How good, clean data helps brands optimize personalization and increase conversions

Customers today have little patience. If they run into friction at any point in their shopping journey, they know that another online retailer is just one click away. To compete within this chaotic eCommerce space, retailers need to focus on offering a seamless customer experience from start to finish. To discuss how prioritizing data hygiene coupled with a more modern tech stack will help retailers deliver a frictionless customer experience, Digital Commerce 360 spoke with Meyar Sheik, global president at Insider.

What are some of the best strategies retailers can use to boost conversions?

Meyar Sheik: It boils down to how you can differentiate yourself from your competitor—particularly now, as customers’ attention spans have gotten so short. Customers want fast, relevant, and correct information throughout their entire shopping journey. They want to have choices and they want quick, one-click checkout. They want as little friction as possible. 

The best way retailers can differentiate themselves and increase engagement—which will ultimately increase conversions—is to first make the experience relevant and then personalize it to that individual customer. The reason “relevant” must come before “personalization” is because personalization is hard and very data-dependent. The more information you have about a customer, the better you can personalize. 

So the first step is to make sure they’re getting relevant information along their customer journey so they don’t bounce off the site. If you can’t keep someone on the site, the conversion game is over.

How have these strategies to increase conversions changed in recent years?

MS: Traditionally, retailers were focused on just getting customers to their sites, engaging them, and making the experience sticky enough to keep them from leaving. Personalization primarily centered on product recommendations. 

Now, retailers recognize that they need to optimize the shopping experience through segmentation, and create true personalization by testing different experiences and micro-moments—rather than just sticking to product recommendations—to see how they can improve the efficiency of their various pages. Not much has really changed in the past decade in terms of best practices; it’s just about trying to squeeze more juice out of that traffic.

How important are website design, personalization, descriptive product content, payment options, and checkout flow to conversion rates?

MS: Every step is important—and one isn’t more important than the other. Going back to the top of the funnel, if your design or landing page isn’t good, the rest doesn’t matter because the customer will never get to the product pages or checkout. 

Today, more than ever before, it is critical for retailers and brands to take advantage of the latest modern solutions to truly “orchestrate” the entire shopper journey regardless of entry page, touchpoint, or channels and deliver a seamless, consistent, and individualized shopping experience anytime, anywhere.

What are the biggest challenges retailers face when trying to boost conversions?

MS: The biggest challenge continues to be having good data flowing into these systems to best personalize the customer journey. Retailers need to understand consumer behavior, purchase patterns, sales velocity, and inventory levels. They need to know what products people buy together and what they buy subsequent to other products. 

This all starts with good data and having a centralized customer data platform or customer unified profile. From there, they can apply different conversion-boosting strategies along the way.

How can they overcome these challenges?

MS: Retailers need to make the customer shopping experience their top priority. They should focus on data hygiene and data integration to make that priority a reality. And they need to modernize the older, less efficient parts of their tech stack and consolidate wherever possible. 

Partnering with a technology provider, such as Insider, will help retailers overcome these challenges. We offer retailers a single view of their shoppers through a unified customer data platform. We turn that data into actionable campaigns that can be tested, segmented, and personalized throughout the journey and customer lifecycle across multiple channels, devices, and touchpoints.

Personalized messaging for every channel with Insider

With Insider, brands can leverage over 100 pre-built, marketer-tested templates for Email, Web, Mobile Apps, Web Push, and Messaging Apps to engage audiences wherever they are. Spark a personal connection at every touchpoint with individually tailored, AI-powered, cross-channel personalization powered by Insider.

Find out more

Ready to learn more about how Insider’s customer data platform can help your brand deliver seamless, omnichannel, and personalized customer experiences at scale? Book a demo with us today. 

About Insider

Insider—a single platform for building individualized, cross-channel experiences—enables enterprise marketers to connect customer data across channels and systems, predict their future behavior with an AI intent engine, and build individualized customer experiences. Marketers use Insider’s platform to deliver consistent and engaging experiences across Web, App, Web Push, Email, SMS, WhatsApp Commerce, and more.

One-third of Fortune 500 companies and top brands across retail, automotive, and travel choose Insider to deliver AI-led personalized experiences that exceed customer expectations. Insider is trusted by over 1,200 global businesses, including Singapore Airlines, Estée Lauder, Virgin, Toyota, New Balance, IKEA, GAP, L’Oreal, Samsung, Vodafone, Allianz, Santander, BBVA, Pizza Hut, Newsweek, MediaMarkt, Nissan, AVIS, MAC, Marks & Spencer, Madeira Madeira, Avon, and CNN.