The True ROI of Customized eCommerce Experiences
Creating the best experience is crucial to the success of eCommerce sites today—and a customized eCommerce experience is one of the best ways to achieve that.
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Creating the best experience is crucial to the success of eCommerce sites today—and a customized eCommerce experience is one of the best ways to achieve that. Enterprises stand to gain $20 profit for every $1 investment on advanced personalization techniques such as real-time personalization.
Personalization is one of the most effective means for boosting revenue, increasing conversions, and retaining customers. While this is true, it can still be challenging if it’s not done right. Many enterprises still struggle to enable personalization across their eCommerce channels. For these businesses, it may be time to consider implementing a 3D product configurator.
We’ve put together a quick guide to help eCommerce brands and retailers understand the importance of customized eCommerce experiences, and how to implement it to generate the most return on investment (ROI).
The Age of Customized eCommerce Experiences
In this modern age, customers want control over their shopping experience. They want to purchase products that resonate with them in terms of messaging and design. In particular, this is relevant for Gen Z customers (those born between 1996 and 2010) that are already accustomed to personalized advertising and social platforms.
So it’s not surprising that 44% of them will stop visiting a site if it fails to prioritize or anticipate their preferences. Personalization should no longer be a perk, but instead an essential element of present-day eCommerce. Providing a customized shopping experience for consumers makes them feel valued and appreciated.
Product customization can help enterprises increase customer loyalty and retention and get them to become advocates. Considering that more than 50% of consumers choose, recommend, and pay more for brands that offer a personalized service, you can see how personalization can add value.
The Benefits of Product Customization for eCommerce
Here are a few benefits of providing customized products to retailers and eCommerce brands:
- Competitive advantage over companies that don't offer personalization: According to SmarterHQ, 80% of frequent shoppers only purchase from brands that offer customized experiences. So what better way to distinguish yourself from competitors that don’t provide personalization than to offer customizable products?
- More ROI: As mentioned earlier, retailers can boost their revenue, cut down acquisition costs, and maximize their marketing spending by implementing advanced personalization techniques such as real-time messaging and product customizations. The higher your personalization efforts, the greater your returns.
- Better customer experience: According to Gartner, a great customer experience highly influences customers’ purchase decisions. Product customization enhances the shopping experience by providing aesthetic visuals, price quotations, and seamless automation of the entire purchase operation.
- Customer loyalty and retention: When customers have control over the look and feel of a product, it builds affinity for brands that provide it. Product customization improves overall customer experience, drives engagements, reduces return rates, and enables product recommendations.
- Lower return rates: Enterprises can significantly reduce the rate of returns when they implement options for product customization. One of the top factors behind high returns relates to items that did not match their description. With product customization, especially with a 3D product configurator, customers can control product appearance and see exactly what they will be getting.
- Streamlined order process: Product customization enables businesses to automate their entire ordering process. Customers can customize, get price quotes, and order products directly.
Taras Mykolayevych - Business Analytics Specialist
5 Ways to Implement Customized eCommerce Experiences
Mirroring In-Store Experience with a 3D Product Configurator
3D product configurators are interactive, 360°, real-time automated online stores where customers can tailor and visualize their options and make orders on their own. For eCommerce brands and retailers, a 3D product configurator is a game-changer. It puts customer preferences and expectations front and center.
The benefits of providing personalized product configurations are innumerable. By doing so, you can discover new opportunities, increase sales, enable business automation, boost ROI, reduce returns, and ensure higher engagement. When starting your personalization journey, it's best to consider 3D product customization.
Personalized Customer Communications
Personalized customer service communications are an essential element of any business that aims to boost its personalization efforts. It is a marketing technique that enables them to customize their messaging and communications.
That’s the reason why first-party data is vital. You can discover more about your customers by gleaning information through direct interactions with your site, products, or agents. With the data you gather, you can provide more automatic product recommendations, personalized messages, and greetings on birthdays and events crucial to your customers.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
Before you can start personalizing, you need customer data. Customer data platforms are software services that help aggregate and unify customer information to be accessible across all channels and systems. This platform gathers data from first-, second-, and third-party sources across multiple channels and online activities.
These sources include data present in your customer relationship management (CRM), data management platform (DMP), email, website, social media, eCommerce channels, and others. CDPs are crucial to any eCommerce personalization efforts.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality (AR) is getting closer and closer to becoming mainstream. AR enables customers to visualize 3D products within their immediate vicinity. For instance, a customer can visualize how a chair will appear in their apartment before buying it, providing a unique and personalized experience.
With preferences for online shopping on the rise, the adoption of virtual reality (VR) and AR is bound to grow. AR allows them to engage and interact with products before buying.
Lancelot Purdue - Copywriter
Provide Personalized Assistance Guides
Wouldn’t it be great to provide every customer with a personal shopper? Naturally, that would be costly. But thankfully, it's not necessary for eCommerce fashion and luxury brands to go quite that far. You can help your visitors make better purchasing decisions by offering them size charts, guides, and quizzes while they are on your site.
With this information, you can create virtual assistants for your customers, helping them choose more refined and personalized products. This is bound to drive higher sales and ensure higher customer satisfaction.
How Salsita Enables eCommerce Customization with a 3D Product Configurator
Customized eCommerce experiences offer enterprises an avenue to drive customer engagement and increase ROI. While many personalization techniques are available, 3D product configurators offer some of the best ROI.
3D product configurators allow you to boost sales, increase engagement, reduce returns, and understand customer preferences for better personalization and innovation. And that’s what KILO accomplished after implementing Salsita 3D Configurator. More than that, it enabled higher scalability and automation through seamless integration with existing technologies.
Want to know how KILO achieved this? Check out our case study.
