The Ultimate Guide to eCommerce Personalization

Every customer is an individual. Back in the day, a brand’s messages were one-size-fits-all and delivered to as large an audience as possible. Today, eCommerce brands can use their websites, apps, and other digital touchpoints to capture a range of customer data, segment customers into dynamic audiences, and deliver tailored experiences built to align with individuals’ desires and behaviors.

As a result, true, impactful eCommerce personalization is now possible—and, increasingly, it’s what shoppers expect. So join us for an inside look at how to make it work for your business.

What is eCommerce personalization?

At its core, eCommerce personalization is all about tailoring the experience a shopper has with your brand to fit their unique needs and wants. That could mean adding their first name to an email, adjusting the products they see on your website or app to match their interests, or letting them know when their order is out for delivery. Personalization isn’t about using a particular channel or leveraging a specific kind of data; it’s about rethinking your customer experience and taking steps to ensure that it matches the preferences of each shopper.

Why does eCommerce personalization matter?

Consumers receive more messages than ever, across more channels—from brands, but also from friends and family. With so much messaging, relevancy is increasingly key to appealing to people; in fact, 76% of consumers express frustration when they don’t experience personalized interactions. Personalization makes it possible to provide that relevancy. When done correctly, eCommerce personalization can provide your customers with a more appealing, more valuable brand experience—while also helping your bottom line. According to McKinsey’s Julien Boudet, “Personalization initiatives can deliver significant value, including on average 10-30% revenue uplift and higher customer acquisition rates and engagement.” That’s a massive increase, one that can significantly impact the future of your eCommerce business, but only if you have the right tools and tactics in place.

What do you need to support personalization in eCommerce?

The personalization available today is dependent on data and technology. If you’re not collecting the right data or failing to manage it correctly, you may not have the information you need to accurately personalize eCommerce experiences. Serving up failed personalization can be worse than not personalizing at all.

Similarly, if you’re depending on out-of-date technologies, it’s difficult to scale personalization efforts across platforms and channels, leading to a disconnected, frustrating experience for customers. To ensure you’re up to speed, let’s take a closer look at these personalization building blocks.

1. Data collection

To create a successful personalization program, you must be confident that the information you’re collecting is accurate, up-to-date, and can provide real value to customers.

Depending on the technologies you use, some data will likely be collected automatically as users engage with your app, website, or messaging campaigns. To ensure you have the information you need to enrich your user profiles and support truly effective personalization, you’ll need to gather additional data. This can be done behind the scenes by setting up custom events and attributes to track, or more explicitly by using forms and surveys to poll your customers about their preferences.

2. Data management

Having the right data is essential to your personalization efforts. Yet if your actionable customer data processes too slowly or is stuck in data silos, you won’t have the data agility you need to be successful. To achieve true data agility—which occurs when a brand can ensure that its data moves fast enough to effectively meet customer needs and wants—you need to make sure that you can seamlessly move data between the different technologies in your marketing tech stack. That way, when key information becomes available, you can use it in the moment to personalize campaigns and provide truly relevant experiences.

3. Campaign orchestration

Your personalized messaging campaigns don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re part of your brand’s overarching experience for each customer, one that can last for weeks, months, or even years. And while tailoring each message you send is impactful, the benefits of that personalization are undermined if your outreach arrives at unwanted times or conflicts with experiences you’re serving up on other platforms or channels. To avoid this, your marketing technology stack should include a customer engagement platform with a customer journey management tool capable of providing a cohesive user journey.

Tools of the trade: Features that make personalization in eCommerce possible

Carrying out an effective personalization strategy requires mastering data collection, data management, and campaign orchestration. You also need access to key personalization features. From simple segmentation to dynamic content personalization, these tools make it possible to turn customer data into custom experiences.

Segmentation

Stated simply, segmentation involves finding actionable criteria and using these characteristics to assemble a group of users that share something in common. That criteria can be demographic, psychographic, geographic, or behavioral, but it should be distinct and clear. Once segments are created, you can push relevant content to them that reflects that criteria, allowing for personalized content on a segment-by-segment basis.

Segmentation has moved beyond the static, list-based audiences of yesteryear, allowing brands to leverage real-time data to create constantly changing groups of individuals that move in and out of the target segment as they meet (or fail to meet) the defined criteria. This type of dynamic segmentation empowers marketers to create and target audience cohorts based on recent actions and stated preferences seamlessly and automatically, without the need to query a database or ask your engineering team for help.

Liquid personalization

While segmentation is great for customizing messages to categories of users, other capabilities are needed to support true 1:1 personalization. For many marketers, Liquid is that tool. This open-source templating language, originally created by Shopify, allows brands to easily add information from each user’s customer profile—from membership status to total number of loyalty points to recently viewed products or favorited items—into emails, mobile push notifications, web push messages, and more. In today’s environment, knowing how to use Liquid is an essential skill to ensure your campaigns are on par with the competition. So, let’s explore the different Liquid types and dig into some examples of what they look like.

1. Personalization tags

Tags are how Liquid controls the flow and appearance of your messages and documents. They are invisible to the recipient but let marketers set variables, perform operations, specify display templates, and more. Clever usage of tags can allow for impressive levels of customization around a simple framework.

2. Custom attributes and events

While some customer engagement platforms support the collection of certain kinds of data out of the box, most brands find that they want to take things a step further by gathering additional custom user data. The two key kinds of custom data are:

• Custom attributes: Custom attributes are best for storing information about your users, such as loyalty tier, products added to a wishlist, or the last item viewed.
• Custom events: Custom events are actions taken by, or updates about, your users; they’re best suited for tracking high-value user interactions within your application.

Custom attributes and events can personalize the content of your message so that your customers receive communication that is relevant to them. As an added bonus, these data types can also inform more granular segmentation.

3. Conditional logic

With conditional logic, marketers have the power to determine whether a message should be sent and, if so, which version of the message a given customer should receive. That means you can use conditional logic to build out rich, multi-option messaging without having to create separate campaigns for every single variation.

4. Liquid filters

At their core, Liquid filters are all about ensuring that customers receive messaging that is properly formatted. These filters allow Liquid to play with and manipulate your raw data. For example, they can be used to change the case of text, perform mathematical operations, or modify date formats to be appropriate for different geographical regions.

Dynamic content

This powerful customization feature allows marketers to dynamically populate emails with text and images from their company’s backend systems or from public APIs that are updated in real-time. Dynamic content supports personalized recommendations, user-specific offers or promo codes, in-the-moment message variants based on localized weather conditions, and a lot more, all within your messages.

9 Tools to Use for AI-driven eCommerce Personalization

If you think it’s just about one-click copywriting and image creation with generative AI, you’ll be surprised by the breadth of what AI actually offers marketers. AI in eCommerce streamlines and accelerates creative workflows, predicts behaviors to optimize marketing messages, simplifies experimentation, provides AI product recommendations people can’t resist, and much more.

This all translates into better messaging, higher engagement, and more conversions‚all with less time and effort from you. The intelligence may be artificial, but the results are very real.

Here are nine of our favorite AI features to help you better personalize your eCommerce messages.

1. AI Copywriting Assistant

Creative juices running dry? Sick of saying the same thing? Generative AI can help to quickly overcome your creative block for faster campaign activation.

Braze AI Copywriting Assistant is powered by ChatGPT. Simply select the channel, such as SMS or email, and type in a prompt, and AI will help do the rest. One of our suggested use cases for eCommerce: Use it to create different variants for a sale or product campaign, and then test to see which resonate best with your customers. You can even reference your brand guidelines and past campaigns to make sure your content is authentic and resonates with your audience.

“I felt like I always used the same words, the same expressions, the same concept. With the Braze AI Copywriting Assistant, I can find a way to talk about the same concept using different words. And, it provides inspiration to develop new approaches.”

—Raffaella Accogli, Global CRM Manager, Activation at The Fork

2. AI Item Recommendations

Imagine if instead of just batch-and-blasting your bestsellers to everyone, you could recommend the best product or content. We’re talking personalized product recommendations for every single customer, based on their unique behaviors and traits

You can with AI Item Recommendations, which analyzes customer data at scale, to predict what product your customers are most likely to be interested in next based on their previous interaction history. Easily integrate intelligent recommendations into your campaigns across any channel, helping customers discover your products they want or need the most—that will help lead to the best results.

“The AI Item Recommendations feature has been instrumental in driving a remarkable 3X increase in our purchase rates,” said Pam Shih, Team Lead CRM at KoRo Handels GmbH. “By intelligently suggesting tailored products from the Braze catalog during onboarding sessions, it not only reveals invaluable insights into new user behaviors, but also empowers us to deliver highly personalized recommendations from our extensive catalog of over 1,000 products.”

3.Liquid Assistant

If you already use Braze, you’ll know Liquid is the coding language you use to pull customer attributes into messages. Things like their name, favorite products, last purchase, etc.—basically anything you need to personalize the conversation and encourage purchases.

With Braze Liquid Assistant, you can take advantage of generative AI to more easily personalize messages. Just type in what you’re looking to do and the assistant will create the Liquid code for you, suggest improvements, and help you iterate as you adjust your messages. Like “Ask customer to review last product purchases” or “Change copy based on favorited items.” Realize your vision without creating code from scratch, and go from ideation to creation in less time.

4. Personalized Variant

Braze Personalized Variant recognizes that no single variant is going to win over 100% of your customers. While some versions of a message might be better for most, others might prefer a different version. Using AI to predict which of your versions will resonate best with every audience member, Personalized Variant sends them the one that is most likely to resonate. It’s AI-driven eCommerce personalization from a single click in your testing settings.

Check out these commerce personalization tactics from our friends at Shopify.

5. Personalized Paths

Personalized Paths takes testing and personalization a step further—in some cases, many steps. It optimizes any step of a customer journey to ensure people get the message copy, creative, channel, and offer they’re most likely to engage with at any stage of a journey.

It lets you set up sophisticated experiments in Braze Canvas to assess the success of different versions of a customer journey. It then uses AI analytics to understand the path most likely to result in conversion for every individual user, based on their past behaviors and preferences.

For example, for people who abandon their carts… Are they more likely to respond to a time-limited discount voucher via email followed by an SMS prompt before it expires? Or a push notification and an in-app pop-up? Personalized path empowers personalization at any step of a journey for every user

"If we come up with an idea in the morning, we can test this immediately without any restrictions or need for external help. This has enabled us to move things faster and made the “art of the possible” possible."

—Kanchan Lad, Papa John UK’s Senior Product Manager of Martech and Loyalty

6. Predictive Events

One of the main benefits of AI for eCommerce is the ability to spot trends at scale. It’s like having an assistant data analyst on your team, giving you actionable insights into customer behavior.

Often, certain sequences of events can predict future actions. Your team hasn’t got the bandwidth to track these patterns, but AI does.

Braze Predictive Events interprets and predicts a user’s likelihood to behave in a particular way or perform any custom event, based on the similarities and differences to the thousands of customers before them. You can use these insights to create customer segments and send messages to prompt them to take the next best action. Like a re-engagement message to customers likely to churn or a discount to nudge customers over the checkout line.

Check out the BrazeAI™ playbook for inspiration on using AI to max your marketing.

7. Intelligent Timing

Braze Intelligent Timing uses AI to understand when every customer is more responsive to your messages, so you can ping in their pocket at the times that they are most likely to take action. Like a discount for Mo early in the morning, and a cheeky nudge to Tayna about her recently viewed shoes around tea time.

8. Intelligent Channel

Intelligent Channel uses AI to select the channel customers are most likely to respond to.

In the example above, Mo might be scrolling news on his phone when your SMS arrives with an irresistible discount code he can flash at the checkout. Meanwhile, Tanya could be actively browsing your app, checking her inbox for the latest offers.

Understanding where customers engage with your brand can help increase engagement, online order size, and more.

9. Intelligent Selection

Want to bring it all together—variants, timing, and channel—to deliver the right message in the right place at the right time? And do it every time you contact customers? Braze Intelligent Selection supports you in sending the most effective versions of your campaign.

It uses a learning algorithm to determine the campaign that is performing the best, and optimizes the message to send that version to each customer. This AI for customer engagement is always learning, operating behind the scenes to optimize your campaign performance.

eCommerce Personalization Use Cases

Understanding different types of personalization, and identifying which types best fit your customer engagement strategy and available data, are essential steps to carrying out an effective personalization strategy. It’s also important to understand what it takes to execute the personalized experience. Let’s take a look at some significant personalization use cases and the features that power the experience.

1. Name-based personalization

When you send outreach using name-based personalization, your customer engagement platform automatically pulls each recipient’s name from their customer profile and adds it to the message wherever you think is best. For example, instead of saying, “Hi” or “Hi Customer” the message reads, “Hi Sandra."

Name-based personalization is often where marketers begin; it’s a simple use case that many solutions support.

2. Event- and attribute-based personalization

​​With event and attribute-based personalization, you can build relationships with customers by leveraging what you know about them. This approach makes sense when you have specific data, such as someone’s size preferences, buying patterns, and so much more, that can add value and relevance to a message.

3. Location-based personalization

Adjusting messaging based on a recipient’s current physical location is location-based personalization. This type of personalization also makes it possible to target people who live in a particular place or region (or range of places or regions, for that matter).

4. Language-based personalization

It’s a big world, and we’re not all fluent in the same tongue. With language-based personalization, you can input a range of language-specific message variants into a single campaign and use Liquid, for example, to automatically send the English version to English speakers and the Japanese version to Japanese speakers. This type of personalization is a must for any brand with an audience that speaks a range of languages.

5. Dynamic content personalization

Dynamic content allows brands to tailor messages in real-time based on user behavior, preferences, and demographics. For example, you can showcase product recommendations based on past purchases, display personalized discounts for items users have viewed, or even adjust the messaging based on the recipient's location or time of day. By serving up relevant content that resonates with individual recipients, dynamic content boosts engagement and drives conversions.

6. Delivery-time personalization

With delivery-time personalization, every individual gets the message at the time that’s most likely to work for them, making your outreach feel less intrusive and increasing the chances recipients engage with the communications they receive.

Bringing it all together

While each of these individual use cases can add value and relevance for message recipients, you don’t have to stop there. You can use these different types of personalization in concert—that is, embedding various sorts of personalization throughout a message or outreach flow to create a deeply tailored experience. After all, there’s no reason you can’t target a segment to a specific audience, add in details from the recipient’s profile with Liquid, and top it off with in-the-moment touches via dynamic content personalization!

The Braze platform’s key eCommerce personalization capabilities

If you want to get the most out of personalization, it’s time to think about leveraging Braze. Our customer engagement platform allows brands to leverage data on users’ location, preferences, purchases, device type, and more to serve up highly relevant, customized visual content within the full range of messaging channels—including email, push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, and Content Cards—to fit each moment and recipient.

Real-time customization powered by streaming data

Your brand’s ability to deliver real-time personalization depends on how your customer engagement platform processes data. If—like most marketing tech—it’s built on batch processing, your data will be processed on time-based schedules (for instance, every 24 hours) or when a given batch of data accumulates, meaning that you almost never have access to real-time information.

With Braze, it’s different. Our platform is built on streaming data—which means each unit of data is processed individually, allowing for ongoing, in-the-moment flows of information across systems. From segments that update as users engage with your app to messages dynamically personalized to each user, we make it possible to send powerfully relevant brand communications.

Comprehensive cross-channel orchestration

With Braze, brands can take advantage of real-time personalization capabilities within natively cross-channel customer journeys. Marketers can easily build, test, and optimize triggered, automated messaging journeys with Braze Canvas, our drag-and-drop user journey management feature. Even better? Like everything in the Braze platform, Braze Canvas was architected to be both channel agnostic and naturally cross-channel. That means that all the powerful data, segmentation, orchestration, and personalization tools we provide can be used for messages across mulitple channels.

And here’s the fun part: You can add experiment and test messages across different channels, flows, and steps. Test different journeys and send users down the best-performing one with Winning Path, or use Personalized Paths to put users on the journey they are most likely to end in conversion.

Personalization examples: What eCommerce brands can learn from other industries

How Showmax used dynamic content personalization to increase subscribers

South African video streaming service Showmax needed to stand out from the competition. Their library of films and movies in multiple languages appeals to a range of viewers, so by creating a messaging campaign centered around dynamic content personalization, they were able to supercharge their conversion rates. Numerous data points were fed from the app to create target segments: subscribers got viewing recommendations, lapsed users were tantalized with new content, and new sign-ups were gently nudged to enter payment information. Read the full case study here.

How Grubhub’s year-end review used rich content for social success

Grubhub wanted to send its 30 million diners a year-end summary of their Grubhub activities as part of an email campaign to build brand awareness and drive usage. They used Braze Content Blocks, which make it possible to save content for repeated use across messages/channels, and Liquid personalization to automate the process of integrating personalized content into the emails. User data was fed via API into 32 custom attributes directly from Grubhub’s data warehouse. The campaign led to a 100% increase in social media mentions and an 18% lift in word-of-mouth mentions. Read the full case study here.

Final thoughts

Today’s most successful eCommerce brands are making gains with customers by creating unique, personalized experiences. Leveraging effective personalization doesn’t just serve your marketing needs—it enables you to better meet the needs of your users by serving them recommendations, information, offers, and experiences that are truly relevant and valuable, and that encourage the kinds of user actions that really matter.

For more eCommerce personalization examples and best practices, be sure to check out our complete guide: 4 Personalization Strategies for eCommerce Success featuring insights from Twilio, Braze, and Slalom.

Methodology

All Liquid personalization-related data is drawn from the Braze customer base of more than 1,000 global brands and has been anonymized and aggregated. Liquid usage agnostic of the Liquid type was pulled from the Braze platform from February 2020 to May 2021. All data that is displayed at the liquid type level was pulled from February 2020 to February 2021.

eCommerce personalization FAQs

What is an example of personalization in eCommerce?

eCommerce personalization examples include using zero-party data and first-party data to tailor experiences for customers based on their individual characteristics, such as their:

• Location
• Gender, age, and other demographics
• Language
• Platform
• Operating system
• User behavior
• Other characteristics, such as product preferences, clothing size, etc.

One of our real-world eCommerce personalization examples is from a Braze customer, the EMEA-based brand Styli. The company prioritized creating more relevant, personalized messaging to increase customer sessions, engagement, and sales by leveraging the Braze customer engagement platform. Using the customer data they’ve collected—including customers’ genders, languages, user behavior, and other factors—Styli built a more engaging marketing program and boosted ROI by 50%.

Get more eCommerce personalization examples and best practices in the full case study.

How can brands implement personalization in eCommerce?

Brands can implement personalization in eCommerce by:

• Collecting the right data: Accurate, real-time insights that can be used to provide greater value to customers
• Orchestrate journeys: Engage customers and drive long-term loyalty
• Use the right channels: Reach customers where they are, where they want to talk to you

This is all possible with a partner like Braze. With our cross-channel personalization and data capabilities, we make it possible for businesses to bring together their customers’ preferences and behaviors in real-time and activate that data to drive personalized, relevant experiences.

How does personalization improve the customer experience in eCommerce?

Personalization improves the customer experience in eCommerce by making it possible to curate the most relevant campaigns, interactions, offers, content, and products for individuals at the 1:1 level. Customers expect brands to understand and meet their specific wants and needs and are more likely to engage with, complete a transaction with, and become loyal over time to companies that do.

How can Shopify users leverage Braze for enhanced eCommerce personalization?

To understand the value of integrating Braze with Shopify, you first need to get a handle on the capabilities that both of these solutions make possible on their own.

1. Braze for engagement

Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers relevant and memorable experiences between customers and the brands they love. With Braze, brands can instantly interact with customers by triggering personalized emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and more—all based on their behaviors and preferences.

2. Shopify for commerce

Shopify is a leading commerce platform that provides online stores and retail point-of-sale systems the tools they need to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size. It includes out-of-the-box SEO tools, analytics, messaging features, and more. Shopify makes it easy to deliver better shopping experiences to consumers everywhere.

By integrating Braze with Shopify, it’s possible to supercharge customer experiences using real-time customer data, supporting better customer relationships and stronger marketing performance. Using these technologies together, brands can:

• Deliver personalized customer experiences with real-time Shopify data
• Orchestrate communications across all marketing channels
• Optimize campaigns and customer journeys to boost sales and customer retention rates

Once Braze is integrated with your Shopify account, you can take advantage of the Braze platform’s engagement tools, which include:

• Real-time segmentation. Use the Braze platform’s real-time data streaming architecture to segment your audience based on whether users have carried out certain actions, like whether a customer has placed an order or how many times they place orders in a given window.
• Campaign and customer journey triggers. Use Shopify events to create path-to-purchase campaigns and Canvases (Braze-powered customer journeys) across multiple channels, supporting real-time campaigns like abandoned cart conversion campaigns, post-purchase retargeting, and cross-sell/upsell outreach based on previous purchases from a Shopify storefront.
• Transactional messaging. Engage with customers via automatic ordering and fulfillment messaging flows based on user actions, allowing you to keep them informed and engaged as they move through your brand’s customer lifecycle and ensuring they’re always informed regarding when orders are fully paid, returned, or updated.

Best of all, the Braze/Shopify integration is marketer-friendly and easy to set up. All you need to do is locate Shopify within the Braze dashboard, install the Shopify application, and verify completion. No coding is necessary!

By integrating Braze with Shopify, you can transform Shopify data into personalized, real-time customer experiences in scaleable, sustainable ways. This empowers you to drive relevant, timely messaging across the full range of messaging channels, all while reaping the rewards of a customer-centric approach.

What are the benefits of using dynamic segmentation in eCommerce personalization?

The main benefit of using dynamic segmentation in eCommerce personalization is that it uses real-time data processing to create continuously updating segments, making real-time personalization possible. This means customers get the most relevant campaigns based on their current wants, needs, behaviors, interests, and activities and are more likely to engage, take action, and complete a transaction.

Why is basic personalization not enough for today's eCommerce customers?

Named-based personalization is not enough because eCommerce brands miss opportunities to drive incremental purchases and fuel higher order value. Advanced brands leverage rich customer signals—including preferences, activity, demographics, and behavior—to drive more relevant recommendations and campaigns.

Find out even more reasons why basic personalization isn’t enough with insights from Gopi Pandya, Channel Manager, Mobile, Customer Retention & Engagement at Pizza Hut, and Margaret Gorin, Head of Business Value Advisory at Amperity.

What role does message customization play in effective eCommerce personalization?

When eCommerce brands are able to customize messages based on user demographics, preferences, interests, behavior, and activity, recipients are more likely to engage and convert. In fact, an analysis of Braze data reveals that personalizing messages can lead to an uplift in conversions by as much as 27%.

As mentioned above, personalization can lead to a 10-30% revenue uplift on average and higher customer acquisition rates and engagement.

How can real-time data be used to enhance eCommerce personalization strategies?

In-the-moment customer data—including users’ locations, local weather, time zones, devices used, browsing and transaction history, and campaign engagement history—is key to delivering highly personalized content, campaigns, and experiences that accelerate engagement, increase conversions, and foster deeper customer relationships.

Brands can use real-time data to:

• Create more accurate segments based on customers’ in-the-moment actions and attributes
• Send location-based campaigns based on the user’s most recent location
• Deliver personalized recommendations based on customers’ recent transactions and viewing history
• Create tailored message variants based on the individual’s local weather
• Deliver triggered campaigns in the moment when a customer takes an action, such as sharing a product with a friend or adding an item to a wishlist.

What are some successful eCommerce personalization examples?

Some successful eCommerce personalization examples come from industry leaders Overstock and Ibotta, two Braze customers who used personalization capabilities to send highly tailored customer outreach and saw their conversion rates soar as a result.

• Overstock used personalization to send tailored product alert emails to customers to let them know when an item they’d browsed had dropped in price or was almost out of stock. The campaign delivered an impressive 21% conversion rate, and open and click rates that were 3X and 9X higher than industry benchmarks, respectively. Read the full case study here.
• Ibotta used Connected Content to instantly populate campaigns with individually relevant recommendations. By curating these highly personalized experiences, Ibotta was able to increase conversions by 2X. Read the full case study here.