eCommerce Personalization Pitfalls and how to fix them

Personalization is vital for every e-business to improve the customers’ experience and increase conversion rates.

Nowadays, 89% of digital businesses invest in personalization. (Forrester)

However, not all businesses have the knowledge to involve it in their sales and marketing strategy or they don’t have the budget to hire a digital marketeer to do that.

As a result, a lot of companies make mistakes in terms of technology, approach, culture or data use.

As a business owner, save yourself from the disaster by avoiding the e-commerce personalization pitfalls listed below.

We cover you! 😉

Pitfall #1: Personalizing without a strategy

One common mistake is attempting to personalize your eCommerce store without prior research. Only after you do your research you can proceed to your strategy creation. During this procedure, setting your goals is vital. Try to have in mind what you want to achieve when your strategy is implemented and don’t rely on a thought you had to just personalize your e-shop.

For example:

Don’ts. I want to personalize my homepage.

Do’s. I want to increase visitor conversions/loyalty across all web journeys.

Obviously, it’s not enough to personalize only one page on your website. When we’re talking about personalization, we refer to the entire customer journey.

The Solution

While building your strategy, take under consideration fields and metrics you want to enhance, such us:

Conversion Rate
User experience
Customer loyalty

And don’t forget to provide quality personalized experiences to your customers on the entire journey!

Pitfall #2: Personalization Burnout

Nowadays there are too many personalization tools in the eCommerce market. With so many tools you are able to personalize the emails on your email marketing campaigns and provide to your customers the most intriguing products, relevant to their needs and wishes. Due to the abundance of these tools, it can be hard to avoid using all the functionalities available at once. It’s very important that your customers do not get tired of too much personalization because you can easily lead them to burn out.

The Solution

The solution for those business owners who are over-enthusiastic is simple.

Begin by planning a roadmap and follow it.

Before starting implementing personalization on your eCommerce store, create your personalization roadmap. Prioritize your ‘’experiments’’, keep the agenda and the name of the tools. This way, if something goes wrong you will have all the data to evaluate the failure or the success of your experiment.

Congrats!🥳 You made a good start on your personalization route!

Pitfall #3: Personalizing solely on a single channel

Did you know that 73% of your customers today use multiple channels before converting, including apps, the web and social media?

This is a very useful fact, helping marketers and e-business owners to avoid a mistake. Personalization should be an add-on in every stage of customer journey.

For example, you have customers search for a dress, reach to your e-shop and engage with your products, your recommendations, your widgets. Then..they bounce.

What are your next steps???

The Solution

Continue your personalization actions on different channels so that you can also interact with them there.

Transfer your channel from onsite to email marketing. Prepare an email with unique relevant products, just for them, based on their searches, time spent on a page, basket events and previous purchases, if they exist.

In other words, create an omnichannel personalization strategy!

Pitfall #4: Repeating content

It takes a lot of effort to bring new customers to your e-business and keep them engaged. Presentation and fresh content matters in personalization and can make a real difference.

People get tired of seeing the same ads or the same email text, even if it’s personalized.

The Solution

The best way to keep your customers’ interest is to change your content frequently. Be creative, follow the trends and don’t be afraid to think outside of the box to approach your customers.

There is a great example of an e-business which implemented personalization in a unique way.

A beautiful example, which made the company stand out, is an ad campaign via email of easyJet for its 20th anniversary. The ad campaign “How 20 Years Has Flown” was built around data on each customer’s journey with easyJet throughout the years. The personalized emails contained images and links that showcased each customer’s story from their first-ever easyJet flight to their flights to come. (iunera.com)

This campaign had a big impact. 7.5% of easyJet customers, who received the personalized email, made a booking in the next 30 days.

Pitfall #5: Personalizing with the wrong tools

You should be very careful when you choose your partners. And your personalization tool is one of them.

In many cases an e-shop owner is impressed from the seller and doesn’t see the product itself and the value it can give to their e-business.

The Solution

Choosing an eCommerce tool is a combination of many things.

From the technical aspect, try to find a tool and a team behind it which will be aligned with you and can support you during the working hours. For some businesses the safest solution is to find a local partner in the same time zone.

But…don’t deviate the other markets. Some businesses have support teams in several languages and all over the world. Maybe you can find your agent!

From the marketing aspect, the tool should be easy to use and give you the appropriate information. Before you choose your partner in crime, I suggest making a list with the most important criteria for you.

This list can include:

ΑΙ technology

Monitoring
A/B Testing
Integration across your marketing ecosystem
Easy and clear dashboard
Data protection

These are just some features that are vital when you choose an eCommerce tool.

Tip✅ Don’t forget that the needs of today are not necessary the needs of tomorrow. Try to find a platform that is flexible and will also adapt to your future needs.

For example, in Reccodo this is an ace up our sleeve!

Reccodo is an AI based eCommerce Personalization Platform that understands your customers’ needs and wishes. Based on the information it gathers from your visitors’ behavior, it shows the most relevant products to them, the one that will convert them into buyers. Moreover, based on their search history and persona, it gives the opportunity to already engage with them from the search bar!

Of course, you can gather important data both from the clicks on the recommendations and the search queries on the search bar. For example, you can see what people are looking for in your e-shop and create campaigns for these products or maybe add products on your portfolio that you didn’t have before, but people want to buy. 😉

💡Keep in mind that personalized product recommendations can really help you with customers’ retention.

Data are the key to understanding what your customers want. And by having this knowledge you can grow your business further.

Pitfall #6: One-dimensional personalized segmentation/targeting

This is a common eCommerce personalization mistake. The concept of personalization is not one dimensional but multi-dimensional. Behind every purchase there is a person, and we are complicated beings with multi-dimensional characters.

If I want to segment a person in my marketing actions I should take under my consideration multiple data, for example:

Age
What shops do they visit?
When do they do shopping?
Are they looking only for the special offers and discounts?

This is just one example of multi-dimensional segmentation.

The Solution

To avoid this e-commerce personalization mistake of one-dimensional personalizing, it is important that you have a well-functioning Big Data Analytics system in operation.

A Big Data Analytics system can collect millions of demographic and behavioral data and in combination with data science-which transforms these data- you will have multi-dimensional market segments.

Let the data speak!

Wrapping Up

This is by no means a complete list, but it definitely captures the common pitfalls of personalization. Personalizing your website can transform your site from a flat, static platform to a dynamic and responsive way to interact with your customers. However, with so many tools nowadays and the lack of knowledge, it is very easy to fall into eCommerce personalization pitfalls.

The good news is that everything can be fixed. Just make sure to do a proper research and respond to your business needs.

And if you need any help, just poke us! 😊

Afroditi Tsaparoglou

Sales Executive at Reccodo