Longtail Hyper-personalization

[Biffy]

Longtail hyper-personalization are a couple of buzzwords that are demanding more attention. What they mean is niche marketing is coming on strong in ecommerce.

Value-added personalization is an excellent way to exploit the fact that people are creatures of habit. Successful small ebusinesses are being built on strong customer loyalty. A very good way to start a new business is to start with a hobby, or some subject you know a lot about. Provide detailed knowledge, share experience and offer support that's far beyond anything a big corporation can offer. Users complain about the canned responses they get from eBay while praising the personal responses they get from niche etailers.

Longtail is a buzzword that generally describes marketing to search keywords with low traffic. Instead of competing for high traffic, expensive keywords, niche marketers are going after large numbers of keywords that get very little traffic and frequently have no competing bids. They find the ROI and conversion rates are superior and new customers arrive looking for a vendor they can be loyal to. This often translates to a larger net profit with a smaller net cash flow, or make more money with fewer visitors.

I am seeing more and more specialty shops going online with Miva that are lasting. I am seeing more folks move away from Ebay stores with their high costs and restricted set of canned features toward Miva stores with its broad range of highly customized features. It seems I'm doing more and more tightly focused customizations aimed at personalizing the shopping experience.

I initially thought it was just the big improvement in Miva 5 causing this but now I'm starting to believe it's actually part of a larger trend.

Niche stores with longtail marketing are certainly worth a look.

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[NinaLeon]

Re: Longtail Hyper-personalization

What type of customizations have you been doing to personalize the shopping experience?

[Biffy]

Re: Longtail Hyper-personalization

If you have a Miva store with a broad range of products, think about splitting it up into multiple "specialty" stores. This allows very tightly focused marketing of each.

One cool thing I'm doing is serving CSS stylesheets based on customer metric conditionals. We're also working on custom buttons that are based on dynamic customer conditionals but this a rather nascent field and still clumsy. For instance, if you drive a Ford I'm not going to show you any stuff for Chevys and Volkswagons unless you request it. The default is a store customized to your desires, where even the look and feel is customized.

[NinaLeon]

Re: Longtail Hyper-personalization

Wow. What are some of the sites you've done that for? I'd love to see it in action.

How are you/your clients getting the customer metrics?

[Biffy]

Re: Longtail Hyper-personalization

There are so many ways to do this.

On a technical level I use htaccess scripts to get the screen size and browser the client is using and send different CSS stylesheets.

On an antique auto parts site I gather customer info on their make and model in the account screen, then use this to display a catalog of only the parts for their auto. They can link to the entire catalog but the default display is personalized for them.

You can use customer preferrences for product sorting order, too. Provide a way to collect size, style and color preferrences and sort your clothing store with these at the top of the product list.

I had one store where we only displayed a few products based on customer preferrences from a catalog of thousands of products. The customer only wanted to see 4 or 5 products so we filtered a version of the store to only display the approved products. The customer could change his preferrences in the account edit screen.

Just use your imagination. Gather whatever info you need and then use it to filter the store.

Toolkit is my most powerful tool for doing these personalizations.