Personalization allows merchants to offer shopping experiences unique to a customer's preferences. This is done by collecting data on a customer’s browsing and purchasing history.
This kind of information helps Shopify’s algorithm predict what a customer will search for next, which helps you deliver product offerings that are most relevant, narrowing their search and improving their shopping journey. Different studies found the following on personalization.
What these statistics highlight is that website personalization enables enjoyable and memorable shopping experiences for customers. When customers are enjoying their shopping, they’re more than likely to buy something. So, in essence, personalization drives conversions.
In this article, we’ll look at website elements you can personalize to drive conversions.
Banner ads are powerful for persuasion. When done right, they can attract the attention of any customer that lands on the page. In addition to aligning your banner ads to your website’s look and feel, they need to contain engaging messaging as well as a clear and strong call to action.
To influence conversions, you need to take the messaging to the next level by personalizing it. Doing so helps you create a connection with your customers as you’re talking directly to them and affirming their needs. If you have personalization solutions that collect customers’ browsing history, you can tailor the banner ads according to what you predict they might need next. An alternative that works, although not as hyper-personalized, is using geolocation, seasonality, gender, age, job position, interests, and other demographic segmentation.
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A lot of people may argue that pop-ups are annoying, which may dissuade you from adding them into your personalization strategy. In most cases, they can be annoying if the communication is not aligned to the customers’ intended goal and if they’re perpetual.
But, you can leverage pop-ups on your ecommerce site by making them more relevant, and more personalized. For example, you can recapture the attention of returning browsing customers with a pop-up that includes the details of the last product they viewed.
With a tactic like this, there’s a high chance that the customer may still be interested in the product and you could end up gaining that lost sale.
Here’s an example of a personalized pop-up:
Product recommendations are widely used in ecommerce and have proven to be a huge contributing factor in conversions. According to this study, product recommendations account for 26% of revenue. In addition to that, customers that click on the recommendation are 4 times more likely to add the products to the cart and complete the purchase.
The first step to help you win with this strategy is studying your customer’s shopping behavior. This will enable you to suggest products that your customers would actually like to buy.
Irrelevant product recommendations will only have the opposite effect. So, use product recommendation engines to get to know your customers first to be able to make quality recommendations that will convert. You can implement different kinds of recommendations:
Here’s a homepage recommendation example:
Here’s a product page recommendation example:
Most purchases are a result of impulse decisions made by window shoppers who were simply browsing through without the intent to buy. This is mainly due to the fear of missing out (FOMO) on the product. This study found that the average American was spending around $155.03 monthly on impulse buys before the pandemic. In 2020, this number jumped by 18% to reach $182.98. This presents you with an opportunity to use FOMO with personalization to boost conversions. If you know what products your customers have previously viewed or added to the cart, nudge them toward a purchase via a notification alert. Create a sense of urgency with your messaging. This kind of notification re-engages the customer, and because it’s addressing them directly, it creates a connection with them, which can influence buying.
Here’s an example of how you should do a personalized notification alert:
Now that you know of the different ways you can personalize your web store, it’s also just as important to know that it’s not an approach that works for all stores. So, you need to evaluate whether your store can benefit from it. To do that, you need to look at these key factors:
If you’re a small business with less than 50 unique SKUs across categories, you might not need to get into personalization. This is because it’s possible that your products all show in a single category, which means not a single product is lost in the maze of other products.
Personalization works best when you have a large number of products and you need to highlight specific products you wish to drive sales for. It also works best when you are trying to help customers navigate around your extensive product offering by narrowing down their choices so they’re not overwhelmed.
If your ecommerce site is fairly new, chances are your traffic hasn’t reached the level it needs to in order for personalization engines to collect enough data. In this case, the primary focus should be growing your traffic, and optimizing your product content using search engine optimization (SEO) that will help you create better visibility and ranking opportunities. Then only much later, when you’ve gathered enough traffic, can you consider personalization.
One of the main purposes of implementing a personalization strategy is to boost conversions, right? But for personalization to be effective, your site should already be meeting the standard current conversion rate (CVR). Based on industry standards, the average CVR is 0.5-1.5%.
But it all depends on the nature of products sold, operating markets, and how many competitors or substitutes are available. This means that if your CVR is lower than 0.5, you would need to study your current conversion funnel. Doing that will help you understand where conversions are dropping, which will give you a full overview of where the issue is.
In some instances, the issue could be that product information is lacking in some form.
So, ensure that your product information is of the highest quality with a PIM system.
Plytix is a catalog management system that centralizes the storage and management of your product information. With this intelligent PIM for Shopify, you can easily ensure that your product content is enriched, accurate, and up-to-date before sharing it with customers.
With all of your information living in a single location, your product SEO and PLO (product listing optimization) efforts can be streamlined. This leaves you with more time on your hands to assess your site for other conversion issues that may hinder you from starting your personalization journey. To know more about how we can help you, book a demo with us.
We’ve also put together a free download on The Ultimate Guide to Buying A PIM, so you have all the information you need to decide on getting a PIM to help your business grow!