We live in a world where consumers are shown products and services as soon as they even mention or think of availing them! As consumers ourselves, we see how effective our ads are tailored to our interests and how well ecommerce stores like Amazon recommend products for us. For Shopify stores, ecommerce personalization is one of the must-have strategies to maximize conversions.
By providing a personalized experience on your Shopify store, you can make the shopper eager to continue shopping from you.
What is ecommerce personalization?
Ecommerce personalization allows merchants to display relevant offers, recommendations, and content to their visitors based on their browsing and order history, demographics, and other personal data.
For instance, you can enhance the shopping experience for a customer who is about to checkout by displaying a ‘Recently Viewed Products’ recommendation widget. By seeing other products they were interested in, you can nudge them to add more items to their cart.
Importance of ecommerce personalization
Personalization has proven to positively impact ecommerce businesses. Brands that have personalized experiences have seen higher engagement, better customer experiences, higher customer acquisition, and increased conversion rates.
Personalization allows you to successfully lead shoppers from your storefront to checkout. On your Shopify store, shoppers can be nudged to continue shopping, with recommendations tailored to them or relevant messages that encourage them to checkout. 44% of consumers say that they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience with a particular online retailer.
It isn’t just on-site personalization that customers are receptive to. Personalization in cart abandonment emails induces higher customer engagement rates and reduces cart abandonment rates by 10%-30%.
What’s more, personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates than non-personal.
Types of ecommerce personalization
There are 3 broad types of ecommerce personalizations to help you identify the different ways you can personalize your Shopify store’s experience and communication for shoppers:
1. Context
Personalizing your store based on the context like which type of device, location, time of day, etc. For instance, you could send a notification during the weekend nudging shoppers to have a fun weekend. This also includes event-based promotions, localized languages, and currencies, etc.
2. Behavior
Using your shopper’s behavior, you can personalize your store experience and your store’s marketing to display relevant promotions and recommendations like ‘Recently Viewed Product’ recommendations and abandoned cart emails.
3. History
You can tap into your customer’s history to display personalized store experiences and messages. This would include transactional updates, loyalty program messages, and past email interactions.
Ecommerce personalization strategies
1. Localization
If you have a large customer base of Spanish or French speakers, you need to adapt your store’s language to these customers if you don’t want to lose them. Localizing your Shopify store to different kinds of customers is a crucial part of ecommerce personalization. If the experience you are providing is not optimized to a customer, they will end up abandoning your store completely.
When localizing your store’s experience, ensure that the language and the currency of the store are suited to your customers.
Apps like Geolocation allow you to cater to a global audience while providing local experiences. The app will recommend the right language and currency for your store visitors based on their details. This way, you won’t want to spend time worrying about unoptimized experiences to shoppers.
2. AI-powered product recommendation
The kind of recommendations that you show shoppers on your Shopify store is important. Irrelevant and vague product recommendations can lower your chances of converting interested visitors.
Take, for instance, Amazon. Amazon displays highly personalized recommendations to its shoppers, helping them find what they are looking for and nudging them to purchase faster. Due to this positive and convenient shopping experience, their shoppers come back to them time and again to shop. 35% of Amazon’s revenue is generated by its recommendation engine.
Set up personalized product recommendations using WISER. This Shopify app is built to help you power your store with personalized recommendations based on each shopper’s history and behavior. Using this data, Wiser allows you to display widgets like ‘Recently Viewed Products’ and ‘Inspired By Your Browsing History’.
You can also set up custom recommendations like ‘Popular Products’ and ‘Frequently Bought Together’. Wiser lets you set up ecommerce personalization on your Shopify store without having to spend too much time customizing experiences manually. Install Wiser now to personalize recommendations on your Shopify store.
3. Location relevant announcement bar
Running a sale for shoppers in a specific country? Or want to inform shoppers in different countries about their shipping times? One of the best ways to add location-based context to shoppers is with a customized announcement bar. This can allow you to display different messages based on the country that the shopper is from, ensuring shoppers receive a very unique experience and accurate information about your Shopify store.
You can enable this with the Country-Based Announcement Bar App. This newly launched app lets you display specific announcement messages for different countries. You won’t be limited to one generic announcement bar anymore!
4. Live chat
When you enter a retail store, you have a store assistant who helps you find the right size and clear any questions you have. This experience is often lost in an ecommerce store. This is where live chat can help.
With a live chat, your shoppers can ask questions to your team and get instant, personalized help. With their questions answered, shoppers can go on to confidently shop from the store. 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer live chat support.
Tidio is a Shopify store that lets you set up live chat on your Shopify store. With it, you can set up automated chatbots to answer frequently answered questions as well as allow your customer executives to respond to custom questions from shoppers.
5. Segmented audiences for personalized marketing campaigns
Your analytics has a goldmine of information on the different ways you can personalize experiences for different customers. Analytics apps like RevTap allow you to tap into customer segments. These segments define different kinds of customers you can have on your Shopify store and understand their preferences.
You can then use these customer segments to send personalized marketing campaigns to these segmented audiences. This way, you can deliver relevant messaging to shoppers, increase clicks and conversions for your marketing promotions.
6. Product customizations
Shoppers want more flexibility with how they customize the products they buy. This is especially important for items like shirts. Many ecommerce stores provide multiple variants of a specific product and even custom details, based on the industry. You can provide such flexibility on your Shopify store too.
The Bold Product Options app lets you set up a customizable product so that shoppers can choose specific details. You can even use the product customization app to add image swatches, size options. engraving details, ask for gift wrapping, etc. For instance, if you allow custom messages on the product, your shoppers can input the text while adding the item to their cart.
7. Triggered marketing messages
Triggered marketing messages allow you to send messages to shoppers based on a behavior or action taken by them, or by where they are in the customer journey. This action may be making a purchase or viewing a specific page. Some triggered messages include transactional messages like order confirmation or review requests.
SmartrMail is one of the best Shopify email marketing apps. Using its inbuilt automation flow features, you can set up triggered marketing messages to be sent to shoppers. These automated messages can be sent for different reasons— abandoned cart messages, cross-sell products, offer personalized recommendations, etc.
One of the most common automated messages set up by Shopify stores is the abandoned cart email. This allows you to remind shoppers about the item left in their cart in an attempt to bring them back. You can set up a sequence of 2 or 3 abandoned cart emails to nudge these interested shoppers to come back and buy, using tactics like discounts and urgency.
8. Personalized search results
Smoother shopping experiences result in better conversions. By improving search functionalities on your Shopify store, customers can add context to their search, letting them find the product they are looking for more quickly. In one study, it was found that when site search was used, conversion rates on ecommerce stores shot up by 80%.
Searchly is a Shopify app that lets you enable a smoother search experience on your Shopify store. Shoppers can filter their search with specific details like color, size, and type, allowing them to find the product they are looking for quickly. The app also allows you to enable auto suggest so that shoppers can be shown suggested keywords in real time instead of having to type out the entire word.
Ready to personalize your Shopify store’s experience?
Ecommerce personalization is a crucial part of any store’s success. By keeping in mind different ways you can personalize your store experience, you can cater to online shoppers, provide relevant recommendations and suggestions, and increase your conversions.
Product recommendations, especially play a huge role in how online shoppers end up buying on your Shopify store. With the right recommendation displayed at the right parts of your store, you can nudge shoppers to buy more, remind them of products they expressed interest in, and lower drop offs. Recommendations are a surefire way to enhance the shopping experience.
Wiser makes it easier to deliver personalized shopping experiences. The Shopify app lets you display unique and customized product recommendations based on the shopper’s behavior and history.
You can place these recommendations across different parts of your store, nudging more sales. Ready to enhance the shopping experience your store offers? Install the Wiser for product recommendations app today.
