Each of your customers has a different story. They’re different ages, they’re from different places, and they may even speak different languages. They each have their own needs, interests, preferences, personal goals, and media habits.
In other words, none of your customers are quite like any of the others.
So why would you treat them like they’re all the same?
Indeed, this is why it’s so important to offer personalized experiences on your Shopify store. If you haven’t done so already, don’t worry — from an overview of the benefits to a sampling of Shopify personalization examples to step-by-step instructions for how to implement this strategy, our guide covers absolutely everything you need to know to get started.
First, a quick definition, just to make sure you have a firm grasp of the concept before we continue: ecommerce personalization is the practice of tailoring your site’s design for specific shoppers or groups of shoppers.
Whether it’s a change to a single line of text or a complete overhaul of your Shopify theme, when someone is presented with a personalized experience, that means they’ll be seeing a version of your store that others don’t.
Personalization provides many benefits to Shopify merchants, including:
Most of the different personalization techniques that you could implement on your Shopify store fall into one of four categories:
To provide some inspiration for your own personalization efforts, we’ve reviewed specific examples covering each of these categories below. Also, we’ll walk you through how to turn each of these ideas into a reality with Shogun Personalization.
If you’re running promotions on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, then you should consider adjusting the language on your site for the different age groups that are known to frequent each of these platforms.
For example, let’s say you have campaigns on both Facebook and TikTok that link back to the same product page. Compared to other platforms, Facebook users are disproportionately over the age of 50, while TikTok users are disproportionately under the age of 29. So, a loose writing style that mixes in the latest pop culture references may be appealing to TikTok users but alienating to Facebook traffic.
By adjusting on-site copy and images according to the user profile of the different platforms that are sending traffic to your store, you can tailor your writing so that it’s more likely to lead each of these groups into making a purchase.
Campaign
Influencer marketing can be a highly effective way to promote your products. This involves arranging for someone with a significant social media presence to recommend one of your products to their followers. Not only will this expose your product to many people who weren’t previously aware of it — it also provides a valuable recommendation from a source that you know these prospects trust, increasing the odds that they will be convinced to place an order.
Now, instead of just sending the influencer’s followers to the same product page that everyone else sees, you could add elements such an image of the influencer enjoying your product or even a video of them demonstrating how it works. This creates a seamless transition as followers navigate from the influencer’s account to your website, reinforcing why they’re interested in your products in the first place.
And with personalization, you can make it so that this customized version of the page is only shown to those who are being directed to your site from the influencer marketing campaign. Everyone else (who might not even know who the influencer is) will still be shown the standard version of the page, preventing confusion.
Creating personalized influencer marketing landing pages will help you get a bigger return on the investment you’re making in these campaigns.
Campaign
Over 60% of all internet traffic these days comes from mobile devices.
So, most of the people who visit your site will likely be doing so on a smartphone or tablet. If these mobile users aren’t able to have a good experience on your storefront, then they’re just going to back out before they ever make a purchase.
Most Shopify themes are responsive, which means they’ll automatically adjust to the size of the visitor’s screen. But you could still do more to accommodate mobile users.
For example, with Shogun Personalization you can remove entire sections from the mobile version of your store while still keeping them on the desktop version. You should consider doing this for any section that’s not absolutely necessary — otherwise, your site might be too cluttered for the smaller screens of mobile devices.
Creating a pared-down version of your store for mobile users will lead to higher time on site, conversion rate, and average order value figures from visitors who happen to be using a smartphone or tablet.
Device type
To publish two versions of the same theme with Shogun Personalization, you’ll need to create a duplicate of your theme in your Shopify store’s theme library:
Despite the recent advancements in AI technology, research has shown that human translations (that is, translations that were performed by a human) are much more accurate than machine translations (like what web browsers do when they automatically translate content from one language into another).
While machine translations usually get most of the words right, they often have trouble in areas such as nuance and humor. Sometimes, an AI-generated output may even accidentally include something that’s culturally insensitive. If you want to get the wording of your translations exactly right, you’ll need to add human translations rather than rely on the automatic translations provided by the visitor’s browser. And this is all possible with personalization.
Adding human translations to the version of your site that is seen by those who speak a different language will improve the user experience for these visitors, resulting in a higher conversion rate and more sales revenue from this demographic.
Geolocation
You would like visitors to buy your most expensive items more than anything else, of course.
But not everyone is going to have the budget for that. In fact, if you try to promote such items to people who can’t afford it, you probably won’t get any sales at all. For these visitors, you’d be better off promoting items that are around your normal prices instead.
You can see where we’re going here, right? With personalization, you can use a prominent space on the page, such as a featured product box or featured collection slider, to promote expensive items to those who can afford it while also promoting more affordable items to those who can’t.
And to determine how likely it is that someone will be able to afford an expensive item, you can use geolocation as an approximation — some areas in the country have an average household income of less than $30,000, while in other areas it’s as high as $150,000 or more.
Recommending relatively expensive items in areas with higher incomes (while sticking to more affordable items in areas with lower incomes) will result in more sales than if you just recommended the same products to everyone.
Geolocation
Ideally, visitors will create an account on your store rather than check out as a guest — this provides you with contact information that can be quite valuable for marketing purposes, and having saved sign-in credentials, payment and shipping details, etc. will make it easier for the customer to place more orders in the future.
To encourage more people to sign up, you could offer those who are visiting your site for the first time an exclusive deal in exchange for creating an account. This can be done through a combination of Shopify’s discount capabilities and Shogun Personalization.
A personalized offer for new visitors who haven’t yet created an account will persuade more people to sign up, which will help you generate more revenue from these customers down the road.
Behavior
For this example, you’ll need to set up a discount and an alternative version of your theme in addition to your personalized experience:
Then, in Shopify Email or whatever other email marketing solution you may be using, set it up so that new signups are automatically sent a message containing the discount code for this promotion.
Once all of these steps have been completed, people visiting your store for the first time (at this point, there’s no way that they’ve signed up for an account yet) will be shown the banner promoting your offer for account signups. And then if they sign up, they’ll get a message that allows them to actually access this offer.
Overall, these examples are just a starting point — Shogun Personalization allows you to create whatever kinds of experiences you want for your particular customers. And since all of Shogun Personalization’s features can be accessed directly through the Shopify admin, that means there’s no need to jump over to another platform or learn any new editing tools to create your personalized experiences, making the whole process quick and easy.
