How to Implement Personalization Strategies to Drive Ecommerce Success

Today’s consumers have sky-high expectations when it comes to making a purchase online. From lightning-fast loading times to sleek user interfaces, ecommerce retailers have a lot to deliver. But buyers today don’t just want a great ecommerce website, they also demand a highly personalized experience across every interaction with your brand. 

McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions—and 76% become frustrated when they don’t happen. To meet buyer expectations and avoid negative brand experiences, ecommerce brands today should look for ways to improve their personalization strategies. And these are investments well worth making: in that same study, faster-growing companies derived 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.

In this article, we’ll share everything you need to know to move beyond a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy to delivering personalized brand experience. We will also share the features, tools, and resources Shopify offers to empower robust personalization strategies.

The importance of personalization strategies in ecommerce

Today’s consumers expect a personalized, curated experience at every touchpoint with a brand. Personalized experiences are no longer considered innovative, they are now the new baseline. A recent Gartner survey found that 71% of B2C and 86% of B2B customers expect companies to be well-informed about their personal information during an interaction. 

A strong personalization strategy is a must-have for modern businesses

With today’s sophisticated, finicky shoppers, a robust personalization strategy is key to improving loyalty. The average buyer journey for today’s online shopper is highly configurable at every touchpoint, from product recommendations to targeted discounts—even setting a preferred payment method in checkout.

And these efforts are well worth it. In our own study of more than 800 million consumers, 50% say personalized offers and promotions from brands they’ve interacted with improve their shopping experience. And a McKinsey survey found a 10% to 15% revenue lift for businesses who execute personalization strategies well.

Personalization is possible, even with evolving privacy laws

Personalization strategies can be complicated by shoppers who are increasingly more concerned about the privacy of their personal data—the very data used to personalize their experience. A complex, evolving landscape of consumer regulations also presents a challenge: according to Gartner, 75% of the world’s population today has its personal information covered by modern privacy regulations. 

That’s why it’s critical for retailers to avoid using third-party data. Third-party data is obtained through external sources that individuals didn’t consent to share with your business. Instead, marketing strategies should be built on first-party data—personal data willingly shared through an online interaction. First-party data can be collected from form fills, cookie consent forms, as well as at different times during the purchasing process. Together, all of this first-party data provides the foundation for compliant personalized marketing strategies that respect data privacy.

With Shopify, businesses get the tools they need to own and take full advantage of their first-party data. As part of their core customer model, Shopify’s integrated analytics allows merchants to unify customer data from every storefront and touchpoint to gain insights into buying behavior, demographics, and more. Shopify’s approach to customer data is built to help retailers stay compliant with current and future data regulation changes—no matter where in the world their customers are.

Tips for implementing personalization strategies

When implementing a new personalization strategy, it’s important to take it one step at a time. That way you can test and measure the effectiveness of each personalized touchpoint. It’s important to avoid getting too spammy or “creepy” in your approach, so be sure to test different strategies to find the right approach.

Tip #1: Capture prospects and segment your audiences

As we mentioned earlier, it’s best to base your personalization strategy on first-party data. One easy source of first-party data is from customers who have provided personal information to make a purchase. To broaden your reach, data from potential customers who haven’t made a purchase can be obtained through lead capture strategies.

People interested in your brand, but not quite ready to buy, are often willing to provide their contact information via a form. These forms can offer potential buyers something of value in exchange for their details, such as:

• Discounts on a future order
• Personalized offers or invitations to events
• Gated content (a guide, checklist, or other handy information)
• Membership to email lists that provide updates, offers, and specialized content

As you implement these strategies, you need to make sure all of your data is being centrally stored and captured. This allows you to segment your audiences into groups based on interests, buying behaviors, and demographics. These groups give you the foundation for personalized outreach, such as a notification about a local sale for customers living nearby.

Tip #2: Create and send personalized emails

Once your first-party data is captured and segmented into distinct groups, you can start sending personalized emails. The more targeted your lists are, the more you can tailor your outreach, and the better it will convert. 

Some examples of personalized emails based on geographic data could be:

• An email with discounts on seasonal items based on local seasonality
• Special offers for parents during back-to-school months
• Holiday-based promotions, such as Diwali, Christmas, or Lunar New Year

You can also create personalized emails on buying behaviors, such as:

• Special offers for abandoned carts
• Offers on luxury items for buyers of high-end items
• Post-purchase emails with items that go well with the item(s) they just bought

Those are just a few of the many personalized emails you can send. You can even send one email to multiple segments, and have just a portion of the email dynamically generated. Any easy example is an email that includes the buyer’s name. But you can also get much more sophisticated than that based on what you know about the recipient, such as including specific promotions based on their purchase history. 

A robust personalization strategy can include sending a large number of emails to many targeted groups, especially for large retailers. That’s where automation can help. Tools like Shopify’s Flow app allow you to set up automated, tailored emails to your customers and prospects, without having to manually create them each time.

Tip #3: Personalize your storefront and the browsing experience

A key part of a successful personalization strategy is tailoring your storefront and browsing experience for potential and returning buyers. While this was once considered innovative, it is now considered table stakes for today’s consumers. If your storefront doesn’t offer features and functionality that deliver a personalized experience, buyers will choose to shop with a competitor who does. 

Ideally, you want to make sure every interaction on your website reflects your brand’s unique relationship with its customers. Some important ways to deliver a personalized shopping experience include:

• Contextual personalization: Show dynamically generated content and interaction options based on a user’s specific context, such as their behavior, preferences, location, device, or time of engagement. This can be as simple as providing a mobile-optimized experience for someone browsing on their phone, to showing winter clothing to visitors in a location with seasonal cold weather.
• Personalized product recommendations: To show customers that you know what they want from your brand, provide personalized product recommendations. You can set portions of your storefront to show curated product listings to visitors based on service data such as recent purchases and site browsing history.
• Account creation: Allow customers to self-manage their experience with the option to create an account. Buyers can log in and see their order history, track current purchases, and streamline checkout for future purchases.
• Interactive chatbots: If done right, chatbots and messaging services like Shopify Inbox can be an important part of a personalized experience—and drive conversions as well. Site visitors can get answers to frequently asked questions in seconds, receive discounts and offers based on inquiries, and much more. Just remember to keep interactions and responses feeling natural, friendly, and helpful. 

While it’s not fully part of a personalization strategy, it’s important not to overlook the performance of your online storefront. Having an ecommerce website that loads everything quickly improves the overall experience with your brand. Businesses that build storefronts on Shopify get the benefits of a reliable, high-performing, global infrastructure platform. Because of a relentless dedication to optimizing performance, Shopify stores render 1.8 times faster on average than stores on other platforms.

Efforts to personalize and improve the storefront experience are well worth it. Dermalogica Canada boosted B2B conversion rates by 23%, with a 338% increase in reorder frequency after migrating to Shopify. With Shopify, they improved the way their products were merchandised and improved the browsing and checkout experience. Not only did customers order more frequently, but they also converted more often. Dermalogica’s B2B conversion rates increased from 74.4% to 91.5% after the migration. 

Tip #4: Offer personalized payment options and checkout

To complete a personalized buyer journey, consider customizing the checkout experience and offering more ways for shoppers to pay. While it may seem like checkout is a straightforward process, tailoring the experience for your customers can improve conversions, reduce cart abandonment, drive loyalty, and much more. 

Add multiple payment options for buyer convenience

Today’s shoppers prefer frictionless buying experiences. That’s why it is so important to incorporate multiple payment options, such as Apple Wallet, Google Pay, Venmo, and others. A recent study found that one out of every six shoppers selects retailers based on their choice of payment, showing how important convenience is to the overall buyer experience. Shop Pay is another critical payment method to support, and we’ll dive into why later on.

Customize the checkout process

There are a few key ways to personalize the checkout process to avoid abandoned carts and boost conversion rates. Start by offering shipping options based on the customer’s location, purchase history, or preferences. For repeat customers, prefill checkout fields with their saved data to speed up the buying process.

You can also showcase curated upsells or cross-sells during checkout to boost the average order value. At the end of checkout, you can redirect customers to a dynamic thank-you page with personalized messages or recommendations.

The impact of fast, personalized checkout

While they may seem like small improvements, checkout personalization can have a big impact. Maine Lobster Now ships seafood directly to their customers’ doors, and requires a highly customized checkout. Customers need to choose their own delivery date and have the shipping costs automatically adjusted based on location. By moving to Shopify, they were able to benefit from the world’s highest-converting checkout that ensured the checkout experience was smooth and fast. Critically, Shopify’s checkout could be quickly customized for their customers right out of the box. Today, their overall conversion rate is up by 69%—and by 97% for mobile orders.

Tip #5: Automate as much as possible

To implement a robust personalization strategy at scale, you can’t do everything manually. That’s where marketing automation tools come in, along with other resources from your platform provider. From abandoned cart emails to post-purchase follow-ups, businesses can automate key touchpoints to make personalization easier and faster.

Some platform providers like Shopify offer their own marketing automation tools to streamline personalization and drive loyalty and engagement. Retailers can use prebuilt templates for the most common personalization needs, including:

• Capturing a new lead and sending a welcome email
• Re-engaging a customer who browsed specific products
• Automatically adding new customers to the right segments
• Upselling additional products after a buyer's first purchase

You can also automate more complex personalization strategies by creating custom workflows in Shopify. No matter how complex your customer base is, it’s possible to keep the work of personalization to a minimum with automation.

Building a personalization strategy with Shopify

Businesses that build their storefronts on Shopify gain access to powerful tools to tailor the buying experience to their unique customer base. Shopify’s core customer model provides a unified, centralized foundation to quickly build and launch a winning personalization strategy.

Start with Shopify’s unified approach

Shopify’s core customer model makes building and launching personalization strategies simpler and more streamlined than other platforms in the market. This framework unifies browsing, purchasing, and order data from all of your channels into a comprehensive profile for every customer—all instantly accessible through a customer data platform.

These customer profiles become a single source of truth for running targeted marketing campaigns and personalizing touchpoints. Shopify’s platform can also aggregate data from customer tags, tracking pixels, and integrations. This gives you the ability to personalize browsing experiences not just for customers, but also returning visitors who may not have made a purchase yet.

Collect and analyze first-party customer data 

The next step is to use Shopify’s first-party data collection tools to gather the data you need without relying on third-party data sources. 

One tactic is to use Shopify Pixels to track customer actions on your website. When you add tracking pixels to your Shopify store, data is collected securely through both client-side and server-side tracking. You can also quickly set up consent prompts on your website, keeping you compliant with privacy regulations.

You can also use Shopify Forms to give site visitors an easy way to join email lists or get discount codes in exchange for their information. All of this is captured and sent to Shopify’s platform, so you won’t need to import contacts or manage separate lists. 

Once the data is in the platform, Shopify provides robust segmentation tools to create highly targeted groups. Advanced segments can be built and customized using ShopifyQL, Shopify’s query language designed for ecommerce, based on factors like purchase history, order frequency, customer value, or location. Data from these detailed segments can also be used to inform and refine personalization strategies.

Once you have centralized data collection and management in place, you are ready to build and optimize your personalization strategy. Shopify’s tools don’t take long to set up, and can significantly drive conversion and revenue.

Launch personalized Shop Campaigns to reach new customers

By setting up a Shop Campaign, you can quickly expand your reach to more than 150 million potential new buyers. Shop Campaigns dynamically showcase curated products, personalized promotions, and tailored content based on the potential customers’ preferences, browsing habits, or location. This provides a curated, personalized brand experience for both new and lapsed customers.

Shop Campaigns are also risk-free, making them a great first step in a personalization strategy. You only pay acquisition costs when a new customer converts for the first time. Brands can see up to 24% new customer growth, with 50% getting their first order within 48 hours of launching a campaign.

Shop Campaigns was a game-changer for electrolyte retailer HydroMATE. Today they attribute nearly half of their daily customer growth to Shop Campaigns, while lowering cost per acquisition. Their new customers are loyal as well—nearly 10% of the new customers HydroMATE acquired through Shop Campaigns returned to repurchase within just 14 days.

Use Shopify Collabs and Collective for personalized acquisition

Shopify Collabs give you an easy way to acquire new business through influencers and content creators. You can add application pages to your website to recruit affiliates who align with your brand. Once they join your brand, you can share commission offers, track gift campaigns, and send personalized affiliate links and codes. Influencers can be rewarded for referral purchases with automated commission tracking and payments.

The Shopify Collective allows businesses to sell their products through other Shopify merchants to reach entirely new customer bases. By combining Collabs and Collective, retailers tap into a network of creators and stores, gaining exposure to more potential buyers. These tools empower businesses to scale personalized strategies with little effort.

Build campaigns with Shopify Audiences

Businesses can use Shopify Audiences to create optimized, targeted ad campaigns. Using a customer data co-op from participating merchants, Shopify Audiences analyzes shopper behavior to build prospective customer lists, all while maintaining privacy. When businesses run awareness and consideration campaigns using Shopify Audiences, they can lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) by up to 50%. 

Shopify Audience campaigns can increase your reach while driving efficient marketing spend. By using Shopify Audiences, formalwear retailer Mac Duggal saw a 2.3x increase in retargeting audience size, a 3.6x lower cost per purchase with retargeting ad sets, and a 2x return on ad spend (ROAS). Ad campaigns using the latest version of Shopify Audiences Retargeting Boost lists have generated up to 2x more orders for every marketing dollar spent, reducing wasted ad spend and driving bottom lines.

Leverage Shopify’s Shop app

Available to all businesses with stores built on Shopify, the Shop app offers a number of tools to improve the buying process and connect with highly engaged shoppers. These features include:

• Order tracking: With the Shop app, buyers can easily track everything they need to know about their orders, including tracking numbers, estimated delivery dates, and even a map showing the package's location.
• Simplified reordering: The Shop app streamlines reordering by saving payment and shipping information for faster checkout.
• Loyalty rewards: Shopify stores can integrate loyalty programs or rewards into the app, allowing customers to earn points or discounts for repeat purchases.
• Improved customer support: Customers can contact businesses directly through the Shop app for support or inquiries about their orders.
• Wishlists and favorites: Customers can save products they want to purchase later to wish lists or mark stores as favorites for easy access later.
• Push notifications: Businesses to notify customers through the app about new product and collection launches. They can also get notified about the status of their current orders.

Brands using the Shop app can see significant benefits, especially when it comes to repeat business. Fifty-nine percent of orders on the Shop app come from return buyers, and 20% are from customers who previously purchased from the same business through the app. The Shop app is a great way to build customer loyalty by offering a convenient, personalized buying experience.

Give buyers the option to pay with Shopify’s Shop Pay 

A final piece of a personalization strategy built on Shopify is offering Shop Pay, a high-converting accelerated checkout. Shop Pay simplifies and streamlines the checkout process, driving revenue—orders processed with Shop Pay have a 19% higher average order value compared to other checkout methods. Shop Pay users also buy more per transaction, with a 10% higher units per transaction (UTP) rate than those that use other checkout methods. 

Shop Pay can also be a powerful tool for personalization and customer retention. Shoppers who use Shop Pay are 77% more likely to make a repeat purchase on any Shopify store. Shop Pay converts up to 50% better than a typical guest checkout, and outperforms other accelerated checkouts by at least 10%. Shop Pay can also influence purchase decisions—just offering it as a payment option can increase lower-funnel conversions by 5%.

Conclusion

Personalization is essential for ecommerce brands to stay competitive in today’s market. According to McKinsey, 72% of consumers expect brands to recognize them as individuals, and 78% indicate that personalized interactions make them more likely to repurchase. Providing tailored experiences across the buying journey is critical for attracting new customers and driving customer loyalty.

Any successful, compliant personalization strategy starts with first-party data, gathered across channels and centrally stored and managed in a single, intuitive platform. Shopify’s core customer model enables businesses to easily collect insights from multiple channels to inform marketing campaigns and touchpoint personalization. This foundation allows businesses to segment audiences, automate interactions, and deliver tailored experiences across the entire customer journey.

To learn more about personalizing the shopping experience with Shopify, download our free guide: Seeing Around Corners: Personalization.