It’s time for e-retailers to get more personal with shoppers, study says

While 77% of online consumers say they find online recommendations “somewhat to extremely” useful—with many saying that they’ve purchased recommended products—a matured technology market is offering online retailers a new generation of off-the-shelf and easy-to-use personalization tools, Forrester Research says in a new study.

“As the amount of content online grows—particularly on e-commerce sites that often sell tens of thousands of different products—and consumers are left to wade through cumbersome experiences on their own, personalized e-commerce experiences promise customer engagement and loyalty through increased relevance,” Forrester says in the study, “Which Personalization Tools Work for eCommerce—And Why.”

“Enabled by external tools sometimes called personalization engines, recommendation engines, discovery engines, or behavioral targeting tools, personalization allows retailers to increase relevance through activities like matching cross-sells to customers based on interests or customizing clickstream paths based on previous purchase or visit histories,” says the report, which was authored by Forrester principal analyst Sucharita Mulpuru along with analysts Carrie Johnson and Scott Wright.

Forrester found that 77% of online shoppers say they find online recommendations “somewhat or extremely useful” and 54% say they have noticed on retail web sites product recommendations based on what they or other shoppers had previously purchased. Of that 54% who noticed recommendations, 34% say they have purchased recommended products.

Although web site personalization technology has been around for years, it has been costly to deploy and difficult to manage, Forrester says. But new personalization tools are easier to deploy and manage, and in many cases more affordable, it adds.

The new tools—from vendors offering personalization tools within software application suites as well as from those offering stand-alone personalization engines—support a range of techniques ranging from personalized greetings to advanced cross-sells across multiple web pages and selling channels. The latter enables retailers to present personalized product recommendations across multiple pages of a web site as well as in-store POS systems and call centers, Forrester says.