Building a Personalized Customer Journey: Stage 3-Purchase

If you’ve been in the personalization game for a while, or if you’re just getting started, then you’re likely familiar with the term “1-to-1 Personalization.”

Derived from the concept of “personalization,” 1-to-1 Personalization refers to the focus on delivering optimal experiences to individuals rather than customer segments.

Therefore 1-to-1 Personalization technology aggregates a user’s behavior (site visit history, browsing activity, geographic location, device type, etc.), so a personalization engine can analyze the aggregated data and push out the most relevant, impactful experience to each customer based on this data analysis.

One of the many benefits of personalization for retailers is the boost to ROI and an increase in conversion rates. So, let’s look at the spot in the customer journey where conversion takes place – during the purchase stage.

In Monetate’s “Delivering a Personalized Customer Journey: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide,” we outlined the four main stages of the customer journey – Landing, Engagement, Purchase, and Re-engagement.

In this blog post, we’re going to focus on Stage #3 – Purchase.

If you’re looking for a refresher on stages one and two, you can check out our earlier blog posts on Landing and Engagement.

So, what do we know about customers at the purchase stage?

As the customer reaches the purchase phase, we now have a much fuller picture of who they are and how they’ve interacted with your brand.

Alongside what we already knew about the customer, their previous session behavior has been added into the mix: we know what items they’ve added to the cart, what they browsed for but didn’t add to the cart, and what else they’ve searched for.

Notice that at each stage of the customer journey we are carrying the insights and data from the previous interactions into the next in the example below:

You’ll notice that data is not getting stuck at one particular point or with one specialized team. It adds up to a deep understanding of who is interacting with your brand across channels.

Therefore, the data you collected during Stage #1 (Landing) and Stage #2 (Engagement) come into play to build a more complete picture of your customer to fuel the customer experience.

But the purchase stage is a very particular type of journey that will require specific messaging.

In addition to this, standard segmentation categories like where the customer is, what time of year it is, what age, gender, etc., will all affect customer behavior.

If you can stitch together this information, joining the dots between the interactions and data points, you can create an individual customer profile for each site visitor.

But how do we use this data and information to build out our personalization strategy and customer journey?

Put Customer Data to Work with Personalization

Now that you’ve collected an abundance of data about your customers, you can leverage this information to craft the ideal customer journey that leads down the path to purchase with personalization.

Customized messaging that speaks to each customer’s individual experience enables your brand to meet your customers where they are by giving them a personalized shopping experience that will result in satisfied customers making purchases.

Or in other words, at the purchase stage, a personalization strategy that integrates all these factors will allow you to see:

• Past information on the individual customer, giving you a full picture of where they are in the customer journey.
• How they’ve interacted with the past experience.
• Whether they’ve purchased or added to the cart previously.

Having this information at your fingertips becomes critical at the purchase stage.

The customer has done their research and is ready to make a buying decision. The messaging you use here will have a decisive impact on your conversion rate.

Making the Most of the Purchase Stage to Boost Conversion

At this crucial step in the customer journey, what you do with the information you’ve gathered makes a huge difference.

A single, integrated personalization solution (like Monetate Personalization) that gives you the ability to test, target, merchandise, and personalize each interaction with your brand offers businesses huge opportunities to improve the customer experience and drive uplifts.

But there are other merchandising tools and other tips and tricks that you can leverage to lead your customers to complete their purchases.

For example, the purchase stage of the customer journey is a great time to display social proof messaging.

A sophisticated personalization strategy will allow you to go beyond showing the same customer reviews to all visitors, instead, using machine learning to make decisions about what kind of social proof will be most effective with each customer.

With some visitors, scarcity messaging highlighting how few items are left in stock will help seal the deal, with others, alerts that showcase the popularity of a product will nudge customers toward conversion.

Examples of Purchase Stage Enhancements

SCARCITY SOCIAL PROOF: Alert customers to declining stock levels with ‘limited stocks left’ or ‘only 5 left in stock’ messaging on the product page.

POPULARITY SOCIAL PROOF: Highlight how well an item is selling with ‘15 sold today’ or ‘best seller’ badges next to your products. Kibo customer Toolstation saw a 30X ROI from implementing this type of social proof messaging, playing on FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

PURCHASED RECOMMENDATIONS: Display recommendations at checkout to increase the likelihood of increased revenue per session.

Let’s take a look at more social proof in action by looking at the success story of Monetate customer HALL Wines.

HALL Wines: Scarcity Social Proof Messaging to Create a Sense of Urgency

HALL Wines, a Napa-based winery and online wine retailer, used dynamic testing to work out what social proof messaging to display to which customers on their site.

Being a retailer of a luxury product (wine), they knew that their customer base was well-educated about their product and eager to get their hands on vintages new to the market.

They also suspected that scarcity messaging – highlighting when particular wines were about to sell out – would work well with their customers.

But they didn’t know exactly how to apply this intuitive understanding of their customers, so they used Monetate’s dynamic testing capabilities to find out what social proof messaging would work best, and when to deploy it.

Through the process of testing different messaging, analyzing the results, gathering insights, and testing again, they were able to strike exactly the right balance with their scarcity messaging, creating a sense of urgency without disappointing too many customers when their limited, luxury product sold out.