Last week, we discussed the need for eCommerce stores to focus on personalizing their online shopping experience in order to stay competitive in today’s market. (If you missed it, catch up here.) With 59% of shoppers agreeing that personalization has an effect on what (or how much) they purchase, online retailers should be investing in a strategy around this driving factor—including how they provide and display CGC.

In our previous post, we introduced three key approaches to personalization:

1. Customize to the individual shopper
2. Customize by the brand category
3. Customize by the product

In this post, we’ll focus on the first component of the strategy.

Customize to the Individual Shopper

Show the reviews and the types of content that are most helpful to each shopper. That’s a simple statement, but there are many ways to go about it—and brands should use every avenue available to them.

Reviewer Profile Dimensions

TurnTo’s newest platform allows eCommerce sites to not only display reviewer profile information, but to create a customized experience for a visiting shopper by dynamically prioritizing the reviews from other customer profiles most similar to their own. This not only includes age, gender, and location, but stores can add custom profile details that are most relevant to their shoppers.

Take beauty & skincare for instance. Shoppers could use filters on skin type, hair color, skin tone, etc. to find information from reviewers like themselves. A shopper may want to know if a moisturizer is right for their sensitive skin, or if a foundation color really matches their dark or light skin tone. By giving shoppers the ability to customize the review content they see, stores can increase shoppers’ confidence that the product is the right choice.

Beauty & skincare isn’t the only product category that can benefit from reviewer profile filters. For example, a sporting goods store could benefit from the ability to sort on profile dimensions such as sport of interest and level of skill. A shopper who is new to a sport or activity will appreciate the reviews of other amateurs, and may not understand the details in reviews from advanced customers. On the other hand, a semi-professional may want to filter out reviews that rate ease-of-use for first-timers. Providing options to sort by custom dimensions allows even unknown shoppers to find the best information for them.

Preferences by Age and Gender

If you only have demographic data about your shopper, you can still make some personalized default settings in the display of your CGC. As with any demographic data, individuals may vary widely in their preferences, but age and gender do play a role in shoppers’ CGC preferences.

All shoppers say that ratings & reviews are the most helpful type of CGC, but women rate all types of CGC higher than men do. With the higher ratings for photos & videos and Q&A, it’s worth displaying customer-submitted photo and video at the top of reviews for female shoppers, and making the Q&A widget easy to find. On the other hand, a PDP designed for men should prioritize easily sortable ratings & reviews.

Divided by age, the 18-24 group rates photos and videos equally as helpful as customer Q&A, while all other age groups rate customer Q&A as more helpful, second only to ratings & reviews. Shoppers over 50, however, are the only group to prioritize product descriptions from the store above any type of CGC (by a small margin, just above ratings & reviews). For them, written content is key, so a PDP designed for that group could de-prioritize visual content.

If dynamic page layouts aren’t an option, companies should design the layout based on their target market, and then run a/b tests to find the optimal UX for their shoppers.

In the next post, we’ll talk about customizing your CGC to your eCommerce category and product.

Download our free 2019 State of Customer-Generated Content for more insights into making your CGC outstanding.