Who is your target customer? Whether they’re millennial parents with some extra money to spend or vegans looking for better dinner options, they’ve got something in common: rising expectations. We’re all bombarded with targeted offers, ads, and messaging whenever we so much as open our email or scroll through social media.
With every spontaneous discount code and push notification, customers expect better personalized campaigns. Keeping up can be a challenge. In recent years, legislation and consumer trends have devalued third-party cookies—the longtime foundation of ecommerce—making it even more difficult to get to know your customers.
Real-time personalization guided by first-party data is your solution. Fifty percent of consumers say personalized offers and promotions from brands they’ve interacted with improve the shopping experience. Virtually all consumers want to self-serve a buying journey filled with personalized content and relevant experiences.
In this blog, we’ll explain how real-time personalized marketing can deliver shopping journeys that convert, all while building a sustainable, long-term growth engine for your business.
What is real-time personalization?
Real-time personalization instantly adapts your online store’s content to deliver each customer a unique shopping journey. Using data customers share with you, real-time personalization provides them with bespoke, relevant content, offers, product recommendations, and more. It’s a collaborative effort across your whole operating and marketing stack, with everyone working on the same customer model using first-party data.
Effective personalized experiences should give customers the same feeling they get when they’ve been helped by a knowledgeable associate on the sales floor, or when they’ve earned a free item from a loyalty program.
Remember, today’s customer has an ambiguous response to retail personalization. Avoid tactics that come across as intrusive, creepy, or overly algorithmic. Customers want relevant experiences, but they don’t want their whole identity reduced to an item they clicked on 18 months ago—or even worse, to fear their personal data isn’t safe with you.
Consider Peter Drucker’s long-held advice: “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.”
Drucker wrote those words in 1954, but they’re quite relevant to ecommerce personalization now. Nurturing customers is the core of business growth, so be transparent with your personalization techniques. Allow customers to opt out of certain features. If customers feel a genuine connection to your brand, you’ve built a valuable relationship.
Benefits of real-time personalization
Today, 100% of buyers want to self-serve all or part of their customer journey. With such demand for a hands-on approach, how can your business stand out?
First-party data provides a wealth of insight for personalized marketing. And successful personalization strategy starts with building the best possible checkout experience.
Checkout is a high-leverage spot for retailers to cater to their customers. Shoppers value personal touches like having their preferred payment method at the ready, or being reminded of loyalty points they’ve earned that could be applied at checkout. This could be the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.
You can supercharge your personalization efforts by pairing them with the premier checkout experience. Hundreds of millions of people use Shopify Checkout each year. Our look, feel, and flow is familiar and trusted. We’ve built that reputation by delivering on high-volume holidays and making everyday transactions simple and secure.
And we convert. Shopify Checkout is the world’s highest-converting checkout, outpacing the competition by up to 36% and by 15% on average.
How does real-time personalization work?
Here’s a step-by-step guide for building real-time personalization for your target customer profiles.
Gathering customer data from multiple sources
First-party data is the foundation of everything. It’s the data you own, the data your customers entrust you with. And it’s the best way to personalize the customer journey.
This could be as simple as serving student customers with back-to-school offers, or customers in colder climates with alerts for warmer clothes in winter. If a customer searches for a specific item, you could email them a newsletter that delves into how to use it, with suggested add-on purchases. And that email could be made even more relevant with a subject line and intro informed by that customer’s demographic and behavioral data.
First-party data is the foundation of real-time personalization, but it’s not the only method. Second-party data—customer info collected from other stores you trust—can be used alongside first-party data to enhance the customer experience for those who opt in. Combined, diverse data sources can make your outreach hyperspecific and scalable, too.
But only if you have the right platform to tie it all together.
Shopify unites all your browsing, purchasing, and order data in one core customer model. You don’t have to integrate a bunch of third-party tools or worry about losing data across different selling channels. We connect all the dots so you’re ready to use your data for segmenting and scaling your messaging however you wish.
Collecting and analyzing behavioral data for insights
Analyze customer actions to identify patterns and preferences. Are you getting lots of purchases from a certain demographic? Explore ways to engage them more specifically. Are a lot of people asking your AI chatbot similar questions? Something could be amiss in the checkout process.
You can use machine-learning algorithms to process streaming data and generate metrics or “features” for personalized recommendations. Smart search, powered by machine learning, directs customers to the items they’re looking for even when their search queries are a little off, ensuring sales aren’t lost.
And be sure to collect and analyze customer feedback to refine your personalization strategies. Messaging that stood out three months ago could fade to background noise if you’re not truly engaged with your audience.
Understanding and segmenting your audience
If first-party data is the foundation of everything, segmenting is the foundation of knowing what to do with it.
Segmenting means grouping customers by key characteristics so you can personalize marketing efforts towards each group.
With Shopify Segmentation, you can segment customers based on demographics, purchase data, storefront engagement, third-party app data stored in Shopify, and more. You can use customer data to identify distinct customer groups and tailor marketing efforts towards whatever kind of person you want to reach—and run personalized experiences at scale. And Shopify’s Web Pixels give you a powerful and compliance-forward way to keep track of how buyers use your store, from discovery to checkout.
Mapping the customer journey and identifying touchpoints
The ecommerce customer journey map is growing less linear and more complex. As shopping behavior grows ever nuanced, it’s important to anticipate every customer touchpoint and plan personalization opportunities.
The customer journey begins with brand awareness via advertising and marketing, all the way to purchase (and then, customer support and loyalty building). Throughout the process, customer journey orchestration identifies key moments to trigger personalized responses. For instance, personalized retargeting ads can convince customers on the fence to tap “Buy.” And AI-powered chatbots can answer queries about order status and return policies.
Shopify is your key to data collection and identity resolution in personalizing the customer journey. Shopify Functions, Metaobjects, and other new platform primitives give you infinite possibilities for what to build, and the right framework for building it, so any app or customization will work effortlessly with everything else.
How to implement real-time personalization with Shopify
Shopify’s first-party data tools give you everything you need to maximize marketing technology—and drive conversion.
Here’s a sampling of what sets us apart:
- Shopify’scustomer data platform unifies buyer touchpoints across channels, devices, and sessions. If a potential buyer signs up for your email list on their desktop, receives confirmation on their phone, and taps the link in their email app, Shopify lets you target them with personalized messaging without missing a beat.
- Shopify’s web pixels let you transfer data client-side and server-side to use customer behavior data reliably.
- Ourattribution and ROAS reports give you an accurate, unbiased view of marketing performance. You can see where traffic and orders are coming from, and how much you’re spending to get them.
“Now, with third-party cookies behind us, marketers on Shopify already have everything they need to optimize the shopping and checkout experiences with the best data out there: the data they own.” Bobby Morrison, Chief Revenue Officer at Shopify
