Increasing use of mobile devices is perhaps the biggest shift in consumer behavior impacting today ecommerce. Forecasts from Ericsson & The Radicati Group show that 7.33 billion people have mobile devices, of which 6.92 billion are smartphones. There has been a corresponding increase in the relevance of mobile commerce, as 79% of smartphone users have made purchases from their devices. Ecommerce business owners need to recognize this proliferation of mobile traffic as the opportunity that it is and respond personalization into their mobile strategies. Artificial intelligence (AI) can certainly help improve these personalization efforts if used in creative ways.
WHY IS PERSONALIZATION IMPORTANT FOR MOBILE COMMERCE?
While more shoppers are making purchases through their mobile devices, ecommerce brands have yet to perfect the mobile shopping experience. Customers still face problems such as poor mobile website designs that are difficult to view and navigate and slow website loading, sometimes frustrating buyers to abandon the pages. As a result, conversion rates on mobile are still lagging the numbers on desktop. But rather than discouraging businesses from turning to mobile, this should be a call to action to implement strategies to help them monetize the burgeoning global mobile commerce market. Personalization is one such strategy worth exploring for brands.
Mobile commerce personalization involves delivering mobile shopping experiences that are specific to each customer's needs and preferences. Because the goal of mobile personalization is to provide every customer with the most convenient and engaging experience possible, it's a strategy that solves many of the challenges associated with bringing ecommerce apps and websites to mobile devices. Mobile personalization includes user profiling and behavior tracking for better understanding of the target audience. Veraccordingly, brands can recommend products, create personalized product offers and promotions, and offer dynamic pricing. In addition, the user experience can be customized with personalized navigation menus and saved preferences.
Mobile commerce personalization has several benefits, including the following:
MORE USER INVOLVEMENT
By providing product and content recommendations tailored to customers' quirks, users become more engaged when interacting with mobile websites or apps. This would reflect an improvement in engagement metrics such as more time spent on the page and lower bounce rates.
SMOOTH SHOPPING EXPERIENCE
Personalizing mobile shopping for customers leads to a better customer experience. Veel shoppers discover products and research on their mobile devices, but are unable to complete transactions due to the poor experiences available on mobile. By focusing on personalization, your brand ensures consistent delivery of smooth mobile shopping experiences.
HIGHER CONVERSION PERIODS
Although a larger percentage of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, conversion rates for desktops (3%) remain higher than for mobile devices (2%). Mobile personalization helps customers initiate and complete transactions on their mobile devices, giving your brand a competitive edge.
VERIMPROVED CUSTOMER LOYALTY
Optimizing the mobile experience for your customers will improve their loyalty to your brand. This is because they enjoy convenience and relevance while interacting with your platforms, increasing the likelihood of them turning to repeat buyers. Loyal customers not only have higher lifetime value, they also serve as word of mouth for your products and services that share your brand's mobile experiences with friends and family.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
Due to the increasing use of mobile phones, a wealth of customer data is available on these handheld devices. Mobile personalization can be a source of insight into customer preferences and behavior, which will help companies develop newer strategies to improve mobile commerce delivery.
WHAT ARE SOME AI-POWEREDVEN PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES USEFUL FOR MOBILE COMMERCE?
If your company wants to improve its mobile commerce strategies by offering a higher and more accurate level of personalization, artificial intelligence has some interesting solutions to offer. AI has plenty of exciting features that can help you strengthen your brand's connection with its customers and keep you ahead of the competition.
Here's how AI can help improve mobile commerce personalization:
ACCURATE PRODUCT RECOMMENDATIONSVELINGEN
Highly accurate and relevant product recommendations are an area that ecommerce brands must perfect to deliver delightful experiences to customers. AI algorithms can power product recommendation engines by analyzing customer data such as user behavior and purchase history. Amazon's recommendation engine, considered by many to be the gold standard in the industry, is driving up the company's average order value and conversion, making it an excellent case for using AI for product recommendations in mobile commerce.
Collaborative filtering is the most commonly used AI technique for this purpose, especially when user data is minimal. It identifies similar customers based on available data and then recommends products that a user may have purchased or used with another user with similar characteristics. Content-based filtering is another valuable method. Here, products with similar descriptions, features, and tags are recommended to a user. Other techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning also apply, and often a hybrid of different techniques is used to ensure mobile users have excellent recommendations to get.
CONTEXTUAL PURPOSE
Context targeting is a powerful ecommerce personalization strategy that is becoming increasingly important today as it provides relevance without invading privacy. This strategy leverages factors such as location, weather, time, and other contextual data to deliver personalized content to mobile users, leading to increased engagement and conversions. It is expected that AI algorithms can contribute to more accurate context targeting.
For example, AI can analyze a user's location to recommend nearby stores or products that are popular with users who live within that geographic location. Similarly, AI algorithms can make weather-based recommendations to increase the relevance of their offers and increase conversion. AI can also identify device type and optimize text, image and video content based on device capabilities. By applying AI-driven context targeting to mobile commerce personalization, brands can seamlessly improve the satisfaction mobile users derive from interacting with their web and app platforms.
DYNAMIC PRICE OPTIMIZATION
Dynamic pricing is another powerful personalization strategy that can be applied to mobile commerce. This strategy ensures that companies maximize revenue generation by adjusting prices to prevailing conditions. It's a necessary mobile personalization strategy because of the long hours people typically spend on their phones. For example, AI can help companies make real-time adjustments by monitoring market demand, inventory levels and competitor prices. Similarly, AI can perform advanced segmentation so that companies can offer personalized pricing to different segments of mobile users. Using AI in this way is important for businesses because it helps keep customers' attention as they use their phones, increasing conversion rates and profit margins.
CHATBOTS AND VIRTUAL ASSISTANT
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are valuable tools for personalization in mobile commerce. This technology is easy to integrate into mobile websites and applications and can contribute to positive shopping experiences. According to Criteo, 30% of mobile shoppers use their smartphones to learn more about a product. By setting up chatbots and virtual assistants, your company can make customers happy by providing instant, 24/7 answers to customer questions. Also, AI-powered chatbots can be trained to make personalized recommendations, which will surely increase user engagement and sales opportunities.
SEAMLESS SEARCH EXPERIENCE
Delivering relevant search experiences is certainly important for mobile personalization. Using AI algorithms and techniques is essential to predict user intent and deliver accurate and relevant search results. First, AI-powered search can analyze historical customer data, such as purchase history and previously viewed product pages, to better understand user intent. Semantic search can also be used to understand search intent by going beyond keyword matching to properly understand the context and meaning of words.
VerAccordingly, AI can provide search results that are more likely to match the mobile user's preferences. In addition, AI can provide auto-complete features and suggestions using parameters such as the user's search history, popular searches, and popular products. Visual search is another area that AI can improve by analyzing uploaded images and providing matched product results. Bringing AI-powered visual search to your mobile platforms is a particularly appropriate move as the use of visual search is on the rise these days.
In short, the global mobile commerce market is on the rise and ecommerce brands should pay attention to that trend by offering services such as mobile personalization. The benefits of this are more user engagement and conversions and ultimately more revenue. AI technology can boost your personalization efforts in many different ways, making it a technology worth investing in for brands on a mission to delight mobile users.
