But, fundamentally, personalization is so important because it enables retailers to market to customers in a way that directly and precisely meets their needs and desires.
So how can you personalize your store for more sales and revenue?
In this post, we’re going to look at twenty-seven real-life examples of ecommerce personalization. These examples are simple, effective, and you can replicate all of them without allocating significant resources.
What Is Ecommerce Personalization?
Ecommerce personalization is the process of creating shopping experiences that cater specifically to individual customers and not a single broad audience.
Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to ecommerce, retailers will ensure that important elements of the customer journey, including on-site browsing, email, social media activity, and even paid ads, change based on the needs and past behavior of customers.
You might be asking, “That’s all well and good, but what’s the point of personalization?”
Personalization results in happier customers that are more willing to purchase from your store.
It’s a fair question. Creating elements, both on-site and off-site, that adapt to individual customers is more resource-intensive than opting for a single, general solution.
But the answer is simple. Personalization drives more sales. A lot more sales. Retailers report a 20% increase in sales after implementing personalized features.
So the moral of the story is that by overlooking personalization, you’re leaving a sizeable chunk of revenue on the table for your competitors to snap up.
What Are Personalized Product Recommendations?
Personalized shopping recommendations are recommendations based on a shopper’s profile. They are usually determined by two things: past visitor activity and preferences that a customer has selected on your site.
Recommendations are most often displayed either on product pages or in sales emails.
On product pages, customers might see sections displaying related products, recently viewed products, product ads based on past activity, and so on.
There are many possible personalized email recommendations. Customers may choose, for example, to be notified of updates about out-of-stock products or opt-in to category-specific mailing lists. Equally, customer data can be used to send customers information about relevant promotions, products they have abandoned before finishing checkout, or suggestions based on past purchases.
Personalized recommendations can even be delivered through paid ads. Facebook remarketing, for example, allows retailers to target past visitors with ads for products they have previously viewed or added to their cart without purchasing.
What Are Personalized Social Media Notifications?
You can use personalized social media notifications to interact directly with customers through social media.
This is made possible by AI-run chatbots, which give you the ability to communicate with thousands of customers as though you were talking in person. Users can open their Facebook messenger app, for example, and order a new product they have recently viewed. Or they may wish to speak to customer service to process a refund or check the availability of an item in a local store.
It’s also possible to send users direct messages to build engagement. You can thank them for a purchase, ask them for a review, notify them of a new product they might be interested in, or just wish them a happy birthday.
What Are Personalized Triggered Emails?
Triggered emails are personalized emails that are sent when a customer undertakes a specific action.
#EmailMarketing is still one of the most effective methods of promotion for online retailers, boasting an average 35% open rate. Personalizing emails further increases their effectiveness. Click To TweetHere are four of the most common “triggered emails”:
- Welcome emails that are sent when a customer first makes a purchase or registers an account on a site.
- Abandoned cart emails prompting customers to complete a purchase. This type of email is sent after a customer adds a product to their cart but doesn’t finish the checkout process.
- Reactivation emails which are sent after a period of inactivity, incentivizing customers to make a purchase by offering them a promotion or discount.
- Order follow-up emails that notify customers of an item’s shipping and delivery status.
Some Are Examples of Ecommerce Optimization You Can Use to Boost Your Store’s Conversions
Now that you got a solid overview of the different types of personalization strategies, let’s move onto the examples themselves.
1. Run Geo-Location Alerts
If you have separate stores for visitors from different countries, offer to redirect them when they land on the wrong site. Most retailers will have country-specific domains (.com, .co.uk, .fr, etc.) for international customers.
There is a caveat to this tactic, however. Don’t force customers to view products on a country-specific site. Often, visitors will leave your store because they’re actually in the right place but your geo-location script keeps trying to redirect them.
2. Provide Seasonal Content
Seasonality plays a significant role in some ecommerce sectors, especially fashion. Customers will be looking for different products depending on the time of year they visit your site.
You can pre-empt this interest by including notifications and offers that are tied to specific seasons like spring, summer, autumn, and winter, or even holidays like Halloween and Christmas.
One of the quickest ways to implement this strategy is by including season-specific elements on your homepage and in site-wide areas like the sidebar and header. You should also alert customers to new lines and seasonal promotions via email..
It goes without saying that seasonal content will not apply to every segment of your market, and you should account for seasonal variations and holidays in different countries and hemispheres.
3. Cover the Basics With Personalized Emails
Personalization has the power to dramatically increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, prompting customers to open, read, and click on emails.
While you can leverage many different types of personalized emails, for various situations and segments of your customer base, there are a few that you should send to all customers.
Here are the essential emails to include in your personalization strategy:
- Order updates – Let customers know when their order has been processed, shipped, delivered, etc.
- Feedback emails – Ask customers what they thought about their purchase and if they had any problems. These emails are also great for generating customer reviews.
- Subscription alerts – If you expect customers to use a product more than once, such as with consumable household items, send them an email after the usual period of use.
4. Personalize the Homepage
Your homepage will likely be one of the most popular pages on your whole store, if not the most popular page. It’s prime space for advertising products, promotions, and offers.
Whenever a customer lands on your homepage, they should see a host of personalized links, including their preferred categories, recently-viewed products, suggested items, and more.
Just look at how many personalized elements are included on Amazon’s homepage:
You might be worried about overwhelming customers, but it’s entirely possible to organize numerous homepage elements in an easy-to-view way, that allows visitors to pick the options most applicable to them.
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