NEW YORK – May 14, 2019 – Monetate, the worldwide leader in personalization, today publishes its latest Ecommerce Quarterly Report that addresses how bespoke experiences broadly impact customer performance. Throughout Q4 2018, Monetate examined whether exposure to website customization has a measurable effect as it accumulates over a customer’s time spent engaged with the brand online.
The report analyzes a random sample of more than one million sessions from across Monetate’s global retail customers to draw insights about the impact of consistent personalization throughout a session. Highlights include:
- The power of personalization compounds with each experience: conversion, add-to-cart and cart abandonment rates improve exponentially over a bounded series of personalized pageviews. When exposed to:
- Three pages with personalized elements – conversion rates double, from 1.7% to 3.4%, when compared to consumers who are only exposed to two pages.
- 10 personalized pageviews – conversion rates meet 31.6%, add-to-cart rates hit 65.2% and cart abandonment rates drop to 58.8%.
- Patterns differ between audience groups: each segment may have its own “tipping point” for the amount of personalization that it takes to coax users into their full performance potential.
- Facebook offers an untapped gold mine: normally, Facebook has the highest bounce rate and lowest average session value of all referring channels. But when this specific segment is exposed to eight pages of personalized content, conversation rates reach 4.9% – up from 1% at seven pages – definitively exceeding the performance of other referrers.
- AI is a critical component in a brand’s ability to reach individual customers: this is especially true for customers with distinct profiles that make them difficult to serve with rule-based segmentation, but who contribute disproportionately high value to the business.
Consumers are harder to engage with today than ever before. Marketers should not be designing their personalization strategies as a series of one-off tactics, but part of a cohesive experience that enhances each individual’s journey. Its effects should be persistent over time and pervasive across interactions, not just limited to a lightbox delivered on exit or a customized banner on the homepage.
“In order to catch and keep a customer’s attention, it is vital that marketers offer a personalized experience to website visitors immediately. Marketing dollars need to be spent on strong engagement levels, not just expensive bounces. By incorporating multiple personalized pages, brands are empowered to drive higher add-to-cart and conversion rates,” said Brandon Atkinson, COO, Monetate. “Unless personalization is infused both persistently and pervasively into a user’s experience, brands are missing an opportunity to achieve more value from their efforts.”
Q4 2018 Ecommerce Quarterly Report and its methodology is available for download: https://get.monetate.com/eq4-2018-quarterly-report/
Contact:
Christine Penwell
Hotwire for Monetate