The importance of establishing a strong customer identity

The importance of establishing a close-knit customer identity across devices to provide the customized experience that the consumer expects.

The need to fundamentally know who your customers are and what they want has become increasingly important today on e-commerce platforms. While staying focused on new customer acquisition in recent years, many online sellers can lose lost sight of their current customers. As a result, the expectation of a personalized shopping experience by loyal customers leaped past the capabilities of many e-commerce platforms.

Although e-commerce platforms have the luxury of owning some of the most beneficial first-party data in the sector by virtue of requiring logins for purchases, their understandings of their customers and the full customer journey are incomplete. That’s because many users stay anonymous as they browse across platforms when they are not logged in.

Today, the ability to leverage a true understanding of a customer’s purchase decision results in the ability to deliver better shopping experiences. E-commerce platforms that have taken the time to invest in and understand their customers in a personal way are now leading the rest by providing better customer experiences that result in further sales.

That’s the power of identity, and all e-commerce platforms must make the most of it for the future. By doing so, e-commerce sites can find new opportunities in the following areas.

Product Recommendations

Anyone who’s ever gone down the rabbit hole of “recommendations” and poorer after can declare that e-commerce sites excel at taking customer information and translate it into a unique and individual shopping experience. Such recommendations are vital to upselling and creating more revenue.

Advertising

One of the toughest challenges e-commerce platforms face is the fact that a single user could possess many IDs. Across browsers and devices which could be very limited. Without a cross-device, cross-platform understanding, an individual fracture’s into multiple users. Phone, the person might be known as a man aged 21-30. ablet, he’s known only to be high-income. On her laptop, no information is available at all on Chrome. But on Internet Explorer, he’s known to be a running enthusiast. Yet, all of these contrasting profiles represent the same person. If an e-commerce platform can collect that identity and understand is looking at the same person. Then the, ad experience delivered to that person can be completely unique and personalised.

Finding New Customers

Finally, e-commerce platforms today are constantly challenged to find and gather new customers. When people make purchases on an e-commerce platform, those sales have actual value. But if the e-commerce site doesn’t know how and why the users came to the site. Or how and where they saw ads, and which ones are working. This can seriously damage how an e-commerce site can gather new information. And better tailor a shopping experience to suit a customer need’s.