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Here’s a figure that might surprise you:
35% of the Amazon marketplace’s revenue comes from its recommendation engine.
Amazon relies heavily on personalized buyer experiences to drive sales, using features like “Frequently bought together” and “Recommended for you” cross-selling.
The retail giant’s success underscores the importance of personalization in eCommerce. Every conversation around optimizing the customer experience now revolves around personalization—especially since 86% of buyers prioritize personalized experiences in their shopping decisions.
But what’s the best way to ride the personalization wave for your WooCommerce store?
In this article, you’ll learn all the secrets and best practices to customize the buyer experience to increase your sales figures. Let’s begin!
1. Create loyalty programs
Fact: a loyal customer making repeat purchases is worth a lot more than tens of customers who buy once.
A loyalty program is the best way to improve your eCommerce funnel and create a loyal customer base for your brand and reward your repeat buyers for their loyalty.
You can create a loyalty program customized to your buyer’s expectations using plugins like WooRewards. Follow these steps to create an intricately designed loyalty program to move your customers up the ladder.
- Decide the actions you want to reward: A loyalty program focuses on rewarding customers for repeat purchases. But you can also attribute other steps—like social shares and registrations—for a reward.
- Define ways for redeeming the coins: For all the rewards you offer, create rules for redeeming the bonuses. Keep these rules convenient and straightforward for the buyer, so they don’t think twice before participating.
- List down the rewards you want to offer: Create a combination of rewards and categorize them into multiple levels. You can offer a variety of prizes, like coins, free shipping, and discount codes.
- Outline the rules: Not everyone can participate in the loyalty program else it will rule out the exclusivity factor. So, set the eligibility criteria and rules of participation to make the best of your rewards.
Get your inspiration from Nordstrom’s loyalty program, The Nordy Club. The fashion brand provides points for every purchase. After you collect a certain number of points, you become a part of the exclusive club to reap a host of benefits.
2. Leverage personalization at its best
Create a personalized experience right from the point a customer visits your WooCommerce store. Simplifying your store’s navigation is perhaps the best way to achieve this so you can put out all the options in front of customers and let them decide where they want to go.
Copyhackers, for instance, shows a pop-up to take you to the best resources based on your needs.
The most crucial element of creating a tailored experience for every buyer is—giving them complete control over the process. Here’s how you can do it.
Produce personalized content
Identify your target audience, their pain points, and shopping needs. Use this information to create blog content that engages with your buyers actively. Focus on content that people will want to link to in order to increase your website authority and get traffic that you can convert later.
Publish opt-in forms
Send a compelling discount coupon or use creative copywriting, like Frank Body does.
Send push notifications
Create and send push notifications to bring buyers back to their cart or lure them to check out your collection. Push notifications can convert even better than email since they are more likely to get the shopper’s immediate attention.
Create triggered emails
Take a cue from Spotify to personalize your email marketing campaigns and engage with your buyers.
Instead of only sending scheduled emails, you can use email marketing to send transactional emails like this one that are triggered by user actions.
Publish seasonal content
Create content for every season and mark special holidays, motivating your audience to buy more.
Every holiday and seasonal event gives you a new hook for creating fresh content and sales for your customers.
Make the best use of technology
From improving your WooCommerce store’s UX to personalizing LinkedIn messages for your B2B store, advanced Machine Learning algorithms can significantly enhance your buyer’s experience.
Use technology to personalize your store experience through product recommendations, dynamic content, and social proof like testimonials.
More importantly, technology can improve your customer service in multiple ways, including several payment options, a fast-loading website, a secure store, and a direct chat service.
Conversational commerce and the use of chatbots enhance the customer experience while you learn from your customers and build relationships on autopilot. Using the right technology allows you to personalize the chatbot experience and give it a human touch.
Email is probably the most profitable marketing channel for eCommerce store owners, and for a good reason. Research shows that every $1 spent on email marketing brings a return of $42 on average.
But personalizing your automatic newsletters and email campaigns involves more than just entering the user’s name.
Personalizing your emails starts with a catchy subject line that hooks the reader. You have to then combine customer data with actions a user takes to create personalized emails.
EasyJet, for instance, celebrated its 20th anniversary with a personalized story email to every customer. The mail followed a story template and filled in customized details for every user. It offered a nostalgic walk down the memory lane to every EasyJet customer, highlighting the brand’s promise of quality customer experiences.
Besides newsletters, you can create email templates for multiple stages in a buyer’s journey—from when they sign up to when they make a purchase.
You’d be surprised to know that a discount offer can lead to 67% unanticipated purchases.
Whether you want to host a flash sale or launch a new collection at discounted prices, the WooCommerce toolbox and multiple coupon plugins allow you to create an array of discount offers. The Smart Coupons extension is one way to generate these coupons.
You can use these discount offers strategically to deliver a personalized experience to your buyers. Send them a coupon on their birthday or a promo code for the products they like.
Look at how ASOS incentivized its app users to purchase a tailor-made promo code for them.
Here are some best practices to leverage personalized coupon marketing and surge your sales:
- Give steeper discounts for bestselling items.
- Multiply the results by merging discounts with a referral program.
- Leverage the fear of missing out (FOMO) and add a deadline for the expiry of discounts.
- Publicize your discount offers on the store, social media, and email campaigns.
- Target the holiday season to create attractive coupons and push them through marketing.
- Create messages like “you’re only $10 away from getting a 15% discount on your order” to incentivize more purchases.
5. Work on abandoned cart email recovery
Did you know that even at the peak of your WooCommerce store’s success, you might still be losing out on many sales?
Simple reason—abandoned carts.
A customer abandons almost 88% of all shopping carts. So, technically, you’re only making one-tenth of your total potential sales.
This is where abandoned cart emails can change the game. An abandoned cart email allows you to persuade users to complete their purchases, personalize their shopping experience, and significantly increase sales.
Casper’s unique recovery email is a great example to inspire your own. The mattress brand uses a personable copy that says “come back to bed” with the cart items listed to complete their purchase. In the end, this clean email also uses a testimonial to prove just how worthy its products are.
So, how can you make your abandoned cart emails enticing enough to win a lost sale?
Here are some best practices.
Save the cart
Many reasons can lead to an abandoned cart—it might just be a bad internet connection. So, take this opportunity to show your prospects that you care. Save their cart and include this list of items in the recovery mail. This email from Jack Wills is a great example.
Write irresistible copy
Good brands like Food52 can turn abandoned carts into a marketing opportunity. How? create an eye-catchy subject line and a clever copy to convince your prospects to make that purchase. Food52 personalizes its recovery email perfectly to do just that.
Create a compelling CTA for the deal
An abandoned cart email without a CTA is like a ship without a sailor. Create a crisp call to action and place it properly in the email to grab the user’s attention and get them to take action right away. Look at how Saatchi Art uses a clever CTA button with a discount offer to bring prospects back.
Focus on the timing
Rejoiner’s research concludes that a recovery email sent within 1 hour of the abandoned cart can lead to a 16% conversion rate on average. Here are the best timelines for up to three recovery emails:
- First mail within an hour after abandonment
- Second mail after a day since abandonment
- Third mail after three days since abandonment
Personalized exit-intent popups can help you grab attention before the user leaves your site and reduce cart abandonment. Use these strategies to your advantage and personalize customer experiences with a recovery email sequence while increasing your conversions and sales as well!
6. Focus on cross-selling and upselling
Cross-selling and upselling are tried-and-tested solutions to increase your sales while personalizing the purchase experience.
Simply put, cross-selling is about selling more products complementary to what the customer wants to buy, while upselling aims to sell a more expensive version of the same product the customer wants to buy.
In both cases, the customer spends more money, and you win a larger sale amount. These two practices also help in increasing brand awareness about your products.
Here are some proven ways to leverage cross-selling and upselling on your WooCommerce store.
Frequently bought together
What started with Amazon’s unique recommendation engine has now become mainstream across eCommerce stores. You can cross-sell complementary products to a customer with a separate section like this.
This store creates a combination of products that customers can get if they buy any one product from this bundle.
Sample or trial items
Offering free or low-cost sample products is another great way to cross-sell your customers.
Sephora has a dedicated section for trial products that customers can choose from when purchasing above a certain amount. This practice is premised on the idea that a customer will naturally come back for more once they try that product(s).
Related products
A common practice to upsell items is to display a list of “related products” either on the checkout page or product pages.
Chewy is the perfect inspiration for creating such a section. The store has a “Pet lovers also bought” section to show similar products in a higher price range.
The key to cross-selling or upselling your products lies in identifying your audience. Understand and segment your buyers and prospects into different categories to hit the bull’s eye with your product recommendations in each of these sections.
In the end, this method helps you develop a sales mindset to close more deals at better-priced and more profitable packages!
7. Make use of referral programs
Building trust for your WooCommerce store might be the most challenging part of scaling your business.
But one sure shot solution to cultivate credibility for your brand—and progressively so—is with a referral program. When 92% of customers trust a recommendation coming from a friend, you cannot afford to miss out on this opportunity.
A referral program shoots multiple shots in one go. It helps you:
- Reach new audiences
- Establish customer trust
- Close more sales
- Add a touch of personalization.
Airbnb’s famous referral program shows precisely how powerful referral marketing can be. The hospitality brand’s growth team spent hours into research and testing to launch multiple versions of their referral program to achieve 900% year-on-year growth through referrals.
But here’s an overview of strategies you can use:
- Find the incentives: Start with brainstorming about what you want to offer to the customers under this program. You can provide cash, points, discounts, or free products as a reward. Figure out what’s the most popular option and decide your incentive.
- Define the rules: Creating a referral program demands careful strategizing. Outline the rules for availing the incentives and test these rules for loopholes.
- Track the referrals: Once in action, you can’t give away referrals and forget about the same. Track your referrals and analyze the KPIs to gauge the success of the program.
A well-designed referral program is a step towards building your brand recognition. More importantly, you are also putting efforts into personalizing your engagement with customers.
Get to work personalizing your store
Starting and scaling a WooCommerce store is no cakewalk. But personalization can make a huge difference in boosting sales.
While a personalized subject line can lead to a 50% increase in open rates, 50% of customers return to websites with product recommendations. These numbers signal the huge difference personalization can make for an eCommerce business.
But personalization efforts can backfire if they seem too personal. So, craft a detailed strategy for brand personalization to give a solid direction for your campaigns. Use these seven strategies highlighted in this article to create your personalization campaigns and win more sales for your brand!
Thanks for reading this article and if you want to find more ways to power up your store, check out our many WooCommerce plugin collections.