E-commerce Personalization Is A No-Brainer For New Online Brands

Website personalization is a powerful way of connecting with customers, drawing them into your website experience, and hooking them with the feeling that your brand is tailor-made for their tastes and needs.

Talking about e-commerce personalization in this episode of The E-commerce Revolution Podcast is Francis Pilon, Head of Global Partnerships at LimeSpot, the leading provider of e-commerce personalization technology. Francis was the founder of The Jibe and RISE, agencies that help online businesses succeed.

How LimeSpot's Personalization Improves the Customer Experience

LimeSpot is an app available to Shopify and Big Commerce merchants. And so, there are a number of components to this, but the idea is to give the tools for merchants to create better and more engaging journeys for their customers. So whether it be helping them discover new products or designing the brand to meet the expectations of the customers, they feel more familiar with the brand. It essentially removes a lot of the friction throughout the journey to make the experience more pleasant.

And so this has a double effect of making a greater experience and greater journey for those shoppers. The merchants benefit from it as well because there are fewer opportunities to be distracted. It's a more straightforward way to the purchase point.

Protecting Customer Privacy In Personalized Marketing

There are certainly concerns about many AIs, and we're worried a little bit about how they can encroach into our lives. I think there are honest answers to this. And I think the mechanism like GDPR, which safeguards users' privacy, is really important and anonymizes customers and third-party cookies and all these things.

I'm very sensitive to this, personally. Because I value privacy a lot. But I feel comfortable working in a company like LimeSpot because this aspect of privacy and respecting individuals and what they share with us is really important.

Website Personalization with Dynamic Content

This product is pretty exciting. Essentially, we allow a merchant to segment their audiences and shoppers into segments. This can be based on specific behaviors, such as items in specific collections that they look at, or it can be based on what they've purchased in the past, IP address, for example, where they're located in the world, or UTM parameters.

Once you have these segments, we allow you to dynamically change the site's content to best match the expectation of the customers that are in segments would have of you.

So, a repeat customer versus a new potential customer. The new potential customer may respond well to an experience where you're building trust with the brand, rather than, you know, here's a 10% discount. Maybe what they want to know is that you're an ethical brand. So you can change your hero image to respond to this. You can change the content of the page to respond to this.

Advice for Brands to Grow Traffic and Convert Sales

If you were going to be advising a direct consumer brand, what three things would you tell them they need to focus on to grow traffic and convert sales?

Well, even with my LimeSpot hat off, I want to say personalization. It is important. If you want to compete with the Amazons of the world, that is key.

Site speed. It is important, and people don't have the patience. There's a great movement toward "headless." Part of this is to address some of the challenges that the platforms have traditionally had with site speed. Although it's still unnecessary, not all brands can afford these solutions just yet.

And then I want to say: special touch. As I mentioned earlier, those handwritten notes and packages, your fulfillment – it's all about differentiation and being able to connect more personally, being empathetic to your customer's problems, and helping them solve problems.