{"id":293,"date":"2010-08-02T10:42:09","date_gmt":"2010-08-02T09:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/?p=293"},"modified":"2010-08-02T10:42:09","modified_gmt":"2010-08-02T09:42:09","slug":"this-time-its-personal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/uncategorized\/this-time-its-personal","title":{"rendered":"This Time it&#8217;s Personal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While the recession is still in full blow online sales have gone up 15% to \u00a350bn. Yet to really\u00a0 secure\u00a0 those sales retailers have found that they just have to go one step further and this time it\u2019s personal!<\/p>\n<p>Echo E-Business Management\u2019s managing director Deborah Collier says \u201cPersonalisation gives any etailer the competitive edge. Branding is important but the ability to engage customers and understand them is crucial in tough times.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Personalisation has been a hot topic for some time, helping brands improve one-to-one marketing, customer segmentation, up and cross-selling. But today, it\u2019s all about predicting what the customer wants before they even know they want it and then making them think it was their decision in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>One etailer springs to mind as a brilliant example of personalised shopping: Amazon. Each time you log in they suggest new books, CD\u2019s or DVD\u2019s according to your previous purchases. But personalisation is more complex than this.<\/p>\n<p>Guy Westlake, senior product marketing manager EMEA at ecommerce provider Vignette, suggests: \u201cThe most cutting-edge technologies track customers\u2019 actions on your site and build a profile of their wants and behaviours from there. Within one or two clicks on the site, you can build up a picture of the consumer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Three-step process<\/p>\n<p>However, in what may be seen as personalisation heresy, Westlake explains that, as a rule, our behaviour is never that individual and even if it were, you could never give every single person exactly what they wanted. Instead, he advocates a three-step process:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Use technology to harness the wisdom of crowds and understand your consumer to personalise the product offering. \u201cIt\u2019s low cost, high return and has a short lead time to implement,\u201d Westlake says.<\/li>\n<li>Personalise the online experience taking the lead from social networking. \u201cRetailers underestimate that customers love talking to each other. They like to have ownership of brands and it creates advocates further along the loyalty ladder,\u201d he reveals.<\/li>\n<li>Allow users to add their own further levels of personalisation. Westlake explains: \u201cSites such as the BBC\u2019s draw users into the experience, create ownership of the online environment and make it a port of call rather than a sales channel.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The biggest problem etailers face is people abandoning their baskets moments before checking out. One suggestion is to introduce a \u2018Click to Call\u2019 button allowing customers to talk through their purchase with an assistant. Customers feel reassured that they are getting the same level of service online as in store. Also, another problem is people spending a lot of time clicking through pages and abandoning the site leaving it inactive. One way to combat this is to include pop ups to remind the customer that they have un-purchased items in their basket.<\/p>\n<p>Another problem is the log in procedure made simple by using Facebook connect- one click allows the site to use the data on Facebook to automatically create an online account- this speeds up the purchase process as this is where many people abandon their baskets.<\/p>\n<p>Personalisation is now the new differentiating factor as retailers boost their websites and niche etailers pop up out of the blue. You want to stand out from the crowd- <strong>then make it personal.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While the recession is still in full blow online sales have gone up 15% to \u00a350bn. Yet to really  secure  those sales retailers have found that they just have to go one step further and this time it\u2019s personal!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312,"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions\/312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nouri.sh\/buzz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}