The Power Of Personalization In E-Commerce User Experiences

Learn how to harness communications data to provide hyper-personalized e-commerce experiences that will boost engagement and revenue.

Enhance personalization across ecomm platforms

As e-commerce continues to eat up larger chunks of the overall retail market share, customers are saving their loyalty for companies who go the extra mile. According to a recent study by McKinsey, 71% of customers now expect personalized interactions from the brands they engage with. Seventy-six percent of customers express frustration when companies fail to deliver them.

Customers expect to be instantly identified and understood. They want companies to be aware of their pain points and to present adequate solutions.

By accessing and using customer communications data found in email inboxes, companies are in a better position to offer such personalized solutions. Extracting this data using inbox parsers makes it possible to offer hyper-personalized user experiences that’ll increase customer loyalty and engagement that will, in turn, boost revenue.

Personalization Drives Customer Engagement and Loyalty

Hyper-personalization creates stickier user experiences which, in turn, drives customer engagement and loyalty. Personalizing your products or services makes them more appealing and useful to your customers, encouraging them to stick around longer. This stickiness drives engagement and loyalty, which is great news for your top line.

Companies are constantly fighting for attention, and customers’ expectations of the type of messages they receive from brands are ever-changing. One Accenture study found that nearly half of all people surveyed have abandoned a website for another due to bad curation. The same study found that 91% of customers are more likely to engage with a brand that offers personalized recommendations.

Customers who are better engaged are more likely to give their loyalty to a brand. According to a SmarterHQ report, millennials are 28% more likely to remain loyal to a brand if they receive personalized messages. Another study found that 72% of customers only engage with marketing messages that are tailored to their interests.

The results are in: tailored user experiences mean more revenue for your business. Retailers who offer hyper-personalization have been found to realize a 25% lift in revenue.

Personalization Reduces Acquisition, Marketing, and Sales Costs

Improving engagement and loyalty among your customers makes you money, and it also helps you hold on to more of it. The more loyal your customers, the less money you spend on acquiring new ones. A study by McKinsey found that companies who roll out personalization programs spent up to 20% less on marketing and sales.

The e-commerce industry has been experiencing rapid growth in recent years, and competition for new customers is fierce among online retailers. This increases the cost of acquiring new customers. Companies need to spend more on things like paid ads and dedicate more resources to organic channels. By focusing on retaining the customers you already have and building loyalty, you increase customer lifetime value (CLV) and spend less on acquiring new users.

How to unlock the power of personalization

Truly effective personalization programs are backed by data and are implemented throughout the customer lifecycle.

Personalize User Experiences Along the Buyer’s Journey

From pre-purchase to post-purchase and customer care interactions, companies should be looking to weave personalization into every customer touchpoint. Every stage of a customer’s journey presents multiple opportunities for personalization which can result in higher engagement and loyalty.

  • Consideration phase
    • Share personalized recommendations based on previous purchases.
    • Offer best price guarantees.
    • Offer coupons to hesitant buyers.
    • Direct leads to blog posts or other resources related to the products they’re considering.
  • Purchase phase
    • Create personalized add-on recommendations at check-out based on previous purchases.
  • Post-purchase and customer care
    • Offer streamlined support experiences to resolve disputes more efficiently. This provides customer support agents with a holistic view of each customer’s information and history with the company. Customers will feel like the company knows them and issues will be solved faster, contributing to a stellar customer experience.
    • Provide seamless returns or refund tracking while analyzing customer sentiment.
    • Provide information on how to get the most value from the product they purchased.
    • Include customers in loyalty rewards programs.

Utilize Customer Communications Data

Data is the crucial ingredient when it comes to offering hyper-personalized user experiences that will ensure you stand out from the competition. Customer data provides insights into purchasing history, preferences, sentiment, and pain points, which are what allow you to craft personalized experiences. Obtaining, integrating, and synthesizing this data, however, is seen as the main challenge for 67% of companies trying to offer personalization.

Your customers’ inboxes are one of the best sources of such information. They contain context-rich and real-time data on their buying behavior. This is better than data from web analytics and third-party research, which tends to be passive and won’t necessarily reflect your own customer’s intent. Email information like shipping and order details, tracking numbers, email headers, and contact information are crucial for offering personalization.

The bad news is that data from email is unstructured. This means it’s very difficult to extract value from and integrate it into your company’s data stack. Circumvent the issue by using email or inbox parsers to extract, structure, and categorize unstructured email data. With this data in hand, you’ll be in a perfect position to offer hyper-personalization and enhance your end-to-end customer experience.

Tapping into purchase and shipping data in customer emails gives you the powerful insights needed to build and enhance your retail media strategy. With access to holistic 1st-party data from emails, you can better understand consumer behavior, segments, and trends; deliver more personalized and impactful messages to customers, and measure effectiveness at multiple touch points along the customer journey. These in-depth insights power optimizing ad targeting and messaging with actual in-store and online sales and give you the tools to fund additional investments in personalization to drive better consumer experience, greater customer loyalty, and revenue.

How a Fortune 1000 FinTech Firm Used Personalization to Grow Gross Merchandise Value

A Fortune 1000 FinTech e-commerce firm was able to significantly boost conversion rates for repurchases by offering hyper-personalization. The firm was looking to reduce friction in its post-purchase experience by offering more personalized offers and needed a way to gain access to its customer communications data.

After a failed attempt at trying to build its own parsing solution, the FinTech company turned to Nylas’ Inbox Parsers. Nylas was able to connect to their customer inboxes, aggregate shipping data across merchants, and integrate and sync it to the company’s application.

The company was able to grow its conversion rates by 600%. Nylas’ solution was five times more efficient and accurate at parsing email data than the company’s previous in-house solution.

Get Started with Nylas Inbox Parsers and Deliver Personalized E-Commerce User Experiences

The Nylas Neural API offers inbox parsing solutions that will help you create data-driven, hyper-personalized user experiences. Nylas parsers use economies of scale to process huge quantities of representative data and ensure precision without the large costs and resources needed to build your own solution in-house.

  • Leverage AI to build accurate customer profiles.
  • Access real-time data and understand how customers are experiencing your brand and product.
  • Parse emails to obtain real-time purchase data to build personalization models as well as understand customer behavior and trends.

Connect with one of our Inbox Parser experts to find out how we can help you deliver personalized user experiences that will strengthen customer loyalty and boost revenue.

You May Also Like

How To Deliver Communications Features That Your Customers Will Actually Use
best cpaas companies
11+ Best CPaaS Companies for 2023: CPaaS Providers Comparison
Are Pre-Built Communications Solutions Worth the Investment?
Are Pre-Built Communications APIs Worth the Investment?

Subscribe for our updates

Please enter your email address and receive the latest updates.