Consumers are harder to engage with today than ever before. Marketers should not be designing their personalization strategies as a series of one-off tactics, but rather as part of a cohesive experience that enhances each individual’s journey. New research from personalization firm Monetate addresses how bespoke experiences broadly impact customer performance.
Throughout Q4 2018, Monetate examined whether exposure to website customization has a measurable effect as it accumulates over a customer’s time spent engaged with the brand online. Ideally, the effect should be persistent over time and pervasive across interactions, not just limited to a lightbox delivered on exit or a customized banner on the homepage.
The firm’s new Ecommerce Quarterly Reportanalyzes a random sample of one million sessions from across its global retail customers to draw insights about theimpact of consistent personalization throughout a session. Highlights include:
The power of personalization compounds with each experience
Conversion, add-to-cart and cart abandonment rates improve exponentially over a bounded series of personalized pageviews. When exposed to:
- Three pages with personalized elements– conversion rates double, from 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent, when compared to consumers who are only exposed to two pages.
- 10 personalized pageviews– conversion rates meet 31.6 percent, add-to-cart rates hit 65.2 percent and cart abandonment rates drop to 58.8 percent.
Patterns differ between audience groups
Each segment may have its own “tipping point” for the amount of personalization that it takes to coax users into their full performance potential.
Facebook offers an untapped gold mine
Normally, Facebook has the highest bounce rate and lowest average session value of all referring channels. But when this specific segment is exposed to eight pages of personalized content, conversation rates reach 4.9 percent—up from 1 percent at seven pages—definitively exceeding the performance of other referrers.
AI is a critical component in a brand’s ability to reach individual customers
This is especially true for customers with distinct profiles that make them difficult to serve with rule-based segmentation, but who contribute disproportionately high value to the business.
“In order to catch and keep a customer’s attention, it is vital that marketers offer a personalized experience to website visitors immediately. Marketing dollars need to be spent on strong engagement levels, not just expensive bounces. By incorporating multiple personalized pages, brands are empowered to drive higher add-to-cart and conversion rates,” said Brandon Atkinson, COO of Monetate, in a news release. “Unless personalization is infused both persistently and pervasively into a user’s experience, brands are missing an opportunity to achieve more value from their efforts.”
Download the full report here.
