In a consumer market that leans heavily towards online shopping, the Shopify platform has seen tremendous success over the last few years by offering store owners a simple, easy to use platform for creating an online store, including all the necessary bells and whistles like a shopping cart solution designed to sell, ship and manage one’s product portfolio.
However, in an environment of hundreds, if not thousands of directly competing businesses using Shopify for their online stores, how does one stand out from the crowd? How does one manage to stay ahead? One answer is personalization.
Why Personalize on Shopify?
Personalize because the consumer wants to feel special. They want to be considered unique. They want to be offered a personalized shopping experience instead of just being treated as one of many. They want to be an individual, not just a faceless part of a larger crowd.
Nowadays, online businesses know that personalization is useful for increasing profitability and properly implementing personalization into the shopping experiences sees significant improvements in terms of both turnover and profit.
The numbers don’t lie. Over 94% of businesses saw an increase in conversion rates when they personalized their search engine marketing. 94% of companies say they saw an increase in conversions when they personalized their website. And 95% of companies saw an increase in conversions when they personalized their emails.
While there may still be a number of users who are concerned about the way their data is stored in order to provide a personalized user experience, the vast majority seem to agree that the advantages far overcome the concerns, with an improved shopping experience being one of the most talked-about results of Big Data.
What is Shopify Personalization?
Personalization is, in this case, a method of providing the customer with a tailor-fit shopping experience, taking into account his or her own preferences. The end result is more than welcomed by most shoppers, as they are able to get better deals, save time, and simplify the overall shopping process.
What are Some Examples of Shopify Personalization?
Shopify personalization provides consumers with an improved experience by taking into account the individual consumer’s prior behavior, shopping, user profile, and demographic. It can be manifested in a number of ways:
Related Products
Imagine someone is shopping around for a sofa, has finally found their perfect one, and added it to the basket. Personalization will now display related matching products, such as an armchair or maybe a coffee table. This provides the user with an idea of what to shop for next, as well as maybe have a better image of how to set up the space in which the sofa is intended to go.
Recently Viewed Products
Sometimes, when browsing through a large Shopify store, the user might view a product, then browse to another one and then to another one. At some point, the user decides the first product is the one he wants but does not remember exactly how it was called. A recently viewed product personalization will be of assistance in this case.
Similar Products
Someone shopping for a sofa finds one that is the perfect shape but unfortunately they’re not too keen on the fabric. Similar products personalization is here to help, listing similar sofas, with different fabrics, thus making the road towards the final purchase that much easier.
Personalized Product Recommendations
On a large Shopify store, with tens if not hundreds of categories and thousands of products, personalized product recommendations from DataCue provide the customer with a personalized shopping experience right from the homepage, recommending products based on the past interactions the user has had with the store.
Personalized Banners
Imagine a user who is into baseball is browsing through a sporting goods store and, instead of seeing banner related to his preferences, is shown banners for women swimwear. This is ineffective for both the consumer and it’s where the banner personalization from DataCue comes into play, providing users with a complete personalized experience when on your website.
Personalized Notifications
There is a lot of news and offers that a store might feel the need to announce to the world, but there are only a few of which a particular consumer will actually care about. Displaying notifications to all users, irrespective of their personal preferences, will in the end result in most users ignoring notifications.
On the other hand, if a Shopify store implements the personalization of notifications based on user preference and past behavior using a system like DataCue, then each user will only receive notifications that are of actual interest to them. The likelihood of them interacting with those notifications is far greater and the user feels the site is catering to them personally, which is clearly good for business.
Personalized Email
Consumers that receive generic emails from a Shopify store will, in most cases, ignore them. If they actually need the information in that email, they will use it but be left with a sour taste in their mouth at the end for being treated as part of the flock instead of an actual individual.
This is where email personalization comes to help the Shopify business connect with its customers in a friendly way, making the experience more pleasurable. And, as we all know, a happy customer is a returning customer.
Personalize Your Shopify Store
The online shopping market has evolved over the past decades. Having a good, functional online store is no longer sufficient to ensure success. Every Shopify store must consider personalization when looking for ways to increase conversion rates. Focusing on the customer’s needs and preferences is nowadays more important than ever before and can either make or break the success of an online store.
