5 Elegant Ecommerce Personalization Examples + 2 That Flop

Personalized marketing increases the likelihood of a purchase. Yet many ecommerce retailers fall short in this area. A lot of what’s out there is still pretty generic, but not everything. 

We scoured the web, social accounts, email inboxes, and SMS chats to find some great examples of personalization done right—and a couple examples to avoid.

5 Elegant Ecommerce Personalization Examples

Level Seven Salon

Timing is everything, especially when it comes to email outreach. Level Seven Salon, a collective of hair and beauty professionals, understands this.

Shortly before the first day of summer in Seattle, this email landed in one of our inboxes.

So let’s analyze why this email works so well from a personalization standpoint.

First, the layout is clean and uncluttered. There isn’t anything unnecessary in the design, just the name of the business, a stylish black-and-white shot of the salon, and a banner that makes it crystal clear what this email is about. 

But it is the copy that really wins. The information is really timely. 

June is the unofficial kick-off of pool party and backyard bbq season in the Pacific Northwest. Anyone concerned about keeping their hair in top condition while enjoying pool days in the sunshine wants to know the best ways to do that.

Three quick tips to maintain healthy and vibrant hair is hard to resist. It’s a short read, straight and to the point.

It’s also an excellent reminder to book an appointment for hair care, which is the real point of this email. Hair upkeep is something that usually gets lost in the busyness of the very short summer months.

While it might have been a nice touch to personalize the salutation, it isn’t a huge negative in this instance. It is more than balanced out by the rest of the email. It also works to remind the reader why they got the email in the first place—they’ve been a past customer of the salon.

If you want to reach your customers in an effective way, think about timing. What’s on their mind at different times of the year? What expert information can you share that will bring them value?

Recognizing needs builds trust with your customers. It shows that you understand their pain points and have solutions. It’s also a great way for your outreach to generate the kind of results you want.

Emails are easy to automate with an email marketing service. You can personalize them as much as you like and design them to showcase your brand tone and voice.

Public Goods

Sustainability is more than just a buzzword these days. Many customers want to maintain an eco-friendly lifestyle. This extends to the products they buy.

Public Goods is a membership-based, sustainable lifestyle brand that offers personal care, household, and food items. They use organic ingredients and avoid all toxic chemicals. The containers are made with 100% recycled consumer plastic. 

When a visitor first goes to the website, they are offered a 15% discount if they provide their phone number. The company makes good use of this information with a follow up SMS.

This strategy works on a couple levels. 

It puts the discount code front and center, even if the customer left the page without making a purchase. Days or even weeks after their initial inquiry, it’s a gentle reminder that it just takes one click to enjoy the discount.

But the bigger win for Public Goods is in the copy. It has all the feels that resonate with an environmentally conscious consumer.

Greener planet. Home. Begin your sustainable journey.

These words and phrases trigger strong identification and emotions with the recipient. They see themselves as being part of the solution, not the problem. It’s a lot of good feeling packed into a few short sentences.

When you’re thinking about ways to personalize your outreach and avoid the seven fatal ecommerce mistakes, don’t discount people’s feelings. These are powerful emotions to tap into. Figure out what resonates with your target audience, and craft copy to match.

Likewise, automating your marketing efforts like this is an easy way to remain front-of-mind in prospective customers, while boosting ecommerce sales.

Stitch Fix

Stitch Fix is a monthly clothing subscription service for women, men, and children. A customer completes a style quiz, then a personal shopper puts together five items that match the customer’s preferences. Customers receive a box each month with their stylist’s picks.

If you’ve never used the service, it is surprisingly accurate. Customers can keep everything, or return the things they don’t like. Customers can also shop for individual items at any time.

This strategy puts a ton of customer data at the company’s fingertips. 

Which is why, when you visit their site after a purchase, Stitch Fix devotes a lot of homepage real estate to making recommendations for items that go with things you already bought.

A returning customer can see combinations of items they may not have considered otherwise. Everything from tops, bottoms, shoes, and accessories are paired with something they already own.

This is a powerful way to encourage additional sales. 

It takes the guesswork out of it for customers. Maybe they aren’t fashion-confident or simply don’t have time to spend scrolling online to build their wardrobes. Either way, with just a few clicks, they can instantly have new outfits.

If you want to boost your own ecommerce bottom line, dig in to what you already know about your customers. Ecommerce analytics can help. 

Then go one step beyond the usual “you might like” suggestions to target what will resonate with your customers. Many of the best ecommerce website builders will have tools and plugins to help you do this.

Chewy

It is easier to get a repeat sale from an existing customer than a first sale from a new customer. Chewy, the online pet supply company, understands this.

The brand also knows that busy pet parents want convenience when taking good care of their furry or feathered best friends. Which is why the company includes a Buy It Again section for logged-in customers on the homepage.

This strategy makes it easy for people to remember what they’ve purchased in the past. It also is a friendly reminder that it may be time to stock up again.

It saves time, too. Customers no longer have to scroll through past purchases to find the exact brand and size of something they want to buy again.

Does Max need a replacement pet bed? One click and the exact same bed is in the shopping cart. Running low on cat food? Add Mimi’s favorite brand to your cart and have it delivered to your doorstep.

When you make it as convenient as possible for customers to make repeat purchases with just a click or two, you’ll have satisfied customers and increased sales.

REI

Online shopping is convenient and saves time. But there are still occasions when you need something right away and even one-day shipping isn’t going to cut it.

REI, the outdoor gear retailer, understands this dilemma. It knows that when it comes to backpacks, tents, and other gear, you might need it right now. In fact, you wouldn’t be the first customer racing in ten minutes before closing time on a Friday night to grab a replacement cooler for that weekend’s camping trip.

Which is why having in-store availability as one of the filters on their search tool is invaluable. They take it a step further by matching your “local” store to your REI account or geolocation, depending on whether you’re logged in or not.

This means when you find the perfect Yeti cooler, you know right away where you can go to pick it up right now. If it isn’t in stock in the store closest to you, you can search other nearby stores, too. 

Thanks to REI, no camping trip will be ruined for lack of a new cooler. Mosquitos, however, are another story.

But all joking aside, this kind of location personalization can mean the difference between a sale and a frustrated customer.

When you can meet the customer where they are in terms of needs, you’re one step closer to a sale. Figure out what drives customers to make a purchase, then give that to them on your website.

2 Ecommerce Personalization Examples NOT To Copy

Lululemon

Follow-up emails after a sale are an essential part of the ecommerce experience for customers. Providing status updates, tracking information, and estimated delivery dates are all customer expectations after they place an order online.

These email messages are also an excellent opportunity for personalization and cross-selling—at least when it’s done well.

Sometimes, it is a bit of a fail. Even the biggest and best stumble now and then.

Lululemon, the athleisure brand, usually has its messaging very well-defined, especially for repeat customers. But not always, as evidenced by a recent email one of our team member’s received after purchasing the popular Everywhere Crossbody Bag.

While the bag itself is a unisex item, our team member is a woman and buys a lot of things for herself on the Lululemon site. Leggings, jackets, and sport bras usually fill her shopping cart. She’s never browsed or purchased anything from the men’s collection.

Yet, in the post-sale confirmation email she received, Lululemon suggested she complete her look with the following items.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with suggesting men’s clothing as a follow-up to her purchase of a unisex bag. But there’s nothing particularly compelling about it either, especially since they have years of her customer data at their fingertips.

Had they offered her a yoga top or dress to complement her new bag, they might have made a quick sale. 

If you’re going to personalize your ecommerce messaging (and you definitely should), don’t miss easy cross-selling opportunities like this by making irrelevant suggestions. Lean hard into the customer data you have and make the most of it.

Hey Shape

Anyone who’s spent time scrolling social media knows that creepy feeling of thinking your devices are always listening. After all, if you ask your partner about flying to Italy for vacation, you almost immediately see sponsored posts in your Facebook feed promoting hotels and tourist activities in Rome.

It’s probably not our imagination, and the targeted ads we see are definitely no coincidence. 

But if you don’t carefully segment your targeted audience, these ads can sometimes be totally irrelevant and potentially even offensive.

Take the brand Hey Shape. It offers miracle shapewear that promises to tuck your body into a shape that makes you more confident. 

If you’re in the market for this kind of thing, then perhaps the ad speaks to you. 

But if you are content with your current body and have never expressed an interest in a “solution” like this, then the ad will probably annoy you, especially if you keep seeing it over and over again. Worst case scenario, you might even be offended at the suggestion that you should be doing something about your body at all.

Avoid using slang and jargon that doesn’t make sense to the age group you’re promoting your ad to. The word “snatched” is a good example. Sure it resonates with a younger generation, but not so much with people over 40. If someone viewing your sponsored post has to go to Urban Dictionary to figure out what a word means, you’ve probably lost them as a customer.

If you’re an ecommerce retailer that wants to leverage social media to produce personalized ads, do so with thoughtfulness and care. Refine and segment your targeted audience as much as possible. Create different ads for different audiences. Don’t just pick a 30-to-70 age range of women or men and hope for the best. 

You’ll get much more traction when your sponsored posts truly resonate with the audience they reach.