Ecommerce Biz Employing Real-time Personalisation See 7x More Purchases: Report

Decoding the importance of tailored personalisation strategies across various ecommerce applications, CleverTap has released a report, ‘Navigating Personalisation: A Balancing Act for eCommerce’, that analysed data from 500,000 messages across 43 global ecommerce businesses.

The report finds that ecommerce businesses that leveraged use-case-based personalisation strategies saw 6x more purchases than the industry average, and 7x more purchases than businesses relying on blanket, one-size-fits-all personalisation strategies. 

CleverTap assessed personalisation via three channels – email, push notifications, and in-app messages. The report establishes the 4 levels of personalisation (L1 - L4) and advocates for an optimal blend across different levels to maximise results. These four levels of personalisation from least to most personalised are:

• L1: Tailors recommendations and promotions based on demographic data, ensuring relevance for distinct customer segments
• L2: Delves into behaviour-based segmentation, crafting messages from past customer actions
• L3: Predicts preferences and intent, tailoring content and offers accordingly
• L4: Leverages real-time data, triggering immediate, highly relevant messages based on current behaviours and events

The report discovers that businesses with higher levels of personalisation tend to have better business outcomes. It categorised these businesses into three groups—

Striving: Businesses that use limited personalisation with higher send frequencies.

Steady: Businesses that use a high degree of personalisation but have lower send frequencies.

Stellar: Businesses that use a high degree of personalisation and optimal send frequencies.

Striving businesses, on average, sent 22 messages to users every week with minimal (L1) personalisation, leading to them underperforming the industry benchmark by 77%.

Steady businesses overlooked L1 personalisation; underestimating the power of simple demographic personalisation which limited engagement at the generic level. But by prioritising more advanced levels of personalisation (L2 and L4) they outperformed industry benchmarks by 74%.

Stellar businesses adopted the optimum blend of all four personalisation levels, with an emphasis on L4, outperforming the industry benchmark by 500%. Compared to striving businesses, they achieved nearly 7x more purchases.

Stellar businesses used L1 personalisation to successfully promote large-scale events that impacted the customer base at large. Simultaneously, through more granular levels of personalisation, they were able to guide customers towards subsequent conversion events. These stellar businesses prioritise behaviour-based and real-time messaging over activity-based communication. This approach minimises intrusive messages following specific customer activities and, instead, focuses on nudging customers only when behaviours of intent are shown.

“When it comes to personalisation, often businesses can be myopic in their decision-making – thinking personalisation of any shape or form will help achieve the lofty goals they set,” says Jacob Joseph, VP – data science, CleverTap. “While it's true that some personalisation is better than none, over-relying on any one type of personalisation will deliver subpar results compared to businesses with a more holistic approach. With a strategic mix of personalisation techniques eCommerce businesses can overperform industry benchmarks by 6x; elevating their brands from striving or steady to stellar status.”