Personalization may be the single most important thing you can do to increase revenue and make your store more successful.
In this guide, we’ll help you take the next step on your personalization journey by reviewing all of the specific strategies and techniques that you should consider implementing for your brad–from the storefront to marketing campaigns.
Personalization is delivering unique experiences to shoppers based on certain criteria or attributes. For example, it could mean a special discount offered only to new customers, a recommendations widget that changes its display based on the visitor’s browsing and purchasing history, or free shipping for visitors who are located within a few miles of one of your distribution centers but not those who are further away.
In other words, personalization is any aspect of your customer experience that is customized for certain shoppers.
One key reason why it’s important to provide personalization is that most of your customers probably prefer it. A survey of 8,000 consumers located all around the world found that:
It’s easy to see why online shoppers are so into personalization. It saves time by connecting them to the products that are most relevant to their needs and interests, and it can also save them money by unlocking exclusive deals.
Shoppers like personalization so much that it usually leads to more sales. In fact, a study from Deloitte found that brands with high personalization are nearly twice as likely to exceed their revenue goals than brands with low personalization.
A one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t make any sense for online marketing. Each potential customer will have their own personal set of needs and preferences. And a message that’s persuasive for one type of customer might not do anything at all for another.
So, instead of trying to appeal to everyone, you should be personalizing your marketing efforts. This will allow you to make your messaging more targeted — and, therefore, more effective.
By segmenting your email list into different groups and then tailoring your copywriting for each type of visitor, you should be able to increase your overall open rate and click rate.
For inspiration, here are a few of the most common methods for implementing email marketing personalization:
| Customer Attribute | Email Flow |
| A once-frequent customer is no longer active | It’s much easier to retain previous customers than convert first-time visitors — reaching out with an email along the lines of “It’s been a while…” or similar messaging can help get these inactive customers back in the cycle of placing orders on your store. Throwing in a discount makes such campaigns even more effective. |
| A customer purchased an item on your store but didn’t leave a review | Once a certain number of days have passed without the customer leaving a review, you could set it up so that an email is automatically sent to them requesting one. |
| The customer has read a certain blog post on your site | You should send these customers an email recommending related blog posts they will likely also be interested in, as this will give your website’s overall engagement a boost. |
As with your email marketing campaigns, the more targeted your SMS marketing campaigns are, the more effective they will likely be. Some of the best ways to personalize SMS campaigns include:
| Customer Attribute | SMS Flow |
| It’s the customer’s birthday | Send the customer a Happy Birthday text along with a link to a free item, exclusive deal, or some other type of gift to commemorate the occasion. This sort of recognition will make the customer more loyal to your brand. |
| The customer has abandoned their cart | It’s easy to get distracted on the internet — if someone added items to their cart but didn’t check out, they may have simply forgotten to do so. A quick text reminder might be all that’s needed to close the sale. |
| The customer has indicated they want to be updated when an item is back in stock | Once the item has been restocked, immediately notify the customer via text to ensure they receive the message. |
Even if you don’t have someone’s contact info, there’s still a way to reach out to them with personalized messaging.
This is made possible with retargeting ads — here’s how it works:
Paying for advertising, compared to reaching out yourself via email or text, can get quite expensive. That’s what makes personalization especially important in this case — retargeting allows you to get more bang for your buck, as you’ll likely have a higher conversion rate and return on investment for your campaign.
In addition to personalizing your marketing efforts, you can also implement personalization directly on your storefront. This can involve changing the page design, written content, product catalog, or any other elements of your site depending on who is visiting it.
While there are many different ways to do storefront personalization, all of these techniques fall into one of two categories: personalizing for browser profiles and personalizing for customer profiles.
Even when no purchase is made, there are many different details you can gather about anyone who is browsing your site, such as when they’re browsing, where they’re browsing from, and which exact pages they’re looking at.
Here’s what you can actually do with that information:
What it is: With this type of personalization, a different version of a page is displayed depending on what date, day of week, or time of day it is.
Why it’s useful for merchants:
Actionable example: After misjudging demand, you have ended up with way too much of one of your products. To make room in your warehouse for more popular items, you decide to hold a “Half-Off Wednesdays” promotion for the products you need to move and add a countdown clock to the product page to further instill a sense of scarcity.
How to set up this personalization in Shogun:
What it is: Visitors in one location are shown the original version of a page, while those in other areas are shown customized variants.
Why it’s useful for merchants:
Actionable example: There are many factors that affect shipping, including the location of the customer as well as the weight and dimensions of your products. You may not be able to find a way to offer free or heavily discounted shipping to shoppers in certain locations where it’s cost prohibitive. In these cases, you can use personalization to create a banner to promote free shipping for regions where it’s offered–and remove that banner for locations that are not included in the free shipping offer.
How to set up this personalization in Shogun:
What it is: This type of personalization involves changing up your page design or content based on how a visitor behaves on your store.
Why it’s useful for merchants:
Actionable example: As mentioned above, one effective technique for marketing personalization is to appeal to inactive customers who were once regulars. You can also do this with storefront personalization — for example, you could use a banner on your homepage to welcome back visitors who haven’t been around in a while and present them with an exclusive deal.
How to set up this personalization in Shogun:
What it is: Personalization based on where your web traffic is coming from, which can be tracked using the entire referral URL, a portion of the URL, or a UTM tag.
Why it’s useful for merchants:
Actionable example: TikTok has quickly developed one of the largest user bases in the world, and you may want to take advantage of this popularity by marketing your store on their service. TikTok users have shown that they prefer to consume content in video format, so you should consider making your site more video-centric for these particular visitors.
How to set up this personalization in Shogun:
Once someone has gotten to the point of completing a purchase on your store, you will have collected quite a bit of information about them (contact info, shopping preferences, etc.). This allows you to get more granular and achieve a greater level of personalization than what’s possible through browser profiles.
For example, you can use customer profiles to run personalization campaigns based on:
What it is: This type of personalization involves changing an aspect of your site (often the product recommendations) based on a customer’s previous purchases.
Why it’s useful for merchants:
Actionable example: There are some types of products that customers only purchase rarely, such as big-ticket items like refrigerators and washing machines. So, instead of wasting precious screen space on promoting such products to those who have already purchased them, you can personalize a recommendations widget to promote optional add-ons to the product or other complementary items instead (fridge organizer bins, laundry detergent, etc.).
How to set up this personalization in Shogun:
What it is: Custom page designs or features for customers who have earned certain loyalty rewards.
Why it’s useful for merchants:
Actionable example: The more blatant your loyalty program is, the more likely it is that visitors will be aware of it and participate. Instead of just emailing out coupon codes to those who qualify, you can use personalization to change your entire homepage for loyalty members, using design elements such as a popup to thank them for their business and promote exclusive deals.
How to set up this personalization in Shogun:
What it is: This type of personalization involves targeting customers based on how much they’ve spent on your store.
Why it’s useful for merchants:
Actionable example: Even if you don’t have a formal loyalty program, you can still use personalization to recognize and reward your biggest customers. By regularly offering these customers exclusive deals, you can improve the odds that they’ll continue to stick with your brand.
How to set up this personalization in Shogun:
While we’ve separated marketing personalization and storefront personalization in this guide, it should be noted that there’s no need to do so for your own personalization strategy.
Indeed, whenever you send out a personalized email or text, the landing page on your store that this message links to can be personalized as well.
All of this (and much more) is possible with Shogun.
