How to Customize an E-commerce Website to Boost Sales

If you are not using personalization when designing your e-commerce website, chances are that you are losing out on revenue. In fact, over the past few years, as personalization has become more and more commonplace in the world of online shopping, businesses have lost billions of dollars in potential sales as a result of poor personalization or a lack of it. But, if you get the personalization right on your e-commerce website, you can seriously boost your success with a predicted 15% profit boost for businesses that successfully implement personalization strategies. We’ve put together some e-commerce personalization examples that you might like to try.What is E-commerce Personalization?E-commerce personalization involves presenting customers with offers, recommendations, and other content based on their previous behavior, site actions, demographic and more. One good example of an e-commerce site that leads the way in this is Amazon. When you visit the website, you immediately see a range of personalized offers based on what you’ve browsed, what you’ve added to your basket, and what you’ve bought from Amazon in the past. And, statistics show that online shoppers want more of it, with a whopping more than 70% of people reporting hating being shown irrelevant content.Adjust the Navigation to Suit the Visitor:When you create an online store, designing the homepage and navigation based on the visitor’s interests is a great way to have every customer feel like they are number one. For example, you might adjust the navigation to go to a certain section, such as women’s or men’s clothing, based on what the customer navigated to previously when they were last using your website.Weather-Sensitive Personalization:Along with showing items to users based on their previous actions on the site, some e-commerce websites are taking it a step further by offering suggestions to users based on what the weather’s like in their area. This is a common tactic used by clothing and fashion e-commerce stores that might show ads for summery clothes on a hot day and ads for coats and umbrellas when it’s raining.Use Browsing Behavior to Recommend Products:As you learn how to create an online store, you will also learn that product recommendations are one of the top ways to drive sales, particularly just before the checkout process where the customer is committed to buying and may be more inclined to add something tempting to their basket before they make the purchase. But if you keep showing your customers suggestions for products that they have no interest in, it’s not going to go very far. Instead, using past browsing behavior data allows you to figure out which products each individual customer is going to find more appealing as a product suggestion.Personalized Search Results:When a customer searches for an item on your website, you can use what you already know about their previous behavior to ensure that they are shown the most relevant results. This will not only increase sales by increasing the likelihood that your customer will easily find what they are looking for, but it also reduces customer frustration and generates more loyalty and respect towards your brand.Personalized Marketing Emails:Nobody likes receiving generic spam emails, so put some thought into personalizing the emails that you send customers on your mailing list. You can use the browsing data of customers who have logged into your website to figure out what they are most interested in, and send them emails that are relevant to their browsing history and past behavior on their site. For example, if you have customers who have looked at a certain product, you can use this information to fire them an email when this particular product goes on sale and let them know that there’s a chance to get a discount on an item that they have previously shown interest in. Many e-commerce website builder tools will easily link up with a range of custom email marketing services that you can use together to achieve this goal.Use Geo-Location Targeting:If your business operates in several different countries, or you sell to customers across the world, an easy way to create a custom ecommerce website is to use geo-location targeting. This means that customers are easily able to move to the version of your website that is relevant to the country that they are viewing it from, whether that means access to a different range of products or simply being able to read the website in their own language. Amazon again is an excellent example of this; giving customers the option to view the US or UK version of the site when they log in. Another great way to use geo-location is to keep customers informed of personalized shipping costs and times in their area.When it comes to e-commerce success, personalization is becoming increasingly more necessary.