging: What email misses out on can be covered through SMS, website messages, and browser push notifications. This is called cross-channel messaging. By utilizing automated messages your eCommerce store can adaptively target customers based on their past purchases, categories, and product pages.
Conclusion
The developments in the sphere have been revamped E-commerce industries and customer’s personalized experiences.
To rise above the competition, you need to smart choices and establish responsible personalization experiences based on the factors that adapt and engages your audience according to where they are in their buyer journey.
Digital Presence Today in one of the digital marketing companies that follow the best practices for adaptive eCommerce. We have a team of talented professionals to help you provide the best-personalized user experience. We also specialize in lead segmentation and generation and email marketing. To get full adaptive eCommerce solutions visit, www.digitalpresence.today.
