Personalization: How to Increase Returns and Build Customer Trust

In Summary

The internet, at its core, is a faceless, sterile producer of HTML gobbledygook (letter vomit). It’s only through building great applications and collecting data that we can get a better picture of who our customers are and what they are looking for. But our efforts are only as good as what information the customer is willing to give to us.

What is personalization? Why should we care about it?

Here’s an example: we can differentiate between a pre-recorded political campaign phone call and a legit person on the other side.

Since we can’t replicate in-person personalization, we can do it in subtle but powerful ways:

• Tweaking search results to boost results that are helpful to a customer.
• Automatically applying filters for product listings to weed out unhelpful products.
• Arranging slider / hero images on the home page to push them toward relevant sales.
• Adjusting the product recommendations based on order or browsing history.
• The best: highlighting rain products when the visitor’s physical location is raining (I’ve seen this, and it’s really good!). Or sending an email to visitors based on their geography and weather forecast.

What are the results of well-implemented personalization?

Your conversion rate will increase. Your average order value will increase. These are the magical numbers that almost completely represent the health of an online store.

But how we get there is through making the customer journey easier: 1) morph their experience into what they want at the time and 2) accelerate the process to purchase.

What are the results of poorly-implemented personalization?

Here’s another example of personalization gone wrong. I received this email:

What would this look like on your website? Sites that feature car parts have a Year/Make/Model selector. Beauty brands often have a survey to ask questions about skin/sensitivities. MarlowWhite.com (a military uniform distributor) has a similar selector.

Popups are annoying, so please use those sparingly: only when the user has shown engagement with the website can they be deployed. Just below the header or integrated into the menu system are two great places to request this information. It will be seen.

A fairly-recent feature on Google is highlighting text on the resulting page. This is a collaboration of the Chrome (and Safari) web browsers with the search engine. It’s possible for a developer to fetch the highlighted portion of text from the value in the URL proceeding: `#:~:text`

Accelerate the process to purchase.

We, as customers, are not usually on a website for the viewing pleasure. Sadly, many merchants perceive that customers love their website so much that they wish to spend hours a day (in fact, some even build a mobile app to download).

The more a customer has to hunt on our website for the product they desire to purchase, the more likely they are to think, “Forgetaboutit! I’m going to Amazon.” And we just lost a sale.

Helping a customer find what they want as quickly as possible is a sure way to increase your conversion rate. How do we know what they want unless we ask them?

What are potential applications for personalization? / Where can we deploy personalization?

Category / Search

The most common location for personalization is search results. We want to help customers find the perfect product as quickly as possible. Once visitor preferences or information is available to the display engines, it can then positively affect results. Both Adobe Commerce Live Search and Algolia are examples.

Product recommendations

These are one of the most under-looked areas for enhancement. When someone lands on a PDP, chances are high that they won’t find the exact product for which they are looking. The couch will be too expensive or the color wrong or the fabric not durable enough. We risk the visitor clicking back, and the sale is lost.

Nosto and Adobe Commerce Product Recommendations are the two solutions that are capable of handling this.

Marketing emails

What is this customer interested in? Send emails related to these interests. Will this take extra time, for sure! But is it worth it? Only time will tell thanks to your A/B tests.

Just looking at these once-in-a-while emails as your only marketing emails is missing at least 50% of the equation.

Oh, and don’t forget, the customer adds their email multiple times on your website. They should never have to re-enter it again. Seriously, this is the 21st century.

I did a podcast with Andrew Davis a while back, and he focused on customer touchpoints. When does the product ship (yep, covered)? When does the product arrive (sometimes “yes”)? When does the customer start using this? When are they most likely to be thrilled with the product?

But even when the product arrives, are there usage instructions? What is their onboarding experience? We all know how painful Ikea furniture is to assemble. Could that be the same story for your products?

You are likely thinking, “Wow, the time investment will be significant.” You are correct. Remember, this magazine is similar to those old Sears catalogs where you take an idea and try it—if you implement one thing from each of these Empowering Merchants magazines, you will see tremendous results (I hope you gain more than just one thing).

One of the more basic ideas of personalization is this:

Once the association between a customer’s email and a browsing session are made, your tools of choice should allow you to now target this customer based on their browsing.

Klaviyo is a great example of a tool that can do this very thing. It is easily integrated into Magento or Shopify. Pricing is super reasonable. You’ll be thrilled once you implement a solution like this. It’s somewhat possible inMailchimp, but I find that Mailchimp is less focused on ecommerce and is used by a wider group of businesses.

Using a platform like Klaviyo would allow you to:

• Send instructions X days after the product has shipped.
• Send a review request X days after the product has shipped. The goal is to have the email in their inbox at the moment when the customer is most excited about the product.
• Abandoned cart email. Try to add value to the email.

I know this is tough, but do your best to keep the marketing content to a minimum. Instead, focus on “how can we empower this person to be the happiest user of our products—ever?”

Where to start?

The most important question is “what’s wrong?” Why do you want to change something?

This is now whitespace—a blank canvas. It is up to you, the artist, to fill in the blanks. My goal is to inspire you with what to start drawing.

I suggest you ask the question: “What does it take to provide a personal experience?” If you have a brick/mortar store, see how your salespeople interact with the folks that come into your store. If you don’t, work through this list, asking this question: “How can I add a personal touch to these key places?”

• Marketing emails. How can you make this more like an email from a salesperson to the customer, instead of what the customer knows is a blanket email. Review the Dicks Sporting Goods email a few pages back. If the customer has ordered before, consider thanking them (don’t we all want to support companies who are “hungry” for our business?). Klayivo can even predict when the customer will purchase next—thus you can preemptively get in front of them.
• The "thank you for your order" screen. Instead of feeding them upsells (who is going to buy more now, unless it’s all free shipping), how about taking this opportunity to direct them to being effective users of the product, assuring them the product will arrive on time, and that you stand behind it?
• Transactional emails (order confirmation, shipping confirmation). You can stuff more products in front of the customer. There are occasions where this is appreciated. However, if you inscribe wedding party gifts, and the customer ordered knives for their groomsmen, consider highlighting an article about wrapping + gifting them correctly (if this is a thing).
• Home page. Highlight the categories that customers have shown the most interest in through the hero image. Present similar or related products.
• Customer account page You know what this customer loves—share content with them that they will love.
• Category/Search pages. I put this one last because it’s the most obvious. Customer information and their behavior should at least partially reorder the results that are shown on these pages.

No matter how you get this information, save it. I’d say it again if I can. If they aren’t logged in, save it to their session. If they are logged in, save it to their account. To ensure GDPR compliance, make sure the customer can edit it in their account if they are logged in.

• Upon registration, the customer’s selections are transferred from the session to their customer account. This should be pushed out to any relevant platforms, like Gorgias (support system), MailChimp or Klaviyo.
• Your development team should include this information for third-party tools like FullStory/HotJar (tools to watch your visitor’s sessions to identify usage problems), Gorgias or LiveChat (help desk solutions), or Algolia.
• Update your workflows and automations to adjust data.

Action-based

This type of personalization is founded on what actions the visitor takes. They clicked on Add to Cart on this page. They viewed this product. They placed an order.

Don’t get me wrong; these are helpful. But if the budget exists, do your best to personalize based on input provided by the customer.

These actions paint a broad picture of what the customer is looking for: if they are looking at couches, you’ll see this. Here’s where it falls short: if you believe this person is just looking for couches, perhaps you would show them more couches? But what happens when they have already purchased the couch, and you keep showing them more recommendations? No effect (or they are bothered: Wayfair is a perfect example).

You will most likely start here. If someone is interested in couches (and you have control over resulting personalization), think of what else they might like next. Be one step in front of them.

Person-based personalization is ideal because you are working with specific selections made by a human. This gives you far deeper insight into who they are.

Tools for personalization

Website personalization tools

Adobe Commerce Personalization

If you gain enough value from the features that Adobe Commerce offers, then the sticker shock will be overcome. You (and your development team) must analyze these features and make an internal commitment that you will use them. If you don’t... you’ll end up with a significant, yearly donation to Adobe—and you have better things to do with your money.

We know Adobe Commerce inside and out, so it’s critical to call out these features.

Customer segmentation

Every customer is assigned to a customer group. Each group has many customers, but each customer is only in one group. I bring this up because many people confuse a customer group and a customer segment.

Customer segments are calculated. A customer can be in multiple segments.

Segments are powerful. They allow you to identify customers that match conditions:

• Customer address
• Customer attributes (name, customer group, newsletter subscription which ties into Mailchimp)
• Totals of cart items
• Product purchase history
• Totals of orders

With this, you can target dynamic blocks (along with cart / catalog price rules) at those who match the customer segment’s conditions.

You can also export the list of customers so you can use it for targeting in third-party applications. Be careful of applicable laws.

If you don’t have Adobe Commerce, you can get much of the same functionality by using Mirasvit’s “Customer Segmentation Suite for Magento 2.”

Product recommendations

Recommendations are the first of Adobe’s move toward “microservices” for the Adobe Commerce platform. This feeds activity-based data to Adobe Sensei and the recommendations are returned.

There is no full equivalent of this for Magento Open Source... except for some third-party offerings which we will discuss below.

To be honest, I can’t say whether third-party offerings are better or worse than Adobe’s as I haven’t been able to do a head-to-head shootout yet. I will say that while most of the third-party systems will accept additional data inputs, Adobe Product Recommendations won’t.

Adobe Live Search

This is a brand-new feature that was just released. This seems to be a competitor with Algolia. At this point, I’d recommend Algolia. This will likely change over time, but Live Search is too new to say exactly what to think.

Algolia (Search / Category Display / Product Recommendations)

I have yet to find a better search tool than Algolia. It’s incredibly powerful but also reasonably priced. Its feature set is rich, and the results are quite customizable. The Magento integration just works “out of the box.”

We were working with a merchant who was using a different “bees knees” search provider. A funny side note: this search provider had six case studies on their website. Four of the featured websites had switched to Algolia. We also made the recommendation: installation was fast, and they were impressed with the results right out of the box.

Algolia can also take over displaying products on category pages. The benefit is you can use their merchandising and personalization tools to adjust the order of the displayed products.

Note: neither Algolia’s Magento module nor Shopify app supports product recommendations yet. This is likely 2022 or beyond.

Nosto / Vue.ai

These two solutions are pretty similar in their offerings (on the surface). They both offer product recommendations. Pricing is not available.

MailChimp / Klaviyo

We use Mailchimp for our email marketing. It does everything we need it to do and way more. Frankly, we don’t use automations like we can. If you don’t use your email marketing platform to the fullest, that’s ok. It should be on your to do list, even if you can’t get to it until next year.

Klaviyo is on our watch list. We are considering switching to it. Klaviyo is slightly more expensive.

For Magento, the Mailchimp integration works, but it can be hard on CPU resources.

Typeform

We talked about collecting data from your customers in our last edition of Empowering Merchants. TypeForm was my recommendation. The forms are beautiful and are easy to build with logic. You can point someone in the right direction and then collect which direction they were pointed to.

Depending on your GDPR restrictions, your developer can customize the form to add anonymized details which can then be passed back to your customer data through a callback.

What types of custom data can we feed to the personalization engine?

We aren’t Facebook, so we are unable to get the depth of knowledge about each visitor. However, we can start collecting data as soon as they set foot on our website—and the longer we keep them, the more we get to know them.

One caution I present is GDPR. It’s up to your lawyers to determine whether or not you need to comply. But if you do, the data that you collect per customer needs to be viewable/editable.

Email address

The second your customer enters their email into the checkout, live chat or anywhere else, you should capture this. In fact, the Klaviyo Magento extension does just that. Once you have the email, you can use this to connect the dots across the board. Remember, your developers should rarely, if ever, write the email directly into the HTML source code. Instead, use an anonymized token for cross-platform communication.

Placed order

Once you have a customer, you now have a plethora of information about them. Do keep data privacy in mind. However, you have their address and can target them geographically in a reliable way (instead of relying on their IP address’ geolocation).

Website interaction events

You can combine these events (Add to Cart, live chat, contact form submission) with additional data, like what product or category they are on. Most personalization engines discussed here do this out of the box.

Other ideas

• Specific features used
• Type of device (this is not as ideal for person-based personalization)
• Landing page
• Product path
• Products / categories viewed