Effective Personalization Strategies for Improving E-commerce Sales

Have you ever felt that your favorite e-commerce store understands your choices better than your partner? If yes, you are one among those new-age consumers who have gotten used to enjoying personalized services.

Customers these days are getting so used to receiving personalized experiences that it is now being taken for granted. In fact, 66% of customers say that they feel quite discouraged when they come across content that isn’t personalized.  

Rather than competing on pricing, e-commerce sites are now competing against each other to provide the best user experience. Personalizing customer experience helps brands gain customer satisfaction and loyalty. It makes them stand out from competitors and boosts conversion rates.

What is e-commerce personalization?‍

E-commerce personalization refers to the practice of providing a relevant experience for each user visiting your store. This is done by tracking browsing history, purchase history, location, age, gender, language, etc., using AI and other machine learning-driven algorithms.  

E-commerce personalization starts with knowing your customers and their preferences. Segmentation is the next step. By analyzing the data collected, you can group customers with similar requirements. Segmentation is especially important for stores that cater to a large audience base. For example, if you have products for both middle-aged men and young teenage girls, through segmentation you can provide unique experiences for both.

With the right personalization strategies in place, you can define user behavior, provide a seamless experience and guide them toward a purchase. Below are six ways you can engage your customers better and provide personalized experiences.

1. Offer user-specific product recommendations

E-commerce stores display products to customers based on their past searches and other website interactions. Product recommendations reduce the bounce rate, and can be placed on the home page, product page, or even as pop-ups.  

Recommendations help brands to upsell or cross-sell and thereby increase average order value. For example, for a person looking for a particular mobile phone with certain features, you can suggest one at a higher price by telling them that the second one has more features and therefore offers more value for money. This is an instance of upselling. You can try cross-selling by recommending phone cases or accessories to a customer purchasing a mobile phone. Upselling and cross-selling recommendations are most effective before, during, or after checkout.

Wiser, Product Recommendation Quiz, Dialogue AI Personalization, etc are some very useful Shopify tools that can help brands to provide personalized recommendations.

2. Provide easy on-site search

E-commerce personalization has evolved greatly and brands are now vying against each other to provide a holistic experience.  

The on-site search bar plays an important role in deciding the quality of user interactions with your store. By integrating a smart search option into your store, you can help your customers find precisely what they are looking for.  

Zevi’s shopify app is an amazing tool that can help you bridge the gap between your customer’s needs and your offerings. This AI-driven website search engine understands your customer’s queries and provides the best results. It deploys a neural search option that can understand different and mixed languages so that your customers can search in the most natural way and still get the best results. This AI-driven search engine not only provides accurate results regardless of misspellings and errors but also keeps learning from them.

3. Add customer reviews

Adding user-generated content in the form of photos, videos and text reviews from customers can add a whole new dimension to your personalization efforts. Adding reviews acts as an indirect form of product recommendation. Here your loyal customers are doing the recommendation for you, and that too, free of cost.

Shoppers tend to trust content from their peers more than those created by the brands themselves. In fact, 95% of customers make a shopping decision after going through customer reviews.

The Shopify review application, Reviewbit, is a unique tool designed to send automated, personalized review requests through WhatsApp. The very act of collecting reviews is a great way to engage customers after purchase and enhance their overall experience. If the buyers are unhappy with the purchase, they can be directed to customer support for an instant resolution of their concerns.

Add product reviews from customers to your storefront using beautiful display widgets from Reviewbit. The reviews can be added to your homepage, product page, or collection page so that your customers get to know how the products look in real life.  

4. Display location-specific products

For brands that have customers across the world, personalizing based on location is an effective way to increase conversion rates. Track the country, state, and locality of the buyers to display products and offers accordingly. You can make sure that the language and currency are displayed according to the location.  

By tracking the location, you can also display products based on local festivals or seasons. For example, if you are a store that sells clothes you can display products based on the weather conditions of a region. You can personalize your homepage to display winter clothes for one set of customers and summer wear for others who are in warmer parts of the country.

5. Provide relevant special offers

Displaying targeted special offers is another method to attract the attention of buyers. Offer relevant deals based on customers’ past purchases. Limited-time offers on products that the customers are interested in can create a sense of urgency and a fear of missing out.  

You can offer exclusive sales for your premium customers, referral discounts for first-time shoppers, and special discounts for your loyal customers.

6. Personalize your emails

Personalization doesn’t happen only when the users are on your website. Email marketing campaigns play a vital role in increasing your store’s revenue. Segmenting your audience based on demographics, purchase history, browsing history, etc will help in running targeted personalized email marketing campaigns for each group. Personalized email marketing generates a median ROI of 122%.

You can set up abandoned cart recovery emails to encourage your customers to act on their abandoned shopping carts. Adding customer names to your emails, though looks insignificant, can make a whole lot of difference in the conversion rates. Personalized emails deliver 6 times higher transaction rates.  

Wrapping up

Through personalization, you are providing a positive shopping experience to your customers. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work anymore. Personalization helps you make their shopping experience more enjoyable. The most successful stores are those that can engage their customers and create a great experience for them so that they keep coming back for more.

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