Personalized customer experience in ecommerce

Published in

Elligense | Tech in elearning and ecommerce

7 min readFeb 15, 2019

Nowadays all of the web experience becomes more and more personalized due to artificial intelligence (AI). Google provides us with search results based on our location, Facebook recommends friends we may know, and Amazon suggests to buy exactly what we are interested in.

When talking about ecommerce, customers always expect personalized attitude, it had successfully worked in offline retail stores with a help of consultants, but can personalization be implemented in an online store? Is there any way to personalize a typical ecommerce website? Let’s first understand what website personalization is.

What is ecommerce website personalization?

Website personalization provides users with specific content and experience based on their location, behavior or device.

Today’s shoppers are more demanding, they want to get what they want immediately without doing much. That’s what personalization does. With a help of machine learning (ML) and AI, websites can provide a personalized experience for each individual person. Moreover, ecommerce websites can now use real-time personalization and adapt the website’s content according to the user’s actions.

Here are some personalization examples in ecommerce:

Greeting of a first-time visitor
Upsells on a checkout page, directly related to product
Sizes, language, and currency based on the user’s location
Abandoned card emails and push notifications

This leads to more satisfied customers, better conversions and as a result, to more revenue.

There is no personalization without data

Before learning how to enable personalized experience on your website, let’s learn more about sources of data without which it is impossible.

Here are key data sources that lie in the foundation of customer experience personalization:

Traffic (geolocation, source, device and if its a first-time visit)
Personal Data (name, birth date, etc.)
On-site interactions (product and category pages visits)
Search queries
Social media and search tracking codes
Purchases and add to cards

There are a lot of ways to personalize your customer’s experience and as well a wide range of tools to help you with that. But as with any innovation and change, you should have a strategy and define what you will personalize and how.

Implementing Ecommerce personalization

There are so many tools and strategies of website personalization out there that you can personalize mostly everything. We will walk you through each point with examples and tools to use.

Geo-location personalization

Butterfly Twist detects the IP address of the computer, understands the location of the user and sets the American sizes if browsed from the US.

Another way to personalize customer experience based on IP address is making an offer based on the weather like it was done in Burton:

In addition, you can change currency according to a customer’s location.

Returning visitors experience personalization

You can display ‘recently viewed products’ in a specific section. They will remain even if the user has left the shop and returned later.

For first time visitors, you could show a popup with a discount offer on first order:

Traffic sources targeting

Providing visitors a content based on their journey can increase satisfaction and loyalty. Just look at the example below:

Special offer for visitors who came from Reddit.

Customer’s status based personalization

Naked Wines has an entirely different home page and navigation for new visitors.

On that page, everything is optimized to onboard first-time visitors.

When logged in, users enter the personalized page addressing them by their first name.

CRO (conversion rate optimization) tools for customized content

These CRO tools will help you to segment traffic and serve dynamic content to your visitors:

Dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing means re-pricing products based on day, time, traffic segments and competitors’ prices. But keep in mind that this type of personalization is accessible to ecommerce enterprise companies only.

Moreover, there are only a few solutions offering dynamic pricing.

Such retailers as Home Depot, JC Penneys, Cheaptickets and Priceline charge people according to their device. For example, they charge more from the IOS and Mac users than from Android. And they show higher-priced items first when browsing from a desktop and don’t show them to mobile visitors.

Tools for dynamic pricing:

WiseDynamic by Wiser provides all the major solutions and works for both enterprise and mid-tier stores.
Prisync compares prices in your competitors’ stores and re-price products based on the rules you set.

Personalized Product Recommendations

Nowadays, product recommendations are familiar, there are really infinite ways you can segment your catalog and make perfect recommendations.

There are several types of product recommendations:

Best Sellers — People always trusted the choice of the crowd and this model remains one of the most effective for increasing conversion rates.
However, this type of suggestion becomes the most powerful when you collect more data about your customer and make the recommendation personalized.
You Might Also Like — This type of product recommendation personalization works on a customers’ real-time behavior by showing products similar to ones they have visited.
Cross-sell — It requires making connections between products and providing customers with the exact cross-sells, up-sells or down-sells matching the product they choose. This tactic can greatly increase AOV (average order value).

Examples of Product Recommendations

ThirdLove increases their AOV by offering complementary products based on the currently viewed product.

In addition, note other powerful points:

Copy — “Complete your look” motivates customers to order the entire set.
Matching Colors — The suggested items match the color of the currently viewed product.
Offer — They maximize the result by offering a discount when you purchase the whole set.

ThriveMarket personalizes their best-sellers based on the interests of a customer. They don’t just show the best-selling products of their entire catalog but offer the best-sellers that match the preference.

Personalized Triggered Emails

Your personalization efforts should go beyond your website. Email marketing remains one of the most powerful communication channels and you should consider personalizing it.

According to Bariliance, an average ROI(return of investments) of email marketing is 3,800% or $38 for every $1 invested. Moreover, triggered emails have 306% more click-throughs than non-triggered emails.

Ecommerce trigger emails types

A “triggered email” is sent after the user action. The most popular type of triggered emails is a cart recovery email, which is sent when a customer added items in their cart but abandoned it without a purchase. You can see the chart of the most effective campaign types below:

Emails personalization types

Demographic personalizations — The most popular one is to place the customer’s name in the email.
Session personalizations — This is the next most well-known type of personalizations. These emails contain information about the products and categories a customer has visited during the session.
Recommendation personalizations — You can send product recommendations in an email, same as on the website.

Examples of personalized triggered emails

Bonobos includes product recommendations at the end of the email:

One more example from Bonobos — abandoned cart email:

Keep in mind that almost any email marketing services provider supports personalized Emails so it is easy to integrate.

Personalized targeted advertisement

This types of personalization include remarketing campaigns that can be implemented by Facebook or Google. You can show ads based on the customer’s activity. We are sure you have seen this by yourself when after visiting an online store, you were followed by ads of products you have visited all over the Internet.

Next Steps

In this guide, we have covered all the possible ways of ecommerce personalization.

Now it is time to start implementing this knowledge in your business by answering these questions:

What are your goals? What do you want the personalization to bring you? What results are you expecting?
According to your goals, what personalization strategy will you choose?
Finally, select the tools you will work with and development team that will help you.