Content Personalization For Ecommerce Store: Tips to Follow

Pretty pages attract customers, quality pages keep them – and engage more. If you want to succeed on the global marketplace, just opening up a Shopify store is not enough.

You have to invest time and effort into optimizing your page to the best possible level. In this article, we will give you some tips and tricks for personalizing your content, which is another important facet of Shopify store optimization.

1. What is content personalization in ecommerce?

Personalizing your ecommerce content (like a Shopify store, for example) is defined by Techopedia as presenting your merchandise, recommended items, various offers etc. in a way that is tailored to the shoppers who come to your pages, based on their personal data.

2. Why is it important?

Because it is a major boost to ecommerce success. When you expose your visitors to personalized content, you are telling them that you care. Thus you acquire more customers, you get better engagement rates, higher conversion, and increased customer satisfaction levels.

 

Custom-crafted recommendations and checkout prompts, for example, can be the little nudge you need to keep people shopping on your Shopify page. And it is definitely worth the effort: in a research report released by Epsilon, it is shown that 80% of consumers (aged 18-64) are more likely to buy from brands that personalize their shopping experience.

3. Ecommerce content personalization types

Depending on what data points you primarily rely on, personalizing user experience can be grouped into three broad categories.

 

3.1. Based on context

Personalizing your Shopify store and offer based on context means that you leverage data about the logistic side of your visitors’ browsing.

What data do you need?

You would need to gather information such as:

• which location they are accessing your Shopify store from,
• at what time of day they most frequently visit your store,
• what kind of device are they using to browse your offer, and so on.

What to do?

You can leverage this type of data in a few different ways. Popular options include:

• offering your Shopify store in a local language,
• offering payment options in local currencies,
• having a converter button to express prices in local currencies,
• having promotion events, e.g. for holidays,
• prompting visitors to buy something on their days off or weekends.

 

 

3.2. Based on behavior

Behavior-based Shopify optimization refers to tracking user behavior across all of your pages and then using that to tailor their experience.

What data do you need?

You need to know what people click on. Use cookies and related technologies to track:

• what product categories people view
• how they typically sort the displays (by price rising/ price falling, by popularity, by newest etc.),
• what items are frequently viewed together
• what items people often give up on, etc.

What to do?

Use this information to present your store’s visitors with custom recommendations and promotions, such as:

• recently viewed products
• abandoned cart items
• new products in their favorite/ most viewed categories
• limited-time discounts
• products other people check out along with what they’re buying

 

For example, let’s say you sell academic supplies and your target consumers are university students. If a customer is frequently looking at study materials or writing tools, you can recommend them research aids, grammar checkers etc. such as TrustMyPaper, Grammarly, or similar.

This is especially useful if you form a partnership between your Shopify store and another business, which can earn you commission fees or other benefits.

 

3.3. Based on history

In addition to their website behavior and the context of their browsing your Shopify, you can also leverage your customers’ history to personalize their experience.

 

What data do you need?

Tap into whatever you have legal access to that can give you insight into people’s past interactions with your Shopify business. Good sources of information include:

• transaction records
• previously exchanged emails
• messages regarding loyalty programs
• promotional newsletters

 

 

What to do?

Personal data history can be leveraged in the most versatile ways. Use it to personalize your visitors’ store experience on the whole, as well as to custom-tailor the messages you send them.

 

4. Use good data gathering tools

Whichever type of content personalization you decide to employ in your Shopify business, remember to be meticulous and precise in your data gathering.

 

A research and writing experts at Supreme Dissertations, claim: ‘Space travel, the cures for diseases, even the invention of the internet all started with someone collecting and organizing information.’

Take some time to research the best plugins and apps for your Shopify business. Choose the ones that will best match your data mining and general personalization needs.

Popular tools in 2020 included:

• Barilliance
• Monetate
• Evergage
• CommerceStack
• Attraqt
• Dynamic Yield
• and many others.

 

Google the most popular choices, or see what got recently featured on the Staff Picks of the official Shopify App Store.

5. Take action!

Going forward in 2021, here are some content personalization strategies you might want to use for your ecommerce business.

• make AI-facilitated recommendations (the Shopify app WISER is a great choice for this)
• localize the available languages and currencies in your Shopify store (consider an app like Geolocation)
• use localized announcement bars to inform shoppers from different countries about local sales, estimated shipping timelines, and other location-based announcements (a good choice for this function is the Country-Based Announcement Bar Shopify app)
• find apps that will power customization of individual products in your store (e.g. clothes colors, custom text, wrapping for gifts, different sizes of items etc.)
• personalize customers’ search results (Searchly is a popular tool for this purpose)

Let’s recap

Look into the context, behavior, and history of your store visitors. Use Shopify analytics apps and plugins to localize your store, customize products and recommendations. Add auto-suggest and various filters to your search functionality so that people can find the things they’re looking for more quickly and more smoothly. Follow these tips and keep your strategies flexible, and your Shopify store is sure to see a boost in sales in the new year!

Nicole Garrison is a content strategist, writer, and contributor. Find her on Twitter.