paul-smithOne of the most effective ways to set your company and brand apart from the competition while increasing your bottom line is by creating a personalized, unique shopping experience.  This fact is especially salient in the current e-commerce apparel industry, where a glut of competition and fast moving companies require concerted and ongoing efforts to create distinction, whilst also prioritizing customer experience.

In this article I’ll outline a few of the best practices for website personalization in the apparel industry. In particular, I’ll highlight some of the top features of website personalization software, and how you can leverage those features to create a dynamic, engaging shopping experience.

Dynamic product recommendations

Providing a personalized shopping experience for your customers is largely centered around one thing: accurate product recommendations at the right times. To accomplish this, relying on an e-commerce personalization software program that is automated with machine learning is the only true viable option dynamically merchandising as your customers shop.

Consider using merchandising banners to provide targeted product recommendations to your customers throughout their shopping journey. Based on what they are viewing, what’s in their cart, and past search queries and purchases, your software can generate tailored product recommendations.

Product recommendations generated in this fashion have a higher conversion rate from browsers to buyers, lead to larger purchases per visit, and increase transitions from one-time shoppers to repeat customers.

Brand continuity

One critical, but sometimes overlooked aspect of creating a custom, unique shopping experience is maintaining brand continuity throughout your site. From search result to landing page to product page, your site should have a consistent look and feel throughout.

This approach is more aesthetically pleasing while giving your customers seamless transitions between pages. Prioritizing brand continuity throughout your personalization implementation is an important step in cultivating both brand awareness, and ultimately increased brand loyalty.

 Intelligent search functionality

Merely placing a search box with a magnifying glass on it in the corner of your site is no longer adequate for e-commerce markets. Users require an intuitive, self-correcting product discovery layer which begins as the first few characters are entered.

Automatically incorporate trending and seasonal products into search results, then configure your search to act as a personal shopper for your visitors by curating a relevant selection in real-time based on their activity.

Lastly, your search engine should include navigation assistance such as product filtering by brand or type, so that users can quickly and easily navigate to broad or specific categories.  Each of these features is critical to transforming your customer’s shopping experience from bland to unique.

Geolocation for products

In the apparel industry, geographic differences in fashion trends can have a measurable impact on your bottom line. Customers in the Northeastern United States during December may want significantly different products than their counterparts in the Southwest.

Ensuring that your personalized shopping experience accounts for these differences in location requires enabling geolocation for your products. Geolocation can also take into account regional differences in price, style, or preference.

With geolocation enabled, your intelligent searching system will recommend products based on where the customer is conducting the search from. This will allow you to always provide the most relevant search results, and more accurately predict the products that customers are searching for.

Bespoke landing pages

Creating unique and engaging landing pages for your products is not only a personalization best practice in the apparel industry, it is also an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization. With the right website personalization software in place, creating dynamic, unique landing pages for products can be accomplished easily and effectively.

Customized landing pages offer a cost-effective way to create a unique, personalized shopping experience that will help your apparel company stand out from the competition. Further, by using this technique you can integrate your merchandising team into your website personalization efforts. The result is a more aesthetically pleasing, customized shopping experience.

Download the SLI ESP™ product brief to learn more about how website personalization can help grow your e-commerce business.