6 Strategies to implement Shopify’s Segments feature to increase your CVR

As a marketing expert, you know giving a personalized experience to your shoppers is a great strategy for getting your Shopify store business to the next level. The question is of course, how? You need solutions that scale well to match your busy schedule and limited resources. At the same time, you want to turn the customer data you’ve been collecting into something more actionable on top of the typical analysis purposes, as important as that is. Shopify’s segments feature is a great tool to add to your marketing strategies to do just that!

What is Shopify’s Segments feature?

Shopify’s Segments feature is a great way to separate your customer base into groups based on a common behavior or characteristic. Some broad, high-level categories can include the following.

Demographic

Demographic customer segmentations can be separated by age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, family structure, income, and more. This way of breaking down your customers may be more relevant for targeting your ads and adjusting your branding, and less relevant with Shopify’s segments feature.

Geographic

This way of segmenting is based on geographical location. This is very relevant for what languages may be spoken, cultural norms, as well as for your logistics and shipping costs.

Psychographic

Psychographic segmentation categorizes people based on their interests, beliefs, values, lifestyles. This breakdown is quite abstract, and more helpful for understanding your customer persona. It is helpful for branding, product development, and for higher level strategic planning. It is less relevant to Shopify’s segments feature.

Behavioral

This breakdown is based on customer activities such as purchasing behavior or email subscribers to your newsletter. It is a great segmentation strategy because there are many potential marketing automations you can attach to it – described further in detail below. To get you started though, here are some concrete examples to give you an image:

• New users who haven’t purchased yet vs users who have purchased at least once
• Abandoned checkouts in the last 30 days
• Users from different countries or using different languages

These examples and more can be found in Shopify’s provided segment templates as shown in this screenshot. With a general understanding of types of segmentation criteria under our belt, let’s get into specific, actionable ways you can implement them into your store.

Shopify console Shopify’s segments feature screenshot

Segmentation strategies to increase CVR

The statistics are in on how personalized marketing campaigns can affect your store:

• 91% of shoppers are more likely to buy from brands that remember their preferences and offer personalized recommendations and deals. Additionally, 83% of consumers are open to sharing their data in exchange for the advantages of a personalized shopping experience.
• Personalized messages in email marketing campaigns generate 5-15% more revenue than those without any personalization.
• 65% of online stores experience higher conversion rates after implementing a personalization strategy.

(Source: https://www.optimonk.com/ecommerce-personalization/)

In order to take advantage of these user preferences to achieve similar outcomes for your store, we have broken down 6 strategies for turning segments into personalized experiences.

Strategy 1: Increase cart value with upselling and cross-selling

Many experts, including Forbes, state that retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. For e-commerce, retention strategies can take the form of upselling and cross-selling. Based on the customer’s purchase history, you can recommend products that typically pair with what was purchased. On a similar note, recommending products that a customer has already purchased can be a waste of your marketing efforts, not to mention annoy your valuable customers.

Strategy 2: Increase customer engagement and customer loyalty with rewards

Giving rewards such as loyalty points to your most valued and loyal customers can increase customer satisfaction while at the same time increasing customer engagement and repeat purchases. Sending rewards to customers who made a purchase is definitely one strategy, however, you can attach rewards to other actions that benefit you as well.  Examples such as completing surveys to gain customer feedback, or signing up for an email newsletter to grow your list of customers are well worth rewarding your customers for. Not to mention, sharing discounts can increase a first-time buyer’s likelihood of making a purchase!

The BLOY Loyalty Program & Rewards app on Shopify is a powerful tool to implement such strategies. It allows businesses to create customizable loyalty programs where customers can earn points through various actions, like registering accounts, celebrating birthdays, or placing orders. Points can then be redeemed for rewards such as discounts or free shipping, helping boost customer engagement and repeat purchases.

Strategy 3: Convert abandoned carts

Another common personalized and effective marketing campaign is reaching out to customers who abandoned their carts. Customers who added products to their cart have clearly indicated they are interested and may need an extra incentivized push either as a reminder or to push them over the hump. Sending a personalized marketing message with a link to their filled cart can encourage an abandoned customer to pick up where they left off in their customer journey. Again, including an incentive may address what was causing their hesitation in the first place.

Strategy 4: Product recommendations

Recommending products based on customer behavior is a great way to increase your store’s CVR. If a customer purchased or just viewed a product, you can base what products to display on that. Many times this data won’t be available to give high-quality recommendations, which is where product quizzes can become a great and low-effort behavioral segmentation strategy for you. Apps such as Gojiberry allow you to display a set of questions aesthetically customized to match your brand, that lead to product recommendations based on the user’s answers. Like a brick-and-mortar shop assistant, it is a great way to guide your users early in their customer journey to the products that are the best match for their needs. What’s more, you are gathering data directly from your customers to include in future customer segmentation strategies!

Read more: How to Improve eCommerce Customer Experience in 10 Ways

Product quiz to help find the right skincare routine for you

Strategy 5: Localize your online store to more markets

Shopify is well known for its increasingly advanced and convenient tools around localizing your store to more languages and markets. Easily translate your website to multiple languages, and then display different sales and discount opportunities depending on where your target audience is located. Some locations may care more about shipping costs, or others may have a local holiday that is not relevant to other regions. Shopify shares research on a 13% increase in conversion for buyers showing their own language compared to when the default store language is different. When you segment customers this way, it opens strong opportunities to grow your e-commerce business.

Strategy 6: Gain a deeper understanding of your various customer segments

Different customers from different regions may have different needs. If you sell to both consumers and to wholesale customers, those 2 segments will definitely have very different needs. The first step to growing your business is having a deep understanding of your customers’ needs. You can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Without the right tools, it can be difficult to separate the data you gather from the various segments. Survey apps like Gojiberry include segmentation features to display surveys to the correct customer segment so you can ask the right questions to the right people, leading to relevant insights. Not only this, the insights you gather through surveys can be integrated with third-party apps through Shopify Flow to generate new customer segments based on survey answers. Surveys can both benefit from customer segments and generate them to begin with!

Wrapping up

Especially for larger stores, segmenting your customers into major categories with different needs can help you give a more personalized experience, leading to increased purchase CVR and revenue growth. Shopify’s Segments feature, surveys and quizzes help you gather data while marketing automation tools are easy to link to these gathered insights to send out promotional content that can lead to higher customer retention. Data regulations are becoming stricter by the day, but savvy marketers must find powerful tools and strategies to give their customers the personalization they desire.