13 Ecommerce Personalization Examples (+5 Strategies for YOUR Store)

Are you looking for the best eCommerce personalization examples you can use to boost sales with YOUR store?

Personalizing the user experience (UX) is a great way to engage your customers and drive more revenue. But, like most things in life, eCommerce personalization takes time and energy.

The good news is that you can look at what other companies have done to replicate their success. By doing so, you can leverage battle-tested strategies to grow your business FASTER.

So, in today’s post, we’re going to share 13 eCommerce personalization examples that you can learn from.

Before we do, though, let’s get clear on what eCommerce personalization is and why it’s a concept you need to know.

What Is Ecommerce Personalization?

Ecommerce personalization is all about creating a more tailored experience for your customer.

It’s something that you can do across the entire user journey to make it relevant to each person that visits your site.

The right eCommerce personalization strategy helps you define your traffic’s behavior during their shopping session as precisely as possible.

In other words, by serving “personalized content” to your customers, you can improve your conversion rate and strengthen customer loyalty.

Personalization is essential for eCommerce because it helps you take a more targeted approach to prospects and customers.

When you personalize your site, you make it easier for your visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for (and faster).

In fact, there are 3 major benefits to eCommerce personalization, including:

• Boost UX: Create loyal customers by creating a positive shopping experience that’s personalized to your visitor’s needs.
• Increase Sales: Watch as more revenue pours in as more visitors purchase your recommended products.
• Drive MORE Conversions: Grow your email list, get more webinar attendees, or reach any of your marketing goals by offering content tailored to your individual client or lead.

At the end of the day, it’s easy to see how eCommerce personalization is effective.

So, now, let’s turn our attention to 13 eCommerce personalization examples that you can start implementing today.

13 eCommerce Personalization Examples

In this section, we’ll look at 13 eCommerce personalization examples. But in doing so, we’ll also explore 5 proven strategies that you can use to personalize the UX for your online shop, too.

Here are the tips we’ll be looking at in today’s post:

1. Create Offers Based on User Behavior
2. Display Products or Campaigns Based on Location
3. Upsell, Cross-sell, & Downsell at (& after) Checkout
4. Help Users Navigate Your Website
5. Personalize Your Optin Campaigns & Emails

Let’s get started.

1. Create Offers Based on User Behavior

Something that you can do to personalize the user experience is to create offers for people based on how they interact with your website.

One of the most common examples would be optimizing your site for mobile visitors.

But for eCommerce stores, in particular, you’ll need a deeper level of personalization for the best results.

The goal is to get a better understanding of how your target audience shops on your website. This could involve looking at:

• Popular posts and pages
• High-converting posts and pages
• Customer purchase or browsing history
• And more…

The goal is to let your user’s behavior trigger the offers or products you show them.

While there are many ways to accomplish this, one of your best solutions is OptinMonster:

OptinMonster is the world’s BEST lead generation software. It also comes loaded with campaigns and triggers that you can use to show the right offers to the right people at just the right times across your website.

Here are just a few of the features that let OptinMonster help you create offers based on your user’s behavior:

• MonsterLinks™: Increase conversions by displaying campaigns on a button or link click.
• OnSite Retargeting®: Engage returning visitors by showing fresh campaigns and preventing “popup fatigue.”
• Cookie Retargeting: Take OnSite Retargeting® to the next level by using 1st party cookies to determine which campaigns your returning visitors should see.

Plus, OptinMonster comes with a variety of display rules specifically designed for eCommerce:

These give you the options of display products, offers, or deals depending on:

• The items placed in your visitor’s cart
• Product pages your visitor is browsing
• Number of items in your visitor’s cart
• And much more…

And these are also the same kinds of rules that eCommerce companies like Kennedy Blue used to increase sales by 50%!

Want to see it in action for yourself? Click below to start your 100% risk-free OptinMonster account today:

Now let’s take a look at a few companies that got this level of personalization right.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #1) Amazon

When you visit their site and navigate to your personal page, you’ll see categories based on your previous onsite search and browsing behavior.

Of course, it’s not perfect, as gifts you shop for will also show up here, but it’s still pretty accurate.

By showing you products that you’ve already looked at, Amazon is more likely to increase sales and get you the items you’d been hesitant to buy (or forgotten about).

Ecommerce Personalization Example #2: Shoeline

Shoeline takes product personalization to the next level. If you’re signed into your account, you’ll see the products you’ve viewed in the past, but also the items you’ve purchased.

While you can find this information with most eCommerce platforms, Shoeline makes it much easier to view:

You’ll notice that the customer has 2 tabs:

• Viewed
• Purchased

Doing so helps Shoeline’s current customers discover new products or purchase items still in their cart.

Either way, they get more sales from this eCommerce personalization tactic.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #3: Madison Island

Madison Island goes beyond sorting products by newness, rating or price, to gauge how interested shoppers are in certain products based on the time they’ve spent browsing product pages:

That means each customer will see a different order of options as they browse various product categories.

Now let’s look at another way you can personalize your eCommerce store’s UX with geolocation targetion.

2. Display Products or Campaigns Based on Location

Another method you can use is to tailor your messaging to people depending on where they’re physically located.

This is particularly important for eCommerce stores that also have brick-and-mortar shops to consider (and can also be a great way to drive more foot traffic to your physical location).

But as you’ll see from the following examples, you can also use people’s physical locations to boost attendance at regional events, improve seasonal campaigns, and more.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #4: Podbike

Podbike is reinventing the velomobile in a BIG way. At one point, they struggled to get more people to attend their test-driving events.

Then they began using OptinMonster’s Geolocation targeting to promote this event exclusively to people who could participate:

As a result of this personalization, they saw conversion rates increase from 4.46% to 13.3%.

Read the full Podbike case study for more details.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #5: Shop Direct

This example comes from Shop Direct on their Very.co.uk website. They use geolocation to show campaigns based on the weather of the user.

Here’s one version of the homepage for a sunny day:

And another for a cold one:

When you’ve got customers from all over the world, personalizing your products around seasons is a great way to boost sales.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #6: WatchShop

WatchShop wanted to promote a special message to viewers from the US. They wanted to make it clear that when you make a purchase in USD, you’d get a better deal.

That’s why they created this popup specifically for traffic coming from the US:

OptinMonster’s Geolocation targeting feature allows you to segment your visitors by location to show appropriate offers to each group.

It’s the same method IMSource used to boost conversions by 6500%.

And to make it easier to segment your email list by location, you can use a form builder like WPForms.

With WPForms’ Geolocation Addon, you can collect and store your website visitors’ geolocation data along with their form submission.

That means every time someone submits a form, you can see their location, zip code, country, and a map next to their entry.

This makes it easier to send personalized emails to promote local stores and events.

3. Upsell, Cross-sell, & Downsell at (& after) Checkout

It’s no secret that one of the best ways to boost sales from eCommerce personalization is from target upsells, cross-sells, and downsells.

While the 3 techniques are similar, they each use a slightly different strategy to increase your customer’s average order value (AOV):

• Upsells: Suggest products that are more expensive than what your customers have purchased or have in their cart.
• Cross-sells: Sell items related to what your customer is browsing (or has purchased in the past) regardless of pricing.
• Downsells: Suggest products that are less expensive than what your customers have purchased or have in their cart.

While it isn’t always the case, these transactions tend to occur around the shopping cart.

By that, we mean upsells, cross-sells, and downsells are MOST most effective at 3 distinct times:

• Right before checkout
• During checkout
• Immediately after checkout

This is when customers are the most excited about their purchase, have their credit cards in hand, are would be most likely to add similar products to their order.

Let’s look at a few examples of companies that get this concept right.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #7: Amazon (Cross-sell)

You can get more sales by recommending products while people are at checkout.

In this eCommerce personalization example, Amazon shows products related to what’s in the cart:

Notice that the pricing of these products varies, making this more of a targeted cross-sell.

The goal isn’t to use pricing to affect purchasing behavior. Amazon isn’t leading customers to a larger purchase like you would with an upsell funnel.

And users don’t necessarily have an expensive item in their cart making for an easy downsell.

Instead, these are simply related products that can boost the AOV from this customer.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #8: LifterLMS (Upsell) 

One of the most common forms of upsells is offering a “freemium” service with the hopes of eventually converting those subscribers into paying customers.

LifterLMS is a company that helps entrepreneurs build and sell online courses. As such, they offered a free plan to users and wanted to boost their subscription rates.

They were able to do that by creating campaigns with OptinMonster:

The result? Not only did they get over 7,000 new leads, they also saw $23,700 in revenue over the following 5 months.

You can get all the details by reading the LMS case study here.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #9: Dominos Pizza (Downsell)

Dominos is a great place to see downselling in action.

Though it’s a restaurant (and not a typical eCommerce store), they aren’t shy about trying to increase your AOV..

When you place an order through their app or website, you’ll see lots of opportunities to add lower-priced products to your cart:

This is effective because users have already promised to spend more money on other products.

So when Domino’s shows additional items at a lower price, hungry customers are more likely to add them to their cart.

4. Help Users Navigate Your Website

As your website grows, you can expect 2 things to happen:

• You’ll get more traffic
• Your site is harder to navigate

That’s because the more pages you add to your online store, the harder it is for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for.

That’s why it’s important to keep eCommerce personalization in mind when designing the layout of your eCommerce website.

Let’s take a look at 2 personalization examples that nail this.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #10: CopyHackers 

Copyhackers isn’t a traditional eCommerce store, but they provide a great lesson in personalization.

When you enter the website, a slide-in scroll box instantly gives you the option to find what you’re looking for. But before the CEO can help you do that, you provide a bit of information about yourself.

The small questionnaire starts with whether you’re new or returning:

Then it continues to learn more about your reasons for visiting the site:

This allows users to TOTALLY customize their own customer journey and, as a result, boosts more sales for Copyhacker’s website.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #11: ASOS

Another good eCommerce personalization example is changing your homepage and navigation based on visitor interests.

For example, when we typed in the URL of the ASOS home page, it automatically redirected to the women’s section because that’s what we’d looked at before.

ASOS is most likely using cookie retargeting, which is also part of OptinMonster.

5. Personalize Your Optin Campaigns & Emails

Finally, let’s not pretend like eCommerce personalization ends when users are on your website.

In fact, when it comes to eCommerce, LOTS of your store’s revenue is likely driven by email marketing (and if it’s not, it really SHOULD be).

That’s why it’s important to personalize 2 other aspects of your customer’s journey:

• Optin forms
• Email campaigns

“Optin forms” are simply things like popups, floating bars, welcome mats, and so on that capture your visitor’s email address.

And email campaigns are typically an automated series of emails that new subscribers will receive.

The goal is to tailor each of these to your new leads and gently guide them down your sales funnel.

In doing so, you can achieve massive jumps in sales from your online store.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #12: Expat.com

Expat.com is a community membership website. Their goal is to help people either move abroad or find the right resources to live abroad once they make the move.

At one point, they were trying to get more email subscribers to join their online community.

And once they starter personalizing their optin forms with OptinMonster they saw BIG results.

How did they do it? Expat.com began adding the name and location of their logged-in members to upsell paid products.

Here’s an example of a campaign they made to get a quote for international health insurance:

As a result of this personalization, they were able to add 14,000 members each month and convert 2.09% of traffic that was actively leaving their site.

You can read the full details about how Expat.com boosted conversions and affiliate sales here.

Ecommerce Personalization Example #13: OptinMonster

Most marketers know that successful email campaigns require audience segmentation.

That’s when you organize your lists based on demographics, interests, purchase behaviors, and more.

By organizing your lists into smaller groups of people with similar interests, you can make your email copy much more effective.

But let’s talk about a way to personalize your eCommerce emails that’s even more simple: adding customer names to your email copy.

Most modern email service providers (ESPs) offer this service with the click of a button. But that small effort can make a big difference in conversions.

We do this at OptinMonster with our email campaigns. Rather than a generic greeting like, “Hey there,” we’ll add the customer’s name in either the subject line or the email copy itself:

Again, this is a service offered by most ESPs on the market.

Don’t have a reliable email provider yet? Check out this helpful resource: 7 Best Email Service Providers for Small Business.

It’s a very basic practice in personalization, but one that we don’t see enough marketers taking the time to actually use.

And that’s all for today! These have been 13 eCommerce personalization examples.

We’ve also shared 5 proven personalization strategies that you can use for your online store.

We hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, you definitely don’t want to miss the following resources:

• 28 Powerful Ecommerce Personalization Tools to Increase Revenue
• 5 Creative Ways to Personalize Your Optins
• How to Personalize Your Popups With Customer Names

These articles will have even more information and tools that you can use to grow your eCommerce business.

Published by Nathan Thompson

Nathan Thompson is a father, a writer, and a lover of travel (in that order). When he’s not wrestling with his kids, you’ll likely find Nathan giving his eyes a much-needed break from screens with a good book or planning a family trip with his awesome wife.