Personalizing the Shopping Experience: Utilize Snaps and Shorts for Customer Engagement

Slowly, but surely, online shopping is becoming the norm. Some industries have wholeheartedly embraced E-commerce, while others still trail in comparison. But if statistics regarding E-commerce can tell us anything it's that online shopping is only going to grow and expand in the coming years. Therefore, regardless of what industry you operate in, you'd be smart to consider E-commerce as an important add-on. And to make your E-commerce efforts fruitful, you will need to rely on personalization.

Understanding the importance of E-commerce personalization

In theory, you could try to run your online store the old-fashioned way. You set it up, connect it to your website, work on your SEO, post on social media, and hope for the best. While this may yield some traffic, it doesn't really set you up for success. Namely, if you wish to make it in the modern E-commerce, personalization will be crucial.

Modern customer experience

Personalization is supposed to tailor the shopping experience to each customer's preferences and behavior. If the AI progresses enough with big data collection and analytics, this might be the case. But, as it is now, personalization is based on segmentation. What this means is that you use personalization software to segment your customers into various groups. Then you create specific content for each group. This includes choosing relevant products, designing content, and offering recommendations that the customer within the group would find interesting.

Because of this, each customer feels understood and valued. While before customers would simply view generic marketing content that had little to do with them, this is no longer the case. Now, they can appreciate the fact that the content they see is relevant to their age, gender, demographic, location, and prior spending habits. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and improved loyalty.

Better engagement

In the modern marketing landscape, your primary goal shouldn't be to reach as many people as possible. Yes, getting people's attention is an important aspect of any marketing strategy. But all the attention in the world won't be enough if you aren't able to convince people to engage with your content.

Well, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that people aren't really keen on engaging with generic marketing content. You yourself likely ignore generic marketing on a regular basis while scrolling through social media. Well, if you wish to rise above obscurity and actually have people engage with your brand, personalization is your best bet.

Personalized recommendations and offers catch the attention of customers like generic content never could. By catering to the individual customer (or a specific group) you naturally motivate them to explore your products and spend more time on your E-commerce platform. If you review the engagement metrics, you'll see that this increased engagement leads to higher conversion rates and repeat purchases. Not to mention that when customers are presented with products that match their interests and needs, they are far more likely to make a purchase. Personalization even helps reduce decision fatigue by offering curated choices. Thus making it easier for customers to find what they are looking for and finalize their purchase.

Higher average order value (AOV)

A good salesperson knows that a customer rarely buys just one thing. Sure, they might visit your store with the idea that they only need one item. But, it is up to the salesperson to understand their customer and recommend something that they might find interesting. Well, if you work on personalization, you'll have a system that does this for you. Personalized product recommendations based on past purchases or browsing behavior can encourage customers to add more items to their cart. By doing so, they will increase the average order value per transaction, which in turn increases your revenue. While you can look to draw in as many customers as possible and simply hope that they will spend while in your store, it is better to invest in actually increasing the AOV.

Another aspect to consider is that personalization works wonders for up-selling and cross-selling. Namely, if you know what the customer wants, it is fairly easy to recommend something a bit more expensive, but of better quality. It is similarly easy to offer products that are related to theirs, and therefore increase the AOV. All in all, personalization holds tremendous potential when it comes to yielding more money from individual customers.

Reduced cart abandonment

Another issue that is much improved by personalization is cart abandonment. Namely, a substantial meta-study has shown that the cart abandonment rate for online stores averages around 70%. This means that 7 out of 10 shoppers will put items into their cart, but not finalise the purchase. And this holds true for various online stores in various industries. As you can imagine, this is a big waste for stores as evidently there was an initial intention to spend money, but something went wrong in the purchase process.

Unfortunately, it is rarely easy to outline what goes wrong during the shopping process. Studies show that 48% of shoppers give up on their purchases because of extra costs like shipping, taxes, and fees. 26% give up because the store asks them to create an account. While these can be viable reasons and things you can improve upon, we would advise a different method.

Namely, what you need to do is to, you guessed it, invest in personalization. By doing so you can closely follow what your shoppers go through during the online shopping session. You can then look to offer relevant incentives or reminders, such as abandoned cart emails with personalized product recommendations or discounts.

Customer retention and loyalty

It should go without mention that customer retention and loyalty pay off. Now more than ever it is difficult to catch the customer's attention. Especially if they have little experience with your brand. So, instead of struggling with customer acquisition, you need to invest in customer retention. Luckily, personalization shines in this regard. Through it, you'll be able to build stronger connections with your customers. By consistently delivering personalized experiences and showing that you care about your customers you will naturally foster loyalty and encourage repeat purchases. If you also include direct customer input, you will easily develop long-term customer relationships. The more you can make your customers feel like an integral part of your brand, the better.

How to utilize snaps and shorts for customer engagement

Now that we have a general idea of why personalization is important let's delve deeper into how to acutely use snaps and shorts. Both snaps and shorts are bite-sized, visually-based content formats. Through StorifyMe they are fairly easy to create and then integrate within preexisting online stores. Because they are dynamic, it is also possible to program your store to change content based on who is viewing it, therefore personalizing it. But, let's not go into too much detail about why shorts and snaps are useful. Instead, let's outline examples of how they can help create immersive shopping experiences

Showcase product features

When people check out products within your store, they will likely consider your competition. After all, it is highly unlikely that you are the only store that sells in their area. So, keep in mind that competition is always a click away and that you need to provide a reason why your customers should stay with you. The easiest way to do this is to create an app, as it makes it less comfortable to check other stores. But, another way to motivate your buyers is to use shorts to showcase product features.

The more you can outline the quality and the value of doing business with your store, the more likely they are to stick with you. If you have any loyalty programs running, or other discounts, you should outline them clearly and center. The more you study each group, the easier it will be to determine when and where during the shopping process should you showcase products. Ideally, you will highlight unique selling points and demonstrate the value proposition of your products in a concise and compelling manner. You can also use close-up shots and dynamic camera angles to showcase product details effectively.

Run flash sales and promotions

Flash sales and promotions are a tried and true way to draw in customers. After all, who doesn't like to save money by making a timely purchase? Well, a neat way to create a sense of exclusivity is to offer limited-time discounts or promotions exclusively for your snaps and shorts followers. You can use countdown timers or stickers to create urgency and encourage viewers to take immediate action. And if you do so for items that they are likely to find interesting they will be that more likely to make use of the sale. This can be fairly easy to do, especially during holidays. A personalized shopping experience combined with a timely offer is bound to yield a sale. Just make sure to include clear call-to-action (CTA) messages directing customers to your e-commerce store to redeem the offer.

Behind-the-scenes glimpses

We've already written how important it is to build a sense of trust and communication with your customers. After all, it is your goal to make them feel as if they were a part of your brand. Well, one of the ways to bring your brand closer to your customers is with behind-the-scenes content. You can authentic and transparent behind-the-scenes footage to humanize your brand and connect with your audience on a personal level. Through this footage, you should highlight your company's values, mission, and commitment to quality or sustainability. You can then encourage interaction by asking viewers to share their thoughts or questions about your behind-the-scenes processes. Keep in mind that we all like to know what is going on behind the scenes, which is why behind-the-scenes content has a certain intrinsic interest to it.

User-generated content

The store with the best marketing is the one that convinces its customers to do the marketing for them. This not only entails word-of-mouth marketing, which is still vital. But also in user-generated content or UGC. There are some terrific examples like the Stanely Cups, where a well-crafted piece of UGC helped the company thrive. If you are to learn from Stanely, you'd be smart to help branded customer create content of their own. Create hashtags and encourage your followers to create and share content featuring your products. Then look to repost user-generated content on your own snaps and shorts account to showcase customer satisfaction and foster a sense of community. You can even offer incentives such as discounts, freebies, or shoutouts to encourage more user-generated content creation.

Interactive experiences

Another way to engage your customers is through interactive content. Namely, you can use interactive features such as polls, quizzes, and challenges to encourage customer participation and engagement. You can even create interactive shopping guides where users learn how to use your app or store, and then finalize their purchase.

Another way to make use of interactivity is to ask for feedback on new product ideas or gather insights into customer preferences through interactive polls and questions. You can even incorporate UGC into your interactive experiences thus improving the sense of community and collaboration. Now, you shouldn't hinder the shopping experience of users who don't like to interact unless needed. This is another reason why it is important that you keep close track of your customers and only push interactivity where you feel it will yield results.

Cross-promotion

Modern marketing dictates that you need to spread your brand across different platforms. Regardless of what industry you work in, you at least need to have a website and a social media presence. Ideally, you will also have an app to help you create truly personalized shopping experiences. And an email system where you regularly contact your customers through email campaigns.

While this is good and well, it is equally important that you connect various platforms. What you are looking for is an omnichannel engagement where users will seamlessly go from one platform to another. Well, both snippets and snaps can be of use here. Namely, they can be a terrific way to bridge one platform to another. After all, what better way to interest your customers for a specific platform of yours than through a snap or a short? It should, of course, contain a link or a swipe-up CTA to make the transition seamless.

Final thoughts

In our view, persuasion is going to become the norm of both E-commerce and marketing. Shoppers will slowly grow accustomed to tailored shopping journeys and will find stores that don't provide them as unaccommodating. So, we strongly urge you to start using personalization. Whether for product discovery enhancement, better customer segmentation, or simply to create an immersive shopping experience. Personalization will become the norm. Meanwhile, stores that don't adhere to it will be seen as outdated. Shorts and snaps are easy to create, implement, and optimize with personalization in mind. After all, here at StorifyMe, we've long recognized how important it is for brands to have bite-sized, attention-grabbing content. We feel that by using them you have the best chance of properly implementing personalization over multiple platforms. So, don't wait and get to it. We are here to help!

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