So, you wanna be an ecommerce personalization rockstar, huh? You’ve been hearing all about personalizing the customer experience and are excited about what it can do for your brand. You’ve followed stories of brands making their customer experiences better; creating personalized engagement and personalized content that earns more dollars from each customer visit. You’re excited to give it a try in hope of really making an impact.

Below are some tips and tricks to help you with your mission and get you started that I’ve learned in my role as a Solutions Consultant with Monetate.

1. Focus on your company’s goals

If there is one thing that gets people behind a single initiative, it’s a shared goal. What is the big focus for your company this year and next year? Increase email signups? Increase AOV? Drive-in store shopping? Fix your mobile experience? More page views? Whatever it is, build your personalization strategy to support it.

2. Set expectations

Getting lots of people excited is the fastest and most effective way to gain momentum for an initiative.  Set expectations with those that will be interested in the outcome by sharing your expected results. Ensure that people are in agreement with the metric you’ve selected to improve before your first foray into personalized experiences by asking them what metrics they would like to see personalization improve. And, make sure you know what the baseline performance is today, either with a static experience in place or the results from a recently run test.

3. Be inclusive

Get people involved and excited with ideation! The more folks thinking about how personalization can improve the business, the better! In fact, a recent study by Monetate suggests that the most successful organizations have made personalization an integrated part of their operations and charter for all staff, not a siloed project that is managed by a single person.  

4. Find A Company Who is Doing it Really Well

Some of our Monetate clients have woven personalization into the fiber of their culture and helped solve some of the pesky issues such as, engagement and customer paths, just to name a few. This article about Office Depot UK’s experience with Monetate and how their team deploys personalization might help give you some ideas.

5.  Keep Folks Excited

Take Monetate client Finn Christo, below, as an example.  He turned to social media to pump up excitement around some things he’s doing with Monetate Intelligent Personalization Engine that are paramount to reducing his bounce rate metrics.

Hopefully, with good communication, determination and general passion, you will spread the word about personalization and your peers will jump on the bandwagon. Good luck!