An ecommerce store can provide some great insights into your customers, their wants and needs and where they are in the buying journey. The data collected by your online store can be used for segmentation, personalisation and help you make better decisions.
In the old world of retail, someone working in a store could infer a lot about a customer just by looking at them as they walked through the door. Similarly, a local business may know regular customers and be able to make recommendations based on a history of interactions.
Segmentation
Customers can be grouped, or segmented in real-time based on their behaviour on your website. This data can be added to information about location, device and timing to build segments.
A segment can be simple ie. People who accessed the site from an iPhone, or it can have multiple rules. eg. People who have visited from the UAE who have looked at the PRADA brand page, but added a Chanel product to the basket.
Note that when using an Ecommerce system like Magento, the customer does not have to be added manually into one of these groups, the system automatically adds and removes consumers based on rules.
Once the segments have been created, they can be used to create other rules that change their customer journey or experience. e.g. Users who are returning to the site, but have not added anything to basket may receive a discount to encourage purchase.
If you have enough data, then you may be able to create a customer segment that contains only one consumer, which is the goal of personalisation.
Personalisation
Once upon a time, retail was simple. Local sellers knew local buyers. The local bakery, butcher or fruiterer would know what each consumer liked when they were celebrating when they were down on their luck. The shopkeepers knew their customers because they talked to them and because they had been customers for years in some cases.
Personalisation is a buzzword at the moment in Ecommerce. In most cases, it is not personalisation at all – more like micro-segmentation. The danger with using rules that are based on average behaviour, or not thinking about the details, is that you risk annoying the customer by getting it wrong.
This happens with a lot of retargeting campaigns at the moment. You may have experienced it – you are doing some research for work, you visit a site that might be a prospect or even a competitor and you get followed around the web for the next few days by ads that you have no real interest in. Even worse is the situation where you keep getting the ads, even after you have made a purchase of the same product at the same website.
The data is getting better and the marketing automation algorithms are getting smarter. Interactions with social media, reviews, on-site behaviour and past purchase data add up to give retailers a better picture of their customers and allow for truly personalised recommendations and offers.
Is knowing your customer better a benefit of E-commerce? Not if you are a local butcher. But Ecommerce allows you to know more about a wider range of customers and collects that information even when your store is not open.
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