Advanced Strategies to Increase Conversion Rate on Shopify

If you’re one of the 600,000 ecommerce retailers operating on Shopify or Shopify Plus, you have access to a world of valuable technologies to increase conversion, boost sales and offer a stand-out shopping experience.

However, with so many technologies available to “power up” your platform, choosing the ‘dream team’ of ecommerce tech stacks for your ecommerce business can be an overwhelming task.

In this article, we explore 3 critical pillars of a personalized commerce experience to increase conversion and sales in your Shopify/Shopify Plus store and power up your performance. This includes:

The role of data in personalized shopping experiences
The influence of customer segmentation in the buying funnel
Examples of personalization in practice across key pages and stages in the buying journey.

Increasing Shopify Conversion Rate Through Personalized Commerce Experiences

Nearly 40% of consumers believe that retailers should do more to offer personalized content.

And as the world of ecommerce continues to evolve, the pressure only increases for retailers to deliver shopping experiences that are relevant to their customers. In fact, about 81% of shoppers want brands to understand what products they like, anticipate their needs and know when to approach them.

When it comes to balancing personalization with meeting your goals of increasing conversion, average order value and sales, this becomes a huge challenge.

Thanks to advances in Artificial Intelligence, the possibilities for delivering 1:1 commerce experiences across multiple touchpoints and devices are endless. As a result, more retailers are leveraging the data available to them to personalize how customers interact with their brand.

Powering Personalization and Conversion Rate Through Data

The core step in delivering a personalized shopping experience is in your data. As shoppers interact with your store, they leave behind massive amounts of valuable data that help you understand what they like and how they interact with your brand.

Transactional data is the data most retailers base personalization on. This is typically old data reflecting historical preferences.

Behavioral data reflects a shopper’s intentions and buying pattern as they interact with your online store.

Using both types of data to improve personalization and grow your business can be a challenge.

First, customers interact with your brand at multiple touch points. They may first come across your business on Facebook, then receive an email on their mobile phone, and then visit your site on a desktop computer weeks later.

Data is typically locked away in silos. You can increase Shopify sales by investing in the right technologies, but getting these tools to talk to one another is the real challenge.

Once the data is available, what do you do with it? Even if you are able to combine this data in one unified format, how do you actually go on to action that data to improve the commerce experience?

To solve these challenges, focus on the kind of data you’re collecting. Our research over the past 9 years has revealed that:

On average, it takes 3 visits for a shopper to make a purchase (and 5 visits from the first purchase to make a second one).
Transactional data only accounts for 1.6% of the data captured in an online store (that leaves 98% of valuable data untouched).
Only 20% of repeat customers order products from the same product category of their initial order.

The Art of Automated Segments: Defining Experiences that Impact Your Shopify Sales

Personalized commerce experiences require you to meet your customer wherever they are in their journey and then tailoring their every interaction. In other words, define experiences based on the segments that customers current or prospective belong to.

For example, you can automatically tailor what is shown to a first-time visitor vs. a loyal or VIP customer.

Using Data to Outline the Shopping Funnel

Once you’ve gathered data on how your shoppers interact with your store, use that data to map out customer journeys and target shoppers based on their behavioral preferences and position in the buying funnel. This is known as segmentation.

From first-time visitors to loyal customers, each segment you generate has a specific set of characteristics and rules. These can be leveraged to move shoppers within those segments down the funnel.

For example, retailers typically identify shoppers who have provided their email address or added something to their shopping cart as being ‘close to purchase’. However, we’ve found that these factors do not always correlate directly to purchase intent. By using behavioral data, you can infer positions in the funnel to significantly improve your targeting. Then, you can incorporate various methods – such as ads or pop-ups – to automatically encourage shoppers to progress through the funnel.

***Unique Vintage****’s add-to-cart feature offers product recommendations at checkout – as well as free shipping threshold – in order to boost average order value.*

By using automated segments, you can:

Reduce the need for discount coupons by better identifying the prospects who don’t need an incentive to purchase.
Display shipping information to prospects who are close to purchasing but are still deliberating their purchase.
Shoppers who are not that far along in the funnel will not be bothered with shipping information until it becomes relevant to them.
Predict brand and category affinities based on onsite browsing behavior and then use that data to target shoppers with improved messaging and/or a merchandising strategy.

One core component of Cynthia Rowley’s personalization strategy is offering product recommendations to customers based on the categories they’re most interested in.

Segments aren’t only limited to the onsite experience, either. You can use them to:

Adjust your Facebook ads and Google Adwords campaigns to reflect buyer profiles or where shoppers are in your sales funnel. This allows you to target in your ad campaigns further.
Create full, dynamic landing pages to increase conversion rate from third party traffic sources.
Create bespoke mobile experiences specific to each segment.
Maximize your email click-through rate by offering dynamic email content whenever the email is opened.

*LeSportsac* dresses up their homepage with a mix of vivid visuals, new arrivals and trending products to entice new visitors.

From Prospect to Purchase: Personalized Product Content that Drives Results

Offering personalized content at each digital touchpoint is a critical part of any modern ecommerce experience. Let’s analyze the value of content personalization in the Shopify commerce experience.

Increasing Average Order Value with Content Personalization

Content Personalization allows you to personalize every content element on your website to increase conversion and offer a better brand experience. This includes automatically adapting your site’s messaging, visuals, layouts and more to each shopper. This makes each shopper feel like they’re in an online store made just for them.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of two completely different customers navigating the same sporting goods website:

Anna, a yoga fan from California, only browses yoga related items. Meanwhile, James from London is into trekking and other outdoor sports. With Content Personalization, the brand is able to tailor the visuals on their site according to each shopper’s demographic, behavior or preferences. This includes everything from the photo used on a product page to the brands that are highlighted in homepage images.

Ready to unlock additional strategies to increase your Shopify store sales?

94% of companies feel like personalization is critical to business growth, which makes relevant commerce experiences a necessity – but that’s not the only strategy you need to power up your success.

Not sure how to get started? Our team of ecommerce specialists can help you find a game plan that matches your business goals. Reach out to us for a demo specific to your needs.