Are you interested in adding a more personalized ecommerce experience to your website?
Personalization is nothing new for ecommerce, but it’s becoming a popular way to retain customers and increase sales.
In this post, we cover what ecommerce personalization is as well as a few different strategies you can use to implement it.
What is ecommerce personalization?
You can implement ecommerce personalization in a lot of different ways, but they all have the same purpose, and that’s to improve the customer experience by optimizing it for individual customers.
Have you ever had an ecommerce store or app remind you that you haven’t ordered a particular product in a while? Or maybe you logged into an ecommerce store, added a few things to your cart and didn’t check out and now that store is sending you abandoned cart emails.
These are examples of personalization in ecommerce.
The benefits of ecommerce personalization
According to a report by McKinsey & Company, 71% of consumers expect personalized experiences when shopping.
Even more crucial, 76% of consumers say personalization makes them more likely to make a first-time purchase with a store while 78% say it makes them more likely to shop at that store again.
This is just one example of the benefits personalization brings to ecommerce.
Here are a few more:
- Improved customer experience
- Increased customer loyalty
- Better conversions
- More sales
- Makes your store more competitive
- Helps you to get to know your customers better
Improving the customer experience and increasing customer loyalty
When you offer a personalized experience in your store, you improve the customer experience on an individual level.
Depending on what type of personalization you offer, customers will be able to find products that they like easier, will remember to order something they were planning on buying or will receive more support even after they’ve made a purchase.
Implementing a personalized shopping experience gives you the opportunity to demonstrate to your customer that you care about their individual needs, not just your own. This is something that’s often missing from ecommerce stores since you can’t speak with customers face to face.
Personalization turns first-time customers into loyal customers, and loyal customers make repeat purchases.
Better conversions and more sales
If you personalize the shopping experience for new customers, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase. This means you’ll receive more conversions from new site visitors.
You’ll also receive more sales as a result overall.
New customers will make more purchases, and repeat customers will make more purchases. Plus, repeat customers will have higher average order values.
More competitive
It’s hard to find many niches that aren’t untapped these days. There are likely at least half a dozen stores like yours in your niche, and they’re all fighting for the same customers.
You can really make yours stand out by increasing your personalization efforts.
Ecommerce businesses are hard to sustain as it is.
A personalized ecommerce experience may just give you the edge you need to remain competitive.
Get to know your customers better
A good ecommerce personalization strategy only works if you know what your customer wants.
Increasing your personalization efforts forces you to place customer data, customer behavior and customer engagement under a microscope, giving you key insights on what customers like and what actions they’re most likely to take.
This will help you get to know your customers better, which will help you determine what new products to sell, what to promote in marketing campaigns and what content to create.
10 ecommerce personalization examples
Here are a handful of examples of personalization in ecommerce for you:
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Ad retargeting
- Retaining customer data
- Integrating personalization into your email marketing strategy
- Email segmentation
- Optimized website experience
- Dynamic content block
- Special discounts based on customer behavior
- Product recommendations on the checkout page
- List of products purchased in the past
- Personalized bestseller lists
1. Abandoned cart reminders
If you collect a customer’s email address, you can send them reminders when they leave items in their shopping cart but do not check out.
Often times, a customer wants to know an order’s total, including tax and shipping fees. They’ll need to go through the checkout page to do this, so you’ll wind up collecting their email address even though they didn’t create an account or complete a purchase.
This gives you the opportunity to send gentle reminders about the abandoned items.
2. Ad retargeting
Ad retargeting will soon look different as browsers move away from cookies, but for now, you can retarget customers on other websites through the use of third-party cookies.
Let’s say a visitor browses your store, and then visits a site that has ads from Google or browses Facebook.
You can set up retargeting campaigns that display ads for your store on other websites your visitor browses.
3. Integrate personalization into your email marketing strategy
Most email marketing services allow you to build profiles for each subscriber on your list. These profiles feature your subscriber’s name and email address but can also feature additional fields depending on which service you use and which fields you want to use on email forms.
These fields allow you to personalize any email by including your subscriber’s name.
However, there are three specific types of emails ecommerce stores can use to add personalization to their email marketing strategies:
- Abandoned cart reminders – For first-time visitors and repeat customers who added items to their shopping carts but didn’t check out.
- Order follow-up – For sharing additional tips on a product your customer purchased or for recommending similar products.
- Reengagement – For encouraging a customer who hasn’t made a purchase in a while to return to your store.
4. Retaining customer data
Giving customers the opportunity to save their personal data for easy use on future orders is a simple way to add personalization to your store.
Personal data includes:
- Saved shipping addresses
- Saved payment methods
- Order history
Having this data easily accessible makes placing additional orders a lot easier.
5. Email segmentation
Email segmentation is extremely important for ecommerce stores. It allows you to offer a personalized ecommerce experience and retain customers by delivering personalized marketing messages.
You can integrate your ecommerce platform with your email marketing service, which will allow you to set up marketing automations that segment customers based on purchase history.
These segments will allow you to deliver personalized product recommendations that are based on products customers have purchased in the past as well as personalized content recommendations that are based on interest and demographics.
6. Optimized website experience
Certain web builders and plugins allow you to customize what content gets shown depending on certain factors.
For example, you can translate your entire website into Spanish and redirect your visitor to the Spanish version of your website if their browser is set to the Spanish language.
You can even create regional versions of your website and redirect visitors to it if they’re visiting from that region.
You can also change how certain content looks depending on the type of device they’re viewing from.
7. Dynamic content block
Create dynamic content blocks that change depending on if a customer is new or returning.
Offer a discount on first time orders for new customers. If a visitor is logged in, show product recommendations that are based on the visitor’s purchase history instead.
You can even show the last product(s) they purchased in case they need to purchase it again.
8. Special discounts based on customer behavior
Sometimes a personalization strategy can be as simple as offering special discounts that are dependent on customer behavior.
For example, you can set up exit-intent popups that trigger when a customer is about to leave your store. You can use this popup to advertise a special discount that’s hard to pass.
You can also encourage visitors to make a purchase by offering discounts in your abandoned cart emails.
A discount may also be the perfect way to reengage a customer who hasn’t placed an order in a while.
Finally, loyalty programs offer simple ways to offer customers personalized discounts based on actions they take within the program, such as referring five friends.
9. Product recommendations on the checkout page
There are two types of product recommendations you can and should place on the checkout page:
- Products that are related to products your customer has in their cart
- Products that are related to products your customer has purchased in the past
Adding “Add to Cart” buttons to each makes it easy for your customer to add last-minute products to their cart.
10. List of products purchased in the past
Some customers aren’t interested in trying out new things no matter how much you want them to take part in marketing campaigns for new products.
For these customers, you should set up special lists that contain products they’ve purchased in the past.
If your store is quite large with different departments, you can even set up different lists that are organized by product category.
Each product should have an “Add to Cart” button.
How to get started with ecommerce personalization
First, improve the way your store handles privacy by allowing customers to opt-in to personalization.
This can be done by including personalization in your privacy policy, which should be connected to an opt-in popup.
Overall, you should consider designing customer journey maps, then optimizing those maps with personalization.
The map will reveal where you lose customers the most, which should give you ideas on where to start with personalization.