Ecommerce Strategy - Personalization

In the greater context of an ecommerce marketing strategy, it is clear that one of the most important components focuses on maximizing personalization opportunities throughout the customer experience. However, most ecommerce retailers struggle not only with what personalization tools and techniques to provide & support, but also how to establish a framework and roadmap to build their strategy.

ecommerce providers must first answer a range of over-arching questions in order to develop and prioritize their business strategy to support their personalization goals. For example,

● “What is most important: customer acquisition or customer retention?”
● “What types of customers have the highest value: frequent shoppers or biggest spenders?”
● “How do you want to target customers: individually or segmented?”
● “Which customer is most important: long-time buyers or untapped newer shoppers?”

..and many more questions that help to determine the relationships that an ecommerce retailer values and therefore considers worth investing time and money to cultivate. Once these questions are answered and the results prioritized, it becomes easier to narrow down the tools and techniques available to support the organization's goals and align their technology capabilities with these initiatives.

Effective personalization strategies and solutions are undeniably successful in increasing the bottom line profitability for ecommerce retailers. Of course, the most well-known success stories like Amazon & Netflix focus on recommendations and cross-selling techniques, but other techniques such as interactive filtering which ask customers a series of questions can be just as powerful. However, it is important to make sure that not only are privacy issues addressed, but also that usability and relevance issues are handled effectively as well. An example high-level outline for developing a cohesive personalization strategy would include the following:

I. How do customers, affiliates and partners interact with our site?

a. Behavioral patterns

b. Marketing campaigns (email, search, blogs, pricing, etc.)

c. Customization techniques (configurable product offerings, etc.)

II. How do we manage our customer relationships?

a. What values are most important? (spenders, loyalists, etc.)

b. Segmentation (geography, interests, community, opt-in, etc.)

c. Privacy

Only after deconstructing the present state of an ecommerce marketing strategy will one be able to explore the tools and techniques available to achieve the personalization opportunities that abound.