In an age where personalized marketing is considered the holy grail for success, creating a website that connects one-on-one with your customer can hugely impact how they interact with your brand.
Tailoring the website experience helps merchants delight shoppers, and as they say, happy shoppers spend more – right?
The key is to build a dynamic ecommerce website that uses advanced technology to attract and retain customers and guide them to that checkout.
What is a dynamic website?
A dynamic website is a website that displays different content every time a user views it.
Whether you’re welcoming a first-time visitor or a returning customer, your page can adapt itself to be relevant and engaging.
The way content changes will depend on various factors such as in-session user behavior, past data, and demographics:
- In-session behavior: Content is adapted based on the user’s behavior within the website. For instance, what pages were visited, the time duration spent on the site, and which products they added to the cart.
- User data: Content is varied based on previous user behavior, such as past purchases and engagement with prior marketing material (such as email opens and ad clicks)
- User demographics: Content is updated based on demographics such as geo-location, time-of-day, or buyer personas.
So, what can dynamic websites do for you?
Predictive recommendations
How often have you caught yourself browsing through items in the ‘recently viewed items’, ‘items frequently bought together, or ‘related items’ categories?
These categories are all curated into your customer journey to place products you are likely to click on, learn about, and buy.
How does this work?
Dynamic websites can customize product suggestions to optimize the customers’ shopping experience using AI and machine learning technology alongside a wealth of customer data.
Regardless of whether the user is an existing shopper (signed in to an account) or a guest, the website can track and suggest the most relevant products throughout the shopping journey, helping them browse more effectively and keeping them engaged on the website.
Perhaps one of the most well-known examples of dynamic ecommerce websites is Amazon.com – the multi-billion dollar behemoth that revolutionized online retail and logistics for the entire world. By clicking on ‘your recommendations’ on their website, the user will be redirected to a page full of products closely related to items they have browsed before.
Predictive search recommendations
Have you ever started typing into a search bar, and your sentence was finished for you? While they don’t exactly read minds, ecommerce predictive search recommendations are extremely useful in automatically guiding the best search items for customers.
For instance, if a shopper starts to type in the letter ‘k’, they might see the word ‘keyboard’ autocompleted for them. This conclusion is drawn based on their previous shopping behavior and browsing history; for example, the shopper could’ve just added a mouse pad into their shopping cart moments before. If another shopper types in the same letter, they might see the word ‘kettle’ autocompleted instead, again based on their own browsing history.
Intelligent predictive search recommendations can assure brands that their shoppers explore the site on the quickest path to purchase.
Predictive sorting
Once a user lands on a search results page, dynamic websites can automatically sort the order of products shown based on the user’s previous browsing or buying behavior.
This functionality enables shoppers to view items they’re most interested in without having to scroll through pages of products to find what they’re looking for.
Predictive sort is especially handy for users shopping on mobile devices; after all, 54% of all ecommerce activity happens on mobile.
Due to screen size limitations, mobile tends to show fewer products per page, and shoppers typically only click on 3.88 pages whenever visiting a new website. Predictive sorting is a simple way to list items they would like most within the first few pages, making the mobile shopping experience more seamless.
Search Dictionaries
Have you ever searched for an item but got no results in return? Maybe there was a typo, or the keywords entered didn’t specifically match any items in the system. It can be discouraging. Luckily, smart search dictionaries can help.
Smart search dictionaries capture and analyze data across your ecommerce website to find relationships between search terms, then intelligently searches for an alternative recommendation with the closest synonym.
For example, a shopper searching for an “indigo top” might not get any results because the color could be too niche. But, the search dictionary will recognize synonyms for indigo and pull search results for similar colors like blue, navy, or purple items. The shopper looking for the “indigo top” may or may not find what they were initially looking for, but there is a higher chance that they would not leave empty-handed.
Moreover, merchants can also enlist alternate words for typos and customize these lists themselves if they know what words are most commonly misspelled.
If your website isn’t dynamic, it’s time to get started
Making the shift to a dynamic website can benefit every stage of sales.
From customizing the browsing experience to providing more accurate recommendations, the proliferation of dynamic website content has been one of the most salient online marketing trends of recent years.
With personalized dynamic content, the right products can be presented to the shopper at the right place and at the right time.
Not only does this help generate more sales, but the value of personalization also lies in increasing customer retention.
By paying close attention to detail (data), merchants can understand their customers’ needs and wants and learn how better cater to the increasingly fast-paced consumer lifestyle.
Are you looking to take your website to the next level? Contact us for a FREE consultation and transform your ecommerce website for long-term success.
