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Personalization: the Secret Weapon for eCommerce Sales Success

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, we really wanted to share our tips for getting the most out of your eCommerce platform this holiday season.

(Yes, it’s even bigger than Christmas.)

What better reason could there be to share our very first blog post, right?

Typically, small and large online stores alike put a lot of effort in their Black Friday/Cyber Monday marketing campaigns, which leads to a lot of extra traffic. But with so many different offers to choose from, the individual shopper is often overloaded with options.

That’s where shopper personalization comes in. At LimeSpot, we help eCommerce shops of any size provide their customers with personalized shopping suggestions through data-driven technology, similar to that used by eComm giants like Amazon and Zappos. Here’s why.

The Choice Overload Problem

In a landmark study, researchers discovered that consumers who are offered a limited selection of items are far more likely to buy than consumers offered a much wider variety.

The researchers set up a tasting booth in a grocery store, where they offered either six or 24 different types of jams. Shoppers were invited to sample as many of the jams as they wanted, and were offered a $1-off coupon for their favorite.

You probably won’t be surprised that the table with 24 jams attracted more customers (about 60% of those who walked by) than the table with 6 jams (40% of traffic). After all, 24 jars of jams would make for quite the spread!

But you might be surprised that people didn’t necessarily sample more jams from the bigger table. On average, people only tried 1.5 types of jam at either table. And no one tried more than two flavors!

The coupons let the researchers track purchases made by their jam-samplers, which lead to even more interesting findings: about 30% of the shoppers who stopped at the table with only six flavors made a purchase. But only 3% of customers from the larger table ended up as purchasers.

That’s a huge difference. And the market philosophy behind this discovery applies to your average Shopify retailer just as much as it does to retail giants like Walmart.

Online retail giants like Amazon and Zappos succeed in solving the choice overload problem by analyzing their customer’s behavior and providing them with personalized product recommendations and prices that lead to a dramatic increase in Conversion Rate.

Solving Choice Overload Through Personalization

Personalizing offers is easy when you’re a small webstore and you have a one-to-one relationship with your customers. But most eCommerce retailers don’t work that way, and have too many customers for that method to be effective.

Consumers only have so much money to spend on Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. So if your visitors don’t find the products most relevant to them right away, they’re going to spend that money somewhere else.

Bottom line: the easier it is for your visitors to find what they want, the more money you make. And the biggest eCommerce platforms know it—which is why you’ll see personalized recommendations on Amazon, eBay, Spotify, Netflix, and other major players.

That’s why it’s vital for shops to offer smart product/customer segmentation and personalized product recommendations. A webstore that personalizes product recommendations can dramatically increase their order value and overall revenue.

How LimeSpot Helps Make Personalization Simple

Data-driven personalized shopping suggestions used to be limited to only the biggest eCommerce sites. Now, LimeSpot helps anyone achieve the same effect across hundreds or even thousands of customers, without you having to lift a finger.

As a leader in the industry, LimeSpot has analyzed over one-billion transactions to date. Yes, that’s billion with a ‘b.’ This includes over 18-million products, over $2-billion annual GMV, and the shopping behaviors from more than 120-million unique monthly shoppers around the globe.

This repository of data lets us provide focused, effective results for shop owners, and enticing personalized product recommendations for shoppers. LimeSpot is also trusted to help boost conversions by such well-known brands as Gaiam, and Sparkle in Pink.

Here are some of the advantages we can give your store:

  • Upselling and promoting trending items: Once our algorithms have learned enough from your customers, it can go to work promoting specific Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to the right customers by upselling as they purchase other items, or showing them trending items as they browse.

  • A/B testing personalization setups. You’ll be able to reliably test different personalization techniques and recommendation widgets to identify the best-converting setup for your webstore. These analytics can be gathered in real-time so that you are always working with the most up-to-date information on customer preferences.

  • Reaching customers at the right time. Your customers will see suggestions when they’re ready to make a purchasing decision, and our fast software makes for a seamless experience that won’t negatively impact the end user experience—even when you’re dealing with high traffic events like Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Having the Best Black Friday/Cyber Monday Ever

Your webstore experience is just one piece of the puzzle. The best eCommerce recommendation vendors are also capable of sending out email promotions based on what they learn from analyzing customers.

These email promotions can be timed well in advance of Black Friday and Cyber Monday so that customers have plenty of time to learn about the great deals they’re going to get. And, when combined with the above principles of limited choice and personalization, are far more likely to convert than a monster email containing every promo in your webstore.

Embracing artificial intelligence and automation is the key to implementing personalized shopping that scales with your success. It’s not a futurist dream or an advantage exclusive to corporate retail giants. It’s here and it’s within your reach courtesy of vendors like LimeSpot, which makes Amazon-style personalized shopper technology available to everyone.

Try LimeSpot For Yourself!

Try installing the LimeSpot Personalizer app on your Shopify store if you’re ready to see what difference a personalized shopping experience makes for your customers (and your bottom line,) there’s no better chance to find out than right now!

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