The Different eCommerce Personalization Applications Your Business May Need
What are the personalization applications available?
If you’re not in the know already, eCommerce personalization refers to any number of ways an online store customizes the browsing and buying experience to fit their users. It is cross-channel and is driven by real-time data.
Using data to understand your customers, personalization enables your business to offer experiences that are so relevant and contextual, they feel like magic. Personalization can be based on data like past purchases, browsing history, personal demographics, and expressed preferences.
To facilitate the process, there are many eCommerce personalization tools available on the market. These applications serve to help make the process easier and more streamlined, so that you can carry it out to the best of your ability.
There are 2 main clusters of software applications that we’ll be running through that your business may need.
- Gathering data
The first are applications that help you gather data. In eCommerce personalization, having data about your consumers is the first and most pivotal step. Without consumer data, you’d be personalizing blindly, and chances are you’d be doing all the wrong things.
Data in our digital world is aplenty. In the context of personalization, zero and first-party data are the most relevant. In our list, we will cover a couple of useful applications that can provide your business the important data that you need.
- Performing personalization
The second cluster is applications that help you activate this data in customer outreach . These are platforms that offer key personalization features, support personalization on messaging channels, marketing automation, building customer journeys, and more. These applications help you execute your personalization efforts at a portion of the effort.
Top applications for gathering data
For eCommerce personalization, zero and first-party data are the sources of data you should be looking at. If anything, they are the only sources of data that your business takes into consideration.
Zero-party data is information that consumers intentionally and proactively share with brands. On the other hand, first-party data is defined as data one can collect from their own website, application, or other digital platform, which businesses can analyze to gain a better understanding of their own traffic and performance.
This data gives you insights about your own consumers, which is the whole goal of personalization. This is also the reason why zero and first-party data are preferred over second or third-party data. Leverage the data to find out things such as their habits and interests so as to create a more magical experience for your customers.
The following are some sources of zero and first-party data that can help you.
- Fairing
Fairing is a post-purchase survey platform that can help your business gather zero-party data about your consumers. With the surveys, you can dig deep and learn more about your customers by asking them key questions. These questions span categories such as attribution, research, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and more.
It also helps your business uncover the impact of their marketing strategies by incorporating post-purchase "How Did You Hear About Us?" questions. Brands utilizing this approach have witnessed over a 20% increase in marketing attribution, enabling more precise targeting and maximizing conversion potential.
In your surveys, ask questions like “What occasion is this purchase for?” or “Who is this purchase for?”. Businesses stand to learn key insights about what their consumers are thinking, what their customer journey is like, and so on. This information will prove critical in guiding how your business carries out its personalization efforts.
- Segment
With Segment’s simple analytics API, your business will be able to collect user events from any platform. Segment currently supports over 25,000 companies, and collects over 1 trillion events every month on their APIs. You would be able to send data from any platform or part of your product for your business: mobile, web, or server.
Segment’s Connections works with hundreds of tools out of the box, both for data collection and data usage downstream. Without much engineering, you can capture data from sources like mobile apps, websites, marketing platforms, and even point of sale systems.
Once collected, Segment standardizes your data, creates profiles of your customers, and can send this information to destinations like analytics and advertising tools with just a few clicks. And, if you use an app or service that’s not supported, you can easily create a custom connection or destination using Segment’s API.
- Cartful Solutions
Cartful Solutions offers Cartful Cards and product finder quizzes. Both of these can be used to help procure vital zero-party data for your business.
Cartful Cards is a mobile-only eCommerce solution designed for Gen Z and Millennials. It uses machine learning technology to guide shoppers to their perfect match through swipes and taps. It’s a fun and easy way to drive stronger mobile conversion rates.
Product finder quizzes are designed to match your brand’s unique style. It comes with custom front-ends that seamlessly integrate into your website. Brands can easily create engaging quizzes to help their customers find the perfect product.
As a whole they offer privacy-safe, proprietary zero-party data for your campaigns and site experiences. They help to boost engagement, conversions, and tailored customer interactions, while helping you to collect important data.
The unique zero-party data from Cartful Solutions can be a game-changer for your marketing and on-site personalization.
- Amped.io
With popups from Amped.io, this can help your brand scale email and SMS opt-ins. It is a no-code builder that allows you to customize popups for your brand in a short amount of time. They enjoy 10-15% opt-in rates, in comparison to the industry average of 3%.
In one of their case studies, they were able to help a brand called ‘Mini Katana’ capture 525,000 emails in 5 months. Mini Katana has been leveraging gamified popups even before partnering with Amped, but they were limited.
The Amped team strategized on how they could best help Mini Katana. After walking through various gamified popup styles and multi-step questions, they decided to test four options:
- A spinning wheel popup (their control group)
- The spinning wheel with a follow-up question
- A fruit ninja popup with floating fruit and an interactive katana cursor
- The fruit ninja popup with a follow-up question
Then, the Amped team monitored the test, making tweaks to optimize the top performers. From this, their list growth boomed as more and more people visited the site, saw the popups, and opted in. Ultimately, the spinning wheel with the follow-up question overwhelmingly won—increasing their opt-in rate to 26% (more than 8x the industry average) and capturing 525,000 emails.
Not only that, the follow-up question also helped to gather critical zero-party data for the Mini Katana team. This enabled them to further segment their audience and get more strategic with their marketing efforts.
Top applications for personalizing your marketing outreach
Having collected all your data and settled on the game plan your business wishes to take, the next big hurdle is implementation. The implementation of effective personalization strategies requires robust software applications capable of not only collecting vast amounts of relevant data but also translating that data into meaningful, personalized interactions.
As such, the role of software applications for implementing personalization emerges as crucial. It is able to unlock the full potential of eCommerce ventures, offering businesses the tools they need to create deeper connections with customers. This is a key step towards staying ahead in today's dynamic digital economy.
- Bloomreach
Bloomreach is a commerce experience cloud that combines personalization and marketing automation tools. The foundation for this is Bloomreach’s Customer Data Engine, which is able to ingest data from different sources and help you activate it across channels.
With the engine, businesses are able to get a single marketing view of their customers. This includes historical data, current interactions updated in real time, and predicted future behavior—presented in a way that’s intuitive for marketers to digest and take action on.
It also has the added benefit of segmentation and building an audience. Your business can go even deeper with custom attributes that you can compute within the personalization platform. You can use a combination of multiple customer properties to arrive at highly relevant segments that are always updated in real time. They are tightly integrated with your marketing channel, so your customers get the right message at the right time.
- Adobe Experience Cloud
The Adobe Experience Cloud covers numerous channels such as web (on-site), mobile app, email, SMS, and ads. It is actually an umbrella of products that help businesses personalize each customer’s experience. Some of the most popular products in this cloud include:
- Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP): This application unifies customer data from multiple sources and builds accurate 360-degree customer profiles. Real-Time CDP lets your business create high-value audience segments for both B2C and B2B use cases across the marketing funnel, without relying on third-party cookies.
With AI-powered insights, you can create complete audiences so your campaigns can be on target and relevant. You’ll be able to boost efficiency with pre-built workflows that understand how data sources are used in audiences.
Not only that, centrally manage audiences for your entire business, including audiences built in other applications.
- Journey Optimizer: This lets you create personalized journeys for your customers, and allows you to do personalization in real-time. Adobe Journey Optimizer is a single application for managing scheduled cross-channel campaigns and trigger-based one-to-one engagement for millions of customers.
You can manage customer engagement across inbound and outbound channels using real-time insights and AI-driven decisioning so you can engage one customer (or millions) with relevant experiences anytime, anywhere.
- Marketo Engage: A B2B marketing automation tool, it helps align your eCommerce sales and marketing. Your business will be able to orchestrate and execute cross-channel campaigns so you can acquire, nurture, expand, and retain customers.
3. Salesforce Marketing and Commerce Clouds
Salesforce offers two distinct personalization solutions: Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Marketing Cloud is a more traditional personalization and automation solution. It helps you to connect customer data from multiple sources. Not only that, it also helps to create a consistent experience across channels with the help of machine learning algorithms. Additionally, the cloud also has a Journey Builder, which lets you build and visualize cross-channel customer journeys.
Commerce Cloud is a specialized eCommerce platform that helps B2B and B2C businesses create personalized buying experiences. Companies use it to give customers the opportunity to stay within a single channel that incorporates all of their data, rather than constantly moving across different ones.
- Yotpo
Yotpo SMS is a text message marketing solution for driving lasting customer relationships. Your brand will be able to personalize your SMS with subscriber growth tools, deep segmentation capabilities, and tailored text flows that maximize ROI.
With SMS marketing, you can leverage data to connect with customers at each stage of the buyer journey, keeping them interested and engaged throughout. Here are a few ways that you can use texting at different customer stages:
- Welcome flows
After a customer opts in to SMS, send them an automated message to welcome them and offer them an exclusive discount on their next purchase as a thanks for joining.
- Loyalty campaigns
If you have a loyalty program, send a text with an invitation to join. For subscribers who are already loyalty members, use SMS to let them know how many points they collected via their recent purchase, or reveal exciting new perks when they reach the next program tier.
- Transactional messages
Send transactional messages when the customer’s item ships, when it’s delivered, and if there are any shipping delays to always keep them informed and excited about what’s to come.
- Review requests
After a customer’s item is delivered, send them a feedback request, either as a return message or an on-site review. 98% of shoppers say authentic reviews are the most important factor influencing their purchase decisions, and SMS can help you more easily capture that content.
- Cross sells and upsells
Send SMS product recommendations based on your customers’ purchases, wish lists, or browsing history.
- Win-back campaigns
If a customer hasn’t purchased in a while, use a win-back campaign to remind them what great products you have to offer and incentivize them to return with a discount (like 10% off their next order).
Using SMS marketing, it can help your brand reduce churn by offering personalized messages and offers at every stage of the buyer journey. The more you do it, the better you’ll be at understanding what your customers want at every touchpoint. This way, you can continuously refine and improve the buying experience.
This list is by no means exhaustive. More applications are getting better, and more applications are entering the market. These are but a few of the top tools that currently exist that are able to readily help any business with their eCommerce personalization.
