Sifting through the buzzwords - eCommerce personalization

At this point, every marketer knows about "personalization" to some degree. It's often difficult to sift through the buzzwords, the similar language, and the thousands of emails you get every day from sales reps (myself included) to decipher exactly which personalization technologies make sense in the context of your business.

I've spent the last year deeply entrenched in the eCommerce personalization space, and wanted to take some time to share what I've learned, and why certain eCommerce technologies (*cough*Jetlore*cough*) make more sense than others.

The customer's perspective

We're all online shoppers as well as marketers, and it's important to think about personalization from a customer's perspective.

Everyone shifts between two very distinct customer states - there's the state where you have a specific intent to make a purchase and are easily converted, and the much larger percent of time where you're "hibernating," and aren't ready to buy.

If you think about your own purchase behavior, which state would you say you're in more often?

Lower funnel technologies

Modern personalization technologies were built to optimize the purchase you were already going to make.

These technologies leverage your last session information to send behavioral triggers, place you in segments to give product recommendations at the shopping cart page based on similar users, and suggest similar items to those you just purchased; all of these methods are meant to make the individual sale more profitable.

A great analogy: Checkout lines at the grocery store. Grocers know you're already spending a good amount on groceries (intent) and while you wait, you're surrounded by low ticket items that are often thrown in on a whim (enhanced sale).

The lower funnel is important, but since you're providing retailers with so much information about what you're interested at that point in time, it's easy to suggest items to up-sell.

The real challenge is addressing each customer while they're in that "hibernation" mode, and keeping them interested and active with your brand/site.

The current state of the Upper Funnel

The upper funnel is where brands and retailers try to bring you out of hibernation. It's the area of the shopping experience where purchase intent isn't known, where customers are passively engaged, and where truly personalized content is most challenging.

Going back to the grocery store analogy - instead of adding a $1.00 candy bar to $150 worth of groceries, the goal of the upper funnel is to have shoppers buy $150 of groceries at your store on a more frequent basis.

Upper funnel channels consist of:

• Promotional email
• Homepage/Section Page
• Mobile

Right now, the upper funnel is an incredibly manual process. Email, mobile, and web teams each have to coordinate with a merchandising schedule and create content manually, for either a broad audience or for segmented groups of users.

Because the information retailers have about you is limited, these promotional channels are often thematic and focus on a certain category or group of items, or are heavy on broad discounts. What ends up happening is that you're trained to wait until a product or category is discounted to make any purchase.

Additionally, segmented content is inefficient due to each user's unique and changing preferences. Once a user lands in a segment, it's difficult to jump to a different one.

Applying lower funnel technologies to the upper funnel

Retailers invest in technologies that were designed for the lower funnel, and mistakenly apply them to the other half of the user experience.

The problem with those technologies in the upper funnel is that they're reliant on recent customer contributed information, which may be completely stale and irrelevant by the time a promotional email is sent.

Example: In January, you buy a winter coat from Macys.com, who use last click data for product recommendations in email. You then spend 6 months in Nepal, living with a group of friendly sherpas and climbing the Himalayas with no access to email. When you return, it's early July, and you are finally free of the bitter cold.

When you open the first Macy's email you've seen in months, you'll see more winter coats because that's the most recent information they have on you. Coats are no longer relevant to you as a customer - both because it's now summer, and because you've already made your purchase in that area.

Adapting the upper funnel to each individual's changing needs

The reason we've seen so much success* from Jetlore's clients is that we're not reliant on last click information or segmentation, and are the only personalization engine that can fully understand user preference. Because of that, we're the only technology that successfully addresses the upper funnel.

Instead of leveraging last session information or what similar users have bought, Jetlore assigns each customer a unique profile. Each profile consists of the individual product attributes they interact with over a long period of time, which are scored for relevance, and shift with each user impression.

From there, our A.I. compares the retailer's entire inventory/catalog/product feed directly to each user profile at the time of interaction, and automatically selects the best content for each user.

We're able to understand what each person does and doesn't interact with at any time, and automatically adjust the content we produce.

*feel free to contact me for specific success stories and case studies

Personalization in a nutshell

Understanding the areas and channels that are unaddressed at your business are the best way to get through the buzzwords.

There are two distinct customer states, and two personalization channels that address them:

• Ready to buy / lower funnel - suggesting impulse buys in the checkout line of the grocery store during a weekly visit.
• Hibernation mode / upper funnel - enticing customers to buy more groceries more often.

The lower funnel is a challenge that Amazon solved for in the early 2000's, and most retailers have covered. But by optimizing the upper funnel, Jetlore's world-wide retail clients are seeing between 40% and 80% more promotional channel revenue.

To sum up, if you're looking to increase revenue, engagement, and marketing productivity, optimize the upper funnel with Jetlore.

Thanks for reading!

-CM