How To Incorporate Personalization Into Your BigCommerce Store

Running a BigCommerce store without any personalization is like trying to win the Tour de France on a unicycle.  In order to be competitive in the modern world of ecommerce–you need to embrace personalization.

In this guide, we’ll show you absolutely everything you need to know about BigCommerce personalization, including the benefits, common personalization segments that brands use, and examples you can run with to implement personalization for your brand.

Personalization Defined and Benefits

In ecommerce, “personalization” refers to all the practices and techniques that involve offering unique experiences to a particular group (or even individual).  

As we’ll detail below, there are two main shopper segments that drive most ecommerce personalization: 

• Pre-purchase shoppers
• Recently purchased or returning customers

The data is clear — this isn’t something you really need to weigh the pros and cons on. Just about every ecommerce merchant can benefit from personalization, as an Adobe report found that around 90% of merchants receive a positive return on investment from their personalization efforts. That includes 9% of merchants who got a return of $20 or more for every dollar spent. Few investment opportunities offer this much safety and this much upside at the same time. 

As for the specific benefits of personalization, these include:

• 64% of marketing professionals reported that personalization improved customer experience
• 63% said it had increased conversion rates
• 55% report that it increased visitor engagement

At the end of the day, it’s all about your bottom line. So, we’ll leave you with one last stat on the benefits of personalization — research conducted by McKinsey & Company has shown that personalization tends to raise overall revenue by 5% to 15%. 

Personalization for Shoppers Before Purchase

Before a visitor has even placed an order in your store, there are still plenty of ways for you to use personalization to provide them with a more tailored experience. 

Shogun allows you to create audience segments based on a variety of conditions. You can also mix and match different conditions within the same segment if necessary — in that case, you’ll be able to determine whether all of the conditions or only one of the conditions must be met in order for a visitor to be included in the segment. 

For example, you can use personalization to show an alternate version of a page to visitors who speak a certain language.

Translations

This allows you to manually translate the contents of each page rather than relying on the visitor’s browser. If a significant share of your customers speak a foreign language, you should strongly consider doing this — the automatic translations produced by web browsers are often much less accurate than translations produced by humans. 

Let’s say you wanted to personalize a page for French-speaking visitors. To execute this with Shogun’s Personalization feature, you would need to follow these steps:

• Create a segment targeting areas where French is frequently spoken, such as France and Quebec.
• Open the page you want to customize in Shogun’s visual editor.
• Create a new variant for the page.
• Assign the new page variant to the audience segment you created for French speakers.
• Manually translate the content of the new page variant into French, then publish your changes — the edits you made to the new variant will only be shown to that particular segment, while everyone else will still see the original version of the page.

Climate

Personalization also allows you to account for climate. For example, an international clothing brand might want to follow the latest seasonal trends on their homepage, but whenever it’s summer in the northern hemisphere it’s winter in the southern hemisphere, and vice versa.

This would be another way to utilize located-based segments:

• Create two segments, one that covers countries in the northern hemisphere and one that covers countries in the southern hemisphere.
• Create two new variants for any of the pages you want to customize.
• Assign one of these new variants to the segment for visitors in the northern hemisphere and the other to the segment for visitors in the southern hemisphere.
• Adjust the page designs to promote whichever products make the most sense at the time — using this method, a brand could simultaneously promote coats and scarves to visitors in the United States while they also promote swimwear to those in Australia.

Hiding Product Mentions

Due to local laws and regulations, there may be products in your catalog that you must not sell in certain areas in order to avoid legal liability. The personalization capabilities of Shogun make it easy to ensure compliance in such scenarios:

• In addition to creating a segment that includes a certain type of visitor, you can also create a segment that excludes a certain type of visitor, such as those located in an area you’re not allowed to sell some items to.
• For each page that features these items, add a new variant and assign it to the segment for restricted users.
• Use Shogun’s visual editor to remove all references and links to these items from the page variant that is displayed to restricted users.

Personalized Site Experiences for Influencer Campaigns

With influencer marketing campaigns, you can introduce your brand to a whole new audience and direct a fresh batch of potential customers to one of your product pages. 

And with personalization, you can create a seamless transition for the influencer’s followers as they navigate from a social media post to your BigCommerce store, ultimately making your campaign more effective:

• Create a UTM tag for the link you plan to use in your marketing campaign.
• Provide this unique link to the influencer for them to include in the social media post leading back to your site.
• Referral traffic is another condition you can use to set up an audience segment in Shogun — create a segment for the visitors who are being directed to your site through the URL you provided to the influencer. 
• Set up a new variant of the product page associated with your influencer marketing campaign.
• In this new variant, create a custom page design featuring an image or video of the influencer enjoying your product.

Targeted Promotions

Perhaps the most common way to use personalization is to offer a promotion to some visitors but not others. There are a variety of ways to set up such promotions, including time-limited deals:

• Use the “Date”, “Day of Week”, and “Time of Day” condition options to create a new audience segment in Shogun — for example, if you noticed in your sales data that Tuesdays are particularly slow, you might want to set up a sale for that day of the week. 
• Create a new variant for any page on which you would like to feature this time-limited deal.
• Assign your time-based segment to this new variant.
• Use Shogun’s visual editor to add on-page elements promoting the deal, such as a banner or countdown clock, to the new variant. That way, you’ll be able to avoid confusion by only promoting the deal when it is actually available.

Pre-Purchase Personalization Examples

Let’s take a look at a couple case studies to see exactly what kind of results merchants can achieve with pre-purchase personalization:

Electrolux

The home appliance manufacturer Electrolux is a massive business with customers all over the world. Instead of offering a one-size-fits-all site, they made the extra effort to provide localized experiences that account for regional differences, such as price sensitivity and cultural factors. 

Targeting: 63 regions, including France, Sweden, Italy, and many other countries

Method: Personalized promotions, loyalty program pop-ups, and homepage recommendations based on the visitor’s location

Result: 16% increase in revenue

By speaking directly to a certain type of visitor’s needs and preferences rather than trying to appeal to everyone, you can increase your odds of converting each individual visitor into a customer. 

TUI Cruises

TUI Cruises realized that their homepage was too broad. Families needed to plan around school schedules, and they placed a high priority on entertainment options. Other visitors had open schedules and wanted exciting new experiences. A more targeted approach was called for.

Targeting: Three audience segments — couples, families, and solo travelers

Method: Different homepage banners and messaging based on these audience segments

Result: 10.3% increase in add-to-cart rate across all segments

The more time visitors need to spend researching their options, the more likely it is that they won’t ever get around to completing their order. Segmented experiences will allow you to increase sales by making the purchasing process more efficient.

Personalization for Shoppers After Purchase

In addition to helping you convert prospects into paying customers, personalization can also help you turn one-time customers into loyal, repeat customers.  

Indeed, there are several ways to provide personalized experiences for people who have made a purchase on your store before, including:

• Recommendations: A customer’s purchase history is valuable information, as it allows you to make an informed guess as to what other items they would be interested in buying. A highly personalized product recommendations section will help you increase your average order value (AOV) and make more sales. 
• Upselling: Compared to visitors who haven’t yet made a purchase on your store, previous customers are more likely to opt for premium add-ons, as they’ve shown that they already trust your brand enough to place an order. This is another effective technique for increasing AOV. 
• Re-engagement: For consumable items such as food and cosmetics, you can dig into your customer data to see when each customer tends to run out of these products. And whenever you notice that a customer hasn’t placed their usual re-order, you can use personalized page elements to remind them to do so. 

To further demonstrate the power of personalization, let’s take a look at some more real-world results:

Nextbase

Nextbase realized that it didn’t make any sense to promote their flagship product, the Dash Cam, to customers who had purchased it already. 

So, they used Shogun’s integration with the Klaviyo Customer Data Platform (CDP) to design a page variant for these previous purchasers, who were shown some of the other items in their catalog instead. 

Targeting: Previous purchasers segment imported from Klaviyo (using the CDP)

Method: Custom collection page variant made with the Shogun visual editor

Result: 122% increase in collection page conversion rate

You could also achieve powerful results by creating custom experiences that are designed to sell a complementary product to what the shopper recently purchased.

GlassesUSA.com

GlassesUSA.com, the world’s largest online eyewear retailer, determined that their product recommendations weren’t as accurate as they could be. This led them to take a more sophisticated approach to the recommendations widget on their homepage. 

Targeting: Homepage visitors

Method: Deep learning algorithm that generates recommendations based on the visitor’s purchase history and session activity as well as site-wide trends

Result: 68% increase in purchases and 88% increase in revenue from their homepage

When online stores have a large catalog, it can be difficult for customers to find what they’re looking for. In these cases, you must do everything you can to help match visitors to your most relevant products — otherwise, there’s a good chance that they’ll get overwhelmed and just give up.

Design Group

Like GlassesUSA.com, the online furniture retailer Design Group has a particularly large catalog. But rather than their homepage, they implemented personalized recommendations on pages that are further down the purchasing funnel. 

Targeting: Visitors to product detail and shopping cart pages

Method: AI-powered product recommendations

Result: 53% increase in number of purchases

These results show that post-purchase personalization can be used to improve just about every part of your store. 

Personalization Outside of the Storefront

Finally, it’s worth noting that personalization doesn’t need to stop at your BigCommerce store. Whenever you reach out to potential customers rather than waiting for them to come to you, you should incorporate personalization into your marketing strategy:

• Email: If you’ve collected a visitor’s email address, what else do you know about them? Instead of sending the same message out to everyone on your mailing list, you would be wise to segment your list based on purchase history, demographic details, personal interests, etc. Tailor your messaging to each group, and consider offering different promotions to each one as well. This will take more time, of course, but it’s often worth the effort — if you have a fair amount of subscribers, it will only take a small uptick in your email marketing conversion rate to generate a significant number of sales.
• SMS: As with your email campaigns, you should be personalizing the messaging in your SMS campaigns as much as possible. Also, when linking back to your site in an SMS message, you can use UTM tags to identify these visitors for an audience segment. If necessary, you can then design a custom version of the landing page for this segment that is especially well-suited for the relatively small screens of smartphones and tablets.
• Physical marketing materials: Even digital companies will often promote their brands at in-person events (this is especially common for business-to-business brands). At these events, you can provide printed materials with a QR code that leads to a personalized landing page welcoming visitors from the tradeshow or conference. 

Whether it’s on your store or off, you should be doing everything you can to offer more personalization to your customers. The benefits are simply too big to ignore.