By Neil Patel

In today’s global marketplace, it’s a great time to be a consumer. The rise of e-commerce means more and more businesses are striving to get the consumer’s attention, offering better prices and services just to keep them interested. With online sales representing 16 percent of total retail ad spend, business owners don’t want to leave money on the table.

The smartest business owners know that the only way to consistently beat the competition is by offering more value to customers.

However, if everyone in my industry is selling the same products, at the same price, how can I stay competitive? The answer: Create memorable experiences.

If you’re looking for a unique way to offer value to consumers, customized products can be a powerful, engaging tool that improves customer satisfaction and drives up conversions in the process.

What Are Customized Products?

Customized products exist as a way for consumers to customize their purchases and walk away with a unique brand experience.

Examples include:

• Nissan letting consumers design their own cars, right down to the engine color
• Lenovo allowing customers to build their own custom laptops
• Build-A-Bear Workshop focusing on unique customization from the ground up

These examples showcase the importance of offering customization and customization.

It’s not just a theory. Epsilon’s research found that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer customized experiences.

The concept of customization was designed just a few decades ago to promote exclusivity. Customized products were a status symbol, a vehicle to make consumers with massive budgets feel special.

Although that’s still the case with certain products (exotic cars and designer handbags, for example), rapid advances in technology have made mass-customization a possibility for everyone.

Still, despite the lowered barrier to entry, product customization maintains a certain allure to consumers. This begs the question: If the key component of customized products is no longer there (the exclusive status symbol), then why are consumers still so interested?

The answer is actually pretty straightforward: Businesses were operating with a fundamental misunderstanding of what made customization so appealing in the first place.

Reasons Your Company Should Offer Customized Products

What massive brands around the world have figured out, and what e-commerce business owners need to understand, is that exclusivity was only a small piece of the puzzle.

Product customization can have a massive impact on customer satisfaction, and by extension, your e-commerce business’s success. Why? Because not all of your customers want to experience your product in the same way.

Think about it. When it comes to something like marketing, we understand that different customers have different needs. The first-time visitor to your site needs a different call-to-action than the customer with the abandoned shopping cart. Customized customer experiences are nothing new, it’s just time that e-commerce businesses started to expand their customization horizons.

Where things get really interesting for me is when you start considering the potential financial …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog