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Quote:Benefits of Personalization

The bottom line is that communicating with your customers in a personalized manner helps you to increase online revenue. Personalization helps multiply lifetime customer value because customers want to visit more often and make more purchases, it helps to reactivate more former customers by communicating with them in a relevant way, and helps retailers gain valuable insight into their customers' interests. More specifically, personalized recommendation marketing can boost sales 5 to 20 percent on average for online and multichannel retailers and increase average order value by 45 percent.

When thinking about how to personalize, the best tactic is to think like a consumer. Instead of thinking about how you can persuade the consumer to be loyal to the merchant, consider how you can improve the consumer experience. Forget about the Web for a while and think about a person-to-person experience. What would make you want to shop in a specific place? Again?

Make it easy to get to the items the consumer wants to see. Don't make the consumer navigate through a bunch of intermediate steps. They want the products they're looking for, and they want to find them quickly and easily. At the other end of the process, make checkout smooth and fast. Checkout should be done in one page or two, not five...