eCommerce Personalization Examples & Tactics For Shopify

Imagine this for a moment: You have a physical store. Your customer walks in looking for something. She browses around, walks down the aisle, looks around to ask you (or your staff) a few questions.

Then, all she hears is this:‍

"Hello, Customer. How can we help?"
"Lady, you looking for something?"
“Hey Visitor Number: 239871032, Want to buy winter coats?”‍

Can you see just how odd it sounds? 

That's what happens to eCommerce stores without personalization.

It’s not just odd or awkward; it’s outright expensive for you. In the year 2016, Accenture fast-forwards to a few eCommerce personalizations stats 2021. According to an  Accenture report, 43% of U.S. consumers are more likely to make purchases with companies that personalize experiences, 31% report finding great value in services that automatically learn about their needs to personalize recommendations.

Did you know that 49% of buyers have made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience? Meanwhile, on average 71% express some level of frustration when their experience is impersonal.

Simply put, most eCommerce retailers just don’t get it. Plus, it’s not too hard to achieve eCommerce personalization to give your customers that little extra love. 

Convinced? Let’s see a few examples and tactics for eCommerce personalization and how you can achieve these for your Shopify eCommerce store.

How to Deliver eCommerce Personalization on Shopify? ‍

eCommerce Personalization is all about making your Shopify store deliver personal experiences by addressing your customer by name, remembering your visitors' choices (including geographic location, previous visitor behavior, products that they are interested in).

Then you can dynamically show content, product recommendations, and specific offers based on those previous actions, browsing behavior, purchase history, demographics, and other personal data.

Personalizing your eCommerce site is a great way to improve conversion rates. It can be difficult, though, to know where you should start and what specific changes you should make.‍

4 Steps to Personalize Shopify Stores (With Examples) ‍

While there’s a lot you can do for eCommerce personalization, we recommend you start simple and keep it simple as well. Instead of going all technical and geeky on you, here are some basic steps you should take to help make your Shopify store a lot more lively, dynamic, and as personalized as it can get. 
‍

Start with Audience discovery & management

You can start creating audiences by targeting visitors in real-time based on the actions they take on your site (browsing a product category, searching for products on your Shopify store, watching videos about a product) as well as what you know about them with dynamic customer profiles (past behavior, stated preferences, existing information, geographic location).

Then, sort and segment these audiences so that you can identify them later (see below). 

To deliver personalized experiences, you'd have to remember visitors' choices (including geographic location, previous visitor behavior, products that they are interested in). Show content, product recommendations, or specific offers based on those preferences when the person returns to your site. 

This is called Dynamic Personalization. Create specific audiences based on several factors such as:

• Email subscribers (or not) 
• Leads (with preferences, history, and lead score) 
• Existing Customers (with a history of their purchases) 
• Potential customers (with browsing history, products they are interested in, products clicked on, videos watched, pages visited, and more) 

Utilizing these data, you can use several tools to help you deliver targeted messages (or not, while they are on your Shopify store).

While how exactly you deliver personalized messages depends on the technology or tools that you’d use, this is how it looks like for some popular tools out there: 

Using OptinMonster, address your email subscribers by their first name by using {{form_first_name}} ‍

Drip uses Liquid Syntax (much like Shopify does) and helps you create personalized email messages based on the information you already have about your customers or email subscribers. Using “Content Snippets”, email messages change based on “If...else” statements inside content snippets. 

Here’s an example of how personalization is done with various tools for Shopify users: 

This is a random content snippet (shows a few subscribers one message while other subscribers see another message). ‍

{% assign randomness = “now” | date: “%S” | modulo: 3 %}
{% if randomness == 0 %}
P.S. Check out my Youtube channel for video tutorials on email marketing automation
{% elsif randomness == 1 %}
P.S. Looking for even more ways to grow your MRR? Here’s a fantastic article I just found
{% elsif randomness == 2 %}
P.S. Do you love inspiring and motivational quotes as much as I do? I’ve collected the 42 best email marketing quotes for you
{% endif %}‍

So, this is what subscribers see as soon as a content snippet is added inside the email. In this example, it’s done after signing off, after “P.S:” 

Some subscribers see this: 

While other subscribers see this: 

See where we are going with this? 

Plan & deliver store visitors' Personalized Shopify Store experiences

Once you know your visitors, you can create compelling on-site experiences tailored to specific audiences that appeal to them. 

The scale and complexity of those personalized experiences can change, but you can still deliver a personalized experience to visitors depending on who they are (already a customer? Is she an email subscriber? Where is she from? What does she like? Did she add any products in the past?

Thanks to the two steps above (audience discovery and your plan to implement the data), you can do the following: 

For instance, just knowing the data above and using OptinMonster on your Shopify store, you could create a targeted campaign with pop-ups as shown: 

Or, you could use smart tags just to send in personalized pop-ups with a specific call to action for your email subscribers (data is taken from your email marketing list, connected with OptinMonster). 

Here’s a detailed guide on how you could achieve this by using Smart Tags with a personal offer to your returning visitors (or previous customers) ‍

Use Retargeting For Customized outreach at scale‍

Personalized experiences aren't always delivered only on your Shopify store: a lot more can be achieved even after your store visitors leave. 

By using effective retargeting techniques (there are several), you can also reach out to your customers with targeted sequenced ads, emails, and more. 

For instance, if you use Adroll retargeting email campaigns, you have a way to send out emails immediately after a potential customer abandons shopping cart as shown: 

Or send out targeted emails to existing customers for cross-selling but based on their previous purchase history. 

Use retargeting emails or retargeting ads to specific, warm audiences that you’ve taken the time to sort and segment leads to high open rates, click-through rates, and sales.

Create to Connect: About Page With Real Pictures & Videos

eCommerce Personalization, however, isn’t just about using tools and technology to call out customers by their names. 

It also has to do with your brand character, the language you use while communicating (blog content, page copy, product descriptions, and more) with your audiences (visitors, leads, and customers).  

Write content like you are writing to your best friend. 

Last, but not least, put a picture of yourself as the "company owner" in contact information so shoppers feel like you're just an email away from answering their question about shipping times for a specific order or how much more it costs to add a gift wrap packaging.

If you have a full-fledged team, put up your team photos out there for your potential customers to see (no one wants to buy from a wall of HTML); people buy from people. 

That way they'll know you care enough to give them individual attention even if it's not related to what they clicked on this time around.

The key to getting eCommerce personalization right is in the right strategy and stellar execution. 

The pursuit of eCommerce personalization usually results in an over-abundance of useless data. Not every personalized experience will resonate with your Shopify store visitors, so it’s important to always understand how these experiences are performing and adjust accordingly. 

That's why you should always keep testing. Your success depends on continuous measurement and improvement of your campaigns, Shopify store design, and constant tweaking with the tools and strategies you implement. 

How are you going to personalize your Shopify eCommerce store?

At la Hutte, we create, we improve, and we grow our e-commerce shops every day. We can help you create awesome, personalized eCommerce experiences for your customers in your Shopify store. See what we do with our eCommerce services.