Conversion is a vital component of online business. It refers to the number of customers who are being affected by your content, advertising, and brand enough to actually make a purchase or perform an action you want them to.
The practice of sending customers through a carefully planned pipeline — a ‘sales funnel’ — is a strategy that works best for online marketplaces such as Shopify to increase conversion rates.
Everything from your name to your headers, graphics, and blogs will play a role in how many people end up visiting and making a purchase. Much of the work lies in perfecting your product pages. Conversion rate optimization is a term used to describe these improvements. It can be performed in small stages over a long period.
Experienced Shopify store owners can attest to the amount of skill required to continuously test and improve their online products.
Personalization of recommendations can help drive conversions. Let’s examine some of the best performing strategies for increasing your conversion rate using personalized recommendations for your Shopify store.
Collecting Data
A personalized shopping experience for your customers starts with recording data. There are many data points you can use to get a good picture of what makes each of your customers tick. For example, consider:
- What do they search for?
- How did they reach your site?
- What have they purchased from you?
- What’s currently in the their shopping cart?
- How active are they on social media?
- Have they interacted with you before?
- Which geographic region are they in?
- Do they typically buy products on discount or more premium items?
- How do they fit into demographics you already have a good picture of?
Personalized Recommendations
A personalized recommendation is designed to increase visitor engagement and consequently sales by showing customers recommendations based on their own particular browsing behavior, past purchases, or other data points.
You can use Shopify with a tool like DataCue to show personalized recommendations to visitors to your store. Instead of being recommended products that might suit anyone, they are shown items that they personally are most likely to purchase.
You’ve probably seen online stores that recommend similar products to the product that you’re currently viewing. With smart, personalized recommendations, the products that you see are laser-focused, tailored to previous buying habits, what you’ve viewed, and even known information like your location, age, and how you’ve reacted to sales and discounts in the past.
Increase Traffic with Personalized Recommendations via Email
Using personalized recommendations can also boost the traffic to your Shopify store.
Marketing can be improved for your Shopify store is with email personalization. DataCue can help you achieve this. Email drives a huge percentage of online sales and sending even slightly customized emails can vastly improve the chances a customer will click through on them and explore the offers in more detail.
The more you learn about your customers and what they individually like, the better the personalized emails become and the more likely they are to make a purchase. Conversion rates increase as you’re selling items in a highly targeted way.
Minimizing Clutter
Not only can you use personalization to recommend products on Shopify that are targeted to each individual, your smart personalization can remove or minimize the clutter on your site caused by products the reader won’t be interested in. DataCue takes personalization to the next level, storing information on what each customer seems to be interested in and morphing the website to cater to them.
Instead of showing the best-selling women’s shoes to someone who is shopping for men’s jackets, the site’s menu, banners, images, and recommended products can all update in real-time to offer the user the perfect shopping experience for what they want.
Removing all of these distractions and showing personalized recommendations can see your conversion rate skyrocket.
Monitoring and Automating Personalized Recommendations
If you are wasting time doing tasks that could be automated, you are losing valuable time. By streamlining your workflow and automating tasks such as sales, discounts, and pricing, you can cut back on the time invested or better use it in another area.
This is also true of personalization systems. Simple systems see you manually making cross-references between products based on what you think will sell well together. But you often get it wrong – an automated system tracks every movement of customers and pairs products together that a manual system would overlook. Furthermore, as your products and business focus change, with a manual system you’re left with trying to fix old recommendations that are no longer applicable.
It is also important to document your conversion rates for recommendations. Benchmarking your conversion rates and comparing weekly tallies will help paint a more accurate picture of which investments are providing returns and where resources such as time could be better spent elsewhere. Again, using a smart personalized recommendations system like DataCue allows you to tap into this information without having to personally records conversions and sales.
Remarketing for Success
Another aspect of improving conversion for your Shopify store with personalized recommendations is through remarketing. Remarketing is a term used to describe ads that target people who have already visited your Shopify store. This can be in the form of personalized emails but most commonly remarketing ads are in the form of banners, pop-ups, and video ads.
Have you ever been browsing a news article when you see an amazing deal for that new pair of headphones you searched for recently on Amazon? That is an example of a personalized recommendation in remarketing.
Learning to incorporate remarketing into your strategy will ensure a large uptick in Shopify store visits. Remarketing has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to build return customers. Personalizing your content and targeting these customers who have already been at your Shopify store through emails or banner ads is a great way to increase conversion for these remarketing efforts.
Cover photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash.
