Ways to Increase Customer Loyalty Via Personalization

It's widely agreed that increasing the lifetime value of customers increases profits. It's less expensive and more effective to increase current customer loyalty than attract new customers. Behavioral targeting can promote loyalty by giving your best customers a personalized shopping experience, exhibiting you know their likes, dislikes, wants and needs. Retailers who aren't currently offering this personalized experience are missing a significant opportunity to grow online sales. The prime place to exhibit this knowledge and draw customers back to your site is the homepage.

The Sound Practice: Recently Viewed Items
A simple way to engage consumers who return to your site on a regular basis is to remind them of what they were shopping for in their previous sessions. This personalization technique gives consumers the opportunity to quickly find items of interest, creating a better experience and improving the likelihood of them making a purchase. By adding this simple functionality, shoppers are more engaged. As we all know, an engaged shopper is more likely to purchase.

The Best Practice: Recommendations Just for You
To engage repeat shoppers even further, your homepage shouldn't only display recently viewed items but also recommendations based on what you know about individual shoppers from their previous behavior on the site. This advanced functionality will engage consumers at a more intimate level, increasing clickthrough rates between 6 percent to 9 percent. Again, this is a more engaged shopper, which increases conversion rates and improves the overall customer experience.

The Next Practice: Personalized Online Shopping
Providing exceptional customer service and a great shopping experience compels consumers to return to their favorite brick-and-mortar stores. Using personalization, online retailers can capitalize on this concept. By taking what they know about an individual, retailers have the ability to engage him or her with a completely personalized online shopping experience.

Innovative retailers create "Recommendations Just for You" pages for their most valuable customers. These pages can include various ways of recommending other products based on the individual's behaviors, product attributes and wisdom of the crowds. Recommendation pages such as these have proven to entice consumers to click at rates up to 20 percent. These clicks ultimately lead to double-digit increases in conversion rates. When shoppers are this engaged, they're more likely to purchase now and in the future.

A personalized user experience is preferred by many. It's important to understand how consumers interact with your website. They're giving you clues to their true intentions; don't be afraid to use this data. In fact, consumers prefer it!

Eric Tobias is president of iGoDigital, a provider of personalization and product recommendation tools. Eric can be reached at tellmemore@igodigital.com.