Despite the fact that 57% of consumers will spend more with brands that personalize experiences, their expectations of a personalized experience are not being met. Per Forrester, around two-thirds of Americans rated their experience with brands as being only “okay.” Zero labelled it as “excellent.”
There are a plethora of reasons why brands fall short—especially when catering to today’s omnichannel shopping habits. Some 30% of consumers use at least three channels prior to making their purchase, according to Retail Dive.
Picture this: An online browser visits your online store and buys a product—but your customer data sits siloed in each platform. The customer receives a promotional email that gives them 10% off in-store after their visit. The idea is there, but the execution is off. It risks customer loyalty and contributes to the sky-high return rates that omnichannel brands already contend with.
This guide shares how to master omnichannel personalization at scale. Whether the interaction takes place in a social media ad, on your website, or in a retail store, learn how to put your data to work and tailor the customer experience wherever your customer shops.
Understanding customer journeys
Before you can personalize the customer experience, you need to know what it looks like end to end. A customer journey map defines each touchpoint, the behaviors demonstrated at each point, and the channels frequently used. This becomes the foundation for your personalization strategy, as it helps you understand how people interact with your brand across multiple channels.
Mapping the customer journey also enables you to identify pain points and opportunities for conversion. For example, your map might show that people in the conversion stage frequently buy from your store, yet when they shop in-store, they spend 30% more on average.
Use this information to your advantage with a marketing automation that uses a visitor’s location to point them towards your nearest retail location. Incentivize this using data you’ve collected thus far, such as:
- How many loyalty points they’ve earned and can redeem in-store
- Items on sale that are related to those they’ve viewed online
- Free in-store pickup options if they’ve viewed your shipping policy page
This helps you build trust and loyalty with customers long after their first interaction, driving long-term growth and sustainable revenue.
Building a strategy for creating a personalized customer journey
A well-crafted personalization strategy helps businesses deliver personalized experiences that drive customer engagement and loyalty. Regardless of where a customer interacts with your brand (online or offline), they receive a consistently personalized experience based on their preferences, purchase history, and interactions.
The core building blocks of an omnichannel personalization strategy include:
- Goals: Are you trying to reduce customer acquisition costs, increase conversion, or boost return on ad spend (ROAS)? Are you concentrating on the full funnel experience, or are you particularly concerned with one or two parts of the funnel? Are you trying to streamline your martech stack? Get clear on what the ideal outcome looks like to align your team and focus your efforts.
- Personas: Define the key personas that you’ll be targeting, and what matters to and motivates them most. For example, if your cart abandonment survey shows that most online shoppers abandon their cart because shipping costs are too high, guide them towards the nearest retail location where the item is in stock and eligible for free curbside pickup.
- Toolstack: Most commerce platforms rely on integrations to transmit customer data. However, maintenance for multiple technologies quickly causes tech debt that erodes efficiency and results in inaccuracies that interfere with your personalization capabilities. Shopify is different: The core data model means your most important data is unified in one centralized customer profile —no matter where it originated from.
The importance of unified customer data
A customer data platform (CDP) helps you unify customer data from multiple sources, providing a single, comprehensive view of the customer. This unified data enables retailers to deliver personalized shopping experiences that are tailored to individual customers’ needs and preferences.
Data compiled in the Seeing Around Corners report shows that most marketers employ between 7 and 10 technologies to execute their omnichannel personalization programs. Yet when this data sits in silos, you can spend hours each week piecing together your buyer’s identity—and that’s before you decide on how to use that insight to tailor their experience.
Shopify is unique in that it brings data from these tools together in one unified customer data model. Whether it’s from a native feature (i.e., Shopify Email or Shopify Audiences) or a third-party app (i.e., Smile or Klaviyo), it all comes together in your Shopify admin to work from a central, accurate, 360-degree view of your customers.
As Molly Allen, senior ecommerce manager at Astrid & Miyu, puts it: “Shopify’s big singular view of our customer is the secret power to scaling fast and managing international growth.”
Key components of omnichannel personalization
Omnichannel personalization involves delivering personalized experiences across multiple channels, including online, offline, and mobile. Retailers must integrate the following components to deliver seamless, personalized experiences that meet customers’ needs and preferences.
Data collection
Limitations on cookie tracking mean it’s harder than ever to detect customer behavior. This has created the need for first-party data—information that’s been willingly contributed by your audience through surveys, quizzes, apps, emails, and social media.
It’s a common misconception that first-party data is difficult to come by. For example, how do you convince a first-time shopper to tell you what they’re interested in when they’re still unsure themselves? The key is to clarify why you’re asking. Nearly half of global consumers are willing to share their personal data if it will lead to better shopping experiences.
Omnichannel furniture retailer Jenni Kaye puts this into practice. They turned to Shopify to unify data they’d collected on their customers, like whether they were part of a loyalty or trade program.
“Deep down, relationships are the most important thing to us, and with Shopify, we can take the time to build those relationships as clients furnish their homes over the span of months and even years by always following up, making sure they’re happy, and then talking about building out the rest of the space,” says Sam Mella, Jenni Kaye’s director of home experience.
Marketing automation
It’s almost impossible to keep tabs on your customers and reach out with timely, personalized offers manually. Marketing automation uses customer data you’ve already collected to trigger an action—without manual intervention. This allows you to personalize the omnichannel experience for hundreds of thousands of visitors simultaneously.
Examples of marketing automation for omnichannel personalization include:
- SMS and email marketing: Configure specific emails that are sent after people complete a trigger, such as abandoning their online cart, viewing a specific product page, responding to a quiz, starting a subscription, or hitting a new loyalty reward tier.
- Social media retargeting: Display items someone has viewed by uploading custom lists to targeting platforms like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Drive up to two times more retargeting conversions with Shopify Audiences.
- Chatbot integration. Embed AI-powered chatbots in your ecommerce store to provide personalized support to those in need. For example, you could create a mini quiz that guides people to find the right product by asking a series of questions that uncover their pain points, purchase motivators, and preferences.
Optimized site design
Unless you’re selling through marketplaces and social media storefronts, the goal of most marketing campaigns is to guide shoppers towards your ecommerce site. It’s a crucial point in the customer journey where shoppers can learn more about the products they’re thinking about buying.
Use the data you’ve collected on your customers to personalize website content. That includes:
- Announcement bar copy
- Product recommendation widgets
- Email popup form incentives
- Loyalty rewards they’re eligible for
- Social proof from customers similar to themselves
- Copy in their native language, in their home currency
Luxury fashion label Represent used Shopify’s Managed Markets to personalize their website amid an international growth push. Now able to sell in more currencies than just GBP, Represent used Shopify to roll out localized versions of their ecommerce site to offer customers seamless payment options in their preferred currencies.
“After we rolled out separate sites for the US and Europe we saw an increase internationally of 50% in sales,” says Represent’s chief digital officer Stefan Lewis. “Most recently, we launched our German translation and that added an immediate 30% increase in conversion rates and over 100% increase in organic sessions.”
The best part? Shopify offers various APIs, extensions, and developer tools that enable you to customize the platform and integrate with third-party solutions, allowing you to tailor the customer experience across different touchpoints.
Multichannel analytics
The omnichannel nature of modern shopping experiences makes attribution difficult. Someone might see your social media ad, sign up for marketing emails, click a link inside an email, and go on to complete their purchase in-store—how do you decide which channel gets the credit for the sale?
Multichannel attribution tracks the entire customer journey to give credit to each touchpoint. In the example above, social media ads, email, and retail stores would each get some credit for the conversion. This helps you land on realistic conversion numbers to determine the success of personalization at each touchpoint.
Omnichannel ordering systems
Say a customer first discovered your products on a marketplace, then went on to buy another product from your online store, and visited your NY location when they were on vacation. Omnichannel ordering systems merge this order data together to give full visibility into your customers’ purchasing behavior to personalize future outreach accordingly—no matter where the sale took place.
Shopify is unique in that it unifies order data as standard. Whether the sale occurs through Amazon, your ecommerce website, a popup shop, or on Facebook, sales channel extensions bring your order data together inside the Shopify admin. This eliminates fragmented data and streamlines back-end operations, reducing complexity and allowing businesses to focus on providing personalized experiences across all channels.
It’s no surprise that Shopify POS retailers experience an equivalent omnichannel sales growth of +150% quarterly on average year over year.
“For years, there was a disconnect between our online business and our retail business,” says Curtis Ulrich, director of ecommerce at Aviator Nation. “Unifying our in-store and online sales with Shopify streamlined our operations and made it so much easier to gather the data we needed to provide our customers with exceptional experiences.”
Overcoming barriers to omnichannel personalization
Common barriers to omnichannel personalization include:
- Budget constraints: Marketing automation tools make it possible to personalize the customer experience across multiple channels—but they come at a cost.
- Accessing and interpreting data: Segment’s State of Personalization report found that almost two-thirds of companies are concerned about the specter of inaccurate data muddying their AI-driven personalization efforts.
- Company silos: Are marketing, sales, and customer support sharing their data internally? Do product teams weigh in on future developments or launches that impact personalization efforts?
Overcome these barriers by investing in the right technology, developing a unified customer data strategy, and fostering a culture of collaboration. Shopify can help you achieve all three through platform unification: everything you need is already there or available in the app ecosystem.
Experimenting with new channels doesn’t require a new requisition, integration, or implementation. You either turn it on, or choose an app. This lowers the platform’s total cost of ownership (where Shopify already excels), as well as the cost of marketing activities—so budget constraints shouldn’t hold you back in the end.
“With Shopify, there is so much money and development effort saved by utilizing a system that can take care of retail and ecommerce,” says Edwin Portillo, VP of technology at Good American. “I think that’s the beauty of it.”
Measuring and optimizing personalization
Measuring and optimizing personalization efforts is critical for delivering effective omnichannel personalization. Only when you know how consumer behaviors change can you deliver personalized customer experiences that meet their evolving needs and preferences.
Key metrics for measuring omnichannel personalization include:
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Customer retention
- Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- CAC to CLV ratio
- Return on advertising spend (ROAS)
- Product return rates
Shopify’s prebuilt analytics reports allow you to immediately draw conclusions without custom-coding dashboards. Plus, you can use custom data exploration to slice and dice omnichannel data to layer additional metrics and drill deeper into personalization performance. This enables you to answer specific questions, such as, “Does the in-store conversion rate increase when we offer online customers a free curbside pickup option?”
Master omnichannel personalization with unified data in Shopify
Omnichannel personalization is a critical component of modern marketing—and the ability to do it comes standard with Shopify.
Shopify’s unified commerce functionality allows you to deliver personalized experiences that meet customers’ evolving needs and preferences at scale, with features such as:
- Shopify POS: Get a centralized view of customer data from both online and in-store interactions. You can personalize the customer experience at the point of sale, offering personalized recommendations, targeted promotions, and loyalty program benefits regardless of the channel.
- Personalized storefronts: Leverage data insights to create personalized storefront experiences. This could involve tailoring product recommendations, showcasing relevant content, and offering customized promotions based on individual customer preferences and past behavior. This creates a consistent and engaging experience across different channels, driving customer loyalty and retention.
- Outreach: Shopify's platform allows for personalized outreach campaigns across various channels using data from the unified customer model. Segment audiences based on purchase history, browsing behavior, and other data points to craft targeted email, SMS, and social media campaigns, ensuring that customers receive relevant information and offers, no matter where they interact with the brand.
- Shop Pay: While Shop Pay is primarily known as an accelerated checkout solution, it also plays a role in omnichannel personalization. By enabling a seamless checkout experience across multiple channels, the data collected through Shop Pay enriches the unified customer profile, allowing for further personalization in marketing and customer service interactions. It’s no wonder 59% of orders on Shop are from return buyers.
- Shopify Audiences: Leverage the collective power of participating merchants to improve ad performance. Create highly targeted audience segments based on shared buyer behavior insights, ensuring your marketing messages reach the most relevant potential customers across various advertising platforms. This enables businesses to expand their reach, improve customer acquisition efficiency, and deliver personalized omnichannel experiences.
“The decision to build on Shopify Plus was crystal clear, given the strength of the product, the platform’s ability to connect with inventory, logistics, ERP and operational systems, and the vision for the future of commerce,” says Louis-Felix Boulanger, COO and cofounder of BonLook. “Together we are pioneering the very best omnichannel experiences for eyewear.”
FAQ on omnichannel personalization
What is omnichannel personalization?
Omnichannel personalization is a customer-centric strategy that tailors the shopping experience based on data you’ve already collected on a customer, regardless of the channel they’re using.
What are the four pillars of omnichannel?
The four pillars of omnichannel are visibility, personalization, optimization, and timing. Covering all bases allows you to effectively interact with customers across any channel.
What are the four C's of omnichannel?
The four C’s of omnichannel marketing are context, content, collaboration, and customer experience.
What is the concept of omnichannel?
Omnichannel is a concept that allows retailers to offer seamless experiences to customers across all channels. Whether they’re interacting with you on social media, through email, on your ecommerce website, or in-store, omnichannel ensures they get a consistent shopping experience.
