10 Personalization Tips to Help Grow Your E-commerce Company

When a user visits your e-commerce site, they do so to experience what you have to offer, but that doesn’t mean that this can’t also include personalization and customization options—both of which can go a long way. There are many ways to personalize a customer’s experience when they visit your website, and although it takes a little bit of extra work and a little bit more patience, it can be well worth it in the end if you really want to see a conversion. As the owner of a SEO company that specializes in eCommerce marketing, I’ve been able to test many different techniques and wanted to share my experiences with those interested in learning about them. Below explains 10 personalization tips that can truly allow your website to have a unique customer experience and how to get started with each:

1.    Build an Ongoing Customer Relationship

Personalization is not a one-time moment in a customer’s visit to your site, but rather it is an ongoing relationship. As HubSpot called it, it’s the “buyer’s journey.” Personalization can help you to guide buyers through every point of their experience with your e-commerce company, so it can be a long process. For example, if someone has already visited and made purchases from your site, you definitely want to remember them and offer a warm “welcome back” type message. After all, you wouldn’t re-introduce yourself to someone you have already met, and you shouldn’t do it on your e-commerce site either.

How can you build this ongoing relationship? By using personalization options on your e-commerce website, you can track each and every customer. This will allow you to know when to start greeting them by name (for example, when they are returning to your site for a second or third time purchasing your product), when to send them more information about the products that they have purchased or expressed interest in, and which products to recommend for future purchases. Following your sales pipeline and buying cycle for your visitors is a great way to get this data, which you can learn more about in detail here.

2.    Segmentation for Customization

The most important reason for you to consider segmenting your buyers according their wants, tastes, income, and any other individual descriptor you can think of is because all of your customers have unique and personal reasons leading them to purchase with your site. Segmentation is number 2 on this list because it’s one of the most basic things you can and should do immediately when thinking about personalization.

Some argue that every type segmentation you can think of will apply in order to better personalize and customize their experience working with your e-commerce company, but that doesn’t always mean that this is the right route for you to take. It’s up to you to determine which segments will be the most important. You can use tools like Optimizely to help.

3.    Customize Content Information

Being an e-commerce company, you likely have a variety of products and services on your site, however there is a good chance that you have not considered every way in which to provide information (in the form of online content) to your users. The benefits of customizing the experience can help show that you understand how to offer information to your customers and set yourself apart from most e-commerce companies that keep it short and never get creative.

Below are a few ideas of different types of content that you can create to get information to your buyers in unique and customizable ways:

• Guides
• Ebooks
• White papers
• Case studies
• Checklists
• How-to instructions
• Product demos
• Tutorials
• User experiences
• Video content

Once you know what certain buyers are searching for (this is one example of information you can pull from your e-commerce site), you can offer them personalized content to help them make up their minds, or better yet, after they purchase something from your site, provide them with the tutorials or a demo video on how to use and enjoy your products.

4.    Make Your Content Dynamic

One thing that really sets some e-commerce sites a part from others is the ability to have dynamic content that is personalized to the users who go on their site. One way that you can go about creating dynamic content is to ask for specific information to help customize their searches. In this way, with each page they view, form they fill out, and email they open, you have the opportunity to learn more about them. This helps each user’s personalized experience because they will recognized that this feedback is creating a dynamic, unique content experience for them. Again, follow the buying cycle of your customers and use remarketing, which you can learn more about here, to make it happen.

5.    Name Personalization

As you might imagine, using someone’s name really helps to build a personal connection. While email is one of the tops ways that companies personalize user experience, using names is often lacking in other places (for example, on landing pages). Try to use names for personalization wherever you can on your e-commerce site—it really amps up the personalized user experience!

6.    Action-Based Personalization

As mentioned above, name-based personalization is often most common when we think of making the user experience unique. However, action-based personalization is also very important. Ultimately, action based personalization involves manipulating what a customer on your site sees on your page, in an email, or on their shopping cart page, and it is entirely based on their actions while they are on your e-commerce site.

Here are some examples that you have definitely seen before:

• “Customers who bought this also viewed/bought”
• “Recommendations for you”
• “Here are some relevant articles for you”
• “Latest [products] that you might be interested in”
• The ability to create and add to a wish list or “buy later” list
• Automatically move abandoned shopping cart items into a wish list

Again, your remarketing data can be a good way to make this happen. Look at your data and create different landing pages for those who fall under each of the different categories.

7.    Customize Product Recommandations

E-commerce companies have used product recommendations in a variety of ways (such as through plugins), but the truth is that they are often used in very silly and irrelevant ways. Your goal as an e-commerce company should be to have the most relevant and personalized product recommendations possible. Consider what they are searching for, and what other relevant products may also be of interest to them.

8.    Smart Calls-to-Action

According to HubSpot, smart calls-to-action (CTAs) are a great way to personalize user experience. If you have a customer who has visited your e-commerce site repeatedly, you don’t want to always have them receiving the same offered and customized messages. Having smart CTAs (Call to actions) is really important in order to show shoppers you’re aware of their interests and that you care about their experience. Whether they click “learn more,” download a whitepaper, sign up for your newsletter, or leave a comment, the pages they are taken too should all have the appropriate CTA.

9.    Mobile Responsiveness

​By now it’s common knowledge that mobile optimization is a key aspect of e-commerce success. More and more people are shopping with their mobile decides, and this number is just going to increase once mobile sites become more commerce friendly. Ultimately, you need to invest in a responsive site design and make sure that you are able to create different site experiences for all screen sizes. This will be sure that different users on your e-commerce site are having a personalized experience that is based on the kind of mobile device they are using, and they can rely on shopping with you on their mobile device rather than having to switch over to a laptop or desktop computer to be able to purchase your products.

10. Personalize Currency And Localization

For some reason e-commerce companies, especially small-business e-commerce companies, tend to forget that a global marketplace is at their fingertips. In terms of personalizing user experience, it should be a priority to make it easy for international customers to shop with your website. The best way to do this is to set up preferences that allow you to get this information on users visiting your site and then set the default currency and language based on the viewer’s IP address. The currency and language choice should be visibly displayed, and viewers should have the option to change it as necessary.

The Takeaway

E-commerce sites really do have a sales advantage when they take personalized user experience into account. These 10 tips are just some of the many things you can do to customize user experience so that the same people want to keep purchasing with your site over and over again. It’s definitely going to take the help of designers and developers to get it all right, so work slowly and just do a little bit at a time. We recommend Magento to help you get all of your needs met, which you can learn more about here. Always be sure to A/B test along the way, and soon your site will be ready to go for anyone and everyone that visits.

Do you have any other tips for personalizing e-commerce sites that you would add to the list? Let us know in the comments section below.

About The Author

Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com

Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.