Personalisation in your webshop: from customer profile to personalised email

Personalisation starts with one customer profile

A personalised webshop shows every visitor what suits them: the right products at the top, advice that matches their question and an email about their situation rather than this week's offer. That only works if you know who is on your site. That is why personalisation revolves around one customer profile, which you use in three places: in your webshop, in your marketing and in your email.

In practice this takes three kinds of software. Your webshop platform or CMS provides the products, orders and customer accounts. A personalisation tool collects what visitors want and adapts the webshop accordingly. And your email marketing software uses the same profile for newsletters and automated emails. Below we go through these steps, using a fictional skincare webshop as an example.

Step 1: your CMS or webshop platform as the foundation

Everything starts with the platform your webshop runs on, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento or Lightspeed eCom. That is where your products and their attributes, your stock, your orders and your customer accounts live. That data tells you what someone has bought and viewed.

What the platform usually does not know is why someone is looking for something. That the customer has sensitive skin, is looking for a gift or has a budget of €40 in mind is not in the order history. A new visitor has no history at all yet. If you personalise on behaviour alone, you start from scratch with every new visitor.

In this step, above all make sure your product data is in order. You can only personalise on attributes you have recorded. If a product has no field for skin type or fragrance-free, no tool can recommend it on that basis.

Step 2: collecting profile data with bluebarry

The second step is finding out what your visitors want. You can do that by asking. Data that customers share themselves, knowingly, is called zero-party data. It is more reliable than a guess based on clicks, and the customer knows what they are giving it for.

bluebarry is a personalisation platform that does exactly that. It works on any CMS, including Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce, and builds a profile of each visitor with several tools:

All answers go into the same profile, together with what the visitor views and buys. In our fictional example, a visitor takes the skin quiz and says she has dry, sensitive skin, prefers fragrance-free products and wants to spend no more than €40. Those four answers are enough to adapt the rest of her visit, and the emails that follow.

Step 3: personalising the webshop itself

With the profile, the webshop adapts to each visitor. That goes further than a block of recommendations below a product:

• Collection pages and merchandising: on the page with day creams, the visitor from the example first sees the fragrance-free products for dry skin within her budget.
• Product recommendations: suggestions on product and basket pages are based on her answers, not just on what other customers bought.
• Landing pages: a campaign can show a different selection to each visitor, so one advert serves several target groups.
• Dynamic bundles: a set of cleanser, serum and cream that suits her skin, put together with an eye on your margin.

bluebarry is done-for-you: the team builds these components in your own theme. You put together your own package; according to the pricing page, individual tools cost from €49 per month, and quiz funnels and product finders €149 per month, with annual billing and up to 5.000 orders per month.

Step 4: using the profile in your emails

The profile only becomes truly valuable when it also feeds your email marketing. Most webshops already send newsletters and automated emails with packages such as Klaviyo, Reloadify or Spotler. bluebarry passes the profile data on to these three, among others, so the quiz answers are available in the email program as properties of the contact.

This lets you, for example:

• send an email with the personal advice straight after the quiz to those who have not bought yet;
• create segments such as "sensitive skin, has not bought a serum yet" and send them a targeted campaign;
• add an alternative that also matches the profile to the abandoned basket reminder;
• show different products to each recipient in a newsletter, while you create just one campaign.

When choosing email software, check whether it supports custom profile properties in segments and in the content of emails, and whether the integration with your personalisation tool updates those properties automatically. You can compare the packages in the overview of email marketing software.

Privacy and consent

You get zero-party data because the customer gets something in return: better advice. So explain at the quiz what you use the answers for, including if you later use them in emails. Ask separately for consent to send someone marketing emails and record when and how that consent was given. If you use cookies to recognise visitors, the consent from your cookie banner also applies. And do not ask for more than you need: asking for a date of birth only makes sense if you do something with it.

Measuring the results

Personalisation takes time and money, so measure the effect. Start with one component, such as a product quiz with a follow-up email, and compare a group of visitors who see the personalised version with a group who do not. Look at conversion, average order value and revenue per visitor, and in email at revenue per recipient rather than just opens. bluebarry includes A/B testing in the plan; most email packages can test subject lines and content.

How to get started

1. Add the product attributes you want to personalise on to your webshop platform.
2. Choose three to five questions that make the difference for your advice.
3. Use them to build one quiz or product finder and connect it to your email software.
4. Create one flow that follows up the advice after the quiz.
5. Measure the effect for four to six weeks, then extend to collection pages and recommendations.

Not sure which combination of webshop platform, personalisation and email software suits you? Compare the packages per component via e-commerce software, or request free advice.