October 04, 2022

Successfully Leverage Adaptive Content on Your Ecommerce Site

A quick search on Google shopping or Amazon shows hundreds of products for customers to choose from. Even niche ecommerce websites offer an endless variety of products and product categories. So if you find your customers frequently abandoning half-filled carts, they just might be overwhelmed with infinite choice.

What customers are looking for is an ecommerce experience that reads their minds. They want products they love to appear at the top of every product search page. 91% of consumers surveyed said they would definitely purchase a product or service from a brand that offers a personalized shopping experience.

You can now fulfill your customers' dreams by using adaptive content. Adaptive content is a powerful technology that provides tailored content and helps customers discover products they truly desire. Read on to find out what adaptive content is, how you can customize it, and easy ways to implement it on your site today.

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What Is Adaptive Content?

Adaptive content (also called smart content or dynamic content) works by customizing your website and product listings to match your customers' preferences. It uses behavioral analytics to determine how best to serve your content to your audience. For example, a woman visiting an online clothing store will see different content on the home page than when a man visits the same site.

The technology behind adaptive content has three key components.

Data collection

The foundation of adaptive content is the individual customer's user profile built from past and current behaviors, preferences, and more. Data collection technology records a website visitor's past purchases, products clicked, social media interactions, search terms, and other details and uses this information to predict what they will like.

Integration

Smart content technology also pulls website visitor data from other sites they visit on the internet. This gives you more comprehensive insights into your customer's thought process. For example, if the customer frequently purchases red items from other shopping platforms, your website can show them red-colored products first.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the driving force behind adaptive technology. Powerful algorithms sort and categorize all your products so the AI "knows" exactly what products you are selling. It then matches your products with the customers who visit your website. For example, if you own a pet store, AI highlights dog products to dog owners and cat products to cat owners.

The Benefits of Adaptive Content for Ecommerce Retailers

As you can imagine, customers love website personalization. A full 60% of those surveyed by Twilio said they would become repeat buyers if their ecommerce experience was personalized. Let's look at some more benefits for ecommerce retailers.

Increased Customer Engagement

Web content personalization increases both site visitor time and engagement. Conversion rates across landing pages and call-to-actions (like your Buy Now button) increase significantly. No wonder brands using adaptive content report revenue increases by over 6%!

Improved Customer Understanding

Adaptive content technology gives you deeper insights into your customer demographics. You can better target your marketing campaigns by age, location, gender, and much more. For example, adaptive content insights reveal that most of your customers are 20-30-year-old married professionals from California. You can then target your ad campaigns to this demographic. Tools like Semrush Persona make it very convenient to create and share your top buyer personas with your marketing team.

Brand loyalty and fan following

Repeat customers make up just 8% of an ecommerce store's audience demographics. However, they can generate a whopping 41% revenue. You can use adaptive content to incentivize customers to repurchase. For example, offer discounts to frequent site visitors or target buyers with personalized product campaigns.

A deal encouraging loyalty

What Data Can You Use for Generating Adaptive Content?

Adaptive content technology uses third-party tracking (called cookies) to record data about site visitors. Data privacy can be a concern, especially with strict data protection laws, like GDPR, prevalent in various countries today. However, statistics show that 76% of buyers are comfortable sharing data for ecommerce personalization.

Some examples of data you can collect for your website include:

  • A geographical location such as region, city, country
  • Your buyer's journey and the questions they are most likely to ask
  • The devices used to visit your website or product listing
  • Time a user spends on a specific product or page.

Apart from cookies, you can collect personalization data directly from your visitors using email surveys, pop-up questionnaires, and yes/no polls on critical site pages.

Pop up surveys to collect relevant data

Adaptive Content Use cases for Ecommerce

There are unlimited ways of using adaptive content, and every brand comes up with its own unique ideas and use cases. We have given some suggestions below.

Relevant Deals and Offers

You can use dynamic content to provide relevant recommendations and discounts. For example, you can email discount codes for recently-viewed products closer to a customer's birthdate. You can highlight travel category items when site visitor location indicates they are away from their usual city of residence. If the customer has purchased a frequently used product like cleaning products, you can send a timely reminder asking them to restock.

Relevant Deals and Offers - example

You can populate your site search results based on real-time behavior and visitor preferences. For example, let's say you search for dog food on a pet products site. You have purchased on the site before, and it knows you own a Great Dane. It can then showcase food brands nutritionally designed for large dog breeds in your search results.

Enhanced Site Search - example

Highlight Relevant Products

You can show off products on the homepage, header, or footer that your buyer is most likely to purchase. These recommendations can be based on past purchases, user behavior, or user profiling.  You can also change the wording of your product listings and website copy to talk directly to the visitor. For example, you can change product descriptions to use words or spelling local to the site visitor's geography. An online grocery store may use the word eggplant for Australian customers but use aubergine to describe the same vegetable to visitors from the UK.

Highlight Relevant Products - example

How to Implement Adaptive Content

There are different types of software tools you can use to start showing personalized web content on your site. For example:

The above solutions are expensive and technical, posing challenges for many small and medium ecommerce brands. If you don't have the technical expertise and budget for expensive software, consider using Semrush Audience Intelligence. It is a free app that you can use to learn everything there is to know about your audience. You can collect data about online habits, interests, purchasing behavior, demographics, and even their mindsets.

For ecommerce owners selling only on Amazon, customization can be more challenging. Amazon doesn't give you the flexibility to integrate personalization into your product listing. However, there is a workaround. You can use a tool like Traffic insights for Amazon to collect data about all your listing traffic. You can funnel this information into targeted marketing campaigns that redirect visitors to your Amazon listing page.

Tips for Making Dynamic Content Work on Your Ecommerce Site

Dynamic content requires flexibility and experimentation to succeed. It is important to test different approaches to get the best results. A lot of success comes from a consistent research process and tweaking. Some other suggestions include:

  • Avoid overspending at the start, as options are endless.
  • Focus on one area at a time and build up gradually.
  • Consider personalization as an ongoing process.
  • Keep adapting as technology and market conditions change.
  • Prioritize your customer's needs over business goals.

Apart from your website, you can also use adaptive content in ecommerce for content marketing, advertising efficiency, and new product development.

Conclusion

Adaptive content gives you control over what your site visitors see and interact with. You can customize the buyer's journey to each unique individual by highlighting those products that they need, want, and will definitely purchase. Reading your customer's mind is no longer as expensive or time-consuming as it was in the past. You can use adaptive content software, plugins, and tools to get started. Semrush even has a free Audience Intelligence tool to collect comprehensive information about every customer. Get started with personalization by downloading the tool and experimenting with it.

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Along with adaptive content, you can use several other technologies to grow your ecommerce business. Another popular technology that we recommend is Progressive App. Read more to discover what is a progressive web app and why ecommerce owners need to adopt them.