How personalized shopping experiences reduce return rates
Vaishali Ravi
·July 29, 2024
The better you understand your customer, the more likely they are to keep coming back to you.
By tracking your shoppers’ digital footprints, you can continually deliver personalized, relevant content that keeps them engaged with your brand—and leads them to purchase more frequently. In fact, McKinsey found that brands that excel at personalization achieved 40% higher revenue than brands that didn’t.
In this article, we’ll look at how to personalize the shopper experience throughout their buyer’s journey—leading to increased sales, lower return rates, and higher customer retention.
How does personalization work?
To personalize the shopper experience, it’s important that you’re tracking the right data.
Integrate your CRM with other tech solutions to aggregate data around every shopper’s interactions with your brand, whether on social media, your app or website, or customer support. You can track how often they visit a particular product page, see how often they’ve made purchases, learn what they’ve bought, and know when they’ve returned products. You can also leverage zero-party data (through quizzes or forms they’ve filled out) to understand their unique needs, such as what size they wear or their preferred product categories.
By getting a 360-degree view of each customer, you’ll be able to build personalized messaging campaigns tied to their actions and preferences.
For example, if a customer visits a product page for a new skincare product at your beauty product site, but doesn’t purchase it, you can follow up with an email or SMS message encouraging them to add the product to their shopping cart, and recommending similar products they may also like.
Or, let’s say a shopper purchased a bag of cat food from your pet supplies store three weeks ago. You can send them a timed follow up message encouraging them to restock before their pet runs out of food.
Using timed and triggered messaging that’s directly related to your shoppers’ behaviors can help you boost engagement, and encourage customers to convert at higher rates.
You’ll also be able to personalize content based on other criteria, such as the customer’s geographic region. For instance, if a shopper is visiting your fashion brand website from Sydney, where it’s currently winter, you can personalize their landing page to feature colder-weather items, with all prices listed in Australian dollars. Meanwhile, if they’re dropping by from Miami, you can display swimsuits and other summer gear, with prices in American dollars.
By delivering the most relevant content to each customer, you’ll deliver engaging experiences that are more likely to keep them invested in your brand.
Personalization in product returns
While personalization is an important part of developing a compelling experience for shoppers, it’s equally important during the post-purchase experience.
When a shopper requests a return, you can leverage a returns management portal like Loop to segment your customers and provide options based on their behavioral history.
For example, if a customer is a loyal, high-value shopper that you want to retain, you can offer them premium experiences such as a longer returns window and free return shipping, or provide them with a bonus credit to apply towards an exchange. On the other hand, if a customer frequently participates in bracketing (purchasing multiple items and sending most of them back), you can provide them with your standard returns window, and charge them a fee for return shipping to discourage future return abuse. Personalization enables you to deliver premium experiences for your best customers, while reducing investment in shoppers with low ROI.
When customers accept exchanges, you can use Loop’s “Shop Now, Shop Later” feature to encourage them to apply their store credit towards any other product in your store’s inventory, or hold on to the credit for later use. You can recommend the same product in a different size or color, or if they simply didn’t like the product, you can provide curated product recommendations based on previous items they’ve viewed or purchased.
By using personalization in the return experience, you’re responding to why the original product didn’t work for the customer, and offering them a resolution to their problem. With a manual returns process, customers typically need to send the product back for a refund and then decide whether they want to try a different size or style—creating a lot of friction that often prevents shoppers from making another purchase. By streamlining the experience with personalized exchange opportunities, you’ll be able to help the customer instantly trade in a product they don’t want for one they do, providing a great user experience.
You can also personalize the experience of physically returning the items. While some customers are happy to print a label and mail back the package from home, increasingly, most shoppers (54%) would prefer to drop-off the item at a nearby location without reboxing it. By offering both options, and showcasing all of the nearby drop-off centers in the customer’s region, you can give them the ability to create the return experience that works best for them. Once they’ve made a selection, you can use that option as their default if they need to make future returns.
Winning over customers with a personal touch
Online shoppers are increasingly comfortable with sharing personal data with retailers—so long as retailers use the information to support the customer’s buying journey. Accenture found that 91% of shoppers are more likely to stick with brands that remember them and provide them with relevant offers and product recommendations.
By leveraging both personal shopper data (what they’ve clicked on or purchased, as well as self-reported data like sizing information) as well as aggregated data (shoppers who like this product also liked that product), you’ll be able to provide compelling offers and recommendations that are tailored to the individual level. Guide your shoppers to relevant options they’ll love, whether they’re purchasing or exchanging a product, and you’ll be able to build loyalty and trust with your brand.
Want to see how Loop can help you personalize the returns experience?
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