customer segmenting and targeting

[♥bruyndoncx]

an infographic with some ideas

http://monetate.com/infographic/personalize-your-website-to-create-a-unique-one-to-one-experience/

 

anyone having done such a thing with oscommerce ?

[burt]

Very interesting question. I did a lot of work on this subject on a particular shop, getting (over time, as it was expensive) almost to the point of having the shop react in different ways to different customers...

 

Eg; customer A owns a rabbit and a guinea pig. So let's target the ads and the category/manufacturers structure solely for rabbits and guinea pigs. Customer B only has a dog, so show him only dog stuff. And so on.

 

It was 80% there, all the hard work done... then the shopowner decided to move on to another developer. So all the benefit that was to come was lost :(

 

How you could use that in a kitchenalia shop I don't know. But with a pet shop it's easy; the customer owns a rabbit, show rabbit stuff.

 

I guess you could look at what they bought in the past (all baking stuff? all white goods?) and target based on that? Maybe on age - do old people like something different than young people ?

 

I wrote a little bit on it on the blog:

clubosc.com/products-to-specifications-and-customers-to-specifications.html

[MrPhil]

Once a (returned) customer signs on to their account, it would not be too difficult to look at their past orders (and browsing history) to get some hints about what they own and what they like to buy. From there, you might somewhat personalize their experience by putting merchandise similar to what they've bought before first in the "new products" and "you might like" (but you will probably want to avoid listing things they've recently purchased). It would be a matter of figuring out some theme in what they've purchased (and looked at) before, which is not necessarily a simple thing. Also, you don't want to stack the offerings so much that they get the impression that you only offer a limited number of products, or that it's difficult to go off and explore other areas. A gentle nudge based on what they've purchased (heavier weighting) or browsed (lighter weighting) would be good, but don't jump to the conclusion that they want to see only Category X or Y. Don't hold on to past purchases and browses for too long -- start weighting them less and less, and eventually discard them. Not everyone wants to be reminded about what they bought 5 years ago, or looked at a month ago.

 

To do this without a positive login identifying the customer could be tricky. As they browse your offerings, you might be able to pick up a pattern in what they're looking at, and from there, suggest offerings in a similar vein. That can be difficult to do until you've built up a statistically valid amount of data. It's possible to save customer purchase and browse information from session to session, but you have to tread carefully with guest browsers. Saving information from session to session would involve cookies, which could be considered tracking cookies under E.U. (and elsewhere) law. Also, there's no telling if the same person is using a computer from session to session. It could even be on a public computer (internet cafe, etc.). I would confine such information gathering to within a single session.

 

For something like a pet store, it's probably safe to assume that if they've bought rabbit chow lately, they have a rabbit or two (or four, or eight...) and you can tilt suggested products towards rabbits. Just don't make it difficult to see other categories, in case they're branching out into, oh, I don't know, boa constrictors (but don't upset them by featuring boas too prominently -- many rabbit fanciers have no intention of feeding their bunnies to their snakes).

[♥bruyndoncx]

Thanks for the feedback.

 

My first idea was that segmenting based on ip (region) would make sense. White goods being a very local offering, open house days being much more relevant to people nearby, or specific promo's more valuable for people outside of belgium.

 

Although we don't have the equivalent of pets, perhaps our brands can act as a pet substitute. People are rather loyal to a cooking brand.

[burt]

@@bruyndoncx - did you come up with any ideas that workable in osc ?

[♥bruyndoncx]

@@burt, no I haven't proceeded with this, i've been working on the collections stuff lately and prepping for xmas, my usual coding weekends have been spent at tradefairs stocking up ...

[MrPhil]

This link was recently on this forum's front page (@@mattjt83's Status update): http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2013/11/11/guidelines-navigation-categories-ecommerce-study/ It might give some good ideas for how sites cross- and up-sell.

[burt]

@@bruyndoncx @@MrPhil @@mattjt83

I wonder if that link deserves its own thread with an open discussion on it (like we had for the SEO thread). We could do a lot in osc to make it more UX friendly...

[♥bruyndoncx]

@@bruyndoncx @@MrPhil @@mattjt83

I wonder if that link deserves its own thread with an open discussion on it (like we had for the SEO thread). We could do a lot in osc to make it more UX friendly...

yes, I think it would be good to have more discussion on this. Linking to multiple categories is what is missing at this point, and that is a tricky one. My customization for collections (based on product families) covers a lot of the other points raised. I wouldn't mind sharing it, but it is not contribution ready, someone would have to go through the code to package it for a standard install.

[MailBeez]

hi all,

 

wonder if someone continues on working on this topic?

 

As part of the MailBeez Email Marketing platform am working with customer segmentation and targeting as well, including RFM (Recency Frequency Monetary) Analysis.

 

Would be great to join forces here!

 

regards

cord