Drew Giovannoli, product marketing manager, Bazaarvoice

The online shopping experience has created many new challenges for brands and retailers who are trying to reach and attract consumers. Overloaded with innumerable options and equipped with the freedom to research and price-compare countless products at any point throughout the path to purchase, today’s shoppers expect a wide variety of options. However, they also have incredibly high standards when it comes to having a convenient and enjoyable online shopping experience.

According to a recent survey, 71 percent of shoppers claim that a “good online customer experience” is very important to them, and 70 percent said they will not return to a website after having a bad online experience. One industry where competition is high and online selling is particularly challenging is fashion and apparel. Over the past few years, new players have entered and disrupted the space making traditional fashion brands and retailers work harder for shoppers’ attention and share of wallet. For example, convenient rental or subscription-based services like Rent the Runway, Stitch Fix and Trunk Club send consumers curated fashion, shoes and accessories based on their personal fashion preferences. Additionally, Amazon is putting an emphasis on growing its apparel footprint and chipping away at the market share of household name retailers.

The personalization problem in retail

Though shoppers love the infinite choices e-commerce provides, the online shopping experience can never truly replace seeing and trying on clothes in physical stores or having a store associate help find and recommend the right items for you. Convenience and customer service are critical elements to the shopping experience and retailers who can deliver both win brand affinity and loyalty among their customers over time.

Consumers expect product recommendations, styling suggestions, and tailored promotions when they’re shopping in physical stores, but replicating this online is a much heavier task. The product catalogs in the online environment are vast and the anonymity of online shoppers make recommending appropriate products and targeting relevant promotions extremely difficult. For example, imagine a young woman is shopping for a new leather jacket. The product qualities that are most important vary consumer to consumer – one shopper might be shopping for style and care about price, appearance and the way the jacket looks with different outfits. Another shopper may be buying a leather jacket for a completely different reason – like riding her motorcycle – and she may care more about durability, weatherproofing and utility.

In physical stores, associates can ask the simple question, “What can I help you find today?” But how do retailers translate this experience online and at scale?

Personalization comes down to data

Successful personalization in the e-commerce environment starts with using customer data. It may seem surprising, but consumers are actually comfortable with sharing their data. Research shows that most consumers are comfortable with companies collecting and using their personal data, as long as it “leads to products and services that make their lives easier and more entertaining, educate them and save them money.”

If brands leverage customer data effectively, they can serve up content, promotions and recommendations that cater to each individual shopper and see consideration, time on site and conversions go up. A recent report shows that apparel retailers that have implemented personalization strategies see sales gains of 10 percent or more, a rate three times faster than other retailers. Also, consumers are looking for these types of shopping experiences. Research shows that 44 percent of consumers say a personalized home page would be very useful when shopping for apparel, but only 23 percent say they have experienced this. This gap clearly shows that fashion retailers are missing the mark and have a major opportunity to improve their personalization strategies and appeal to more shoppers.

The best customer data is behavioral

The reason online retailers are failing to display the best product recommendations isn’t because they aren’t using data. It’s because they aren’t using a complete set of data. Most personalization engines rely on traditional demographic data or a combination of third-party customer data from unknown sources. Based on these data sources, retailers populate their recommendation carousels with products that will hopefully appeal to shoppers who fall in certain demographic categories.

But using the previous leather jacket example, traditional demographic data is not necessarily an accurate way of targeting or suggesting products to your online shoppers. Two women who are the same age and live in the same city may have widely disparate opinions when it comes to finding the best leather jacket that suits her individual needs. Simply put, what people purchase is driven by much more than their age, gender or geographic location. Their lifestyles, hobbies, tastes and personal preferences are all factors that inform the types of clothes people buy.

Retailers must stop making assumptions about their shoppers based on the unreliable data sources they’ve traditionally employed. The secret to implementing an effective personalization strategy is to focus on behavioral data, not just demographic data. Displaying the most relevant online product recommendations is more about understanding where else the customer has been shopping, what products he or she is looking for, and how long he or she has been looking for them. These browsing behaviors do not only inform what products and promotions a retailer should recommend, but they also signify a strong intent to buy and propensity to convert.

Personalization providers are getting much more sophisticated when it comes to the type, freshness and completeness of the customer data they’re using to power their recommendations engines. Retailers must understand what type of customer data is informing their product recommendations and where their data is sourced. Otherwise, they risk delivering unwanted or unremarkable shopping experiences that annoy or turn away shoppers. Retailers who use behavioral customer data that demonstrate intent and purchase patterns will not only deliver the most relevant product recommendations, but create delightful shopping experiences that will convert shoppers time and time again.

Bazaarvoice provides ratings and reviews technology to 222 of the Top 1000 online retailers in North America, according to Top 500Guide.com.