Over the last decade, marketers have been trying to enable and encourage one-to-one communications with consumers without crossing the line of becoming too personal - and getting there has been difficult. Gartner found that 60 percent of marketers note they struggle to personalise content in real-time, yet 77 percent believe real-time personalisation is crucial.

The expanse of information available about consumers on the web is enough to overwhelm marketers into hunkering down and refusing to sort through all the noise to find something valuable. But for those brave enough to find an efficient way to harness big data, there are large rewards.

UK consumers spent £91 billion online in 2013 alone, making the UK one of the world’s leading centres for ecommerce. Global research firm, eMarketer, predicts a 16 percent increase in ecommerce sales, and as the market continues to grow, the competition between retailers – and their marketing teams – increases.

Personalise to survive

In this digital age, your digital presence is you.

We wanted to see what factors UK consumers see as important when buying online and compare this to the factors retailers and, importantly, marketers emphasize. We found that an impressive 25% of UK consumers buy online at least once a week, making the UK one of the hotbeds of the global ecommerce market. Significantly, half of these consumers say they find online retailers through organic search, a channel where one competes based on the quality and uniqueness of content, revealing just how competitive and creative retailers have to be in this space.

A key factor in the consumer decision process was web design (ease of navigation) and personalisation. This seems simple right? A shopper types in what they’re looking for and they find it? Wrong. A red dress can be described in many ways (cerise, scarlet, ruby) and retailers must be able to capture all of this data. After all, what’s the point of having a dress on your site if it doesn’t come up when people search for it? You’ll lose them and you’ll lose their current and future business.

Our research found that UK marketers greatly underestimate the importance of personalisation to consumers. But personalisation doesn’t just mean having someone’s name pop up when they return to a website, it also includes search terms to ensure the site captures everything that a consumer is looking for – and allows them to view the products quickly, marketing campaigns and ensuring that landing pages contain the most relevant content.

Personalisation is a market too big to ignore as Gartner predicts that by 2018, companies that have fully invested in all types of online personalisation will outsell those that do not by more than 30 percent.

Amazon leads the race

So who can digital marketers learn from? Amazon certainly leaves UK competitors in the dust on personalisation, as 82 percent of UK consumers said that no company offers the same levels of web-personalisation as the etail giant. Amazon has raised the bar in customer experience and the challenge is for retailers across the world to try to match that, but how?

Our research found that:

  • 41 percent of consumers said that they prefer when sites provide product recommendations that suit their personal taste
  • 31 percent of consumers said they would be more likely to make purchases if they were offered personalised experiences such as product recommendations or tailored content
  • 57 percent of respondents put importance on the first page of a web site

Marketers must think of personalisation beyond ‘what others who looked at this product have bought.’ Take into account engagement data that indicates how ‘happy’ your customers are. This can be done through tracking and analysing track a number of data points together. Some of the key data signals that influence relevance include bounce rate, time spent on a site, number of page views and conversion. Importantly, these must all be viewed together as – like a rare disease – looking at each one in isolation may lead to the wrong conclusion. You can bet that sites like Amazon are doing this.

Is the ‘brand’ all that matters?

It’s safe to say that there is clearly a gap between what UK consumers are looking for in an online experience and what UK retail brands think consumers are looking for.

For your teams, sure, it’s all about brand reputation but does the consumer really care? For them, it’s all about experience. Companies need to recognise that brand reputation is not as important as they think it is and focus more on improving customer experience. If a consumer searches for something on your website, they need to find what they want (and related items that they don’t even know they want yet) straight away, before they get bored and move on to one of your competitors. When they visit your digital presence, it needs to orient around their immediate needs.

This is where you come in, the marketers. It’s you who help to bridge the gap between retailer’s objectives and consumer’s desires. The extensive customer data out there on the web can be used, by marketers to inform and transform company websites and content into intelligent, automatically updating experiences.

And that, research has found, is what you need to win in the ever growing ecommerce game.

 

By Raj De Datta, CEO and Co-Founder of BloomReach. 

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