Influencer marketing is a core activity for Bubbleroom. In the lead-up to a design collaboration with the influencer Lovisa “Lojsan” Wallin, who was going to release a new collection, they successfully used a pre-launch campaign that beat all previous records. The purpose of the pre-launch campaign was to get as many people as possible to register their interest for the collection, in advance, before the official release.
The campaign went live approximately 2 weeks before the collection was available for purchase and they used 2 types of campaigns, scheduled to end the day before release.
Campaign 1 was an embedded variant, shown to everyone on the landing page.
Campaign 2 was a popup with a countdown to release, with the intention of collecting email addresses.
Demographically controlled callouts
Frank Dandy has made a name for themselves among underwear for guys and girls. They built up their database with demographically controlled callouts within the men’s and women’s sections on their website, and offered a 15% discount on the first purchase.
They used one campaign to show a callout for visitors on the men’s or women’s section.
Discount code reminder
KICKS actively sent out exclusive membership discounts based on the membership status and, naturally, many people forget to use said discounts.
To activate their club members and call on them to use their discount codes, they used Triggerbee to create and aim campaigns to remind their members about their membership discounts. The message in every campaign is adjusted based on the membership level.
Do you want to know more about KICKS and their personalization initiatives? Read a bigger case on KICKS.
Out of stock – reminder
Instead of having people leaving the site when products are out of stock, Boomerang used a reminder campaign triggered by link clicks.
When a product size is back in stock, they send a reminder. This helps Boomerang both with collecting email addresses, to build an email list, but also with enriching the email database and the target audience with clothing size information.
They used one campaign to show a popup for visitors who clicked on a link on product pages, when certain sizes were out of stock.
Discount code raffles
Engaging club members and rewarding loyalty is important for All Things Commerce. Every month they have held raffles for 5 gift cards in different price levels. Information about the raffle is shared through newsletters that lead members to the website.
With the help of Triggerbee Onsite Campaigns, visitors are greeted with a campaign where they can enter their email to be a part of the raffle. If they win, the customer service team is automatically notified about the winner and will send out the gift card.
This has resulted in a very high engagement with an average of 65% participation. Because of the many members going to the website, this has also increased the deliverability of Moomin Newsletters.
Still curious about All Things Commerce’s personalization efforts? Read our big case on Moomin.
Personalized banner
To personalize the experience for their returning customers, Dunken created a personalized banner on the homepage. First time visitors saw a banner with two buttons, leading to the sections for male and female clothing. Depending on the chosen initial category, you got to see an adjusted banner the next time you landed on the homepage, with buttons leading to different categories from the male or female assortments.
Banner 1 had a single variant, for first time visitors, and was meant to segment the next banner for returning visitors. The button choices decided which campaigns to follow up with.
Banner 2 (variant 1) used a banner with an image of a man, with buttons leading to different categories from the men’s assortments.
Banner 2 (variant 2) used a banner with an image of a woman, with buttons leading to different categories from the women’s assortments.
This is a complete guide to eCommerce personalization.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how personalization works, what it is, and why it’s important.
What is Ecommerce Personalization?
Ecommerce personalization is the practice of using customer data to create individually tailored shopping experiences. Some examples of ecommerce personalization include product recommendations, discount code reminders, audience-specific promotions, and the use of first names in various communications.
#3 It helps you maximize the value of your existing audience Personalization done right will help you increase your average order value and customer retention. On top of that, if your discount strategy is based on giving out discounts to everyone who visits your site, you can be more selective and only target specific individuals who need an extra push. You can also generate unique coupon codes for an added layer of security and to increase the feeling of exclusivity.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Over 90% of marketers believe that personalization is important, according to a survey from Econsultancy and Google.
Over 88% of all e-commerce stores use some form of personalization.
But…
Only 23% of consumers believe that retailers and e-commerce brands are doing a good job of delivering personalized experiences.
In other words, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Here are two screenshots showing the results from two real onsite campaigns. Can you guess which one uses personalization?
Hint: B – The one with the highest CTR.
Campaign A has almost 5x more views and fewer clicks compared to campaign B, which is personalized. These are game-changing results.
Campaign A promoted a 25% discount on a newly released product and was shown to everyone visiting the website.
Campaign B reminded loyalty-program members of their unused members-only discount codes.
Pretty neat.
Most e-commerce brands are trying to catch the same fish as everyone else.
The standard e-commerce playbook is made up of discounts, email- and influencer marketing, affiliate programs, and social and search ads.
Personalization is especially important for mature brands that already have a loyal customer base.
Whether you should focus more on customer acquisition or personalization is heavily influenced by where your brand is in its lifecycle.
1. Start | Customers: 0 – 100 | Contact/Email database: 0 – 1 000 contacts
When you’ve just started your store, there is only one thing you should be focused on: getting customers. At this point, you should not even think about personalization. Focus on growing your email database for bigger outreach and getting your first customers. Your discount strategy is critical for growth in this phase.
2. Grow | Customers: 100 – 1 000 | Contact/Email database: 1 000 – 50k contacts
You now have customers and a growing email list, and you are regularly getting sales. At this stage, you can begin to think about personalizing your email campaigns and promotions on your website. Even simple strategies like greeting email subscribers when they visit your website differently than visitors from Instagram can make a huge difference.
3. Scale | Customers: 1 000 – 10k | Contact/Email database: 50k – 200k contacts
You don’t run an e-commerce empire yet, but sales are growing. This is the point where you should begin to think about implementing a loyalty program and start using some e-commerce personalization tactics alongside your acquisition efforts. For example, build out audience segments in your email database or CRM, and target those segments on your website with personalized promotions. Prevent abandoned carts with emails and onsite campaigns, and remind customers of unused discount codes.
4. Mature | Customers: 10k+ | Contact/Email database: 200k – 500k contacts
You are now an established e-commerce brand. A common problem for retailers of this size is finding ways to continue to grow. That’s where personalization comes in. Your acquisition strategy may lead to a lot of one-time purchases, but with a solid ecommerce personalization strategy, you can increase your customer loyalty, retain, and maximize the value of each customer. At this stage, you need to be serious and deliberate about creating customer experiences that your competitors can’t replicate. This is the stage where you need to communicate with your customers based on their membership status, purchase history, and audience segment.
5. Mature and beyond | Customers: 100k+ | Contact/Email database: 500k – 1M+ contacts
At this stage, you are basically a household name. You’ve achieved many successes and you have a lot of processes in place. Now is the time to focus heavily on personalization.
Let’s take a look at a graph that explains the effectiveness of personalization depending on which tactics you use.
The more you understand about your customers, the better you will become at personalization, and the more your customer lifetime value will increase.
How Ecommerce Personalization Works
Personalization needs user and customer data to work. Most of the data used in ecommerce personalization can be classified into two categories:
First-party data
Zero-party data
Let’s go through both.
First-party data
First-party data refers to any data you collect from your customers without them being aware of it being collected. It sounds a lot scarier than it is, but if you have any analytics software installed on your site, you already collect first-party data.
However, all this data is great when used for personalization purposes. For example, you can use exit intent popups to capture customers who are about to abandon your site with products left in their cart.
Zero-party data
Refers to the data that your customers intentionally and willingly share with you, in exchange for a better experience or added value.
Examples of Zero-party data in e-commerce:
Clothing size
Favorite brands
Gender
Communication preferences
Style preferences
etc
Zero-party data is a gold mine for personalization. But how is it used, in real life?
Here are three real-world examples of e-commerce brands that collect and use zero-party data for personalization:
#1 – Zalando
Zalando collects style preferences based on 1) influencers you follow in their app, and 2) which brands you have marked as favorites in your profile. Combined with your purchase history, they use this data to generate personalized product recommendations that you are likely interested in.
#2 – Sephora.
If you register an account with Sephora, they have something they call “Beauty Traits & Color IQ”. This is your “beauty profile” where you can register your skin tone, skin concerns, eye color, hair color, and a bunch of other stuff.
Once you have registered your beauty traits, you can use it to filter reviews from other people with the same traits as you!
Sephora also uses personalized product recommendations, and personalized promotions targeted to you based on your membership level. But they have something that nobody else has: personalized customer review-filters.
#3 Nordstroms
Nordstroms use clothing attributes to tailor and adapt its personalized product recommendations. Once you select a size, the product recommendations change to prioritize products with your selected size available.
As you can see, zero-party data can be used in a lot of different ways.
You need to find ways to use it in your own business, because the use cases are highly dependent on the products you sell, and how your customers navigate your website.
Customer profiles
A customer profile is a detailed customer record that contains both zero-party, first-party, and transactional data. Below you’ll see a table of data that can be found in a customer profile along with example use cases.
Data
Type
Example use
Stored in
Contact information
(E-mail address, name, phone number, address)
Zero-party
- "Hello {{fname}}"
- Pre-filled forms
- Discount code validation
- CRM
- Email database
Behavior
(Clicks, visited pages, time on site, traffic source etc)
Customer data
(Purchase history, loyalty status, average order value, etc)
First-party
- Product recommendations
- Member offers
- Up-selling
- Onsite platform
- CRM
- Email Database
Here is a screenshot of a customer profile in Triggerbee, an onsite personalization software.
When you take a closer look, a lot of the available data can be used for personalization:
User information (“Hello {{fname}}”)
Number of visits
Device usage
Website activity
Visits
Audience belonging
Interests
Visit source
A customer profile is based on behavioral data and expands with each visit. It builds up as each user in your audience clicks links in your emails, makes purchases, and interacts with your brand’s owned channels (website, email, SMS).
You can use data from a customer profile to show and hide content on your website, send out personalized email campaigns, remind people of products in their shopping carts, generate personalized product recommendations, and build website audiences based on behavior in a similar way to how you create segments in your email marketing software.
Channel selection
To tell you the truth, you don’t really have much to choose from when it comes to channels if you want to personalize your marketing and communication.
You need full control over audience targeting, the appearance of your messages, content, and which data is being used.
Here are the three channels you can use for e-commerce personalization:
Website
Email
SMS
These three channels are the only channels you own. They are called “owned” because you own and control the data you collect and use in those channels.
Compare this to social media or search. Your followers on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube might be “your” followers, but the parent companies control the organic reach. You have zero control over your impressions, distribution, and appearance.
When you advertise on those platforms, you basically rent the data.
In your owned channels, you own all the data. You control every parameter up until the moment when your audience receives your message.
This leads us to the next step: designing personalized ecommerce experiences.
The difference between personalization and personalization (what?)
It might come as a surprise, but personalization doesn’t necessarily mean that everything should be “personalized”. Behavioral segmentation and self-submitted preferences from your customers are the foundation of a good personalization strategy.
In reality, here are the two most important things:
Personalization = relevance
The overall user experience matters more than the actual degree of personalization
However, it doesn’t mean that every interaction should or needs to be personalized. In some cases, personalization can become too much and feel forced.
Instead, the goal of personalization should be increased relevance.
Think of it like this:
Imagine yourself regularly visiting a local restaurant 2-3 times a week for several years.
It wouldn’t take long before you know the full staff. And for each visit, you have a better experience.
The restaurant staff will eventually be able to guess what you will order, and they know what’s going on in your life. You come back again and again because you know you will have a great time.
Now, imagine if that same restaurant suddenly would get a new owner that replaces the full staff, creates a new menu, and increases the prices.
Would you still go there? Maybe. But would it feel the same? No way.
You should think about ecommerce personalization the same way. The experience for your most loyal customers should be highly personalized and relevant. But for new visitors and new customers, you need to make a good first impression with a few elements of personalized interactions.
Designing Personalized Ecommerce Experiences
The most important part of designing personalized e-commerce experiences is finding out how to add value to every step of the customer journey.
One of the fastest ways to get started is by making a customer experience analysis.
Step 1: Perform a Customer Experience Analysis
If you don’t know how your customers experience your customer journey, you are going to have a hard time effectively using the right personalization tactics.
The solution? Perform a customer experience analysis.
Start by mapping out 3 or 4 customer journeys and their most important interactions.
But don’t map out every single step in every journey. It takes too long and it will just become confusing. Keep it simple.
Here are four example journeys:
New customers, coming from ads
New customers, coming from influencer links
Subscriber, coming from email campaigns
Existing customers, coming from emails
Write down each step of your selected journey(s), like this:
Gets a welcome email with the discount code, and visits the site from the email.
Adds product to their shopping cart
Completes purchase
This is a very simplified journey for a new customer, but that’s really all you need.
When you have mapped out a couple of journeys, here are four things to look for and take note of in every step and interaction:
Clarity: Is every step as clear as it could be? Friction: What’s causing doubts and hesitation? Anxiety: What makes “me” cringe? Distraction: Are there multiple distractions? Do I know what I want and need to do on the page?
Let’s go through each step:
Clarity
Main question:Is every step as clear as it could be?
What you’re looking for here is if the next step is 100% clear. In the context of personalization, you’re looking for things that can be clearer with the help of personalization.
For example, if you send out a discount code via email, are you showing that discount code on your website for people who click on your email?
Getting a discount code in an email campaign, but not seeing it on the website is a very common problem that easily can be fixed by using personalization.
Missing clarity will also cause friction, which brings us to the next point…
Friction
Main question:What is causing doubts and hesitation?
Anything that makes you feel confused, annoyed, frustrated, or insecure is a source of friction. Friction can be anything from not being able to log in, to not knowing what your discount code is, to feeling confused.
Here’s a real-world example…
One of our customers asked us how they could use Triggerbee’s software to make their influencer marketing more effective. We tried a lot of stuff and helped them set up some onsite campaigns.
The results didn’t really change until we found out that the transition from Instagram to the website was the issue.
All of their influencer links led to a category page – and not a specific product page. So, if you wanted to find the product being promoted by the influencer, you needed to find it yourself.
This caused massive friction.
So, we helped them build an onsite campaign that looked like a website chat, and the chat image was tailored to each of their influencers. When someone on Instagram clicked on an influencer link, they were greeted with a message that looked like this:
The result of this simple ecommerce personalization tactic? Over 20% average CTR.
This makes for a much better user experience and helps decrease friction caused by channel transition.
It’s your job to make every step in the customer journey as intuitive, simple, and non-complicated as possible. So, look for situations that can be simplified using personalization.
Anxiety
Main question:What’s making me “cringe”?
Anxiety is a function of your brand’s credibility and the trust you are asking your customers to have. For example, you can trigger “anxiety” by asking for unnecessary information in the wrong context (i.e. asking visitors to type in their phone number in a newsletter signup form).
If you encounter a situation where you think “why?” or feel stressed, you’ve found an anxiety trigger.
Here are two common anxiety triggers:
Not being consistent. If you display a promotion or discount code on your homepage, you also need visual clues on the product pages that are affected by the promotion. The same thing goes with members-only promotions. If you send out an email with a discount code, make sure to visually display that discount code on the website as well.
Insecurity. A super common example is influencer links leading to a category page or homepage, and not to a specific product page. This can lead to confusion, especially if there is no clear guidance on the landing page on how to find the product being promoted.
Distractions
Main question:What is distracting me?
The more visual inputs and actions your visitors have to process, the less likely they are to make a decision that leads to a conversion. Look for actions that can be pre-populated based on the customer data you collect.
Pre-populating size/color selections like Nordstrom, or having a good selection of related products are both great ways of minimizing distractions.
Product recommendations are great. But they need to be relevant.
Your conversion analysis should result in:
A list of situations where personalization can be used.
A list of tactics that can help minimize friction, distractions, and anxiety.
A list of audience segments that need to be targeted.
And that’s all there is to it.
Step 2: Building Personalized Ecommerce Experiences
Every e-commerce store will have unique challenges. But there are a few tactics that can be applied in almost every online store, and work immediately.
Examples of Ecommerce Personalization
See how top e-commerce brands use onsite personalization in various ways to enhance the experience for their users.
These are the tactics we’ll take a look at:
Abandoned Cart Recovery (On the website)
70% of your visitors will abandon their cart. And unfortunately, it’s one of those things that you just need to live with. You can, however, decrease and prevent them from happening.
Here are the top three reasons for cart abandonment:
Unexpected costs (shipping and other fees)
Mandatory login/registration
Long or complicated checkout process
You probably know abandoned cart emails are effective. But they have two problems:
The recipient needs to be identified or exists as a contact in your email database
The email is sent after the user has left your website
An exit-intent popup is a modal that appears when your visitor is about to leave your website, or more specifically when they move their cursor towards the address bar in their browser (or hits the back button on mobile).
Exit-intent messages are great because they don’t disturb the browsing experience until the visitor is about to leave.
Here’s why you should use it:
First, the user is still on your website and they are close to conversion. Second, the user doesn’t need to be identified.
Here are two ways to use Exit Intent messages that can prevent cart abandonment:
Targeting: Broad | Everyone Why it works: Most people abandon their shopping carts because of unexpected or too high costs. By offering a discount that is as close to the conversion as possible, you can persuade at least some people to take the offer and proceed with the purchase.
K-Rauta
Swedish construction retailer K-Rauta uses discount reminders to incentivize new email subscribers with a 5% discount code:
Targeting: Narrow | New email subscribers Why it works: Whenever someone signs up for K-Rauta’s email list, they receive a 5% discount code. However, far from everyone who signs up uses their discount code. K-Rauta knows that customers who use discount codes spend 52% more on average, so instead of letting people forget they show a reminder during checkout.
Your homepage is your digital front door.
And it’s up to you to greet new customers in the best way possible.
Dunken, a Swedish brand selling rock-themed clothing, uses a personalized homepage banner:
Based on which button you click, the layout will change and display buttons leading to the most popular women’s or men’s clothing categories.
They have over 15% CTR on this banner, so it’s helping visitors navigate through their website.
Targeting: Broad | Non-members Why it works: If you already are a club member, you don’t want to be asked if you want to register for membership again. Plus, avoiding impressions from existing members can increase the conversion rate.
Members-only raffles and competitions
All Things Commerce is the parent company of the Moomin brand. They have a LARGE membership club that is very enthusiastic and engaged. To keep their members engaged, they regularly host raffles and competitions.
Targeting: Narrow | For club members Why it works: All Things Commerce does not incentivize new members or signups with discount codes as most regular e-commerce stores. Instead, they save the special treatment for their members which makes it even more effective for that particular audience.
Pre-launch campaigns
Bubbleroom is a Swedish retailer selling women’s clothing.
Influencer marketing is an important part of their marketing strategy, and they release collections designed by influencers multiple times each year.
They use a pre-launch strategy to generate demand before an official launch. The message is generic, but the targeting was highly personalized.
Targeting: Narrow and broad | Members-only and everyone Why it works: Influencer collaborations are very popular. And Bubbleroom knows the power of segmentation. Their loyal members get the offer first, which creates exclusivity.
Email personalization examples
If you’re not personalizing your emails, you are leaving money on the table.
Here are some effective tactics you can use:
Personalized content
Demographically targeted campaigns
Reminders
Celebrations
Let’s take a look at how Rituals uses personalization in their email marketing.
How Rituals use personalization in email
Email 1: Welcome email with a welcome gift. Email 2: Abandoned cart reminder. Email 3: Reminder that you have yet to claim your welcome gift. Email 4: 1-month anniversary
Rituals obviously know how powerful personalized ecommerce emails can be. They have a distinct look and feel, and they make sure to stack the odds in their favor by sending out reminders and celebrating anniversaries.
Just by using time and activity as a basis for how to sequence your emails, you can easily increase the relevance of your communication.
Personalized welcome emails
You only have one chance to make a good first impression. And if your first email to new subscribers or members isn’t memorable, they won’t be very excited to open your campaign emails either.
Welcome emails drive 3 times the transaction and revenue per email, compared to other promotional emails.
The role of your welcome email should be to introduce them to your brand, set expectations for what’s to come and introduce them to any benefits.
Personalized reminder emails
Discounts are wildly effective as a customer acquisition strategy and for building your email list. However, even if someone signs up for your newsletter to get a 10% discount code, chances are they won’t use it
At first glance, it sounds like the perfect offer. Especially considering a lot of e-commerce companies are trying to become less dependent on discounts.
But what if I told you that customers who use discount codes spend on average 52% more?
Then you would want to make sure that everyone who receives a discount code, uses it.
You can use personalization to incentivize your new subscribers to use their discount codes.
It’s actually good for business!
Here are some examples of personalized discount code reminder emails:
Abandoned cart emails are emails that you send to re-engage shoppers who left items in their carts, without purchasing.
Cart abandonment emails should be sent out within 1-3 hours for maximum performance. Regardless of the reasons that shoppers abandon their shopping carts, you have a very limited window to win them back.
You’ve probably seen your fair share of abandoned cart emails. But have you ever seen an abandoned cart email that leads to even more personalized follow-up emails?
Sellpy is a Swedish brand selling second-hand clothing. They only have one or two of each product in stock at all times, which makes it very hard to effectively recommend products.
Below you’ll see an image of how they personalize their abandoned shopping cart-emails, and use that data to recommend other products in subsequent emails.
Instead of receiving a campaign with generic offers and messaging, demographic personalization offers your subscribers emails that are targeted directly at them and provides offers (products, promotions, etc.) that are relevant to their interests.
Personalized celebration emails
Celebration emails are one of the most effective emails that you can send. According to Experian, birthday emails have a 481% higher transaction rate than regular promotional emails.
They generate 342% more revenue and 179% higher click rates than regular promotional emails.
Personalization can create a new revenue stream for your e-commerce brand, especially if your business is at a stage where you have a large audience, but you’re still focusing on customer acquisition.
Your current data, and your current audience is your most valuable asset.
Personalization can help you unlock the value of your current audience, and with the help of data, create experiences that will increase your customer loyalty, retention, average order value, and much more.
But remember: Don’t try to do everything at once. Start small and take it step-by-step.
As a response to meet the growing demand for personalization within the eCommerce industry, Triggerbee and Avensia has entered into a strategic partnership to deliver superior personalized shopping experiences to Nordic retailers and E-commerce brands. This partnership is an important milestone for the growth strategy of both companies. Triggerbee’s latest Personalization Index report shows that over 88% of e-commerce brands in Sweden use personalization, but few meet consumers’ expectations. This means that there is still a lot to do within the area to increase customer satisfaction.
“The partnership with Triggerbee is important for Avensia because it gives us the ability to improve our offering within Modern Commerce where personalization is an integral part. Most consumers expect personalized experiences. They want to be remembered and recognized when they interact with a brand. But the real problem is that only 20% of those same consumers feel noticed by the brands they are most loyal to. We are going to change that.” – Jens Axelsson
Triggerbee is a next-generation onsite personalization platform allowing retailers and e-commerce brands to create unique, relevant, and personalized online experiences. The solution further expands Avensia’s unique offering, combining deep technical digital expertise with strategic commerce advisory.
“As a software company, you need to work with world-class agencies that have both strategic and operational know-how. Our partnership with Avensia and their 20+ years of e-commerce experience will help many retailers and e-commerce brands to become more competitive through personalized customer experiences.” – Jacob Sjönander
About Triggerbee
Triggerbee builds innovative software for e-commerce brands, news media, and membership organizations. Our software enables digital-first companies to connect with their customers by personalizing their customer journeys, increasing their conversion rates, increasing customer loyalty, generating leads, and increasing the profitability in their communication.
About Avensia
At Avensia, we are experts in modern commerce. We offer solutions for e-commerce, information management, omnichannel and customer experience, as well as retail trends and digital strategy services. By combining technical and strategical expertise we help B2C and B2B customers to accelerate growth and become even more successful in their day-to-day business. Avensia has 300 employees spread across offices in Sweden (HQ), United Kingdom, United States, Philippines, and Norway. Learn more at www.avensia.com.
To get started with A/B testing, or split testing as it sometimes is referred as, you must also come up with your first test or experiment. But, to say the least, it can be easier said than done. Are you going to test messages against customers or new visitors? Headings or button text? Color or size?
The best way to find things to A/B test is by doing a quick and easy conversion analysis. After you have done your conversion analysis, you are guaranteed to have a long list of ideas that you want to test.
But, best of all, A/B testing naturally leads to more questions than answers. Your first test can lead to a whole bunch of follow-up questions, and you want to test their affect on your conversion.
Until then, here is a list of over 30+ things you can A/B test on your site to increase both conversion, engagement, and sales.
Your headline
Your headline is the most important part. Test two completely different variants against each other. One headline can describe your offer, the other can be an attention grabber.
Your offer
10% discount or a downloadable style guide? Try two completely different offers, or rephrase your offer – ex. “10% discount” vs “Get a $15 gift card”
Embedded surfaces
If you use embedded surfaces, or “Onsite banners” – test a banner with an offer against a shopping guide or a blog post.
Countdown or no countdown
Does it increase your conversion rate if you add a countdown to set a time limit for your offer?
Length of forms
Find out if you get better leads / email addresses by adding one or more fields to your signup form.
Images and graphic content
If you are in e-commerce, try showing pictures of either people holding your products or a stand-alone product picture in your signup forms.
Button before the form
Do your conversion rate go up if you show the form to your visitors at the click of a button, or by directly displaying the form?
Tonality
Compare two different variants. In the first variant, your writing is in a light and welcoming tone, and in the other variant you are more aggressive and straightforward.
Discount or no discount
Depending on whether you want signups or just clicks, it may be worth not to mention anything about the discount amount at first. And instead, your message should say that the person who clicks gets a bonus or a discount code.
Newsletter or membership
A newsletter is an old and boring word. Try branding your newsletter as a membership. Or why not “customer club”, the “family” or the “gang”.
Social proof
Display how many that is already subscribed to your newsletter. Try it out, it can increase your conversion rate. Ever heard of “FOMO” (Fear of missing out)?
Increase clarity at each step
Test if you can get more visitors to click or convert by constantly telling the visitor what to do to get to the next step, and what happens at that next step.
The chat trick
Instead of showing a form or a popup, turn your popup into a chat box in which displays a colleague asking a question. Or turn it up a notch by the use of an influencer.
Design vs Blank
Try removing all images and graphic elements from your campaign to eliminate any sort of distractions. Compare a glossy, white campaign with a black text against a heavy graphic campaign.
Social buttons
Tell your visitors to follow you on instagram before they can access a discount code.
Social buttons on the thank you page
Try adding buttons and links to your various channels in the thank you text on the thank you page.
The elimination test
If you already have a campaign giving you good results, then you should compare by trying out different variants. Do so by removing one element at a time for each test. Analyse how each individually removed element effects the results. In this way you will discover which elements that are redundant.
Moving Gif vs static image
Try using a GIF instead of a static image in your campaigns. Moving images could increase your conversions.
Arrows and navigation
Can you increase your results by using arrows or other visual hints? Try pointing an arrow to the button, from the text message to the form and so on.
Rebellious headline
Instead of saying “Check out our new collection” – dare to try something bold like “Here are the dresses that will make you go from night out to breakfast in bed”. Just sticking out your nose and saying what people want to hear, can often be what will pay off.
Size of CTA
Increasing conversions might be as simple as making your CTA button bigger.
Information about Free Shipping
This may seem a bit far-fetched, but if you have an offer you want to lead to a purchase, it can be good to mention if you have free shopping as a benefit. Free Shipping can also be used as an offer by itself.
Benefits / USP
Your benefits are things like “Free Shipping”. Test different benefits, and try describing them differently. If you have home delivery, then try it out by testing “Free home delivery” against “free shipping”, and you might see an improved result.
Symbols of trust
Try adding trust symbols such as “Secure checkout”.
Add a real value to your percentage offers
Instead of just saying “10% discount”, try converting it into your choice of currency. It would look like this “Get a 10% discount (worth up to $50) when you sign up for our newsletter”.
“Unlock” instead of “get”
Instead of giving away something, do a test where you let your visitors unlock a discount or free shipping and see what happens. All you need to do is change your headline from “Get a 10% discount” to “Unlock a 10% discount”.
Remind instead of giving away
Instead of giving away a discount to your visitors, simply remind them about it. “Don’t forget your coupon for 10% off, do you want to use it now?”.
Source Matching
If you are showing a campaign to visitors coming from the link of an influencer, then say that directly in the headline. So instead of “Get a 10% discount”, say “Kim Kardashian wants to give you a 10% discount on her favourite products”.
Show / Hide products
Test what happens if you show your 3 best-selling products in the “thank you” text on your offers. Are purchases increasing? Or did nothing happen?
Placement of customer reviews
What happens if you display 3-5 customer reviews in an embedded form directly beneath the “Add to Cart” button?
Shopping cart offers
Try saving your offers until your visitors enter the shopping cart. Normally, a new customer offer is displayed immediately, but it can be beneficial to save the offer until the visitor is close to a conversion or a sale.
Abandoned cart offers
All e-commerce sites should have a campaign to win back abandoned shopping carts. Try two different offers to get your visitors to stay and go through with their checkout. The first variant should have a regular offer, and the other variant should include a countdown timer next to the offer.
Display 3-5 best-selling products on product pages
Try two different variations of an embedded campaign on different product pages or on the home page. Show a variation with you 3-5 best-selling products, and one with random products.
It’s in the nature of the salesperson to crave new customers. It’s a trait that becomes solidified during the terrifying startup phase and never quite goes away. You start from nothing, looking out upon a world of strangers with the disposable income to make your dream a reality — and only by convincing them of your value can you move towards your goals.
This can become a problem, though, and here’s why: it isn’t practical to find new customers at a pace sufficient to keep your business afloat, let alone drive its growth. Not if you pay so little attention to your existing customers that they go elsewhere. If you make a priority of earning customer loyalty, most other things will start to work out for you.
But how do you manage this? How do you improve your efforts at retention and convince more customers to stick around? In this post, we’re going to run through some useful tips for ecommerce companies trying to run effective retention campaigns, so let’s get started:
Learn from honest feedback
It’s almost impossible to keep customers happy if you don’t understand them. What they want, what frustrates them, what delights them: these things should inform the actions you take to maintain and develop your business (particularly your customer support). And understanding people requires more than just applying empathy or using buyer personas. It requires feedback.
You’ll likely get comments through support queries or social media, but they’ll typically be highly emotive and have only ephemeral significance. What you need to do is consult your customers through detailed surveys provided automatically at appropriate times after purchase. Throw in some small incentives, but nothing major: you don’t want to sway what people say.
Start selling wherever you can
Imagine this scenario: someone buys something from your store, is absolutely happy with every aspect of the buying experience, resolves to buy from you again, and promptly forgets about that resolution. You might think that implies that your brand isn’t memorable, but that isn’t necessarily the case. The internet is full of distractions and other things to buy, after all.
Due to this, there’s a good chance that simply giving people more opportunities to buy from you (and thus more chances to remember how much they like your brand) will produce positive results. Embrace the modern concept of selling everywhere — championed by leading platforms — and give people many more ways to purchase your products. One-click buying via social media, for instance, or even hybrid offline buying through POS systems.
Implement a reward scheme
Unless you have a position of industry dominance and the money and influence to retain it (Amazon-style), it’s very hard to maintain a leading value proposition as an ecommerce seller. Sooner or later, an upstart rival will come along to offer much the same things at lower prices, or outperform you in one or more other ways.
So what do you do? It isn’t advisable to lower your prices across the board, as that will damage your profit margins — but you can sweeten things for your long-term customers through a reward scheme offering things like discounts or extra items for those who’ve purchased from you on numerous occasions. You can also reward people for referring new customers: it’s a fantastic way to drive loyalty and increase your customer base.
Personalize your marketing
Marketing isn’t something you can limit to prospective customers: I noted earlier that you should try to sell as broadly as you can because existing customers can forget about you somewhat, and you should take that same route with your marketing. The big difference is that you should be offering distinct marketing materials to those customers, and making them personalized.
Some companies avoid personalization because it’s difficult to find the right balance, but you need to make it past those initial hurdles and turn it into a core part of your retention plan. This is because loyal customers expect to be treated differently. They expect to be appreciated as special contributors to the health of the company, and that means addressing them personally.
Interact with your customers
How heavily do you use social media for your company? Some prefer to avoid it (it is extremely frantic, and often messy), but its usefulness for business is undeniable. It allows you to show personality, spread marketing messages very broadly, and keep tabs on your competitors — and it’s very useful for interacting with your customers in casual ways.
This could be as simple as thanking someone for mentioning your brand in a positive light, or saying something nice about your products. Every Tweet one of your followers sends could spark an exchange that not only makes them feel better about your company but also paints you in a flattering light for anyone following along with it.
Customer retention ultimately stems from making your customers happy, which has always been the core of business. Following these suggestions will certainly help you get ahead, but don’t stop there: continue to find new ways to delight your customers and give them fresh ways to return value by supporting your brand.
Author:Rodney Laws Rodney Laws is an ecommerce expert with over a decade of experience in building online businesses.
