3 Steps to Improve Conversions with Ecommerce Personalization

Written by Debra Weinryb, Content Strategist at Diff Agency

Customer expectations are growing, and over 90 percent of leading marketers say that personalization significantly contributes to business profitability, according to Google.  And there’s a lot of truth behind the buzz. Amazon claims that 35% of all their sales are generated by their recommendation engine, thanks to “deep learning” technology which look at shoppers’ purchasing habits to make pairing decisions aligned to an individual's behavior.

This industry data demonstrates that customers want to be treated according to their needs and interests, much like a sales associate guides each customer through their purchase in a brick-and-mortar-store. Based on a customer’s browsing history, an algorithm can predict and present what the shopper might buy next, reducing available choices that may be distracting or overwhelming, making the purchasing decision easier. Not incidentally, designing marketing promotions to address a customers’ individual needs with personalization is an effective strategy to not only enhance the customer experience, but also increase lead captures and conversions.

In Diff’s last Justuno partner blog, we wrote about 5 promotional marketing myths on Shopify Plus. Before creating marketing promotions, it’s essential to understand your audience. If you want a chance at capturing the attention of a customer today, you’ll need to speak to the needs of each and every individual customer. With this in mind, we spoke to Rob Hammett, Director of Solutions at Justuno, about how to personalize your online store. Here are three steps Rob suggested for improving conversions through personalized shopping experiences:

1. Define your target audience segments using visitor data

Subscriber data enrichment 

A target audience is the intended consumer for your products or services. The more clearly you can define this group, the better you can address their needs so you can capture more leads and improve your ROI — both key metrics that determine your online store’s success. 

One way to take your understanding of you target audience further is through audience segmentation. This means identifying subgroups within your target audience so you can deliver tailored messages based on their individual traits creating a stronger connection. Subgroups can be based on demographics such as age, location, gender, education, ethnicity, or income. But can also be based on more in-depth psychographics or behavioral indicators like past purchases, hobbies, expressed values, attitudes, beliefs, and interests.

Evo.com, for example, is an action sports retailer with an audience of sports enthusiasts. That audience is divided into many subgroups based on their sports preferences like snowboarders, sledders, skiers, BMX bikers, or surfers.

Subscriber data enrichment is a valuable tool that you can use to understand how to better segment your audience. With Justuno, you can gather data about your visitors by utilizing hidden fields. This means that whenever an email is captured from a prospect or customer, data can be collected about that subscriber, even if a field wasn’t filled out on that webpage. These fields can be the URL they landed on or the one they’re engaging with when they subscribed, and more. Information like this is invaluable to understanding what they’re interested in and which parts of your website are converting.

For example, if a user comes to Evo’s site on their surf landing page, then clicks through to related products like surfboards, wetsuits, or bags, this data can be collected to identify this user as being in the surfer target demographic. 

2. Use personalized marketing promotions to increase email ROI

Once you’ve identified your audience segments, using personalization strategies and analytics can help you understand how much ROI to associate with each group and how to best guide customers toward what they’re looking for. Subscriber data can also help you craft relevant emails for each segment targeting each specific interest. 

For example, you could send out ski-related emails to those browsing the snow-based sports pages while sending surf-related emails to those browsing water-sports pages. Through personalization and analytics, you can create marketing campaigns that are relevant to your audience’s interests leading to higher conversions and happier visitors.

Once you’ve identified these target audience segments, you can focus on creating a more personalized user experience for your customers. Here are a few tools for Shopify Plus users within the Justuno platform that can increase your lead acquisition and conversions:

Cart level targeting

Targeting items at cart level

Cart level targeting is when you target someone that’s abandoning, or leaving your website with items in their cart. Usually, they’re a valuable visitor, and you want to target them with a message that will keep them on your site. Targeting specific items in their cart via a bundling offer can be a great way to save the sale and win the shopper over. 

Justuno’s app on Shopify Plus lets you set up a display and targeting rule to show an item to someone if they have a variant in their cart you’ve selected. For example, if a person puts a specific brand’s red shirt in their cart, they can be shown other red shirts by the same brand that are available for a reduced bundled price. This visitor can see the offer when go to leave their cart, upon returning to your site from an abandoned cart email, or at any point in the customer journey that would be most effective for your audience.

Commerce artificial intelligence (AI) engine

Justuno’s Commerce AI is a brand new feature set that makes it easier for merchants to provide intelligent product recommendations. You can use the A.I. engine to setup, build, and launch personalized product recommendations that can be placed online, in a product detail page, cart, banner, or popup. 

A cross selling algorithm can show recommendations of things that are most often purchased with along with the item a shopper is looking at. While an upselling algorithm can provide product recommendations that are a more expensive version of the product a shopper is browsing, like an upgraded watch face.

Filters work with these algorithms to let merchants narrow the recommendation options or exclude items all together. For example, you could show an upsell on expensive watch faces filtering by price, excluding any item that’s on sale or below a certain price point. The flexibility that Commerce AI gives merchants makes it a popular (and useful) tool for promotional targeting.

Mobile responsive layers

Mobile-responsive promotions

Instead of setting up a pixel width for your email field and mobile promotions, Justuno’s app provides the ability to do absolute widths that are responsive to all mobile devices. From the smallest display to the biggest, your promotional messaging needs to fit all of those devices, while also looking good. As mobile devices become an increasingly bigger part of the online shopping experience, a mobile-first approach is important for you website and your promotional marketing efforts.

3. Evolve your brand with behavioral analytics and A/B testing

Setting up A/B testing

Once you feel that you’ve built consistency in your branding, it’s time to refine your brand experience to find the most appealing (and effective) version for your customers. A/B testing allows you to test different ways of presenting designs and promotions to optimize your marketing efforts by finding the most effective strategies for your audience..

A/B testing is a randomized experiment with two variants, “A” and “B”. By testing two different ways of presenting your design, you can gauge which option performs best with behavioral analytics.  The goal is to tweak your brand’s aesthetic and messaging until you find the most effective strategies for turning visitors into customers.

A/B testing can be focused on the look of your website, such as patterns, colors, product imagery and fonts, as well as the feel like the difference between a clean and simple site vs. a discount heavy fashion site. Regardless of the tests you run, make sure to get creative and use behavioral analytics to find the path to optimization for your target audience. The possibilities of what to test are seemingly endless, but with every result comes insights on how to optimize your website to generate even more revenue.

A/B testing background images

There’s no limit to understanding your customers

Since customer needs change just as much as brands do, it’s important to evaluate your marketing successes and challenge assumptions about your users’ behaviors. Ongoing research through subscriber data, analytics, and A/B testing are handy tools to determine if your marketing campaigns continue to align with your customers needs. Make it a habit to regularly check-in with your shoppers so you can continually optimize your online store for higher lead captures and conversions.

Want to personalize your online store?

At Diff, we help retailers succeed by partnering with solutions that can help you build, market, and grow your business to scale. Contact us to learn more about our Justuno partnership and how we can help maximize customer acquisition with Justuno’s A.I. Visitor Conversion Platform.