The online buying process is often considered sterile and impersonal, with the human contact and purchasing experience that a visit to a store delivers invariably lost. Yet the sector is changing – and quickly. The leading brands are working hard to personalise their e-commerce experiences and ensure these are increasingly closely linked to physical purchasing experiences. Thanks to new technology and artificial intelligence, customers are no longer random strangers. Brands can recognise and profile them using artificial intelligence and machine learning processes. It’s all thanks to real-time monitoring systems.
A problem to overcome
E-commerce’s problem is the gulf between the number of people who browse online stores and put things in their baskets, and those that actually finalise a purchase. It’s what’s known as the conversion rate – and it’s very low, ranging from between one and three in a hundred (according to Statista, 2017). How can this be increased? What’s the secret to getting a customer to make a purchase? In short, it’s about making the whole experience as personalised as possible. Real-time monitoring makes it possible to observe what each user is doing on a website at any given time. Companies can see where they get stuck – do they give up at the payment stage, or do they put lots of items in their basket but end up deciding not to buy? Once they know this, companies can send the user a tailored offer or discount or simply get in contact to ask if they’re having trouble.
Innovative systems
There are companies that offer systems capable of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse huge amounts of data. Nowadays, the majority of websites’ problem is not with the quantity of traffic they get to their sites, but with the quality of that traffic. As we’ve seen, the hard part is to get online users to complete their purchases. And that’s where these systems come in – they are able to decode online user behaviour and map out the entire customer journey on their site.
According to analysis by Statista, efforts to optimise the conversion rate could increase online sales by up to 23%. In short, an e-commerce site that monitors user behaviour and sends targeted suggestions and messages is more likely to be a successful one.
A Salesforce suggests visits to e-commerce sites resulting from targeted suggestions account for just 7% of the total number, yet this small percentage is responsible for 24% of orders and 26% of revenue. Moreover, the spend-per-visit of customers who have clicked on a suggestion is five times higher than the average spend of regular site users. Clearly, personalisation is vital to the online purchasing experience – all forms of commerce need that bit of special care, that human touch.
Real-time monitoring: practical examples
Plenty of fashion brands have cottoned onto this, with the realisation prompting them to undertake a complete about-face in terms of strategy. “Before, there was strong competition within the company between the offline and online channels, as if online was stealing work from physical stores,” explains Giulio Salvucci, the Global e-Business Director at Liu-Jo. “Now, we continue to recognise the value of the in-store experience in the clothing sector, but we see e-commerce as something that supports that.”
Peuterey is another brand that has completely overhauled their strategy, investing in digital to gather information on its customers and use this to drum up more business. By integrating CRM (software that manages customer relations), e-commerce, offline sales channels and their website, the company is now able to obtain real-time data on the average spend-per-order of its customers, average yearly sales, number of unique customers and number of orders. Through this system, Peuterey can profile its users and put together a hi-tech contact strategy featuring marketing activities tailored to each individual customer.