If not, you're missing an opportunity to grow online sales. It’s that simple. Since Amazon continues to set the standard of ecommerce personalization, consumers demand that they receive that “special” treatment. This stems back to being treated like superiorly at your favorite store or restaurant - people like to feel important. 

In this blog, I will showcase online behavioral targeting sound practices, best practices and next practices for personalizing a home page for that valuable repeat shopper.

A simple way to engage consumers that return to your site on a more regular basis is to remind them what they were shopping for in their previous sessions. For this example, I was shopping for my upcoming Thanksgiving / Fall party (don’t worry Dan, you’ll be invited) and had to run to a meeting. When I returned later, I was pleasantly surprised with all my items of interest waiting for me on the home page (Boxed in Green). 

This online personalization technique gives consumers an opportunity to quickly find their items of interest, creating a better experience and improving the likelihood of conversions. By adding this simple functionality, retailers see a 5 to 7% click rate, and an engaged shopper is more likely to purchase than a more generic one. 

From my previous blog, Why Personalize Your Home Page to First Time Shoppers, we showed the Scholastic home page for first time consumers.  It displayed two predictive messages, but for a repeat consumer we can up the ante and make highly relevant recommendations based on what we know about that individual (boxed in green).  

With a combination of "Recently Viewed" and "Recommendations Just For You," we can now introduce products based on online buying habits, utilizing behavioral targeting best practices. This advanced functionality will engage consumers at a more intimate level, enticing click rates between 6-9%. Again, this is a more engaged customer, which increases conversion rates and overall customer experience. 

The Next Practice –Personalized Online Shopping

Providing exceptional customer service and a great shopping experience compels consumers to continue returning to their favorite traditional brick-and-mortar stores. So why not provide that same experience to your loyal online consumers?  It’s a practice that online retail leader Amazon exercises, and we all have seen how that has helped increase online profits.  By taking what we know about an individual, retailers have the ability to engage her with a completely personalized online shopping experience.   

Direct Brands has created this experience for its most valuable customers (MVC). By understanding their view behaviors, book genres (product attributes) and purchase patterns, they provide their customers a “Recommendations Just For You Page.” As an overall statistic, these types of pages have proven to entice consumers to click at rates between 8-20%. These clicks ultimately lead to double digit increases in conversion rates, increasing the lifetime value of that individual consumer and total online sales. 

Each of these practices has proven to increase web sales. At iGoDigital we understand that all of these solutions may not fit your online vision, but a personalized user experience is preferred by more than 62% of all shoppers. It is important to understand how consumers interact with your website, because they are giving clues to their true intent. Don’t be afraid to use this data, your consumers prefer it!