Over the past few years, marketers have increasingly come to appreciate personalization – after all, it offers huge advantages. Personalization improves the customer experience in your shop which in turn leads to more sales and revenue. As with A/B testing, however, there are a few common mistakes that come up again and again. We will share the five common mistakes in personalization in today’s blog post.
Mistake 1: The wrong understanding of personalization
“We already personalize – we use product recommendations!”. A very common mistake that we encounter again and again: Equating personalization with the use of recommendations. While product recommendations are usually part of the personalization strategy, they are not necessarily personalized. So if you use product recommendations on your website, that doesn’t mean you’re already personalizing. Personalized recommendations are tailored to the user’s surfing behavior and interests. Displaying the top sellers in the shop is not necessarily the same thing. This is where a self-learning algorithm is needed, that recognizes the user’s needs and displays the appropriate recommendations at the right time.
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In general, it’s important to note that personalization encompasses much more than product recommendations. Personalization includes a wide variety of actions to put users in the center of attention and offer them a special shopping experience.
Mistake 2: Only paying attention to the end result when personalizing
Shops are often only interested in one thing: purchases. But there is so much more to learn! How has personalization changed the dwell time of users, has the bounce rate decreased and have the click rates increased? These numbers can also be indicators of performance. After all, one of the goals of personalization is to design the shop in such a way that users feel perfectly taken care of, are happy to come back, and recommend the shop to others. In this case, customer satisfaction is at least as important as the number of purchases. With satisfied customers, these come quite automatically.
Mistake 3: Personalizing everything at once
We love personalization – and once you’ve discovered the countless possibilities that it offers, you can easily get carried away by excitement. You quickly tend to want to implement as many setups as possible, at once. Several adjustments on the homepage, perfectly tailored recommendations, countless matching promotions and preferably many more actions. Especially when conducting A/B or multivariant tests, too many actions at once can influence the result and their success can no longer be validly proven. So stick to one step at a time!
Mistake 4: Impatience in personalization
Another common mistake, especially for beginners, is being impatient. While testing, impatience can be fatal. If the desired effect does not occur immediately, the whole concept of personalization on the website is called into question. Yet only a few actions show changes directly after going live. If you want meaningful test results, you have no choice but to wait. Depending on the number of users in the shop and the distribution of the campaign, the duration of the test can vary. Marketers should therefore exercise patience. In the end, waiting will certainly pay off.
Mistake 5: Letting AI do the work for you
The big advantage of using a personalization tool: artificial intelligence (AI), which optimizes the actions in the background. Just because you can rely on a smart algorithm doesn’t mean you can just sit back and relax, though. “The tool will take care of it” is the wrong way to go. After all, machines also need to be fed – in the form of information and data. And humans must provide them. Given the right combination of artificial and human intelligence, success is preprogrammed.
Errors in personalization can be easily avoided
There are a few obstacles lurking in the development of the perfect personalization strategy. But with a little patience, the right plan and some good ideas, you will soon discover the power of personalization. Feel free to contact us if you want to place your customers in the spotlight and provide them with special experiences.