Much has been said about the effectiveness of personalization and behavioral segmentation. From improved conversion rates, to lower cart abandonment rates, to increased up-sells and cross-sells, giving visitors a shopping experience that feels unique to them should be a priority for every online store.
After using a personalized recommendation service for its website, WineEnthusiast.com boasted a 200 percent increase in conversion rates and a 9.8 percent increase in conversion rates for product recommendations, according to a MyBuys case study.
At Guidance, our clients are increasingly demanding personalization features for their online stores, from You Might Also Like (YMAL) modules to the ability to display targeted content based on user demographics. As a Web development firm that specializes in ecommerce and hosting, we’ve had to either custom-code these tools or deploy them from third-party solutions and integrate them to our clients’ sites. That is, until now.
Magento Enterprise Saves Developers Time and Coding, Empowers Site Owners
With the recent 1.6 release of ecommerce platform Magento Enterprise, site managers are now empowered with more tools to add personalized features to their web stores.
Magento’s Rich Merchandising Suite enables highly-effective targeting of customers by allowing site managers to display specific promotions to customers sharing common behaviors or demographics, as pre-defined by the site managers themselves. Specific customer segments can be created based on shared trends like purchase history, browsing history, items in wish lists and/or shopping carts, age, and gender, among other trends. These characteristics can be as detailed as needed. For example, Guidance-client Blueprint, a modern furniture store running on Magento, could display a 20 percent off promotional banner on its Accessories & Décor section, and target customers in their 30’s who have purchased items from their Pablo décor line in the previous 12 months and spent over $500 throughout last month, with a shipping address in California, where Blueprint is headquartered. Now that is segmentation.
Beside allowing site managers to create many combinations of target groups, the Rich Merchandising Suite makes it possible to target these segments in several different ways to better personalize the customer experience and increase site conversion rates.
Merchants can define catalog and shopping cart price rules based on each segment’s attributes—something Blueprint could do to target, for example, Hollywood studio sets, which are currently among its top clients. Cross-sells and up-sells are easier to obtain by presenting customers with options that belong to a sub-category of the existing category and brand currently viewed and displaying them as product suggestions. In Blueprint’s case, customers glancing their Hokkaido glass coffee table will be presented with other Hokkaido tables for the living room, like a side table or a television bench. And when combined with Magento’s enhanced Content Management System (CMS+), Blueprint can also display targeted, rules-driven promotional marketing banners and other creative banners tailored to each customer segment. Both features, the Rich Merchandising Suite and the CMS+, have been designed with non-technical users in mind, facilitating the learning curve for users outside the development team.
In addition to displaying targeted content to these segments, site managers can create segment reports and export all segment data to use independently, either to send targeted email campaigns or to further analyze customer data, among other uses. Data can be exported in CSV, Excel, and XML formats.
Whether you run a small store or multichannel operations, you do your own web development or you outsource it to a professional firm, the new Magento Enterprise version offers a good solution for better store management, as well as new ways to turn browsers into customers.
This article is filed under Open Source and has the following keyword tags: magento, segmentation, guidance, ecommerce platforms.
