In retail stores, the shop assistant worth their weight in gold was the one that sized you up and tailored their sales pitch perfectly. They knew your behaviour through basic profiling, your needs with a few questions and your desires as they observed you browsing in-store. The pandemic hit. Product discovery shifted online, en-masse. Personalisation is now a vital tool for e-commerce.
Why? Because the endless aisle on countless websites and the limitless options online leads many shoppers to exhibit choice paralysis. They need help; they need recommendations that appeal to them directly – an audience of one. The good thing is that the tools that brands can now use have come of age. Artificial intelligence, complex algorithms and data analytics have made sure of that.
We also live in an age of great expectations. Complex searches on Google, Amazon, Netflix or Facebook now provide a very sophisticated, individualised and customer-centric response. Relevance matters. Consumers now demand that brands understand them. Context matters as well. Understanding the customer’s particular needs or intent at any point in time – so-called ‘in the moment’ experiences – is vital.
It pays off too, according to Forrester, 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalised service or experience. If brands get personalisation right they banish irrelevancy, instead they can deliver highly relevant digital experiences at scale, retain and delight customers and do so over time – this affects the bottom line and growth trajectory.
Yet, personalisation isn’t easy to get right. Globally, only 7% of companies have deployed insights-driven personalisation strategies that use sophisticated AI to differentiate themselves in the market, according to research by Forrester. One of the reasons is the metric by which personalisation is measured. Many look at whether it drives conversion and revenue directly. However, they fail to gauge customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value. All are key metrics if you are a brand thinking about connecting the entire online journey.
It is also a challenge for marketers to move beyond segmentation and persona-based shopping. It is easy to personalise for groups of shoppers that can be easily identified, collectivised and understood. We always think of segments because businesses have limited resources to personalise offerings for each and every individual shopper journey. Yet the latest advancement in AI and deep learning now allow us to optimise responses around an individual. And then scale it to meet commercial and shopper needs.
Right now, individual relevant experiences matter. An algorithm cannot foresee Christmas or Black Friday. Of course, you can train an algorithm to work this out, but then it is too late, the event has passed. This is where human interpretation and intelligence also come into play. Marketers need to make sense of customer journeys and shopper intent in a much wider cultural or trends-based behavioural context. This supplements what artificial intelligence can do and is informed by it.
This is why AI orchestration is so important. Controlling how AI-powered search and product discovery delivers personalisation is a vital process. Algorithms need training. Making sense of what customer data to use is vital, so is human oversight.
Personalisation for ecommerce is an incredibly powerful tool if used correctly. In an era of product overload, choice paralysis and a mushrooming of ecommerce making sense of what to buy and from whom will be crucial. Those brands that help their customers navigate product discovery in a proactive and relevant way will win. No one can afford to be irrelevant.
