Now It's Personal
To clear this hurdle and tap into the wider potential of digital commerce, businesses have adopted a number of solutions that fall under the wide umbrella of personalisation.
The term gets thrown around a lot but personalisation is fundamentally the process of tailoring an experience based on information collected from the customer - as in the grocer example.
There are two parts to personalisation. The first is learning about a customer's needs and preferences and, the second is using that information to tailor the product, service or merely the interaction with the business for the consumer.
The field has advanced a fair distance from where it started.
Whereas once a ‘personalised’ approach to e-commerce may have been as simple as including a first name in the address line of a newsletter, advances in processing data have created the possibility of a deeper, more involved relationship with consumers: effective product recommendations based on online and offline purchase history; websites that mould themselves to repeat consumer shopping journeys to offer more relevant information.
Changes in trends and advances in the field, especially around how data is stored and analysed, have given rise to the more refined: ‘hyper personalisation': using this advanced data processing to get ahead of the competition.