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Ecommerce Personalization: How to Turn Casual Shoppers Into Lifelong Buyers

Subharun Mukherjee 18+ years of experience leading product strategy, Go-To-Market (GTM), new market entry, value-based sales, analyst relations, and customer experience programs. Expertise in Financial Services, eCommerce, on-demand services, and the SaaS industry.
Ecommerce Personalization: How to Turn Casual Shoppers Into Lifelong Buyers

If you’re an ecommerce app and you want to grow your customer base and solve for ROI, you’ve simply got to create personalized campaigns and messaging. There is no other way to achieve your growth goals. 
Ecommerce personalization involves tailoring the online shopping experience to meet the individual needs and preferences of each customer. By leveraging customer data, behavioral patterns, and preferences, your ecommerce businesses can deliver personalized content, offers, and recommendations to customers. The result should be much better engagement and retention.

Boosting Loyalty and Sales Through Personalization in Ecommerce

Here are some ways ecommerce personalization can increase customer loyalty and boost sales:
Enhanced customer experience: Personalization allows you to create a customized shopping experience for each customer, making them feel valued and understood. By delivering the digital equivalent of a white glove experience, you create a bond with the customer that grows with the years. All your personalized offers will inevitably translate to boosted LTV. In short: personalization increases customer retention and long-term loyalty. 
In fact, this kind of special treatment was the initial vision that led to the creation of CleverTap — we needed a platform that could personalize marketing experiences at scale because there was none at the time.    
Improved relevancy and engagement: Personalized content and recommendations are more relevant and engaging to customers compared to generic messages. After all, if a user buys street style fashion from your app, you’ll get better engagement with push notifications and emails about the latest street style trends and your latest products within that same category.
By leveraging customer data such as browsing history, purchase history, and preferences, your ecommerce brand can deliver tailored product recommendations, personalized offers, and highly relevant content. And let’s face it, relevant content is eminently clickable.
Increased cross-selling and upselling opportunities: Leverage the power of data! Dive deep into your customers’ purchase history, favorites and bookmarks, and let your database work its magic. Then, recommend complementary products and upgrades that they never even knew they needed. By tailoring the shopping experience to each individual, you’ll create a loyal customer base that keeps coming back for more. 
This personalized approach can increase the average order value and lifetime value of customers, leading to higher revenue and profits. This is exactly what Carousell, an ecommerce customer in Singapore did: by recommending similar categories, they were able to increase CTRs by 3.8x. But there’s more on Carousell below.    
Reduced cart abandonment: Cart abandonment is a common challenge — and a total drag — for ecommerce businesses. However, personalized retargeting efforts can help reduce cart abandonment rates. By leveraging customer data and sending personalized reminders, recommendations, and incentives to customers who have abandoned their carts, you can re-engage customers and encourage them to complete their purchase. Expect higher conversion rates and increased sales. Win!!
Data-driven marketing strategies: As we’ve emphasized, ecommerce personalization relies on data-driven insights and analysis and provides valuable insights into customers’ tastes. These insights can then drive more impactful marketing strategies, such as targeted campaigns, personalized offers, and content optimization. Then, just watch your customer engagement, loyalty and sales numbers go through the roof!

How CleverTap Enables Ecommerce Personalization

CleverTap offers several features that can help ecommerce businesses boost sales through effective personalization:

  • Our product recommendation engine provides personalized recommendations via push notifications, in-app messages, and email using machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data.
  • Set up automated campaigns triggered by customer actions or events, such as sending personalized offers or discounts to customers who have abandoned their carts, boosting sales.
  • Tailor messages to customer preferences through push notifications, in-app messages, email, SMS, etc., to boost sales KPIs and drive customer loyalty.
  • Conduct A/B testing to optimize personalized campaigns, fine-tune messaging and offers based on customer responses for better engagement and sales performance.
  • Slice and dice your customer base with advanced segmentation capabilities, create personalized segments, and target them with relevant content, offers, and recommendations.
  • Benefit from real-time insights into customer behavior and preferences with our analytics capabilities, track interactions, purchase behavior, and engagement patterns, and optimize personalization efforts in real time.

CleverTap in Action: How Our Customer Carousell Increased Week 3 Retention by 71%


Carousell is a mobile classifieds marketplace that allows users to buy and sell items within their local communities. Despite having a large user base, they struggled to retain users beyond the first week. To address this, Carousell partnered with CleverTap to help them implement targeted push notifications.
Their push notifications were designed to encourage users to complete specific actions, such as uploading a profile picture or browsing new listings. These notifications were personalized based on each user’s behavior and preferences, increasing their relevance and effectiveness.
The results of the campaign were impressive. Carousell saw a 35% increase in week 3 retention rates, which translates to a significant increase in the lifetime value of each user. Additionally, users who received personalized push notifications were found to be more engaged with the app, resulting in a 10% increase in daily active users.
Overall, their partnership with us has been a success, resulting in a significant increase in user retention and engagement. By utilizing targeted push notifications, they were able to improve the user experience and drive long-term growth.

Let CleverTap Help You to Get Personal 

There you have it, folks! If you’re an ecommerce app looking to boost your customer base and ROI, it’s time to get personal. And with CleverTap powering your ecommerce, you can do everything from creating meaningful customer segments that drive personalized product recommendations and messaging, to automated behavioral triggers and A/B testing and optimization — all driven by real-time analytics. 
By delivering relevant and timely content, offers, and recommendations you’ll improve customer engagement, drive repeat purchases, and ultimately increase sales performance. So, don’t be a one-size-fits-all ecommerce app in a world of tailored suits. Get personal and watch your customer base and your ROI soar. 

See how today’s top brands use CleverTap to drive long-term growth and retention

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Last updated on March 26, 2024