Today’s consumers expect personalization at every touchpoint—and they’re willing to spend more with brands that cater to those preferences.
Generic emails using the “send to all” trigger are no longer effective—nor is ticking personalization off your checklist by using a “first name” tag in the email subject line. The average consumer receives 121 emails every day. It’s outreach that’s tailored to their unique challenges, motivations, and interests that stands out in a crowded inbox.
Shopify’s unified commerce platform provides tools to achieve effective email personalization at scale. It’s simple to integrate data across your marketing stack into our unified customer data model, so you can collect and activate all of the customer information that matters to your business and personalize the shopping experience accordingly.
This guide shares how to use email personalization to improve marketing KPIs, drive more sales, and build stronger customer relationships.
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Half of consumers say personalized offers and promotions from brands they’ve interacted with improve their shopping experience, our Ecommerce Growth Guide concluded. It makes sense: with so many retailers to consider—many of whom offer comparable products for similar prices—it’s brands that personalize the customer experience who win the sale.
Data from McKinsey supports this: retailers that personalize their marketing campaigns can reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50%, increase return on investment (ROI) by up to 30%, and lift revenue by up to 15%.
Email personalization is essential for cutting through the noise and capturing customer attention in a crowded inbox. Your message arrives right beside communication from other brands—and personalization techniques such as playing on their pain points, addressing them by name, and reminding them of a product they love helps increase the chances that they’ll open your email.
Personalized email campaigns also help build customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value. Data from Monetate found brands can increase average order value by up to 12% when the shopping experience is tailored to each customer’s individual needs and desires.
The decline of third-party cookies means businesses are recognizing fewer website visitors. Browsers’ updated cookie tracking policies and Apple iOS’ introduction of its App Tracking Transparency feature make it harder than ever to pinpoint exactly who’s doing what on your website.
First-party data is now the foundation for effective personalization. Data willingly contributed by your audience allows you to recognize more of the visitors who land on your site. You can uncover not just their website activity, but also qualitative data to understand their purchase motivators, pain points, and challenges.
For example, with strong first-party data and identity resolution, Monte Design can tell I put a recliner chair in my cart even if I didn’t log in—and because I have opted in to their emails, the action can trigger an abandoned cart email to bring me back to make a purchase. This seamless multichannel experience is personalized to me.
First-party data sheds light on who your customers are despite cookie tracking limitations imposed by browsers. It comes willingly from your audience and can take many forms: search queries on-site, retail store visit data, and order history, for example.
The lead capture form is the ideal place to supplement first-party data. This feature, often considered a tradeoff between merchants and buyers, has evolved from a scrappy email-gathering tactic into a mission-critical business function. The key is to offer value to your customers in exchange for their data. Shoppers are more open to this than you may think: almost half would hand over their details in exchange for a better experience.
Merchants on Shopify have a unique advantage over other retailers because this data is compiled for each customer in their own unique profile. Every time someone shares their phone number or email address, they’ll have their own customer profile created in the Customer tab of your Shopify admin—even if they haven’t yet placed an order.
Any supplementary data from email marketing apps, quizzes, loyalty programs, or customer service tickets feeds back to the customer’s unified profile. This gives you a complete, ever-evolving 360-degree view of your shopper to reference in email marketing personalization.
Segments are groups of people who share similar traits, interests, or qualities. Segmentation should be dynamic in nature, automatically adding or removing customer profiles from the segment when they demonstrate specific behaviors.
There are an infinite number of ways to segment your customer lists. Popular examples include:
Shopify uses data from each customer’s unified profile to assign them to a segment based on your predetermined criteria. For example, when a first-time customer makes their second purchase, they’re automatically moved from the “first-time customer” segment into the “repeat buyer” group for more accurate real-time personalization.
Smart cleaning appliance manufacturer Airsign put this into practice after their initial product launch. The marketing team tagged customers who purchased their vacuum at launch. These customers hadn’t had the opportunity to purchase subscriptions for the brand’s AirBags or HEPA filters, which launched some time after the initial product drop.
Airsign’s team targeted this segment with a personalized discount for their subscription service to encourage retention and increase CLV. “We identified the segment in Shopify, created a discount for that specific segment, communicated with them in a way that was very personalized for their needs, and we saw about 30% of those people convert,” cofounder Alex Dashefsky says of the campaign.
Use the first-party data you’ve already collected to personalize your email outreach for each segment. There are multiple ways to do this:
Most email subscribers won’t limit their interaction with a brand to their inbox. Commerce is more omnichannel than ever, and the average shopper interacts with a retailer on multiple channels throughout their customer journey.
Omnichannel personalization leverages the data you’ve collected to personalize this end-to-end experience, no matter where customers shop. They receive consistent messaging, promotions, and recommendations across retargeted campaigns in their inbox, social media, and through Shop Campaigns—the latter of which is proven to drive up to a 24% increase in new customers.
Here’s what that might look like in practice: An email subscriber joins the segment of subscribers who’ve earned 150 loyalty points in your rewards program. They’ve opened your emails but still haven’t made a purchase to redeem their reward.
In the interim, use your Shopify segment in Google Ads campaigns to reach them while they’re Googling, watching YouTube, or browsing a site within the Display Network. Highlight the monetary value of their loyalty points and promote products similar to those they’ve already bought.
Email marketing campaigns are designed to drive users back to your website. Continue the personalized experience there with a storefront that’s personalized to each unique visitor.
Shopify’s data indicates that personalized storefronts will become table stakes for any great retailer. And because you’ve already got a wealth of first-party data on your visitors in their unified customer profiles, you can personalize your website at scale through components such as:
Follow this approach to personalization at each stage of the customer journey. When someone adds a product to their cart and heads to checkout, for example, a customized experience—like allowing them to sign into their account to complete their purchase in a few clicks—can significantly improve conversion rates.
In fact, our data shows that Shopify’s checkout—used by millions of buyers globally—is optimized for conversion. It’s the highest-converting checkout experience in the world, outperforming competitors by 15% on average and 36% better than Salesforce.
Shop Pay can convert as much as 50% better than a typical or guest checkout—and users are 77% more likely to make an additional purchase on any Shopify store after making a purchase.
Don’t just take our word for it. With a new, totally customized checkout, Maine Lobster Now has boosted conversion by 69%—and 97% on mobile. The same results apply to business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce: Dermalogica Canada boosted B2B conversion rates by 23%, with a 338% increase in reorder frequency.
Most marketers use between 7 and 10 technologies to execute personalization programs. Shopify’s customer data platform connects buyer touchpoints across these tools, channels, devices, and sessions, which helps you deliver more relevant and personalized experiences. This is the foundation of personalized outreach.
This unified data model is the foundation of everything that comes next: the world’s best checkout, personalized shopping pages, and cost-effective customer acquisition. It brings together browsing, purchasing, and order data into one model for all your selling channels, so you can run marketing, segmentation, and personalization on that same data.
What’s unique about this model is that it’s also open to third-party collaboration, and can withstand future regulatory changes. In other words: we’ve seen around corners to anticipate evolutions in privacy technology, to help scaling merchants create a complete picture of their customers in light of external and regulatory changes that enable user anonymity.
Shopify’s segmentation uses your unified customer profiles to divide users into segments based on qualities they share—without the need for extra data integrations. These segments are dynamically updated so customers are switched between segments depending on any new information added to their profile.
Segments can be built using ShopifyQL to query customer lists with specific criteria. For example, you can find customers who have bought certain products a certain number of times within a certain time period, or who are within a certain distance of a retail location.
Marketing automation software automates repetitive tasks associated with personalized email campaigns at every stage of their journey. Whether it’s generating a unique discount code for each email subscriber or sending a cart abandonment email 30 minutes after a user exits their session, marketing automation software gives your team back time and energy to focus on higher-priority tasks.
Shopify has a suite of marketing automation tools that are powered by your unified profiles and customer segments:
When combined, these marketing automation tools allow you to send beautiful emails, automate campaigns across channels, and segment data in one place. You can deliver more personalized emails for less money with Shopify—all while converting visitors into subscriptions and sales.
“We can run a global business with six people because Shopify enables us to automate so much of the work,” says Sebastian Geis, cofounder of Paperlike. “That allows us to focus on creating amazing products that people love, provide outstanding customer support, and still do amazing marketing because we’re not worried about our technology.”
Email has consistently proven itself as a sustainable driver of revenue for businesses of all sizes. But with its widespread adoption, you must cater to consumers’ expectations for a personalized experience to stand out in the most sacred place of all: their inbox.
First-party data is the key to effective email personalization. Only when you know what your customers want, prefer, and how they behave can you tailor the experience in their inbox.
Shopify provides the tools and foundation to leverage personalization for long-term success. From a core data model that unifies your data to advanced segmentation and email marketing solutions, it’s never been easier to give customers the tailored experiences they’re craving.
Email personalization is a strategy whereby retailers use data they’ve already collected on customers to tailor their outreach. This can include website behavior, purchase history, interactions with a loyalty program, and how many times they’ve ordered.
Almost two-thirds of marketers believe that personalized emails have the most impact. This is because half of consumers think personalized promotions from brands they’ve interacted with improve their shopping experience.
Examples of email personalization include addressing the subscriber by their first name, reminding them of items they’ve abandoned in their shopping cart, and sending personalized product recommendations based on items they’ve already bought.
