Personalisation is the Holy Grail for mature online businesses. The more personalised you can make your customer journeys, the more likely visitors are to complete purchases and become loyal, repeat customers, boosting your revenue and profits.

Personalisation isn’t all-or-nothing, however — you can choose from different levels of personalisation. That’s why the first step in your journey to personalisation is to set goals and objectives for your e-commerce site. This will help you determine the level of personalisation that’s right for your business so you can plan your personalisation strategy.

Levels of customer personalisation

The most basic level of personalisation is welcoming previous customers back to your site and making product recommendations based on their prior purchases. You can also recommend other products customers might want to buy based on other customers’ purchasing patterns. Amazon was one of the first online retailers to perfect this with its “You might also like…”feature.

Moving up a notch on the personalisation spectrum, you can offer a personalised navigation journey to customers based on their previous purchases or site behaviour. For example, an online golf retailer we work with determined through research that golfers tend to be very brand loyal when buying equipment. So they prioritize brands that customers have bought in the past when returning search results for golf equipment.

An outdoor garden furniture online retailer we work with delivered personalised five-day weather forecasts to site visitors based on their location. Customers were prompted to order furniture in time to receive it in time for nice weather. This boosted the site’s conversion rate by an impressive 28%.

Which personalisation tools do you need?

Your goals will dictate which tools you need to accomplish your personalisation strategy. There’s a wide range of software and plug-ins that use AI and machine learning as predictive tools to provide customized product recommendations and other kinds of personalisation. One of the most common is Nosto, which provides a Commerce Experience Platform (CXP) for personalising the online shopping experience.

This kind of platform offers the highest level of personalisation for e-commerce websites. It provides the data needed to segment audiences so you can create personalised customer journeys by connecting datapoints. For example, if you know a customer’s birthday, you can send a Happy Birthday email with a special offer that brings the customer to your site. Then your site will recognize the customer when he or she returns and start the personalised journey.

Dynamic Yield also offers online personalisation tools. Its ExperienceOS platform uses algorithms to match content, products and offers to individual customers across all digital channels and create highly personalised and synchronized customer journeys.

Both of these tools allow business to create real time audiences within the platform without the need for a Customer Data Platform(CDP) and can be a great way to start the journey.

As the journey progresses and business needs develop and become mature, and integrated with other divisions, a CDP may be a necessary step. One place to house all the customer data and feed it out to all the other platforms.

Some notes of caution:

Watch out for PII. The more data you collect and store about your users the greater a risk this is, and if you are storing PII, you need the right security and protection in place. For some platforms it goes against their usage policies and won’t be tolerated.

Remember that for every audience of segment you create, it’s another task that you data platform must complete when a user arrives on your site. Every time a users lands, the data platform will check them against each segment / audience to make sure they are in the right place, as you can imagine, the more audiences / segments there are to check, the longer this takes. This will affect site performance, and also how quickly the personalisation’s are activated.

AB testing is critical to personalisation efforts

Once you have used software and plug-ins to create personalised customer journeys, it’s critical to perform AB testing to make sure your strategy is having a positive effect on conversion rates and revenue .It’s possible to over-personalise and be intrusive if customer journeys are too tailored.

Its important that whatever tool you choose, it allows AB testing to determine how effective your personalisation tactics are.

Also, there are some situations where using their prior purchase data to personalise customer journeys can backfire, such as holiday shopping. For example, a husband might buy women’s clothing or fragrances for his wife on Black Friday. But continuing to personalise his journey based on these one-time gift purchases would be counter-productive and send him the wrong message.

Implement the right personalisation journey

Before embarking on a personalisation initiative, take some time to figure out what level of personalisation you need based on your goals and objectives. Then determine which personalisation tools can help you achieve them. An optimisation agency can help you devise and implement the right personalisation journey for your customers.

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