Advanced personalization has been around for years - for example, we're now pretty much used to personalized recommendations we get every time we return to Amazon, or login to Netflix.

In fact, Amazon has been so great at delivering highly personalized experiences to its users that consumers now expect to come across a similar level of personalization anywhere they go.

Amazon is also remarkably good at being transparent as to what they're using to personalize customer journeys throughout the site, and giving their users full control over what elements are taken into account:

This type of transparency is a great way to overcome growing privacy concerns - a recent survey by Salesforce found that close to 60% of consumers were willing to share their personal data in exchange for a personalized shopping experience.

On top of that, more than half of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn't make an effort to personalize their experiences.

In other words, for ecCmmerce sites, personalized marketing is becoming an essential, an expectation, not a bonus element.

But while advanced personalization is quickly making its way into big brands' marketing strategies, smaller businesses are still falling behind. Most businesses owners fail to embrace personalized marketing because they assume it requires huge investments, if not hiring their own in-house development teams.

The good news is that advanced personalization is quite doable. There are already quite a few marketing solutions offering help in advanced personalization processes.

1. Create personalized experiences based on a variety of data

Using affordable solutions, you can deliver personalized experiences to first-time and return visitors to your site based on a variety of criteria, including location, number of visits, time of the day, specific events, and more.

For example, Duda is a web design platform built for agencies which has advanced personalization built-in. With this app, you can use a variety of triggers to deliver personalized landing pages to website audiences.

As an example, you can serve a custom CTA to those users who've arrived to the site when a business is closed, or you can set up a custom invite whenever a user lands on your site from a nearby location.

You can choose any of the following triggers (or a combination of triggers):

• Location - What physical location a user is visiting from 
• Device - Which device a user is visiting from (desktop, mobile, or tablet)
• URL - Whether the user lands on your site from a specific URL or from a URL with specific parameters in the URL string
• Time - What time of the day/day of the week/date the user is visiting on
• Visits - The number of times the user has visited

Using these as your starting points, you can then set specific actions that will be triggered. For example, you can add a personalized message to show up in a notification bar or a popup window.

2. Create personalized experiences for returning customers

You can also target your on-site calls-to-action to each returning user. There are a few powerful solutions that offer this functionality.

One of the simplest to implement is Finteza which includes a "re-targeting" feature that enables you to show custom on-site ads and CTAs to your returning visitors.

For example, you can deliver personalized ads to those who read at least half of your newly published guide, or registered at your site:

Finteza can be installed on your site by adding a short Javascript line which doesn't slow your site down.

3. Create dynamic email recommendations

You can also create dynamic email recommendations based on past engagement experiences, such as an eBook downloaded, a link clicked, etc.

There are a few email automation platforms which can handle these personalized email campaigns for you. Campaign Monitor, for example, is a powerful email automation platform, available at a reasonable price.

Through Campaign Monitor, you can select all kinds of email personalization, including:

• Basic email personalization: Name, gender, etc.
• Dynamic personalization based on past shopping behavior:

Their built-in templates include cart abandonment emails, birthday offers, and more.

4. Create AI-Driven Content Recommendations

You can also set up smart technology which can deliver content automatically when requested.

There are a few powerful solutions which enable you to integrate smart, self-learning technology, that can increase on-site engagement, without you having to spend days and weeks testing and measuring performance.

Alter, for example, is a clutter-free content recommendation engine, which uses artificial intelligence to learn each user's behavior, and personalize its messages to get more of your visitors to engage with your web pages.

Alter's messages can be customized, but its auto-pilot mode works incredibly well too. It distinguishes your site's most important pages and learns to pick the best time and message to point your visitors to those.

As noted, personalization in marketing generates more sales, drives impulse shopping, and builds customer loyalty. On top of that, personalized marketing is what more and more customers expect from eCommerce sites.

With the tools listed above, you can start delivering personalized experiences to your customers today.