Everyone likes personalization because it makes the other person feel valued, which can be valuable to build trust around your brand. In fact, McKinsey’s Next in Personalization 2021 Report states that 71% of customers expect businesses to provide personalized experiences.
Personalized marketing refers to the approach of creating content that caters to a specific audience and not interacting with everyone in a similar way. Instead of bombarding your customers with generic messages, you focus on providing personalized content that speaks directly to their needs.
However, when it comes to eCommerce sites, personalization goes beyond these traditional methods and extends into your product descriptions. This guide discusses why personalization is crucial to eCommerce content marketing.
Understanding Your Audience
Personalization is a big part of the customer journey. Understanding your audience and their needs is key to creating content that resonates with them.
- Understand the customer’s needs: One of the best ways to understand your customers is through psychographics. Psychographics is a study of a person’s traits and interests. It is combined with demographics to understand a target market.
- Understand the customer’s preferences: What do you know about them as individuals? What do they like or dislike regarding products or services like yours? Are there any patterns in what motivates them at different stages of the buying process, for example, during research vs. purchase decision vs. post-purchase satisfaction/loyalty programs?
Personalizing Your Content
Personalization is a great way to make your content more relevant to your audience. For personalization to be effective in eCommerce marketing, there must be two things. A clear understanding of what types of data are available to site visitors and how those pieces of data should be combined. Hence, each visitor receives an experience customized for them specifically.
Creating personalized content might be challenging if you don’t have the right resources. However, the good news is that many content marketing agencies can help you. A content marketing agency can help craft personalized content that influences people’s buying decisions.
One of the most important factors when searching for such agencies is ratings. And it would be even better if the agency had good ratings across multiple review platforms or sites. Most businesses usually add their reviews and testimonials to their websites.
WriterArmy is a content marketing company that provides services to businesses in various sectors, including B2B SaaS, healthcare, real estate law, and e-learning. Their website has listed reviews from three different platforms, including Google, Facebook, and Clutch.
Personalized Product Recommendations
Personalized product recommendations are an essential part of the customer journey. They can help you stand out from your competitors, and they can increase conversion rates. Recent research in a few countries like the US, China, and France involving 3,000 customers revealed that they were prepared to pay 25.3% more for personalization but expect compounded savings.
One of the best ways to use personalized product recommendations is at different stages in the customer journey. For instance, you can use customized content to guide users toward relevant products based on their interests, demographics, and past purchases.
This will build trust with your audience as they realize you know what they want without asking them directly. You’ll also give them more ways to get value from their time on your site. They’ll likely click through if they see something interesting while browsing around or looking for inspiration for their next purchase decision.
Again, you can hire a content marketing company to help with personalized product descriptions. Product descriptions themselves are very challenging to come up with because you cannot sound too salesy while highlighting all the product’s key features. To personalize these descriptions, you will certainly need help from professionals.
Targeted Ads
Targeted ads are more likely to be clicked on, shared, and converted. They can also easily lead to a sale because they are created with persuasion and appeal in mind.
You can implement the use of targeted ads in various forms, including the following:
- Personalized product recommendations based on previous purchases or browsing history
- Customer service emails with relevant information about orders or shipping status updates
- Reminders of upcoming sales if they’ve shopped before but haven’t bought anything recently
Personalized Emails
Personalized emails are one of the most effective ways to engage your audience and get them to take action, and the more personalized they are, the better. Per data from Statista, around 319.6 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2021. But not all of them were opened by the receivers. That’s why it is crucial to personalize emails so they don’t end up sitting in the receiver’s inbox.
Personalized emails are more engaging because they show that you’re paying attention to them as individuals instead of just another anonymous customer in a long list of people who bought something from your store. This helps build trust between you and your customers, making them less likely to ignore your future communications.
Personalized emails also help boost engagement by serving relevant content tailored specifically for each recipient based on their previous purchases or other online interactions with your brand. This means no more sending out generic newsletters that don’t speak directly back at anyone.
Dynamic Content
Dynamic content is a big buzzword in the e-commerce industry right now. It’s a powerful tool that you can use to personalize your website and give customers what they want when they want it. Dynamic content can be anything from changing product descriptions based on a customer’s location to showing different products depending on their browsing history.
The best part about using dynamic content? You don’t have to write a new copy every time there’s an update. You simply change one piece of code, and voila. Your entire site changes instantly.
Conclusion
Personalization is a powerful tool for eCommerce marketers. It allows you to connect with your customers in a way that no other medium can and gives them a reason to engage with your brand. Personalization can also increase customer loyalty and reduce churn rates by creating personalized experiences that keep customers returning for more.
But before you start personalizing every aspect of your content marketing strategy, remember that some challenges are involved in making this work effectively, especially when it comes time to measure whether or not it’s working.