How Magento 2 extensions help personalize UX

With the rising role of self-education in the customer journey and the vast majority of website visitors that prefer to remain anonymous, it has never been more critical for online companies to find ways to turn anonymous visitors into viable prospects. Although one-third of marketers see personalization as the most important factor in the future of online marketing, less than 10% of tier-one retailers believe they are highly effective at personalization.

Many companies still struggle to deliver the experiences consumers want; 39% of consumers said they have left a business’s website and made a purchase elsewhere because they were overwhelmed by too many options. The winners in the online marketing challenge will be the companies that successfully gather data and leverage the insights to create more personalized experiences throughout the buyers’ journey, across all channels.

Accenture’s Personalization Maturity Model is a 5-stage framework to drive profitable growth through personalization. The majority of businesses today are still in stages 1 and 2 of the model, however, leveraging Aheadworks’ Magento 2 personalization extensions, e-commerce merchants can benefit from each of the Personalization Maturity Model stages.

Stage 1: Minimal Personalization

Companies experiment with personalization, practice it minimally, and base their campaigns and digital experiences on expert judgment, personas, and simplistic business rules—not data. Personalizing email communications with the recipient’s name in the subject line does increase open rates, but without data you cannot segment your lists based on meaningful, useful customer information (e.g. customers’ purchase behaviors, personal tastes/preferences, demographic information, etc.). As a result, personalized content becomes “educated speculation.”
A simple, yet effective way to segment your audience for personalization is to survey or ask customers their reasons for visiting your website, becoming a user, or subscribing to your email. It can lead to insightful data that results in sending highly targeted emails.

Stage 2: Selective Personalization

Experiences and campaigns are personalized within individual channels based on A/B testing, recommendations, and audience targeting. But there is no cross-channel orchestration, so personalization is either incomplete or inconsistent.

Personal emails have much better chances to recover abandoned shopping carts, generate new product reviews, or increase loyalty and commitment. For example, follow Up Email for Magento 2 is an extension that reacts to an action taken—or not taken—by a website visitor, or a meaningful change in a customer’s behavior or profile, and automatically sends out pre-defined follow-up messages. Emails can be sent to customers with multiple objectives in mind: up-selling and cross-selling, welcome, re-engagement, etc.

Similarly, the Reward Points for Magento 2 allows merchants to properly award customers and provides the opportunity to create loyalty programs based on lifetime sales volumes and personal achievements. The personalization mechanism of the Reward Points extension makes customers feel good about their rewards, especially if the rewards are the result of their persistent efforts.

Tiered programs are becoming an increasingly effective tool for encouraging customer engagement and participation. By offering exclusive products to VIP customers, members are given access to a wide array of rewards that are not available to basic members. This clear distinction between the lower and upper tiers provides an extra layer of exclusivity, making VIP a more valuable status to achieve.

Aheadworks Automatic Related Products extension enables Magento 2 merchants to display only relevant, related products based on the selected products either category, product, or shopping cart pages. Because related product offers are based on viewed product pages or selected items, customers get a “personal approach” to their individual shopping experience and carefully consider the provided product options.

Stage 3: Managed Personalization

Experiences and campaigns are personalized using a cross-channel operating model that maintains the consistency of interactions and manages processes, governance, and platforms for consistent control.

Different teams—web, mobile, customer service, marketing—may share responsibility for Personalization. For example, Advanced Reports for Magento 2 is an analytical extension that explores sales over time and could help to close the gap for collaboration and processes between teams by allowing admins to save their customized report grids, data filters, and information views in report bookmarks. The bookmarks are individual for each user and can be accessed instantly.

Advanced Reports provides a clear view of various performance areas and allows you to run a quick evaluation of your business. The information is tailored for individual purposes and preferences.

Stage 4: Omni-channel Personalization

Personalization decisions are elevated to a strategic level, assuring that all interactions between customers and the enterprise, regardless of the business unit, are context-appropriate and consistent.

The Omni-channel approach requires more knowledge, personalization, collaboration, and synchronization. Magento’s Market Segmentation Suite segments by customer attribute, order, cart, or product. It allows you to create a variety of rules that creates customer segments based on their traits or even trait combinations. You can also save segments and use them to differentiate messages, discounts, newsletters, etc.

For example, you may want to break down your visitor populations into key locations to understand the differences in their behavior. Following the same philosophy of brick-and-mortar retail companies “going local,” you can understand which “local” markets you should tailor your experiences too. You can personalize visitors’ site experience, based on a zip code range in their address, by running a promotion targeted to people just in the state of Colorado, during the ski season.

With the Coupon Code Generator for Magento 2, merchants can create and deliver either single-person or highly personalized coupons designed for narrow customer groups to bring them back to the store for shopping of items with discounted prices. The cart conditions and condition combinations allow sending individual coupons to almost any customer. Due to the personalization, customers consider such coupons as their benefits and often redeem them online increasing store revenues

Stage 5: Enterprise Personalization

Personalization is coordinated across all channels using advanced technologies to drive corporate-level KPIs (e.g. growth margins, revenue, and excess inventory). These organizations typically have a clear picture of what they want to accomplish, but may still need assistance reaching their goals quickly.

Today’s modern businesses are powered by an array of software products where ERP or POS systems can be considered a cornerstone of overall business operations. With Magento POS/ERP Integration Extensions you can easily transition data between the systems, consolidate and manage your retail operations from one place and provide the omnichannel experience customers expect.

Optimizing your eCommerce store enhances users’ shopping experience on your site, and also increases the chances they will return. Key attributes of Magento 2 extensions enable online retailers to:

• Reward best customers
• Enable personalization
• Interface with ERP and A/B digital marketing tools
• Reduce excessive options, yet support omni-channel marketing

Download CommerceBlend’s eBook “4 Steps to Personalization” as a resource to help you understand and execute each of the main stages of the Personalization Maturity Model. This eBook provides additional resources and tools to scale up and successfully navigate, and win in today’s digital marketing environment.