Startups

How can personalisation drive the next wave of growth and sustenance for start-ups?

Your business, irrespective of size, deserves to be discovered.

While large brands can afford expensive mass marketing campaigns, smaller organisations may not always have the budgets. However, they can have the expertise with personalisation ensuring they’re on a level playing field.

Why is personalisation indispensable for your business?

Today, customers in Australia and New Zealand like the rest of the world, relate better with brands that speak directly to them, understand them and empathise with them. A recent study by SOTI revealed 44 per cent of Australians found personalised in-store technology largely enhanced their shopping experience.

Customers desire an experience that is truly helpful and makes the buying process as streamlined as possible. According to Netcore Cloud’s research, customers are 77 per cent more likely to stay longer on a personalised website as it’s more engaging and exciting. One of the key market trends in this area is personalised search. While only 48 per cent of retailers offer personalised search, our research has found that 35 per cent of customers are already demanding it. And 63 per cent of customers said if the content provided by a brand was relatable, valuable, and personalised they’d respond more positively towards it.

Isn’t it frustrating when product recommendations are irrelevant?

With search personalisation, every single user on your website will see different results after performing a search. It uses several factors like location, gender, previous site behavior (such as clicks, viewed products, and purchases), and other data to recommend the most relevant products for an individual. This is a one-stop solution that saves time for customers, as they can instantly find something appealing without scrolling through pages of products.

Therefore, it will be fast and easy for customers to find what they want without even having to think about it. The site knows their preferences and brings those items straight to the top of the search. This saves customers time by reducing the amount they need to scroll and removing items that aren’t suitable or are out of their budget.

Visual Search takes search personalisation one step further by providing users with greater search power. It allows customers to discover products by uploading a photo rather than describing it with keywords, like the traditional text-based search.

Today, only 8 per cent of retailers have image search on their eCommerce websites, yet the global visual search market is expected to exceed $14M by 2023.

Beyond search, new-age businesses need to extend this power of personalisation beyond your website to highlight the most relevant & contextual recommendations across mobile apps, email, app push notifications & in-store for a quicker and more effective impact.

So how does personalisation work?

By analysing large sets of historical & real-time data to understand what each user wants, AI-backed algorithms use diverse data points to generate the most relevant recommendations for each app user. Amongst other data points, they also analyse what each user is most likely to explore, click on, and buy. Couple this with image recognition capability, this engine learns from each user’s search, browsing, and purchase behavior to deliver hyper-contextual recommendations. As a result, you can engage with active app users in real-time by accounting for your users’ unique attributes, preferences, and actions to deliver personalised content or product recommendations.

Personalisation can improve retention, increase page views, and boost revenue but the most important benefit is creating a better shopping experience for customers. By delivering a personalised website experience, you can cut through the clutter and filter out the noise by making the experience more relevant to the individual. It’s a more targeted approach that’s proven to be much more engaging and effective.

This story is originally published in our sister’s publication, Inside Small Business.