Up Close and Personal: Why Advanced Personalization & Merchandising Matter

The rules for retail are changing, and it’s time to switch up your tactics…

Looking for a way to boost conversion and make your customers feel truly recognized? With so much trade being pushed online due to store lockdowns, there’s never been a more important time to offer a truly personalized shopping experience online.

This article will explain how advanced personalization and merchandising practices can help you achieve this in your own e-commerce store and why, in today’s retail climate, it’s so crucial to put these tactics into action right away.

Introduction

With so many changes and challenges being thrown at the world of retail (both on and offline) in the first half of 2020, it can feel as though established norms and certainties are a thing of the past. 

But one truth remains universally constant — in commerce, the customer always comes first.

When it comes to delighting shoppers, personalization represents the ultimate edge that online has over offline — the power to present as many different shopping experiences as there are customers. Combining the potential of machine learning, automated merchandising and well-curated communications, on-site search can be the key to unlocking this magic.

Power Couple: Why Personalization and Merchandising Are a Winning Combination 

The power of personalization in modern e-commerce is uncontested. While retailers see proof of this in the tangible improvements to store performance, it’s interesting to note that the shopping public also appreciate and recognize its benefit.

A huge 57% of shoppers are happy for personal information to be collected if the end result is beneficial to them. 53% of shoppers believe that retailers who personalize their shopping experience provide a valuable service, and almost 60% of shoppers believe it’s easier to find interesting products on a personalized online store. 

When it comes to effective personalization, merchandising provides the perfect opportunity to provide a next-level shopping experience. By serving your customers results that are not only relevant to their search term, but also relevant to them as individuals, your chances of conversion skyrocket.

This is essentially about leveraging the power of context. The more you can learn about a customer’s behavior, the more context you can apply to the products that they’re served. 

Being shown a product that’s perfect on all levels is an almost magical experience. It goes a step further than merely returning products that are ‘relevant’ to the search term — the emphasis isn’t on the search term, but on the human being behind it.

A great example of a brand using Klevu to boost customer experience through smarter merchandising are Xpres: 

“User experience drives our considerations for enhancements to our ecommerce solution. We recognise the importance of straightforward usability and strive to provide a seamless user journey, from landing on site through to making a purchase. Site search had been a real pain point for our customers, but we’ve seen a marked improvement on conversion rates and revenue since implementing Klevu’s search solution.”

Indeed, Xpres experienced +19.8% in revenue, after installing Klevu.

Why is this so important for the future of your online store?

While external factors impacting our industry may change, superlative customer experience will remain a core goal for e-commerce stores.

By taking advantage of the advanced personalization and merchandising offered by Klevu, customer demands can be met with the most efficient and appealing method of supply. Loyalty and satisfaction have never mattered more. If you’re ready to give your customers exactly what they want, via dependable and data-driven personalized merchandising, we’re ready to get you up and running.

This Time It’s (Really, Really) Personal: How Klevu Is Taking Personalization to the Next Level

After witnessing the power and potential of personalization for our customers, in 2020 Klevu is kicking things up a notch — offering the capability to tailor your audience’s experience like never before.

By utilizing our advanced personalization feature, on-site search can now be deployed on a user -by-user basis. You’ll have complete control over how products are promoted based on past interaction, and will be able to fine tune this to each and every individual that navigates your store. Automatically boost brands and categories that are likely to appeal, based on personal preferences and calculated trends.

Presented with such a customized curation of products, your shoppers will either ease their path to conversion, swiftly finding the perfect item and adding to cart. Or they’ll find their curiosity piqued and browse through complementary products and smart suggestions, lifting dwell time.

Of course, the longer they stay, the more Klevu learns about their preferences, meaning that their experience will continue to be enhanced every time they visit your store.

Why is this so important for the future of your online store?

In today’s retail landscape, it’s no longer good enough to be… “good enough.” The online brands who are set to see big wins in 2020 and beyond are the ones paying attention to the finest detail of their user journeys. Leveraging advanced personalization is the smart way to accomplish this.

However quickly the industry changes, you still have complete control over the experience your sites deliver. By polishing this to delight your customers on a truly individual level, you can continue to optimize this advantage and boost loyalty, conversion and order volumes.

Land on Both Feet: The Power of the Landing Page 

Our brand new landing page builder is another powerful new feature from Klevu that’s enabling retailers to get incredibly creative within the realms of personalized merchandising, as well as specially targeted promotions and messaging. From new product line launches to replacing static landing pages with something more dynamic, our landing pages have the capacity to be used in a huge variety of ways across retail sites, and empower you to create a view of your brand that is adapted to suit various customer profiles.

In the past, the creation of landing pages has been somewhat convoluted, often involving significant amounts of developer assistance. Klevu’s new landing page builder sidesteps the need for technical assistance for those wishing to create effective landing pages. Although you’ll want to ensure a dev is on hand for the final platform integration stage, our new builder feature has been specially designed to give maximum flexibility to designers, developers and merchandisers alike.

As a “drag and drop” visual tool, our builder offers a streamlined and intuitive route to getting pages live quickly, offering huge flexibility for merchandisers. Landing pages can be customized to include (or exclude) handpicked or rule-based products via filter queries. With no limit to the number of landing pages you can control from the same management area, our landing page builder enables you to create multiple layouts within the same interface. 

Explore this demo landing page to see the breadth functionality this new feature can achieve, all from within your Klevu Merchant Centre! What’s more, as all product data is pulled from Klevu, there’s no need to query your backend system, meaning lightning-fast landing pages.

Why is this so important for the future of your online store?

In these changeable times, it’s especially important for retailers to remain agile and responsive. We all know landing pages convert: they are a fantastic way to channel traffic towards certain actions, products or collections. Offering the ability to quickly create, replicate and deploy these pages, the new Klevu builder empowers retailers to act swiftly and get the results they need.

Conclusion

It can be hard to know what’s around the corner, but investing in your customers’ shopping experience will never be a risky move. On-site search has always held the potential to elevate online experiences above and beyond modern expectations. 

Klevu’s new advanced personalization and landing page builder features provide unprecedented scope for retailers to create highly effective personalized merchandising strategies that place the individual customer at the heart of things.

Our customers are already making fantastic use of the new powers extended to them, and we’re looking forward to seeing the results of their creativity combined with Klevu’s innovation.

Interested to see how Klevu’s improved capabilities for personalized merchandising could help grow your sales? Book a demo today.

Learn more about how Klevu’s features can help you get more sales right now, by scheduling a live demo.