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Did you know that 56.86% of people think that an eCommerce business cannot be successful without personalization? And, 43.14% of respondents think that customers are used to and therefore expect a maximum level of personalization.
This is according to our recent survey of 51 ecommerce businesses and ecommerce agencies.
However, it is one thing to know that ecommerce personalization is both expected from customers and needed from eCommerce businesses to boost conversion rates and sales.
It is another to actually put it into practice in a way that works and doesn’t get into “stalker territory.”
So, we reached out to a handful of ecommerce businesses, ecommerce agencies, as well as a few customers to share their favorite personalization tips and examples.
One of the most effective personalization strategies is to create personalized post-purchase offers and one-click upsells on the checkout page.
“One great strategy would be to use dynamic post-purchase offers (OTOs or one-click upsells) depending on the products purchased by the buyers, based on conditions such as the product category,” says C Shakhawat Sultan of WPFunnels. “Let me explain. Sure, there are relevant upsell products shown when on a product page, or while viewing the cart. But those do have a high conversion rate. Rather, the use of a sales funnel that uses post-purchase offers has proven to deliver far more conversion.
Once someone has purchased a product, relevant post-purchase offers related to that product would have a greater impact on a buyer’s intent. Let’s say, someone buys a keyboard for his computer. Once he processes the payment, he is redirected to another page where he gets a one-click upsell offer for a Mouse at a 20% discount. The buyer initially came to the site to buy just a keyboard, and he probably already has a mouse. But this added discount (which he wouldn’t normally get on the site) will make him think of buying it, thus a 50% chance of conversion.
Now, the crucial part here is that the offer product has to be related or relevant to the main product. For an instance, when someone is buying a keyboard, an offer for a t-shirt afterward would not make any sense. So, the offer product being in the same category as the main product would be the ideal way to go.”
The best and most well-known example of this is Amazon. You don’t get to more than $197 billion in ecommerce revenue without mastering customer research, upsells, and cross-sells based on customers’ viewing habits and past purchases.
“One of the reasons Amazon is so successful is because it tailors each customer’s experience based on their past purchases,” says Natasha Rei of Explainerd. “For example, if you’ve bought a lot of books from Amazon, the site will start recommending other books to you that you might like. Or, if you’ve searched for a product but never bought it, Amazon will start displaying ads for that product on its site. This kind of personalization makes customers feel valued and appreciated, which encourages them to keep coming back to Amazon.”
David Wurst of WebCitz adds, “Amazon does eCommerce personalization through a combination of customer data and algorithms. By tracking what customers have looked at and purchased in the past, Amazon can make recommendations for future purchases.
Additionally, Amazon runs algorithms that analyze customer behavior to create targeted promotions and product suggestions. A possible reason why Amazon is likely better at personalization than most other leading eCommerce sites is because of the sheer amount of customer data it has.
While many shoppers are aware that Amazon tracks their activity, they continue to shop on the site for its wide selection and convenience. This scale provides Amazon with a large pool of information from which to find patterns in customer behavior.
Besides giving product recommendations based on purchase history, Amazon also personalizes its eCommerce experience by taking account of your location. This means if you are located in a different country than where the item is being sold, Amazon will automatically show you prices in your local currency.
Another way is through their Wish List feature, where you can list down things to buy later on or for you to share with friends or family members to give them suggestions about what they should buy for you during a special occasion.
Personalized eCommerce is important because it gives customers a more tailored experience that meets their specific needs and helps to create a more efficient shopping experience. Personalization increases sales volume because it attracts more customers and makes them stay longer on the site, which could eventually lead to conversions.”
According to our recent survey, the most efficient way to do ecommerce personalization at scale is by creating dynamic offers mainly through banners and pop-ups based on user behavior.
Christopher Moore of Quiet Light says, “One amazing example of customer personalization is automatically updating your homepage banners to promote relevant deals and products based on a customer’s previous purchases. This way, you can show your customers how much they care about them. It’s like walking into your favorite store and being greeted by name, and shown the deals in your favorite section. This type of personalization helps the customer get to where they want to go and makes a purchase more likely.”
Andrew Maffettone of BlueTuskr adds, “I’m a big fan of personalizing pop-ups based on where a user came from. For example, if we chose to run a sale on Instagram, we like to customize the pop-up to be relevant to the people that came from Instagram looking for that sale. We almost always see increased conversion rates when we can customize the 1st thing a user sees when they land on the website.”
One way to add a layer of personalization and increase average order value is by creating bundles and packages.
For example, Richard Clews of Pants and Socks says, “Amazon’s “frequently bought together” box. It’s amazing because it upsells products – but in a helpful way. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a book without realizing it’s part of a trilogy. Amazon will show you the next book in the series so you can enjoy both in sequence. Another example: Amazon will show you toothpaste and floss when you’re shopping for brushes. You don’t have to look up the right toothpaste or fret about forgetting to buy toothpaste. Amazon will remind you. I’m now looking to add the same feature to our site to direct people to matching pairs of socks, underwear, and loungewear.”
To improve the performance of your online store, it’s vital to have access to useful and actionable data. But, with so many metrics available to track, it may be hard to determine which ones will actually help you move the needle.
That’s why we have created a concise dashboard template that only tracks the most important metrics for analyzing the core elements of your ecommerce businesses, such as:
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring your online store’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in ecommerce reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics 4 account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
This is almost too basic to include, but if you are not adding personalized recommendations to product pages, you are potentially missing out on sales.
“When someone clicks on our product, we also display companion products,” says Melanie Musson of TopQuoteLifeInsurance.com. “These companions aren’t tied directly to the product but are also displayed based on the customer’s browsing history. Their history gives us an idea of how they intend to use the product and that enables us to find the right companion product for the customer.”
For example, Leanna Serras of FragranceX adds, “Product-detail page (PDP) recommendations can provide a personalized experience by showing shoppers products that are similar to the ones they have already bought. You can implement dynamic upselling by recommending similar items with higher margins or better conversion rates.
Cross-selling on PDPs helps shoppers to discover complementary items and increase their cart size. In our ecommerce store, personalization programs have increased our conversion rates by 13% and our customer satisfaction rates by 21%.”
While personalization tactics in ecommerce emails, as well as SMS campaigns, have been around for well over a decade, it still works well. Plus, there is more ecommerce-specific email marketing software, like Bento, Drip, and Klaviyo, to make this process easier.
“Personalized email marketing follow-ups have been a huge success for our clients during the holiday season in 2021,” says Matt Erickson of National Positions. ”We implemented this personalization strategy for a number of our fashion clients where abandoned cart customers, past customers, or other opt-in customers would get triggered email reminders based on their browsing or purchase history.
If they had purchased a hat in the past, they might get an offer for a matching belt or shirt. If they abandoned their cart, they would get a follow-up, complete with the product images, showing them what they had placed in their cart. Campaigns like these were supplemented with action-based and strategically-timed triggers to make sure the brand was engaging with the right customers at the right time.”
Stephen Light of Nolah Mattress adds, “For a mattress brand like Nolah, with a very specific product line, we find personalized email marketing to be one of the most effective ways to engage and acquire customers. Purchasing a mattress online can feel like quite a commitment, and we have many an abandoned cart.
We use personalized email marketing to retarget consumers who didn’t quite commit, and we use these emails to provide education on how the product in their cart can benefit their sleep and overall wellbeing. By utilizing user behavior, we can personalize emails to offer something of real value rather than just pushy sales pitches.”
Most ecommerce brands have live-chat enabled on their website and or on social media, like Facebook, to provide additional customer service. You can layer a chatbot on top of that to provide personalized recommendations.
“One of the best methods of eCommerce personalization is the implementation of chatbot technology, which can often make intelligent product recommendations based on the user’s past behavior,” says Roy Morejon of Enventys Partners. “The real-time support couples with personalized, data-based information can impress buyers and keep them on board. You can even do it without AI – a simple live chat with a customer service rep who can help a consumer find what’s best for them is a strong enough personalization technique.”
While you can get some of this data from user behavior tracking in tools, like Google Analytics, more brands, like Beardbrand, are wising up and leveraging product quizzes to gather additional first-party customer data insights. You can leverage these recommendations not only for customer support, but also throughout your marketing efforts.
With recent Facebook Ad and iOS privacy updates, retargeting might not be as effective and cheap as it used to be in the 2010s. However, it can still produce results, especially as a way to counter high cart and checkout abandonment rates.
“Retargeting translated into Conversions Out of sight out of mind is ineffective in dealing with business challenges and certainly not a way to approach marketing, which is why it is critical for every ecommerce business to have a retargeting strategy,” explains Woody Sears of Hearhere. “We realized we had many who traversed our website but left without purchasing, however, we saw it as an opportunity rather than a permanent loss, and knew that acting to re-engage quickly could be the difference between acquiring a customer or losing a sale.
We implemented a method known as granulating retargeting, in which we analyzed website engagement, time on site, and visitor interests, and then re-engage with personalized marketing, videos, or graphics, to continually monitor interest over a period of two weeks. This method provided us a metric to evaluate in which we could reasonably expect a conversion or save valuable time and resources by letting go of an unproductive lead.”
For instance, Rohan Kadam of Biking Know How adds, “I implemented these steps on my client’s website landing pages and was able to reduce the cart abandonment rate from 7% to 3%. The strategy worked wonders for me, it is as follows.
Using countdown clock on my landing page caused an 11% increase in conversions. And, running dynamic remarketing ads got me a 23% increase in conversions. Running dynamic remarketing ads has been most effective for me because firstly, setting them up is very easy on the Google Ads platform. Secondly, through dynamic remarketing ads, I could target my audience (shopping cart abandoners) with highly personalized messages (ads had images of products that customers added into their shopping cart but did not end up buying).”
One of the key components to doing ecommerce personalization at scale is regularly measuring and monitoring what works and what doesn’t work.If you are still using spreadsheets and manually going to all of your key software to update your reports, you are wasting a lot of time and resources. That’s where creating an ecommerce sales dashboard and using ecommerce reporting software like Databox, can be beneficial.
You can connect to dozens upon dozens of software, including Shopify, Stripe, WooCommerce, Google Analytics, and more so that you can monitor your ecommerce site performance in real-time. Get started for free today to see why we are one of the leaders in the industry.
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Jessica Malnik is a content strategist and copywriter for SaaS and productized service businesses. Her writing has appeared on The Next Web, Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and many other sites.
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