eCommerce Personalization: 6 Simple Strategies to Skyrocket Conversions

eCommerce personalization is fast becoming a strategic edge for brands looking to capture a bigger market share. This makes business and logical sense. Today, with the variety of personalization tools, hacks, and tips that marketers are embracing, it is impossible to ignore the benefits of eCommerce personalization. Here’s what the research tells us:

• Increased sales: According to Monetate, marketers can leverage an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences.
• Greater customer preference: Epsilon suggests that around 80% of shoppers will willingly buy from a company that offers personalized experiences. Furthermore, data by Forrester claims that around 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.
• Repeat buyers: Segment predicts that 44% of consumers will become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience with a particular company. 

Seriously, the more repeat buyers you have, the more organic and sustainable your growth will be. Your sales will skyrocket. Your users will connect with your brand thanks to a consistent and personalized experience and translate to long-term loyal fans. You’ll continue to capture a larger pie of the market share. Sounds like a sweet deal, right?

Long story short, if you haven’t integrated eCommerce personalization strategies into your eCommerce marketing game, you’ll eventually fall short of your customer’s expectations.

In this blog, we’ll outline six extremely useful (and practical) eCommerce personalization strategies–complete with real-life examples–that you can implement right away. Let’s get the ball rolling.

eCommerce Personalization: 6 ways to Supercharge Your Online Conversions

1. Use live chat for personalized one-on-one support:

If you want to connect instantly with your customers without any hassle, you need to invest in robust live chat support software. Wondering how it works?

Take a look at lululemon’s website, for instance. The brand has a dedicated live chat section on the website:

On clicking this option, the onlooker is redirected to a page where they have to input important details such as name, contact, and email:

This is the first step towards personalization that the brand is undertaking. By collecting important information, such as email and contact, the brand can send hyper-personalized emails to customers such as the one shown below, which has a featured “We think you’ll love’ section:

Coming back to the website, once the user fills in their details, they can start chatting with the live agent and get the personalized help they need.

In instances, where the live chat agent is unavailable, the brand provides a set of useful predefined options that the customer can choose from to get their queries addressed–such as tracking the order, returning the order, etc.:

🔑Key Takeaway: Live chat empowers your brand to proactively reach out to the customer, ask them if they’re facing any issues, help resolve their queries relating to product purchase, payments, checkout, among others via real-time communication, and deliver a superior experience at the click of a button.

2. Leverage weather-based personalization to boost sales:

If you think sending an email with a first name is going to cut it for driving personalization, think again. For example, consider what Shop Direct does on its Very.co.uk website. Instead of showing relevant product recommendations based on a customer’s purchase history (an industry-standard by now), the brand offers weather-sensitive offers. These are based on the climate that’s brewing as a customer logs in. For example, if it’s nice and sunny outside, here’s how its homepage looks:

On the contrary, if it’s raining and cold outside, the homepage looks something like this:

The result? Shop Direct witnessed a significant uptick in conversion rates and enjoyed additional revenues of £5 million to its top line.

🔑Key Takeaway: eCommerce brands understand the importance of staying ahead of the competition – be it for marketing, website optimization, or personalized selling. So, brands must think how they can personalize the shopping experience while ensuring it remains consistent for the user.

3. Showcase User-Generated Content (UGC) across the onsite funnel:

Did you know that around 54% of customers claim they usually find out about new products through friends? In marketing terms, this means that you’ve got to work on the word-of-mouth publicity and up your UGC game. However, most brands stick to promoting UGC content only on their social media handles–a big mistake. 

If you want to boost your website’s conversion rate, take inspiration from SeaVees. The brand extracts UGC from Instagram (using the SeaVees branded hashtag) and highlights it prominently on the website homepage:

As you can imagine, this small-yet-significant effort builds trust. Shoppers can see products being used actively in real-life by real customers. 

🔑Key Takeaway: As per data, authentic user-generated content boosts credibility. That’s why 87% of brands are using UGC to share authentic content with their audience. However, the trick lies in promoting UGC using the right channel and at the right time. Just like as Skinny Dip demonstrates below:

Generally speaking, “Be where your customers are” is a good place to start for understanding where to promote your UGC content.

4. Remind customers of previous purchase or allow them to continue shopping from where they left it off.

This ecommerce personalization strategy has to be a crowd favorite. Customers today are bombarded with a barrage of marketing communication from innumerous brands every day. They browse, add items to the cart, abandon the cart, and transition between sites mid-way. In other words, your customers are constantly multi-tasking. They’re often forgetting what they liked in the first place, after being overwhelmed with a thousand options. 

The simple solution is to literally remind customers of their previous purchases. This is what Shoeline demonstrates below via its ‘viewed’ and ‘purchased’ tabs:

You’ll be surprised to see how a subtle ‘nudge’ can encourage the customer to complete the purchase without any added effort or friction.

Alternatively, you can integrate a “Pick up where you left off” pop-up to re-engage returning visitors as Bandier does:

🔑Key Takeaway: Personalization is all about making your customer’s life easier. It’s about providing them with relevant product suggestions and enabling them to enjoy a friction-free and contextual shopping experience. It’s about empowering them with the complete picture of their connection with the brand. From their past transactions and order history to their favorite items and most-liked products. You need to let your customer know that you truly get them and their needs. 

👉Suggested Reading: How to Get Sales on Shopify: 14 Proven Tactics You Can Steal From Allbirds

5. Drive personalized campaigns based on user behavior

Marketers understand the importance of customer analysis by leveraging user data in real time. From analyzing their purchase and on-site behavior to capturing information on how the customer is reacting to your marketing campaign, every little detail matters. For instance, if you see a customer who has spent a considerable amount of time on a particular product and is about to bounce off, you can drive an exit-intent campaign as minimumfashion demonstrates below and offer them a discount that nudges them to complete the purchase:

In essence, you’re driving personalized campaigns based on user behavior. This either reels first-time users in or drives repeat purchases. If you’re second-guessing its efficacy, remember that this campaign converted at 37.4%.

🔑Key Takeaway: Not analyzing user behavior can turn out to be a mistake of gigantic proportions. What’s more, it’s not enough to simply track user behavior. You need the right tools to extract actionable insights. Use data to drive different types of personalized campaigns -from emails and in-app messages to exit-intent campaigns and pop-ups, the world is your oyster. 

6. Celebrate your customers every chance you get:

Customers love to feel heard, appreciated, and cherished by the brand. This is why celebrating the major milestones of your customer’s journey becomes instrumental in reinforcing a strong bond. Take a look at Spotify’s email below which ticks off all the right checkboxes in terms of acing personalization.

In addition, you can also celebrate customer milestones (collect birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) and send them a discount to make their day special:

🔑Key Takeaway: Thanking customers for their continued trust and loyalty to the brand is a time-tested universal personalization marketing mantra that works every single time. The idea is to demonstrate to the customer that your relationship with them goes beyond the transactional level, developing into an emotional connect–one that is central to your brand’s success story.

Use eCommerce Personalization to Your Advantage Today

Personalization has taken on a new meaning for eCommerce customers as well as marketers. Gone are the days when a personalized email with the right [Firstname [Lastname] sufficed to wow customers. Brands are increasingly innovating their eCommerce personalization game to come up with new ways to make their customer’s shopping easier, quicker, seamless, and convenient.

Whether you’re just starting out on your eCommerce journey or are a seasoned eCommerce brand, try these strategies outlined above and pave the way for organic growth. Think we’ve missed out on personalization strategies that have worked wonders for you? Share your experiences below. We’re all ears.

Author Bio: This is a guest post from Dhruv Mehta. Dhruv is a Digital Marketing Professional who works at Acquire and provides solutions in the digital era. In his free time, he loves to write on tech and marketing. He is a frequent contributor to Tweak Your Biz. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.