Personalizing Ecommerce Experiences For First-Time Visitors

Do you cater to multiple customer personas? Guiding them to the right products from the get-go can significantly enhance their shopping experience. One effective strategy is to implement a "Choose Your Own Adventure" approach on your ecommerce homepage. Why This Approach Works: → Personalization: By allowing customers to select their persona or interests, you can tailor the shopping experience to their specific needs and preferences. → Improved Navigation: This method helps visitors quickly find the products that are most relevant to them, reducing the time they spend searching and increasing the likelihood of a purchase. → Enhanced Engagement: A personalized experience keeps customers engaged and encourages them to explore more of your catalog and return in the future. How to Implement It: → Identify Key Personas: Start by identifying the main customer personas you serve. For example, if you're a skincare brand, your personas might include "Teens," "Adults," and "Mature." → Create Clear Pathways: Design your homepage to feature clear, clickable options for each persona. For instance, you could have buttons or images labeled "Teen Skin," "Adult Skin," and "Mature Skin." → Tailor Content: Once a visitor selects their persona, direct them to a customized landing page that features products, testimonials, and content relevant to their needs. Show product recommendations tagged for each persona. Bonus points: Setup a personalization campaign that adapts each page of your site with language and imagery to match each persona. e.g. A teen would see imagery of other teens and copy on the page follows suite. By implementing a "Choose Your Own Adventure" approach, you can create a more personalized and joyful shopping experience for your customers, ultimately driving higher conversions and revenue.

They didn’t come to buy. They came to decide 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺’𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬. This is the micro-moment that gets missed the most. They’re not a hot lead. Not price shopping. Not even sure what you sell exactly. They’re just... curious. They clicked an ad. Heard your name from a friend. Saw you in a podcast or on a “Top 10” list. Now they’re scrolling your homepage at 11:47pm from their couch. Half asleep. And most enterprise large brands? They ask for too much, too soon. They want the sale…not even at the moment. They wanted it yesterday. “Subscribe now” “Unlock 15% off” “Shop the collection” “Do a backflip followed by a frontflip” (I am kind of kidding.) Slow down. This moment isn’t about conversion. It’s about 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝘁:  • Build a personalized welcome flow on first visit       •  Ask: “What brought you here?” with 3-4 light options       •  Serve a curated experience instantly:                      • “Top sellers for busy moms”                        “Lightweight picks for travelers”  • Offer a way to “Explore, then decide”         “Not ready to shop? Save your faves. Come back later.”          Let them build a wishlist or even email themselves a cart preview  • Use smart exit-intent      •   Not discount begging      •   Try: “Want a 30-second summary of what makes us the right choice?”  • On return visits, change the welcome tone:    •  “Good to see you again. Want to see what’s trending since you last visited?” Vuori nails this with a chill, curated, never-pushy site experience.  Even though their website is simple, the story is there. Sure you can find opportunities on how they can improve the website. But for now, the story fills those gaps. First visit? You’re met with a clean story, not a coupon. They let the product speak. They let the lifestyle breathe. And they give just enough recommendations (“shop by activity,” etc.) to make you feel like you belong…even if you’re just browsing. There’s no rush. But when you come back...they remember. That’s how you turn curiosity into loyalty…without needing a pop-up discount to get attention.

We've all had the experience many times before of landing on the homepage of an eCommerce brand for the first time that we're genuinely excited to learn more about, only to be hit with a transactional pop up asking for our email address and phone number in exchange for 15% off our first purchase before we've even had 30 seconds to learn about the brand. We we would never greet a real person this way in a real store, and we shouldn't do it online! There's a much better, more human way to greet new site visitors. Respect their time and attention (we're all busy) and pop up a welcome quiz that will ask them a few questions, learn more about them and their needs, then make a personalized recommendation to them based on their answers and THEN we ask for the email/phone number at the end once we've already engaged the consumer in a conversation and provided genuine value to them. The ironic part is this less transactional, more human way of greeting a new site visitor actual leads to more transactions!!! It's counterintuitive to how we've been trained to think as marketers, because we've been told if we want to capture someone's email or drive a sale we should remove as steps between them and the email form/add to cart button. But it turns out (now tested across thousands of brands using the Jebbit platform) that the average brand sees over a 30% improvement in both email capture rate and purchase rate when AB testing a quiz vs. a standard email capture popup box. At Jebbit we've been really excited to parter with SAP via the SAP.iO program over the last few years. Lior Weizman from the SAP.iO team just released an awesome new article (link in the comments) detailing 5 of the top #ecommerce trends going into 2024. It features the exact use case above using Jebbit as well as some other powerful use cases around customer advocacy, immersive experiences, B2B CX, and video commerce featuring other SAP partners Mention Me, Obsess, Zoovu, and Smartzer. Check it out!! I think it should be a commitment from all of us (brands and Martech vendors) in 2024 to try to continue to be more human and less transactional with our customer experiences as it's really a win win for both sides!