After your online Shopify business has been running successfully for a while, you’ll inevitably see growth and improvement of sales. Starting at around $5,000 of sales per month, you may start to see smaller increases in your growth and you’ll be looking for ways to increase your conversions and revenue by percentage points on a month-to-month basis.
There are indeed hundreds of ways you can improve your conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who turn into paying customers), revenue, sales per customer, and profit margin. You know your business better than anyone else does, but one thing that has been shown to be universally successful in improving sales and conversion rates is personalization.
Personalization Works
Personalization is the process of offering a unique experience for each user. A simple form of personalization, for example, is referring to the customer by their name when we know it. Personalization can go much, much, deeper though, changing the entire experience for each individual customer.
It’s been shown that:
- 80% of online shoppers are more likely to buy from a site that offers a personalized experience
- Marketers report an average sales increase of 20% when offering personalized marketing
- 74% of customers express frustration if a website is not personalized
- 82% of email marketers report an increased open rate when personalized emails are used
DataCue and Shopify
DataCue offers a complete personalization suite that integrates completely with existing online business platforms, including Shopify. To install, you simply need to download the app on the Shopify app store, add recommended products, upload your banners, and match the widgets to your theme. It’s possible to customize the look and feel of the app so that it seamlessly fits your current Shopify theme.
From there, every page of your Shopify store can be automatically personalized for each visitor based on their prior behavior.
Your Personalized Shopify Website
Your home page will show products most relevant to the prior behavior of each customer and the customers you’ve had in the past. If the visitor has been to your website before and shown a preference for a product or category of products, those products will be more prominent. Other distractions will be pushed further back in the design.
The system tracks the products that work well together that are likely to generate larger sales per customer. If customers often purchase certain items together, those will be recommended together more often, increasing the amount the each customer is likely to purchase at a time.
On category pages, the best performing products will automatically be pushed to the forefront. As these can change on a seasonal basis, your website will keep fresh and up to date without your input.
On product pages, the customer can be introduced to similar products (for upselling), related products (for cross-selling), and/or products they’ve recently viewed. All of these have been shown to help increase the chance of a visitor adding a product to their cart.
No page needs to go un-personalized. Pages such as the 404 page, search page, and cart page can be personalized. For example, on their cart page, you can show related products that complement the items in their shopping basket. If they search for a product and nothing comes up, you can suggest items based on their previous behavior and what’s selling well now. If they somehow come across a 404 page, you can direct them to products they’ll be interested in instead of just showing an unexciting error page.
Creating Urgency with DataCue Personalized Notifications
Much of the time, customers will place items into their shopping cart and then never go through with the purchase. Other people will return to your site multiple times to check out products they really want but they never pull the trigger. To help them follow through, we need to create a sense of urgency.
One way to create urgency is to use notifications. Instead of intrusive pop-ups, notifications sit at the side or top of your content enticing the user to check out the message. If they do so, they will see information on your products personalized to their interests. The may see that a product they’ve been interested in is now on sale. They might see that you’ve just got new stock of an item they may be interested in based on their past purchases.
With personalized notifications, you can get smart with on-site urgency. You can identify the buyers who might be enticed to make their first purchase if they’re given a small discount just for them. Your special offers are no longer scattershot – they’re targeted at the exact people who might be swayed by them.
Personalized Product Recommendations By Email
Email marketing is an important part of your online business and you can make your emails a lot more palatable if you personalize them to your user’s interests and behavior. Thankfully, DataCue also includes this facility, so you can automatically sent emails to customers when they hit certain behavior triggers.
Perhaps they haven’t bought anything for a while. They will be sent an email personalized to them, showing them products the system thinks they may be interested in based on prior interest and perhaps even a discount personal to them. 20% off a category of products they’re interested in could be just what they need to return to your site and start buying again.
Proven Results
On average, we see something like a 20% increase in average order amount and a 12% increase in conversion rate once Shopify businesses switch to a DataCue personalized setup. Get in touch with us today to discuss how easy it is to take your Shopify store to the next level.
