E-Commerce Content Marketing and Customer Experience

E-commerce content marketing and customer experience: how to improve the customer experience with personalized content? Let’s look at some examples together.

Content, within an ecommerce site, is an increasingly important element in being able to sensitively improve the customer experience for users.

In fact, this content will be able to help and guide consumers at different stages of their purchase funnel, and it is crucial that this content is personalized as much as possible in order to improve its relevance to consumers and, consequently, your results.

The different types of content

We normally tend to identify content marketing for our site solely in the articles we can write for the blog. Although these are important, it would be reductive to consider them as the only content present: in fact, the consumer will perceive almost all the elements of our website as content.

They can be considered content, for example:

hero shot
banner
video
pictures
inlay messages
header
live chat

So when we think about what different content to offer to different segments of our consumers, let’s not just think about what articles on our blog might interest them, let’s instead think about how we can personalize different elements of the page so that we can improve the overall user experience.

In order to do this in a way that is manageable, we must first focus on the user segments that are most valuable to us.

If you want to find out more about user segmentation find some more information in our column “User Profiling Pills” or contact us for a consultation with one of our experts.

But let us come to a couple of examples that show you how this content customization is feasible for both brand sites and more generalist retail sites.

Benefit: an example of content ecommerce

A very interesting example of E-commerce Content Marketing is the one implemented by the cosmetics brand Benefit.

As you scroll through the homepage you will realize how rich it is in content offerings aimed at guiding female consumers in choosing their ideal product.

an example of e-commerce content marketing: Benefit

By clicking on one of the banners below the fold you will also see how the content offering continues with videos, guides to choosing the ideal product, tutorials etc.

As we often repeat in our blog, every click on one of these pieces of content will succeed in bringing value to our customers while giving us the opportunity to profile them more.

…What if they are a generalist retailer?

Some may argue at this point that, being a brand ecommerce, the job for Benefit is surely easier and that a similar amount of content requires exorbitant investment.

In the case where a retailer has limited access to the content of the brands it markets, it could focus more on personalizing the service it offers or the way it interacts with consumers.

One of the strengths that characterizes the most successful physical stores is undoubtedly the ability of salespeople to support the consumer in choosing the best product. It is important to imagine how these dynamics could be replicated, in an automated and personalized way, online as well. This information could turn into buying guides or advice on choosing the best product. If you want some examples you can find them in this article of ours.

Personalizing the user experience can also mean:

Don’t show a newsletter registration pop up to already registered users
Recognize registered but not logged in users by calling them by name (Amazon docet)
show targeted product recommendation based on past user browsing (even for anonymous users)
Show a contextualized and proactive live chat that incentivizes the undecided
Give greater prominence to content and products toward which consumers have shown greater interest

A curious example as well as an interesting cue is certainly Ruffwear, which contextualizes the initial live chat message according to the page on which the user is browsing, thus very much targeting the information and consequently greatly enhancing the user experience.

User segmentation is the key

In B2C ecommerce, it is difficult to relegate the interests of the various buyer personas to a few archetypes and a few stages of the funnel. Indeed, the user experience is a continuous back and forth within the customer journey, taking advantage of all the different touchpoints available to the user. Therefore, it is a very articulated process, and as a result, it is essential to equip ourselves with tools that allow us to follow the consumer by offering him or her the best content and experience at all times in a personalized and automated way.

Only a structured and dynamic segmentation of your users, allowing you to personalize the experience of the most important segments, will enable you to improve your results by adding value to your brand while being able to engage with consumers in a more constructive and valuable way, thus not reducing your communications to mere promotivity.