Personalization enhances your online business. The experts say that decisions have to be taken based on the customer data and their preferences when it comes to product recommendations or home page landscape alteration for the shortlisted customers. Customers from different geographical locations order for the products either in person or online. You need to make sure that the shoppers find your product easy to get a compelling digital experience.
How to create a personalized e-commerce shopping experience
To create a personalized e-commerce experience, you need to develop the content (products / pages / images / product video / comments / testimonials …) strategy that is relevant to the end users. It is necessary to find what customers need. The required content and the form should be designed with right questions in which the customer can share their shopping experience. If your website enables the customers to navigate for specific keywords, it narrows down their search which gives them personalized shopping experience. You can enable personalization in different phases phases.
- Personalization of navigation structure - This is the most important and basic phase of personalization. When a shopper clicks on an item, the website should display the categories of the selected item. E.g. if the user clicks on the books, it should display the categories related to books. Drupal CMS has a powerful menu system in which you can add, modify and remove the submenus as per your online visitor click behaviour. Few modules which can be used to achieve this - Context Menu Block, Personalize, Menu per Role.
- Personalizing based on customer’s behaviour - Order history and customer exact requirements play an important role in personalized shopping experience. Customers have various product requirements which have to be grouped in a segment, taking the front-end (website) and back-end systems (database) performances into consideration. Commerce Recommender which gives personalized products recommendations based on customers purchasing history. Browsing History Recommender module can give personal recommendation, based on what each user has read the content so far. There is Fivestar Recommender module which can create four different blocks - Similar nodes (by votes), Recommendations (from similar nodes), Similar users (by votes), Recommendations (from similar users).
- Personalize using external data source - Personalization can be improved further utilizing shopper location, social network feeds and other factors such as weather to their full advantage. This can be done using a custom Personalize engine developed for your store. Drupal provides excellent integration with Nostro, The Plug-n-Play Recommendation Engine using Nosto Tagging for Drupal Commerce module.
- Personalize by foreseeing customer needs - This phase should be implemented once basic level of personalization is in place on your ecommerce store. This enables the organization to visualize the customer requirements in advance and personalize them accordingly. Commerce Reporting provides a reporting system to Drupal Commerce having features like Sales Report, Customer Products, Payment Modes, Filtering order status Datewise and range-wise that organizes the report on a daily, weekly and monthly basis in a tabular format. These data can be used in many ways to add personalized experience based on their buying behaviour.
- Personalize by support segment - This is the most advanced and the toughest phase where the customer experience is tracked and personalized individually. This is also referred as market segmentation. At this level, an enterprise is in a position to analyze the customer attributes with third-party data practices to make the website more relevant get more conversions. You can use some of the tools like Testing, User Profiling, Segmentation and Targeting to achieve this personalization.
Drupal Commerce, owing to its advanced analysis and optimization tools allows personalized recommendation and personalized email marketing along with offering an innovative and customized shopping experience.
Drupal provides customization flexibility for all kinds of online stores and can be adapted to any device as per the latest trends which gives a unique feeling to the customers. They can interact either one to one or in a multi-channel way which helps you to eliminate the functions that is irrelevant to the customers, thereby improving their experience. Drupal is well known for content customization and has tremendous capacity to meet these requirements. Many organizations use this CMS to achieve the kind of personalization that the users need.
Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company based in Bangalore. Contact us for more information on how to create personalized shopping experience for your next e-commerce project.
Useful Reference:
Content Personalization in Drupal with Drupal WEM Project
You are what you click: Leveraging Modern Personalization Tactics
