Have you ever wandered into a store feeling slightly lost, only to have a friendly sales associate guide you through every stage of the buying process? You begin your journey dejected, and leave the store with a skip in your step—and a bag full of perfectly sized clothing.
Well, guess what? The same type of customer experience is now possible for ecommerce shoppers.
With website personalization, you can give each customer the personal-shopper treatment—catering to each person’s unique tastes, purchase motivations, and pain points simultaneously through a single online storefront.
While personalized websites aren’t a new strategy, the way in which personalization happens is evolving. We’re in the midst of a transition: Increasingly stringent limitations around third-party cookies mean it’s not as easy to keep track of consumer preferences. First-party data is becoming a bigger priority for enterprise retailers looking to accurately personalize their websites at scale.
This guide shares how to do that, with website personalization strategies, techniques, and examples from retailers who’ve already done it.
The evolution of website personalization
Traditional ecommerce websites had a one-size-fits-all approach. It didn’t matter whether you were selling to a first-time customer or a repeat buyer; a Gen Z browser or a baby boomer—everyone had exactly the same onsite customer experience.
Advancements in technology—browser cookies, in particular—meant this no longer was the case. Javascript code shed a light on exactly who was visiting your website and the actions and behaviors they demonstrated. If the cookie recorded that someone signed in to an online account on their previous session, for example, you could prompt them to do the same again next time.
However, things are changing. People are becoming aware of the data that brands hold on them, and it’s making them uneasy. Browsers are taking these concerns into consideration.
We’re rapidly heading towards a cookieless future. Apple, Brave, and Firefox have already limited their cookie-tracking capabilities. And while Google backtracked on its promise to block third-party cookies, one thing is clear: third-party data is no longer a reliable source of intelligence. New approaches are needed to accurately track onsite user behavior and collect data to use in the traditional ecommerce personalization approach.
Building on first-party data
Cookie-tracking limitations mean you can’t always see the bigger picture. When website visitors opt out of third-party cookies on your site—something companies are increasingly required to make easy to do—you can’t tell what they’re doing on your website. In other words: the first half of the personalization strategy—collecting data—becomes a lot harder.
These changes present the need for first-party data that’s owned by you and collected from your target audience. You likely already have this through data sources like:
- CRM data
- Click data and website analytics
- Email and SMS marketing lists
- Product quizzes
- Feedback forms
- Loyalty programs
The beauty of first-party data is that you own it: You’re not buying the same list as your competitors, containing customer profiles from a data aggregator. This gives you a unique advantage: Customers get a hyper-personalized user experience that only you can offer, based on the unique first-party data they’ve given only your brand.
Implementing website personalization techniques
The core customer model
A unified customer data model is the foundation of effective personalization. With third-party data becoming increasingly difficult to obtain—and always being of questionable accuracy and relevance—you need the infrastructure in place to capture owned data on your customers. This presents the need for a unified commerce platform like Shopify.
Shopify doesn’t just create customer profiles for people who’ve bought from you. Website visitors who sign up with their phone number or email address—not just through Shopify features, but also through partner apps like Klaviyo—also have a customer profile made. Every traceable action from your online store, marketing channels, and partner app feeds back to this customer profile for a complete 360-degree view of your website visitor.
Personalized online storefronts
Long gone are the days of a standard online storefront that stays the same regardless of who’s interacting with it. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify let you personalize your website content on the fly, depending on your preconfigured data parameters.
But your customer data must be unified for it to work at scale. For example, if someone has clicked a link to your “Candle” collection page through a Klaviyo email marketing campaign, you need this customer data linked to your unified commerce platform (i.e., Shopify) to add them to your “Candle interest” customer segments.
This segmentation is how you’ll display a different version of your website that’s personalized to that user based on your first-party data—like showing your bestselling candles in a product recommendation carousel, or a popup form that offers an exclusive candle bundle in exchange for their email subscription.
- Localizing the content: The overwhelming majority of online shoppers prefer to buy products in their own language and local currency. Managed Markets makes this possible for your Shopify storefront. It uses a visitor’s IP address and dynamically translates the language, changes the currency, and activates top payment methods for that region.
- Reflecting the visitor in social proof: Show reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content from people who share similar traits to your website visitor.
- Using responsive design: Studies estimate that 44.6% of all website traffic happens on a smartphone. A responsive design lets you personalize the experience by device type. Mobile users get larger images, finger-friendly buttons, and stacked navigation menus.
- Encouraging account sign-in: Accounts aren’t just for customers who want to track orders, manage subscriptions, or initiate returns. Signed-in website visitors can unlock extra personalized features like wishlists, saved carts, and personalized discounts.
J&Co is one merchant using Managed Markets to personalize the shopping experience for international website visitors. The jewelry brand solidified their ecommerce presence in key regions with localized content and currency conversions through a single storefront. This pricing customization helped them stand out against international competitors.
“Customization and personalization are important to us, and Shopify Plus enables that,” says Jenny Kwang, founder and CEO of J&Co. “Not only can we segment customers and customize to their individual needs, we can also easily integrate apps like language translator and currency converter to help us strengthen our international footprint.”
Enhanced checkout experience
There’s a lot at stake for your customers when they head to the checkout. They need to be confident that they’re making the right choice before they click “Complete Purchase.” To increase the odds of them doing so, your job is to reduce as much friction as possible during the checkout experience.
Web personalization makes this possible, particularly:
- Cross-selling and upselling products similar to those already in their cart
- Enabling them to redeem loyalty points on their purchase
- Displaying smart shipping suggestions, like highlighting eco-friendly shipping options for those who’ve visited your “Sustainability” landing pages
- Offering one-click checkout with Shop Pay, which saves a customer’s payment details in a secure digital wallet—proven to boost conversion rates by up to 50% compared to guest checkout
- Displaying social proof from previous happy customers similar to themselves
Ellana Cosmetics turned to Shopify’s checkout functionality to customize the experience for online shoppers. Timely upsells have since increased the brand’s average order value by 17%, helping the cosmetics retailer grow revenue by 50%.
Leveraging personalization software tools
Personalization tools help customize the shopping experience, from product discovery to post-purchase. But it all starts with a good infrastructure.
Shopify is designed to be an all-in-one ecommerce solution that powers every aspect of your business. Unify sales, product, and customer data in one back end—without the need for complex integrations to fill the gaps, or overpriced consultants who increase the platform’s total cost of ownership (TCO). It’s no wonder why Shopify’s TCO is up to 36% better than its competitors.
Merchants with a Shopify store can use this unified data to personalize communication with customers using the following features:
- Shopify Segmentation: Use the data you’ve already collected to group customer profiles by qualities they share. For example, identify high-value customers and offer them invitations to join your loyalty program as a way to increase repeat purchases.
- OctaneAI: Learn more about your site visitors with this quiz-building app. Ask for demographic data, their pain points, and purchase motivations to personalize the experience based on their quiz responses. You can then send relevant content that progresses them through the sales funnel.
- Rebuy: This app uses AI to offer personalized recommendations at scale. Rebuy learns about your website visitors to suggest products they’d be interested in, at all stages of the sales journey—from personalized onsite search to cart and checkout upsells.
- Nosto: Nosto is another app that uses AI to personalize your website, allowing you to offer personalized content elements—like calls to action, menus, and microcopy—to customize web pages for each individual visitor based on data you’ve already collected.
- Shopify Audiences: Personalization doesn’t stop when someone leaves your site. Shopify Audience drives up to two times more retargeting conversions by using Shopify insights to expand custom audience lists across all major ad platforms. If someone clicked your “Patterned mugs” product page, for example, you could use Shopify Audiences to build retargeting lists and show your bestselling mugs in Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads.
- Klaviyo: Use your Shopify data to retarget website visitors through SMS and email. Klaviyo offers a range of prebuilt marketing automation templates and real-time segmentation to ensure customers get the right message, at the right time.
“Shopify has given us agility and efficiency since day one,” says Justin Alexander, cofounder of Koh. “The upgrade to Shopify Plus is now fueling our global growth without the need for additional team members, developers, or agency support.”
The benefits of successful website personalization
Meet shopping expectations
Personalization is no longer simply a way to surprise and delight customers—it’s officially entered the realm of table stakes. Per Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, almost three-quarters of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized experiences.
eMarketer data also shows the aspects of personalization that shoppers think add the most value:
- Loyalty programs tailored to shopping preferences (61%)
- Special offers and discounts based on their shopping habits (57%)
- Wishlist features (31%)
- Emails based on their interests about new products, sales, and restocks (23%)
- Customized product or service recommendations when shopping online (22%)
Meeting these expectations leaves one less hurdle for customers to cross in their purchasing journey.
Increase conversion rates
It’s not just your product quality, price, or brand reputation that influences customers to buy. Per Salesforce, four in five online shoppers consider the experience that a company provides to be just as important as the products on offer.
Take Skin Inc, a skincare brand deep rooted in personalization. They offer custom formulations for customers based on their unique skin concerns and preferences. Their migration to Shopify allowed this personalization to start from a customer’s first interaction with their website.
Skin Inc took advantage of Shopify’s integrations with loyalty programs and marketing tools like Launchpad, a marketing automation tool that lets their ecommerce team personalize the site without help from developers. “Shopify Plus’s integrations have been crucial in empowering us to reach a global audience and ensure that every customer receives a personalized experience,” says Sabrina Tan, CEO and founder of Skin Inc.
The results speak for themselves: Since switching to Shopify, Skin Inc quadrupled their cross-border revenue, with a 200% improvement in conversion rate—all while halving the time spent on operations.
Boost customer retention and loyalty
We all know it’s cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Brands are turning to website personalization as a strategy for customer retention, while also combating customer acquisition costs (CAC) that have skyrocketed by 222% in eight years.
Segment’s State of Personalization report found that personalization drives repeat purchases and better customer retention.
Whether it’s a product recommendation carousel inspired by a customer’s last purchase or a tailored announcement bar with a unique discount code to redeem on product pages they’ve viewed, the positive (and personalized) experience, combined with targeted marketing, keeps your brand top of mind.
Challenges and considerations with website personalization
Data quality and integration
Analysts estimate that 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone. For most retailers, the issue isn’t just collecting data—it’s knowing what good data looks like, and how to use it.
For effective website personalization at scale, particularly if you’re following an omnichannel retail or marketing strategy, you need a central data repository to store important and accurate data from multiple sources.
Case in point: Your email app might show that a subscriber has clicked a link to view the local landing page for your New York store. You then personalize the announcement bar on your site to give a discount code on their first in-store purchase—not knowing that they’ve already been. Your point-of-sale (POS) system data and email list data weren’t integrated.
Shopify’s unified commerce functionality makes this easier, without custom-coding data integrations. Sell from multiple channels—online, in-person, social media, and marketplaces included—and have all of your shoppers’ interactions pooled into one, accurate customer profile that’s accessible from your Shopify admin.
Privacy concerns
Consumers are becoming more tech savvy. Per one KPMG report, 86% of shoppers say data privacy is a growing concern. Two in five don’t trust companies to use their data ethically.
Privacy regulations—like GDPR for EU consumers and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—also impact your ability to collect data about your customers. You must show clear instructions on how to opt out, and be willing to destroy the data you’ve already collected if a customer requests it.
Because of these privacy concerns, the best approach is to merge first-party data (collected through channels you own) with zero-party data. For the latter, customers have willingly volunteered their information, often in exchange for a benefit.
Jones Road Beauty, for example, has a “Shade Matching” quiz. The incentive for the customer is clear: they get a personalized product recommendation that’s tailored to their unique needs and skin concerns. The benefit for the brand is the zero-party data it collects about the website visitor. Quiz answers share the prospect’s skin goals, type, and how they’ll use the cosmetics—all of which can be used to offer a personalized web experience.
Website performance trade-offs
In some cases, website personalization means adding extra code and applications to your online store. This can have a detrimental impact on website performance: the more code you have, the longer it can take for a page to render in the visitor’s browser.
Multiple studies have proven the negative impact of slow loading times on page load speeds, and conversion rates increase with every millisecond improvement in site speed.
First, make sure you’re building on a robust website infrastructure—one with reliable servers and the capacity to render HTML markup. Shopify, for example, has robust hosting servers and a Storefront Renderer (SFR) that make Shopify stores the fastest in the world, rendering up to 2.4 times faster, and 1.8 times faster on average than stores on other platforms.
Manage your web personalization efforts at scale with Shopify
Website personalization isn’t an advanced strategy—it’s mission critical in today’s modern ecommerce landscape.
Customers expect personalized experiences, and they’re willing to hand over their data in exchange for it. And perhaps more importantly: they aren’t afraid to exit sites in search of retailers that use their personal data to tailor the shopping experience.
Unified commerce platforms like Shopify make it easier than ever to reduce your reliance on third-party cookies by surfacing the customer data you already own, all in one place. It doesn’t matter where they engaged, how they bought, or which app you’re using—it’s all in Shopify, ready for you to use for effective website personalization.
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FAQ on website personalization
What is personalization on a website?
Website personalization is a strategy whereby a site’s content changes based on data you’ve collected about each individual customer. This could include personalized product recommendations, translating content to their native language, or popups related to their purchase history.
What is website customization?
Website customization happens when you make changes to a website, such as changing the color scheme, updating the imagery, or altering the layout.
What is the best website with personalization?
Gymshark is a great example of website personalization. The gymwear retailer customizes its website content based on a visitor’s location, showing their local currency and delivery options. It also prompts people with an account to sign in.
How to make your website more personalized?
- Offer personalized product recommendations based on customers’ search history
- Tailor popup forms based on browsing data
- Point people towards your physical store with location data
- Translate your website copy
- Use a visitor’s local currency
- Implement a responsive design
- Reorder navigation menus
