Feb 17, 2023
The right eCommerce personalization software can help you boost conversions, increase retention, and reduce acquisition costs by:
However, there are many eCommerce personalization tools out there, and differentiating between them can be hard. There are three key questions to consider when choosing the right one for your business:
Which channels does the tool support? True personalization is about tailoring the customer experience across all touchpoints. That’s why it’s essential to get a solution that supports many personalization channels, like on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and so on.
In this post, we compare the top seven eCommerce personalization software tools and platforms for enterprise companies, along with options for small and mid-sized businesses.
We’ll start with Insider — our platform for personalized, cross-channel customer experiences — and show how it can help you improve your conversions, lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), and boost retention.
Here are all the solutions we’ll look at below:
Insider
DynamicYield
Bloomreach
Adobe Experience Cloud
Salesforce Marketing & Commerce Clouds
Oracle Marketing
Nosto
Personalize Each Customer Touchpoint with Insider
Before diving in, note that the first six options are robust personalization platforms for companies with lots of website traffic and existing customers. The last one is more suitable for smaller eCommerce businesses.
Insider can connect all your customer data from multiple sources into one place and personalize every touchpoint customers have with your brand. To learn more, visit our website or schedule a demo with our team.
Personalization channels: Web (on-site), mobile apps, web push notifications, email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, RCS, and ads.
Insider is our platform that brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for established channels like on-site and email, as well as emerging ones like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and SMS.
Insider comes with various personalization tools, such as:
Put simply; Insider lets you unify fragmented data, activate it across your channels, and manage all your personalization efforts from one place (as opposed to keeping track of multiple logins and constantly jumping between different tools). That’s why we’ve been recognized as a leading personalization engine in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant and as the top eCommerce personalization software in G2’s Grid.
In the sections below, we’ll show you can use Insider to improve conversion rates, reduce CAC, and boost AOV by:
With Insider, the website personalization process starts as soon as visitors first come to your site. This means you can convert new visitors into buyers much faster without needing contact information or personal data.
Here’s how this works:
When a new visitor lands on your eCommerce store, Insider creates a profile for them in your Unified Customer Database. As they browse your site, our platform automatically populates their profile with information like:
For example, the screenshot below shows the profile of an anonymous visitor.
As you can see, Insider has collected tons of valuable data about the pages this user visited, their actions, and the product they visited last.
These insights allow you to personalize their experience in real-time, which can help build solid e-commerce conversion rates and reduce the time it takes to turn first-time visitors into customers.
In fact, Philips used Insider’s personalization capabilities to optimize the engagement and conversion rates of new website visitors. To do this, their team (with the help of our Account Management experts) integrated a coupon code overlay for both web and mobile users.
As a result, Philip’s conversion rate on desktop devices increased by nearly 15%, while their AOV on the mobile web saw an uplift of 10.15%.
Many new visitors won’t convert immediately, even after a personalized shopping experience.
This usually forces eCommerce brands to retarget users with ads on social media or search engines. While effective, retargeting can increase CAC and lower profit margins.
That’s why Insider helps you bring visitors back to your site using personalized web push notifications.
The process is simple — you only need to send an exit-intent pop-up to visitors, so they can agree to receive notifications. This is a small commitment that doesn’t require any personal data like their email or phone number.
When you have their consent, you can bring them back to your site with web push notifications. And, since Insider has already collected behavior data, these notifications will be personalized based on the categories, products, price ranges, and other attributes.
This capability can drastically reduce your CAC (since you don’t have to retarget users with expensive performance ads) and help you recover abandoned carts.
For example, Lenovo used Insider’s web push notifications to target different user segments. This allowed them to reach visitors who abandoned their cart, send them personalized notifications, and get them back to the site. As a result, Lenovo’s cart abandonment rates fell by more than 10%.
Our predictive audiences can also help you target visitors based on their affinity towards certain attributes, their likelihood to purchase, their discount affinity, and much more.
Here are some example segments you can create without needing any personal data:
For instance, Adidas used our segmentation capabilities to show targeted promotional offers to different customer segments. Our team helped them create different variations of a side menu coupon and A/B test them to see which ones produce the most conversions.
This combination of smart segmentation and A/B testing led to a whopping 258.99% increase in AOV for new users and a 35.31% boost in conversion rates for returning ones.
(If you already have personal data like emails, names, phone numbers, and birthdays, you can create even more precise segments and start scaling personalization across channels, as we’ll discuss in the next section)
After you’ve built your segments, you can take the next step of creating a personalized shopping experience for them — a process we call “activation”.
For example, you can activate an anonymous visitor segment by:
Users’ reactions, behaviors, and survey answers are all fed back into their profiles. This enriches your dataset and lets Insider find the next best steps, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
For example, say you have a visitor who showed an interest in black shoes and gray hoodies but didn’t buy anything even with relevant product suggestions. You can run a quick survey to understand why they didn’t convert — maybe they bought these items from another site or they thought the price was too high.
Either way, our platform takes that data into account when determining the next step. As a result, Insider can suggest products that complement black shoes and gray hoodies (if they bought from another site) or show lower-priced items to get this customer to convert.
Put simply, our platform learns and adapts messaging, content, and product recommendations in real-time.
When you have customers’ contact information (email, phone number, etc.), you can use Insider to make each of their touchpoints with your brand as personalized as your eCommerce site.
For example, say you have a customer segment that showed an affinity for a certain product category and price range.
You can use this information to send them personalized emails or WhatsApp messages two hours after they leave the site. If they still don’t purchase, you can retarget them with relevant social media ads a day later. Or, you can have Insider wait until there’s a price reduction for items in the category and only then engage this segment.
You can set the rules and fully automate the process with Insider’s Architect — a tool for creating individualized, cross-platform customer journeys via a simple drag-and-drop editor.
To make this a bit clearer, let’s look at an example of how one of our customers used Insider’s cross-channel capabilities:
Yves Rocher, a global cosmetics and beauty brand, wanted to personalize the experience for both their visitors and customers. To do so, they used Insider’s:
The whole process was orchestrated with Insider’s Architect. For more details, check out the full Yves Rocher case study.
We know that one of the biggest challenges with eCommerce personalization is getting started. Personalization platforms are often complex to set up and use, so companies usually don’t see a meaningful return on their investment for months.
That’s exactly why we:
As a result, our customers consistently rate us as a top performer in categories like ease of use, ease of setup, and quality of support.
To learn how Insider’s cross-channel personalization capabilities can help you convert more visitors, reduce CAC, and improve retention, book a live demo with our team.
Personalization channels: Web (on-site), push notifications, email, mobile apps, and ads.
DynamicYield is a personalization platform used by online retailers, financial services companies, and businesses in various other industries. Their key personalization features are bundled into their Experience OS — a place where teams can collect and activate customer data.
DynamicYield also offers key personalization features such as segmentation, product recommendations, and A/B testing. However, DynamicYield doesn’t support personalization on messaging channels such as SMS, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp.
Personalization channels: Web (on-site), mobile app, push notifications, email, SMS, MMS, and ads. Bloomreach is a commerce experience cloud that combines personalization and marketing automation tools. The foundation for these tools is Blooreach’s Customer Data Engine, which ingests data from different sources and helps you activate it across channels (similar to Insider’s Actionable CDP). It’s also worth noting that Bloomreach has a broader focus than just personalization since it offers a headless CMS, landing page builder, and SEO features.
Note: Click here to see how Bloomreach compares to Insider.
Personalization channels: Web (on-site), mobile app, email, SMS, and ads.
Adobe Experience Cloud combines a suite of products that help businesses personalize each customer’s experience. Some of the most popular products in this cloud include:
Personalization channels: Web (on-site), mobile app, push notifications, email, SMS, and ads.
Salesforce offers two distinct personalization solutions — Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Marketing Cloud is a more traditional personalization and automation solution. It connects customer data from multiple sources and helps you create a consistent experience across channels with the help of machine learning algorithms. It also has a Journey Builder, which lets you build and visualize cross-channel customer journeys (similar to Insider’s Architect).
Commerce Cloud is a specialized eCommerce platform that helps B2B and B2C businesses create personalized buying experiences. Companies use it to give customers the opportunity to stay within a single channel that incorporates all of their data, rather than constantly moving across different ones.
Note: Click here to see how Salesforce Marketing Cloud compares to Insider.
Personalization channels: Web (on-site), mobile app, email, SMS, push notifications, ads. Like the previous two entries, Oracle Marketing is a more traditional marketing cloud that bundles different products. This cloud is made up of products acquired by Oracle over the years, like Maxymiser (an A/B testing and personalization solution), CloudTwist (a customer loyalty platform), Eloqua (an omnichannel marketing automation platform), and more. Additionally, there are now two versions of Oracle Marketing — one for B2B and one for B2C companies — each of which includes a different mix of products.
Personalization channels: Web (on-site), mobile app, email, and in-store.
Nosto is a commerce experience platform that combines:
Nosto also integrates with popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento. And while it doesn’t support as many channels or advanced personalization features as the previous entries, Nosto can still be a good fit for small and mid-sized online stores.
Note: Click here to see how Nosto compares to Insider.
Insider can help you improve conversion rates, generate more revenue, and reduce CAC by:
Our channel integrations are also easy to set up, reducing the dependency on technical teams. Plus, our support team and extensive template library will ensure you get up and running as fast as possible.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
We hope this guide has helped you understand how to get started with cross-channel marketing. And if you’d like to learn more about how Insider can help you deliver outstanding cross-channel marketing campaigns, book a demo with us today.
eCommerce personalization is tailoring online shopping experiences to individual customer preferences. It involves customizing product recommendations, content, and offers based on user behavior and data.
Personalization involves analyzing user data, segmenting customers, and using algorithms to recommend products, optimize content, and create targeted marketing campaigns.
Personalization improves user engagement, boosts conversions, increases average order value, and enhances customer loyalty by delivering relevant and tailored experiences.
Written by
Christopher Lowe
Christopher has a long history of driving value and creating personalized, omnichannel journeys that enhance customer experience. He's passionate about learning and development and has a keen interest in developing economies, especially ones with a lot of room for digital growth.