5 ways personalisation can increase customer loyalty for eCommerce brands

As fierce competition continues to grow within the eCommerce space, customer loyalty is playing a more pivotal role than ever before.

And of course, as an increasing number of consumers opt to shop online, retaining existing customers has become more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.

So, it’s perhaps no surprise that many brands consider customer loyalty a top priority.

To support this goal, marketers are turning to personalisation.

Because 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalised experiences. And 66% of consumers actually expect brands to understand their individual needs.

By utilising personalisation creatively and effectively, brands can provide meaningful and genuinely useful communications to their consumers. Ones that truly resonate with their needs and wants.

To get you started, read on to learn 5 ways that personalisation can increase customer loyalty for eCommerce brands like yours.

Sending the right message, at the right time

Recommending the perfect product

Creating emotional connections

Re-engaging with lapsed customers

Offering audience insight

Sending the right message, at the right time

Customers go through many different stages within the buying cycle. From learning about a brand, to making their first purchase, and of course then becoming a loyal customer.

To get to that all-important final stage, brands have to ensure that they are guiding customers through the buying cycle carefully. This means sending messages that are tailored to the individual's buying stage, encouraging them to move on to the next step.

This type of personalised messaging comes in many forms. A welcome campaign when the customer first engages, an abandoned basket reminder to encourage them to purchase, regular shipping updates, birthday gifts or discounts, and VIP offers and promotions to encourage them to come back to your brand.

Recommending the perfect product

Generic, one-size-fits-all shopping experiences frustrate a significant 71% of consumers.

When brands fail to use personalisation in their campaigns, they are wasting valuable marketing real estate promoting irrelevant products and services to the recipient. This type of messaging then simply becomes white noise, merging with the rest of the emails in their inbox.

Personalisation, on the other hand, improves customer engagement by showing customers that the brand understands them as individuals; suggesting products and services that are truly of interest to them. Even better, this type of marketing can be achieved in multiple ways. From simple segmented messaging, through to using dynamic content to feed campaigns that are highly personalised to each individual.

Creating emotional connections

Today, consumers crave community.

And that’s not surprising. With the challenges many of us have faced over the past few years, consumers have felt isolated from others, making socialising and shopping in-person a rarity.

Through personalisation, brands can curate a virtual equivalent of a face-to-face relationship, enabling consumers to connect with them on a more personal level.

There are multiple ways that brands can achieve this connection.

A great place to start is with simple references to the individual’s name, demographics, or recent purchase activity.

Or brands can share content and conversations from their wider community which are relevant to the individual. Such as sharing other customers' experiences, content, and reviews for products and services that will be of most interest.

This activity fosters a more engaging experience than eCommerce has traditionally provided, helping to bridge the gap between consumers and brands.

Re-engaging with lapsed customers

Despite sending the most beautifully crafted, highly personalised campaigns, sometimes even your most loyal customers begin to disengage.

Whilst it can be tempting to give up hope on these groups, we suggest using personalisation to win them back and tempt them into becoming loyal customers once again.

Re-engagement campaigns should pull out all the stops when it comes to charming the recipient. They should feel completely tailored to the individual; their name, interests, past purchases, and even their geographic location can all be used to offer the most relevant campaign possible.

This could include offers on their favourite regular purchases, reviews from similar customers, or directions to their closest physical store in case they’d prefer to engage there.

Offering audience insight

Personalisation in marketing is not only beneficial to customers, but also to brands. Enabling them to dig deeper into understanding their audience.

As brands gather data to utilise in their personalised campaigns, they are also gathering valuable insights that can influence their marketing and business strategies.

By gaining a deep understanding of their audience's preferences and needs, brands can feed their personalisation capabilities; further tailoring their offerings to meet their customers' expectations and go above and beyond their competition.

Furthermore, the more brands use personalisation in their marketing efforts, the more customers are likely to engage with their content and campaigns. Leading to further opportunities for brands to learn about their audience.

Next steps

We’ve only scratched the surface as to how personalisation can increase customer loyalty.

With the right data and a little creativity, the sky's the limit.

However, we understand this can be a little daunting. And for many eCommerce brands, getting their data in order is the first step before they can execute personalised campaigns.

If this sounds familiar, then at Jarrang we can help.

With the right support from the right email marketing agency, your eCommerce business can soon be sending out the most relevant and engaging campaigns possible to happy recipients.

Get in touch. with our friendly team of experts to find out more.