These days, building a customisable ecommerce store takes more than simply letting its visitors change the colour of its interface. You want customers to feel like they have a personal shopping assistant offering them product recommendations on your ecommerce website – and here are several ways you could generate that feeling.
Collect and analyse cookies
No, not of the biscuit type – though, if your shop actually sells biscuits, you probably do inspect them closely before you sell them anyway.
Whatever type of online store you run, though, you also need to think about cookies of a different, more digital kind – as these would enable you to personalise the homepage’s content for each user.
Display recently viewed products
These should remain visible on a webpage as a user scrolls through it to see what other items your online store stocks. If a certain product piqued the user’s interest at some point, there’s a chance that they will return to this product listing later – especially if you gently nudge them towards it.
Quiz shoppers on their preferences
No, you don’t need to do that personally, or even assign the task to a human at all. You could instead build interactive quizzes directly into the website itself, allowing visitors to select answers to multiple-choice questions so that the site itself can make purchase recommendations.
Also ask members of your emailing list what they would like to see
‘Sign up to our mailing list!’ How many times have you seen a call to action (CTA) like this on a website? More crucially, how many times have you felt genuinely tempted to join the mailing list?
If you include a similar CTA on your own website, you need to let the reader know what’s in it for them. Why not let them customise what type of content you will email them?
Send emails recommending particular products
Take account of a customer’s previous purchasing behaviour as you attempt to discern which of your stocked products you ought to advocate in emails you send this customer’s way.
Fortunately, as people tend to purchase items complementary or related to ones they have already bought, you might not struggle to come up with suitable recommendations.
Encourage a customer to return to an abandoned shopping basket
If a particular customer places an item in their shopping basket but fails to finish a purchase, you could offer this customer a discount in the hope of persuading them to reverse course. If stock of the item in question is running low, you could also point this out to the customer.
Add new products in reaction to customer feedback
This is a looser form of personalisation compared to those already suggested – but, if you find that your customers are often quick to snap up products your online store usually has in short supply, you could think about expanding your product range in persistently popular categories.
We could build you an ecommerce website complete with a CMS system allowing you to add new product listings quickly and easily.
