Why does personalization make a difference in fashion e-commerce?

Fashion brands face the challenge of personalizing the customer experience

Personalization can be found at several stages of the customer journey: before, during and after the purchase.

Brands tend to focus on everything during customer acquisition, but personalization during activation and retention remains essential.

It's all about creating a quality user experience that will engage the customer and encourage them to take action.

A customer is all the more committed to buy and talk about the brand, which gives him an emotionally positive customer experience adapted to his changing needs.

While the in-store shopping experience is pleasant, with the possibility for customers to touch the clothes, to have salespeople to advise them and fitting rooms, it is more difficult to reproduce it online.

Indeed, most e-shops have a rather static customer journey: a simple navigation from the category page, to the purchase page, through the product page, which impacts the perception of the brand for its e-commerce customers.

This standardization of the e-commerce customer journey is driving consumers to new brands that offer more innovative experiences.

Customers expect more and more personalization of the experience

Customers are naturally attracted to brands that value them, that make them feel like they are being listened to, understood and cared for.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accentuated this feeling even more, as consumers have only been shopping online for more than a year, and their level of demand has risen sharply.

Brand choice now depends heavily on personalization.

According to a study conducted by e-commerce platform Shopify

- 75% of consumers appreciate when content presented by brands is personalized.
- 74% of consumers say they feel frustrated when the content presented is not relevant to them.

It is therefore essential for fashion brands to have a hyper-personalized approach, offering a unique experience to each customer (online fitting, choice of mannequin, composition of looks...as one would in a physical store).

A personalized customer experience to increase conversion

The quality of the customer experience has become a determining factor in the conversion of a customer.

When a customer feels like they are in the center of a brand's attention, they are more likely to buy, and their purchase frequency and average shopping cart may even increase.

A Zendesk global study shows that brands that have implemented a personalization strategy throughout their customer journey have maintained or even increased their profitability.

While most e-tailers compete on price and product, a personalized user experience is what will make a real difference.

To continue to grow their business, brands need to analyze their customers' experience needs, note their evolution, and use new technologies (such as artificial intelligence) to respond optimally.

Personalization provides data to meet the needs of e-commerce customers

One of the many benefits of personalization is the output that brands get from it. Apart from engagement and conversion, brands collect a lot of data about their customers (habits, preferences, searches, order history, purchase values...).

This data allows them to know the customer intimately, to then respond to their needs individually, and even to predict what they might want in a future purchase.

With Veesual's Mix&Match, brands can, depending on the customer's preferences (based on their interactions with the experience), show them the most relevant images, highlight looks that match the clothes they've consulted, and adapt the models to engage them as much as possible.

This data can also be used to feed recommendation algorithms, and guide the creation of future clothing collections.

Brands must therefore capitalize on data, using it to send personalized, contextual and customer-relevant messages in order to optimize ROI.