Running an online pharmacy is certainly a very complicated operation and some of the most significant problems are dictated by the depth and breadth of the catalog, we are in fact talking on average about between 25 and 50 thousand references.
So many SKUs undoubtedly stand for a really wide target audience, which therefore has very different needs: from the sportsman hunting for maltodextrins to the diabetic looking for blood glucose control strips. It is clear that these two target audiences have very little in common indeed, and it is our job, as of any ecommerce, to succeed in making it extremely easy for our visitors to select and purchase the most suitable product.
But how can I do it?
Is it possible to show a different site to each user while giving them a unique experience? Yes, thanks to Marketing Personalization!
Let’s see how, through a customized and automated marketing approach, we can radically improve our results while managing to save time and resources.
- Segmenting our audience
- Customizing content
- Custom Product Recommendations
- Customizing Behavioral Messages
- Internal Search
Segmenting our audience
It is important to create and understand when different segments are worth to us, to assess how many people they consist of, what their value is, and how that may evolve over time. How many athletes frequent our site? How many diabetics? What do they purchase? How often? It is critical to know this answer in order to properly prioritize our marketing strategies and tactics.
Customizing content
Once we have identified the most relevant segments we try to show them, as they browse our site (even as anonymous) products that really interest them…does it make sense to show a supplement to a diabetic? definitely not, but neither does the reverse! We try to show not only the most suitable products but also the best content available to us (images, banners, blog articles, videos etc.). To learn more about this topic, please read this article: Ecommerce Content Marketing, how it improves Customer Experience .
Custom Product Recommendations
Using the best algorithms depending on what stage of the funnel our customer is in is critical. Is it a new visitor or an old customer? Is it coming from a specific campaign or landing on a specific product page? Segmenting it correctly is the first step, but for this segmentation to be effective, we need our recommendation engine to take this person’s characteristics into account so that we can show them the best products. Thanks to artificial intelligence-based systems, this data will also be cross-referenced with that of similar users, thus being able to predict which products are most likely to interest the user.
Customizing Behavioral Messages
Recognizing the visitor to our site and his needs is important to be able to personalize the behavioral messages to be shown to him. Let’s look together at a couple of examples: if it is not a registered user, try to convince him to register possibly using a targeted discount on products of his interest thus personalizing the possible generic registration coupon; on the other hand, if it is an already registered user, let’s try to offer him any specific promotions; the more specific these will be the greater the relevance, the greater the relevance the greater the interest in the promotion.
Internal Search
When the product catalog is so large, the proper functioning of the search is definitely a key element of the user experience and consequently of the success of our project. In fact, thanks to advanced search systems it is possible to customize search algorithms according to the user, something similar to what we described with recommendations. It is also possible to use the search keys entered by the user as an element of segmentation; in fact, they undoubtedly represent a very specific and explicit statement of interest and it would be a shame not to exploit it in order to personalize the rest of his navigation.
We close this first part by emphasizing what is the most important reflection of this activity, which is to make the consumer perceive us as specializing in the product/service of his or her interest. By showing more content and products that relate to him we will be perceived as less generalist than a competitor who will try to show everything to everyone, with positive reflections also on convincing this customer to return to us as soon as possible, but we will cover this topic in the next installment:
5 tips on how to increase Customer Lifetime Value
If you would like to learn more about these issues contact us to speak with one of our experts without any obligation!
