Thank you so much to our friend SJ Carcamo at Justuno for sharing expertise in this guest post!
The idea and execution of personalization can take on many forms in a customer's journey to get to know your brand and product(s). These forms of personalization differ in the tone we take with messages and in the medium they’re delivered (video, voice message, text, etc.).
While personalization is essential to increasing conversions, however, we find that brands sometimes leave personalization efforts on the backburner—perhaps because they aren’t always sure what to do and how to make improvements.
To help, in this piece, I’ll break down what you should know today in order to create 1:1 experiences in your BigCommerce Store.
Getting into Personalization
What comes to mind when you think of personalization? Here are a couple things that come to me off the bat if I were interacting with a particular customer:
- Addressing them by their first name
- Calling out that they’re from Arizona—and you know how hot it is there
By using their first name (that they provided via pop up on their last site visit), you’re greeting them as a friendly store owner might to a regular customer or as an associate would at a boutique. And by noting where they’re from (leveraging geolocation data), you can bring them relevant offerings, for instance, products that are more relevant to hotter climates.
- If you’re on BigCommerce using a multi-store front, you could have personalized geolocation banners that allow you to show relevant shipping offers as well as updates based on city, state, and zip code.
The good news is that this is easily achievable, proactive in creating a 1-to-1 experience, and best of all, it can be done with the data you have.
Based on engagement data you see in Justuno + BigCommerce + Daasity, you’ll be able to analyze what your visitors are responding to best.
(If you’re interested to see where you stand from a conversion rate POV, industry benchmarks for engagement data is always a great place to see where you stand—take a look!)
Getting More Personal with Cart Content Targeting
The last personalization example I’ll leave you with is cart content targeting. You’re likely familiar with the classic cart abandonment pop up or cart abandonment email flow, but you can personalize further.
You can personalize visitors' return experience by having their cart perfectly prepared for them and/or you can show them other products bought based off of the product they have already added to cart.
In doing so, you’re providing a stable next step for the visitor to approach the buying stage again.
Make it easy for them, and they’re more likely to follow-through!
Thankfully, Bigcommerce has features + apps in its ecosystem like Justuno readily available to help you curate your website experience with CRO top of mind!
What is CRO? Read more about conversion rate optimization (CRO) here.
Keeping It Personal with BigCommerce
In my opinion, the top features you can take advantage of in your BigCommerce site are:
- The ability to show product recommendations and use Justuno to curate product recommendations based on new vs. returning visitors and based on what was purchased or browsed last.
- The ability to easily auto-apply coupons from pop up offers—frictionless checkout is a big flex!
- The benefit of checkout page targeting to catch those cart abandoners and show them a personalized message and/or offer.
Visitors arriving to your BigCommerce site will be pleasantly surprised (at first) by your plethora of personalized touchpoints—i.e., the auto-apply coupon + the perfect product recommendation + an offer they’ll use immediately from their attempted cart abandonment.
It’s an experience we don’t get often while browsing a website. If you’ve focused on your navigation menu layout, if your SEO is on point, and your site is fast, then you’re ready to take advantage of these additional targeting scenarios to increase visitor engagement and onsite conversion.
Some Additional Personalization Touches:
- Ask customers how they’re liking their products after a particular number of days since purchase (a week or two is a good starting point here).
- Use a video to highlight your founder, where they can lay out a “how-to-use” video for their product, the benefits/problem being solved, or the inspiration for creating the product.
- Knowing customers’ last product purchase opens so many doors to recommendations for products and categories and to follow up questions you should ask each customer when they arrive on site. Your product catalog sync happens instantly when you install Justuno on your website.
The above mentioned targeting scenarios go hand in hand with key touchpoints on site. These touchpoints include…
- Welcome Message/Lead Capture upon arrival to site (I’ve got you covered with tips to boost your lead capture.)
- Exit Offer: This fires for visitors with 0 items in cart (less buying intent than a cart abandoner)
- Cart Abandonment: A visitor now has items in cart they are willing to leave
- Item Added to Cart: The moment (or a second after) the visitor adds an item to cart they see a follow up message. BigCommerce provides a great modal and combined with a Justuno product recommendation you’re on your way to living and breathing personalization.
- Tracking Page: Targeting your BigCommerce tracking page will allow you to present questions to learn more about their purchase, and allows for further product discovery from the visitors side. In the rush of being on site and getting through checkout a visitor may have missed other gems you have to offer.
Making it a Banner Year
So far, we’ve reviewed touchpoints and targeting scenarios on site. But I do want to call attention to one of the classics, because it remains effective: the top-of-page banner.
This banner is on-site “real-estate” that can be updated with dynamic messaging based on the type of visitors you know are visiting your site.
Consider the different buyer personas that are buying from you and what they need to see to get past the research phase or the decision paralysis phase. Through tests and based on site data, we know that visitors respond to user generated content, reviews that feel real and relatable, and value statements/icons.
Questions to consider when creating a banner:
- What sets you apart from competitors?
- What does your customer base value?
By answering these questions, you’ll come up with more than just 1 banner variation. When you get to this point, I encourage A/B testing of the banners and proactive discovery to understand how visitors are engaging with/ liking your banner.
- Banner Pro Tips: Highlighting BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) options, financing options, fast shipping vs. protected shipping, and email sign up for back in stock notices based on last item seen.
Commerce Personalization Trends
Recently, I came across the following tips & trends in personalizing a BigCommerce site:
- Dynamic Banners. Either implement many messages in a text ticker or Insert reviews based on item in cart or last item purchased.
- Video Commerce for Founder Exposure. Putting your founder’s face out there for a how-to, skills show, or giving your support a name leads to that recognition across the browsing/ researching phase.
Onsite personalization starts from the source (i.e., the visitor), so start capturing data at the point of first arrival on site. We naturally start capturing “data” in our minds when we see someone at a store shopping in the same aisle as us.
So, we are aiming to mimic this point of in-person insights. I always encourage merchants to be open to asking about those user preferences and asking those questions that will elicit better understanding of the visitor.
If you set your goal to be “learn more about my visitor’s experience” then you’ll naturally be heading in the right direction to personalizing your visitor experience. You probably already have a fair amount of data to pull from that can influence the next product carousel you show a visitor or customer.
What’s great about these examples is that you can keep building on them as you learn more. Each learning will evolve to a new segment you want to learn about and from there you are well on your way to 1-to-1 experiences.
