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Why Personalization and Psychology are Crucial to Modern Ecommerce Stores

– Contributed Content-

iPhone in hand

(nvtriab, Pixabay)

5 December 2016. Putting your products and services online for the world to see is perhaps simpler than ever. But why are so many ecommerce brands struggling to make consistent sales?

After all, any combination of the following consistently seems to serve as a black cloud over the heads of many stores online today including:

  • High bounce rate, as users have short attention spans and simply can’t be bothered to stick around on any given product page
  • Low customer retention: sure, you can make a sale once, but are you doing everything in your power to ensure that your satisfied customers come back for more?
  • Cutthroat competition, considering the thousands of competing stores in any given ecommerce niche, standing out from the crowd is much easier said than done

Don’t think of your online business as a game, but rather an exercise in experimentation and understanding what makes your customers tick.

Selling as a Science

In other words, treat selling as a science.

Buyer psychology is constantly evolving in the face of emerging trends in ecommerce. Even though you can sell just about anything online, it takes a few tried-and-tested principles of buyer psychology to truly seal the deal with modern customers. You can apply any combination of the following to your store as means of retaining more customers and ensuring that your brand makes an impression on visitors.

Adding a Personal Touch

The modern buying experience should always be about the customer. That being said, today’s buyers expect an intimate and unique shopping experience that goes beyond clicking “buy.” If you truly want to grab the attention of customers today, you have to get personal.

Doing so is easier said than done; however, consider the following steps as the building blocks of personalization for your brand:

  • Blogging: it’s crystal clear that just about anyone can make money blogging, but ecommerce stores in particular have a responsibility to build a dedicated audience that wants to hear from them
  • Social outreach: you should constantly strive to get the trenches of your customers, via social or email, as means of getting in front of new faces and letting them know that you’re concerned about them
  • Give your your business a face: don’t just be another sales pitch, but give your traffic an inside scoop on who you are a brand (think: pictures of yourself and your team, telling you company’s store on-site, etc)

Using Data to Your Advantage

Beyond giving your business a personal touch, you should also use hard numbers to your advantage when it comes to crafting the ideal customer experience. For example, you should use your buyers’ shopping history as means of personally recommending new products.

Likewise, you can use customer data to figure out what products are your best sellers and use those numbers to influence your next product launch. You can analyze your marketing campaigns too, noting what works and doesn’t in terms of your messaging (think: urgency vs. scarcity vs. social proof, for example).

Today’s ecommerce stores simply can’t afford to be another face in the crowd. Your customers want a personalized experience: take the time to understand the psychology behind your buyers to ensure you’re optimizing your store accordingly.

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