What do clients expect during the buying process?

Contrary to mass marketing, the consumer’s buying process now aims to be a unified, fun and, above all, personalised experience. Personalisation must be part of the consumer’s online shopping journey in order to offer them a unique experience. Starting from a report produced by Qubit, find out what consumers expect, the adopted techniques and the benefits for marketing teams.

Offer a unique buying experience

Qubit, a company specialising in real-time personalisation marketing, analysed more than 2 billion client processes and 120 million purchases before publishing its results.

This study shows that almost three quarters of online shoppers carry out the majority of the purchases on a maximum of five e-commerce sites. This loyalty remains limited however, because 81% of those asked said they would give up on their favourite sites for other sites offering a more enjoyable and personalised shopping experience.

Moreover, half of those who participated in the study admit to liking receiving product recommendations based on their interests and preferences. 49% were happy to give information of their preferences to get a better shopping experience on e-commerce sites. Therefore, price is not the only determining factor anymore in the act of purchasing, but is still part of the personalisation process given that 81% of those surveyed want to receive targeted promotions based on their interests.

What kind of personalisation techniques to adopt?

Given the increasing demand for personalised offers, marketing teams are slowly integrating this technique in their acquisition strategies as well as for creating loyalty. So much so that 74% have already seen a rise in sales and in client loyalty.

For this, Qubit have identified 5 personalisation and optimisation messages that have been proven to work; to increase the rate of transformation of your online shop:

• Scarcity: products that are low in stock
• Social proof: client’s opinions, notes, popular products, trends…
• Urgency: how many days left to take advantage of a product
• Warning messages after leaving your basket
• Recommendations    

If these techniques prove to be effective, they must be used wisely so that you do not over-saturate your clients.

What are the advantages for the marketing teams?

A study carried out by McKinsey & Company called “Marketing’s holy grail: Digital personalisation at scale” (November 2016) reveals that personalisation can reduce acquisition prices by 50%, increase revenue by 5 to 15% and the profit on marketing expenditures by 10 to 30%. Therefore, personalised experiences are three times more likely to contribute to a rise in revenue by visitor than the experiences that are not personalised.