Far more than just plugging in an auto-fill name and sending off the same boilerplate email to everyone in your list, engagement personalization grease that keeps the wheels of e-commerce turning. According to the ‘sommelier of ecommerce content’ Will Lynch, the options for personalization are nearly infinite, and some first-time store owners may quickly find themselves overwhelmed with the options. Here are some of his top tips that anyone can easily implement in their personalization strategy: 

• Incentivize returning customers such as  adding a dynamic loyalty points to abandoned cart emails. Some shoppers abandon carts because they were distracted, some because they wanted to check for better deals from your competitors; a simple automated contact to make sure they did or did not still want the items they were previous perusing may bring them back, but make them a special, minor savings on one or more of the items, either during that transaction or future transactions, and the chance of them returning to complete the transaction greatly increases.
• Personalize automated birthday emails. As mentioned in a previous episode of pitstop, according to Omnisend automated birthday emails drive a staggering amount of your online sales to begin with. Personalizing these messages beyond plugging in the shopper’s name only increases the chances of making a sale. Tailor your contact with them to feature items they tend to look at, and make suggestions based on similar products, or offer discounts specifically for items they purchase repeatedly. Even non-purchasing click throughs of these emails helps, as it confirms to Google and other search engines that your address is valid, and not a waste of traffic to be avoided.
• Use the opportunity to push your specials. If you have a sale going on, or an item that is hot/needs to be liquidated, include the offer directly in the personalized emails. Any chance to organically push a sale is a good chance, and people who receive even automated birthday messages create a positive association between how that email makes them feel and your brand/products, making them far more willing to take advantage of your promoted special.
• Use a dynamic messaging system that updates the very emails themselves. If everytime your customer looks at the personalized email, it shows them something new they may be interested in, or updates them on how many or few of an item are left, they’re more likely to re-engage again and again with that email. This not only generates more sales, but more data for future lists and interactions.
• Everyone likes to feel special, and people who feel special are more generous. Make a big deal out of your customers, and treat everyone, especially your top tier customers and loyalty points members, as VIPs, and make sure to let them know they’re VIPs to your brand. This will bring them closer to identifying with your products and buying from your store not only for themselves, but for others, seeing sharing your items with non-customers as sharing that positivity and special feeling.
• Always, ALWAYS be A/B testing, that is varying up your personalizations and promotions, then analyzing the results for what works and what doesn’t. The more you test, the more you improve from analyzing the results, the more accurate your promotional outreach will be, the more customers who will follow through back to your store, and the more units you will sell, bottom line.

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