Suppose you have an eCommerce store, and you’ve invested in building a strong business, written killer product descriptions, added high-quality product images, formed a responsive support team, and everything else that makes an eCommerce store perfect.
You may still have missed out on one thing that customers are demanding more and more these days! It’s called “eCommerce Personalization”.
64% of customers feel that retailers don’t really know their preferences and cannot offer a personalized experience.
Today, eCommerce personalization is a must for online retailers, and we’ll discuss some top eCommerce personalization trends and best practices to watch out for in 2022. Make a note of these and start incorporating them into your store, if you haven’t already.
10 eCommerce Personalization Trends and Best Practices to look out for in 2022
“Amazing things will happen when you listen to the consumer.” – Jonathan Midenhall, CMO, Airbnb
With that in mind, I’ll discuss the top retail personalization trends that I believe will create a lot of buzz in 2022. So, let’s get started!
1. AI-based product recommendations
I expect to see a lot of AI-based product recommendations in 2022. And most of these products are expected to be on the home page, category page, and cart page. Let me explain with quick examples.
Home page eCommerce personalization
The majority of online shoppers visit your eCommerce store through the home page. So, to create a good first impression through customer personalization, start from home-page eCommerce personalization.
Some popular home-page types of home-page recommendations include:
- Top picks for you - These are personalized eCommerce recommendations for new shoppers
- Trending products - This is again for new shoppers, and it aims to highlight the most sold items in the store
- Because you searched for.. - This type of product recommendation is inspired by users’ browsing history and is highly relevant.
Category page eCommerce personalization
Category pages are where an eCommerce shopper looks for a specific product type. They look for filtered, relevant search results on these pages. The types of recommendations that work best for category pages include:
- Relevance-based sorting - let the users filter their product searches based on relevance. This way, they’ll find products that match their browsing history and clicks.
- Most popular product in the category - Highlight the most sold items in a particular category to capture users’ attention.
Product detail page eCommerce personalization
When a shopper finds a particular product relevant, they click on it to land on the product detail page. There are some great opportunities to increase your AOV with the following types of customer personalization recommendations on PDP pages:
- Similar products - you can display visually similar products that the customers might also like.
- Styling recommendations - offering personalized styling recommendations with real-time personalization. If a user is browsing dresses, this recommendation will display shoes, belts, earrings, and other accessories that can go with the dress.
- Frequently bought together - This recommendation on the PDP page will show which other products people buy with a particular product a user is interested in.
You can always try Argoid’s 1:1 personalization engine that can help eCommerce stores with:
- Increasing CTR on the home page with personalized recommendations
- Prompting user search and quick product discovery with personalized search results
2. Omnichannel presence and support
When you focus on creating a multi-channel, personalization store, the first step should be to build an omnichannel presence. The focus of omnichannel presence is to be present in multiple channels including desktop, mobile, and brick-and-mortar stores, and create a frictionless shopping experience.
In 2022, I expect to see a lot of omnichannel eCommerce personalization. If you are an eCommerce store owner who is still focusing on the desktop-only approach, you’re clearly missing out on a lot of opportunities. It will be possible to leverage retail personalization if you can build a consolidated view of customer behavior across all channels.
So, don’t ignore the growing popularity of mobile devices and go omnichannel to reach out the customers from all channels.
3. Personalized search
The pandemic has impacted the order flow of eCommerce stores across the globe. It has become mandatory for eCommerce stores to strengthen their personalized marketing approaches to keep up.
In 2022, we expect to see more personalized online shopping as eCommerce stores are gearing up for end-to-end personalization. By personalizing each customer touchpoint, online stores can know each customer inside out, and provide a seamless shopping experience.
By shifting to an integrated, personalized search, businesses can offer the most accurate and personalized results to each shopper.
Personalized search captures the individual preferences of each shopper and matches their intent with the product catalogs. With an AI-enabled personalized search feature, eCommerce stores can tailor the search experiences of individual shoppers and improve conversion rates.
In fact, the personalized search can be a great ROI driver for eCommerce stores as it easily creates a personalized shopping experience by reducing search efforts.
4. Enable micro-targeting
With plenty of eCommerce personalization systems around, it is expected that in 2022, we will see a lot of micro-targeting. These personalization tools can help eCommerce stores to distinguish one customer from another based on different customer data like browsing history, purchase history, clickstream data, etc.
The beauty of personalized micro-targeting is that it helps you create targeted customer segments. Hence, eCommerce stores can easily segment the customers who like a particular type of product, and offer them lots of personalized recommendations and deals to boost conversion.
Micro-targeting may be hard to achieve, but a personalization engine like Argoid simplifies the job for you. Find more details here.
5. Adoption of image recognition technology
Another personalization trend I expect to see a lot this year is the adoption of image recognition technology. The integration of image recognition technology and a personalization engine can help eCommerce businesses identify appropriate products within images. This will open new doors of eCommerce personalization as online stores can use these datasets to customize the content of product pages and refine the existing recommendations.
Here’s how image recognition technology can contribute to the personalization of your eCommerce store:
- Once you identify the specific product images your customers are interested in through this technology, you can use those in your product detail pages as “People also bought together” or “Shop the look” recommendations. You can also use those images as email recommendations.
- Image recognition technology can automate the image analysis process, to assess different image attributes like color, pattern, style, etc. Later, you can match these attributes with customer behavioral patterns for enabling more accurate recommendations.
6. Personalized push notifications
Include personalized push notifications in your personalization marketing plan for 2022. We know that 90% of Americans are using the internet. As of 2021, there are 4.66 billion active internet users globally.
With such powerful internet penetration, it makes sense for eCommerce stores to make the most of online push notifications. I strongly believe that online push notifications should be a point of focus for eCommerce stores. Why leave any stone unturned?
A great mode of online user engagement, that can also drive traffic and retarget users, is personalized push notifications.
A customer personalization platform like Argoid can leverage useful customer data like behavioral patterns, preferences, browsing habits, etc., to create highly targeted push notifications.
Argoid offers personalized push notifications for:
- Campaigns
- Abandoned carts
- To notify users on restock
- Wishlist notifications
- Cross-sell/up-sell notifications
Our customers have been able to boost their user retention rate by 10% or more, with personalized push notifications.
7. Personalized product layouts
The next eCommerce personalization trend on my list is personalized product layout. The idea is to design each page of an eCommerce store in such a way that it shows your store’s consolidated knowledge on the shopper’s browsing pattern, previous purchases, or any other information that can influence a shopper’s online experience it’s almost like creating a personal store for each shopper.
8. Automated customer segmentation with powerful analytics
An eCommerce personalization tool is perfectly suitable for automating the customer segmentation process. Product personalization software can collect relevant information from different data points like websites, previous campaigns, and more. It can then use all these datasets to build different customer segments using powerful analytics, making personalized user targeting a lot more feasible for eCommerce companies. I am rooting to see more of this eCommerce personalization trend in 2022.
9. Dynamic content generation
Dynamic content is a type of web content that changes automatically, based on users’ behavior, browsing history, preferences and other attributes. With eCommerce personalization, online stores can personalize any dynamic content depending on the collected customer data.
Personalization tools can help eCommerce stores generate content dynamically. By employing this technique in 2022, eCommerce companies can inject personalization into different types of content like the home page content, product page content, campaign content, email content, and more.
10. Personalized email campaigns
I am also hopeful about seeing a lot of personalized email campaigns in ecommerce. Each customer is different and standing in 2022, if you’re still treating them as numbers, you’re making a HUGE mistake!
An AI-enabled personalization engine like Argoid. can embed product recommendations within your email campaigns based on the user’s behavior. Hence, it becomes easier for eCommerce stores to nudge their customers, grab their attention and redirect them to the website to complete their shopping.
Supercharge eCommerce Personalization in 2022 with Argoid
Instead of spending on multiple personalization tools, eCommerce stores will find it more efficient and cost-effective to have one consolidated system that ties together all their personalization efforts.
Something like 1:1 eCommerce recommendation engine Argoid. Here’s why you should give this eCommerce personalization software a shot:
- It is a no-code platform that’s easy to integrate into your Shopify store.
- It can create relevant, highly personalized recommendations for your eCommerce product page, home page, and cart page with just a few clicks.
- It can leverage historical datasets like browsing history, purchase history etc. to create effective, ready-to-recommendations for your store
- You can send personalized emails, notifications and simplify micro-targeting with this eCommerce personalization engine.
- It takes next to no time to set up and that means you see results quickly.
Want to know more? Book your free demo now.
FAQs
What is eCommerce Personalization?
eCommerce personalization is the process of building a personalized experience for each customer by showcasing product recommendations, content, and customized offers based on a customer’s previous purchases, search history, and other personal datasets.
With the right set of personalization tools, eCommerce stores can engage more online shoppers, boost conversion, and increase the number of repeat purchases.
eCommerce personalization can come in many forms. Here are a few:
- Offering personalized recommendations on the home page, product pages, cart page
- Sending cart recovery emails with personalized offers
- Sending personalized notifications on the latest events and updates
What are the Top Benefits of eCommerce Personalization?
Wondering why eCommerce personalization matters? Here are the major benefits:
- Product personalization adds more value to the online shopping experience of customers. Plus, with personalized product recommendations. 48% of shoppers are more likely to increase their spending.
- eCommerce personalization also plays a critical role in product discovery. With product matching in eCommerce, many new products can get attention from customers, that they might have missed otherwise. This is again a good way to boost revenue