Personalized shopping experiences are helpful not only in capturing faithful customers, but they are also helping to decreasing cart abandonment and increasing online sales.
According to an E-commerce Quarterly report released by Monetate, the leading provider of multichannel personalization for the world’s brands, personalized customer experiences helped the industry reach a record-breaking $51 billion in revenue this past holiday shopping season.
The company’s report revealed that Monetate customers outperformed the industry average in four main categories: bounce rate, add-to-cart rate, cart abandonment rate and conversion rate.
Monetate customers saw abandoned online shopping cart rates of 43.65%, 20 percent less than the rest of the industry in the fourth quarter of 2014, while the industry average reveals retailers experienced abandoned cart rates of 65.98%.
One of Monetate’s clients, a sporting goods retailer, addressed their tablet customers, who exhibited different behaviors than their desktop customers, by serving them a less distracting checkout page with fewer links. These changes led to a 23.3% cart abandonment rate.
Industry average conversion rates were 2.84%, while Monetate customers were at 6.44%. Industry average bounce rates were 30.2%, with Monetate customers’ rates at 19.94%.
Another Monetate client, a luxury clothing brand, boosted conversion rates by sending existing customers emails with a “VIP” message and promotion, encouraging them to visit the brand’s site. The company also used promotional banners to remind the customer of the promotion on every page they visited, gaining a 6.67% conversion rate.
The add-to-cart industry average was 8.35%, a significant increase compared to 8 percent in the same period in 2013, while Monetate’s customer average was 20.36%, outperforming the industry by more than 12 percent, according to the company.
“It’s evident that personalized, curated experiences across multiple channels continue to be a driving factor for successful retail brands,” Lucinda Duncalfe, Monetate’s CEO said. “Consumers expect more personal experiences across every touchpoint that reflect how they’ve interacted with a brand in the past. We’re seeing that the brands who are driving faster to meet that expectation are enjoying tremendous ROI, and leaving their less customer-focused competitors in the dust.”