Ecommerce personalization examples & strategies to optimize the customer experience

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Consumer data privacy has been in the spotlight for years. For starters, it’s becoming more difficult to target audiences with paid ads online:

• In July 2024, Google announced that they’re rolling out a new Chrome experience that would give people a choice about allowing third-party cookie tracking.
• In late 2023, Apple’s iOS 17 expanded on earlier privacy features by removing link tracking when people are browsing in private mode on Safari or using Apple’s Mail or Messages—though brands can still see who clicked the links if they’re UTMs.
• In 2022, Meta removed detailed targeting from its ad service, which ended up increasing competition and pricing out a lot of small to midsize ecommerce businesses.

At the same time, 74% of consumers expect a personalized experience when they engage with brands, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 future of consumer marketing report. It’s just that they want a choice about what they share—33% are willing to share their email address, for example, while only 2% are willing to share their social media information.

As it turns out, what people really want is control—over the personal data they share, how it’s used, and how far it extends.

In other words, people still want to interact with brands, but they want to do it after they’ve given those brands permission to use their data. And that’s a huge opportunity for brands to develop more meaningful—and lucrative—relationships with smaller, more manageable audiences.

If you want this for your own brand, you need to learn about—and invest in—better customer data. Keep reading to find out what that means and how to do it right.

What is ecommerce personalization?

Ecommerce personalization is the use of data to tailor both on-site experiences and brand communications—such as personalized emails, SMS, and mobile app messages—for different people based on their demographics, lifestyle factors, and online behavior.

It’s one thing that can separate an average online shopping experience from an outstanding one.

Here are some types of data you can use to personalize your web on-site experience:

• Zero-party data:  information customers voluntarily share with your brand, like email addresses, phone numbers, and preferences shared through surveys or quizzes. 
• First-party data: information your brand gets directly through customer interactions in your owned channels, like website behavior, purchase history, email engagement, and customer service interactions. 
• Third-party data: information collected by entities with no direct relationship to your customers, like data brokers, advertising networks, and public records. This type of data  is becoming more difficult to use (in part because it’s less desirable for consumers). 

“By adding personalization to your marketing strategy, you make your customers feel like you’re speaking to them directly.“

“By adding personalization to your marketing strategy, you make your customers feel like you’re speaking to them directly,” says Gracie Cooper, former digital marketing strategist at Groove Commerce.

Put simply, ecommerce personalization leads to a better customer experience. It creates customer journeys that feel relevant and timely, whether people are browsing your website or receiving personalized messages. This helps them find and purchase the products they want, faster, ultimately driving higher customer engagement, increased conversions, and stronger customer loyalty.

The benefits of ecommerce personalization

Ecommerce personalization has a direct impact on a brand’s bottom line. This is because personalization—and the segmentation behind it—is the key to creating more relevant marketing campaigns that reach the right audience.

“Creating personalized messages doesn’t have to be a huge lift or require a million different segments,” says Mindy Regnell, head of marketing intelligence at Klaviyo.

“If you run a campaign for a big marketing moment, you can break your list into a few segments and change the copy slightly to better reach someone who’s never bought a product before vs. someone who has. The difference can be as simple as ‘try it yourself’ vs. ‘buy it again.’”

Klaviyo’s 2025 benchmark report found that campaign order rates are more than 5x higher for the top 10% of campaigns across both email and SMS. The repeat purchase rate (RPR) is even higher—7x the average.

These top performing campaigns stand out for a few reasons: they’re highly personalized, more relevant to their audience, and stand out more prominently in inboxes—all factors that lead to improved clicks and conversion rates. In other words, the more targeted your email and SMS campaigns, the higher the potential impact on revenue.

Nonetheless, Jay Narula, head of sales in North America at Nosto, believes both paid ads and paid social will continue to occupy solid places in the business ecosystem for driving traffic. It’s just that these channel investments need to be paired with personalization efforts to properly pay off.

“Marketers spend an average of $92 to get a paid traffic visitor to a brand’s website, but only $1 to convert them once they’re there,” Narula points out. “The second we shift some of that investment, it pays off 10- and 20-fold.”

“Marketers spend an average of $92 to get a paid traffic visitor to a brand’s website, but only $1 to convert them once they’re there. The second we shift some of that investment, it pays off 10- and 20-fold.“

While personalization used to be “something nice to have,” he says, “now it’s vital. It used to be a vitamin. Now it’s a painkiller.”

“Nurturing and managing the customer relationships you’re building through website personalization means converting them vs. not,” Narula adds. “Often 10x, 30x, 80x for brands that really take the time to address it.”

To see the benefits of personalization—and eventually wean your brand off third-party data—you need to collect high-quality, permission-based data that can tell you more about your customer base than paid channels can. Then you need to use that data to create personalized experiences across all your customer touchpoints.

Personalized omnichannel experiences are still a differentiator, too. According to Klaviyo’s B2C CRM readiness quiz, only 12% of brands are reporting that they’re creating personalized experiences across every touchpoint. This means there are still far too many impersonal experiences out there that aren’t engaging customers in the ways they’ve come to expect.

Data as personalization fuel: building your unified customer profile

A unified customer profile is a collection of defining characteristics on your customers and subscribers. You’ll be able to create this profile with two types of data:

• Zero-party data: information someone proactively gives to you, like their email address, phone number, or birthday
• First-party data: information you compile from observing your owned channels, like engagement with email marketing campaigns, product page browsing behavior, and cart abandonment

Mitch McKay, director of partnerships at BigCommerce, prefers this type of data to third-party data because of the consent involved in the process. “I’m willingly giving that to a brand,” he says. “That makes the relationship more enthusiastic, with the potential to be longer-lasting.”

Under this umbrella, the data you collect falls into the following categories:

• Demographic: gender, location, age, income, etc.
• Psychographic: the “why” behind individual customer preferences, such as their likes, dislikes, and values
• Behavioral: past purchases, website browsing history, marketing engagement
• Contextual: devices, channel interactions, seasonal fluctuations

Here are a few of the best ways to collect data for your ecommerce personalization efforts:

• Klaviyo Customer Hub: When customers log in, you capture both zero party and first-party data, as they interact in the Hub. This allows you to segment better and deliver more personalized experiences across channels. 
• Advanced web forms that help you capture more data and self-optimize.
• Quizzes, surveys and conversational SMS: The best ways to collect zero-party data.   
• Post-purchase automations, like review requests and custom review questions.
• Integrations with your ecommerce site (a gold mine of behavioral data).

Point-of-sale systems such as Square and Toast (to gather additional behavioral and contextual data).

Okay, but what can you actually do with all that data?

Narula says he sees the most success with real-time behavioral data, which is a direct line into why someone is shopping in your online store. For example, seafood brand Svenfish sends targeted messaging to online shoppers based on their proximity to a newly launched brick-and-mortar shop.

Contextual data is also relevant, Narula adds. These are all data points that can correlate with personalized website content :

• The weather the visitor is experiencing
• The country, state, city, or even neighborhood they’re in
• The time of day
• The device they’re on
• Where they’re coming from—like Facebook, Google, or TikTok

Finally, Narula advocates for session-based data. A trigger or on-the-spot quiz can help a brand personalize an online experience to, say, a woman who’s in her first trimester versus her third.

Once you’ve decided what kinds of data you’ll collect, you need to learn how to use it within your B2C CRM to launch personalized ecommerce site experiences and measure results.

And if you use Klaviyo Customer Hub, you may be able to personalize even faster, with less effort.

“Because so much customer activity feeds straight back into Klaviyo, we’re able to build sharper segments and flows,” says Dan Nikas, founder and director at Elite Brands, an ecommerce marketing agency based in New South Wales, Australia. “If someone adds a product to their wishlist, stalls a return, or updates a subscription, we’ve got data points to act on in real time. That’s gold,” he says.

“Using Customer Hub, we create highly segmented groups based on favorited items,” says Rachel Fagan, VP of marketing at Happy Wax, a natural wax melt brand based in North Carolina. “We trigger automated flows that gently remind customers about products they’ve shown interest in. If they haven’t purchased, we deploy personalized email blocks within broader campaigns that dynamically highlight those specific favorited products.”

Because so much customer activity feeds straight back into Klaviyo, we’re able to put sharper segments and flows.

What are the main types of ecommerce personalization?

There are several ways to personalize your brand experience for shoppers, but first it’s critical to understand why 1:1 personalization is a must-have and the ways you can execute it.

What’s the difference between 1:1 and 1:many personalization?

1:1 personalization tailors every single brand interaction with a customer—whether on-site or through messaging—to that customer’s unique preferences and behaviors.

Unlike 1:many personalization, which groups customers into much broader segments who receive the same content or offers, 1:1 personalization creates experiences that are truly personal and relevant to each individual. That deeper level of relevance is what ultimately builds trust and loyalty, creating lifetime customers for your brand.

Here are the most effective types of ecommerce personalization:

Types of ecommerce personalization	What they do
Website personalization	Appeal more directly to shoppers by featuring relevant products and offers—powered by behavioral data (gathered through shopping behaviors and tactics such as forms).  Klaviyo Customer Hub allows customers to log in to instantly experience a highly personalized shopping experience and self-service support, all based on their unique behaviors and needs. With every customer seeing what’s most relevant to them, they’re more likely to buy.
Email personalization	Cut through inbox noise and make your brand stand out with personalized product recommendations, dynamic content, or subject lines that hint at their last transaction with your brand. Use the data you have for individual shoppers to create targeted email campaigns that reach them at just the right time and place in the customer journey.  Email personalization pro tip: One of the most effective ways to personalize emails is through automations, which send triggered messages such as abandoned cart reminders and post-purchase follow-ups at just the right time.
SMS personalization	Use SMS personalization to send sales and offers all based on a customer’s interests and past behavior. Set up automations to send targeted messages such as cart reminders, shipping updates, and re-engagement offers that reflect real actions taken by subscribers and customers. Open the door for real, two-way conversations with SMS, allowing you to answer questions and provide lightning-quick customer service, which humanizes the shopping experience and strengthens customer relationships.
Mobile app marketing personalization	Create in-app messages to highlight relevant products or promotions based on each customer’s browsing history and past shopping behaviors. Send relevant offers, reminders, low-inventory alerts, and more via push. These small, personal touches create a helpful, more human experience and keeps your brand top of mind.

How personalization can improve the customer experience

Ecommerce personalization isn’t just about targeted product recommendations—it can (and should) show up throughout the entire customer journey. Here’s how personalization can help during each step:

1. Awareness: Use lookalike audiences—people who are similar to your customers—to target specific groups of people who are new to your brand and capture their attention with relevant ads, social content, and emails.
2. Consideration: Entice shoppers with personalized product recommendations, content, and offers that match their browsing behaviors.
3. Conversion: Personalize messages—like abandoned cart reminders and exclusive offers—to convince shoppers to click that buy button.
4. Post-purchase: Create thank-you messages, shipping updates, and related product offers, based on items they recently purchased.
5. Loyalty: Recognize and reward customers with perks, VIP offers, and highly personalized messages to increase repeat purchases and retention.

From the moment a shopper lands on your website to after they join a loyalty program, personalization can make the experience more relevant and engaging. Here are key some areas where personalization can enhance the customer experience:

Onsite personalization with Customer Hub can drive more ‘add to carts’

• Product recommendations based on past purchases and browsing history give shoppers a truly personalized experience.
• Easy access to products they’ve previously browsed means shoppers don’t have to start browsing from scratch. 
• You can create content blocks and control which ones are show to certain segments. That means you can tailor messaging for different audiences without redesigning your entire site. 
• Unique coupons on shoppers’ “For you” page, so they never have to track down a code they saw elsewhere. 

“Customer Hub’s consolidation of personalized recommendations is improving conversion rates for the brands we work with,” says Justin Ragsdale, strategy consultant at IM Digital, a leading digital advisory firm and Shopify Premium Partner.

This kind of service makes it easier for people to find what they’re looking for, which can decrease bounce rates and increase conversions.

Next steps: gather the data you need to execute these tactics

Klaviyo B2C CRM—the only CRM built for B2C—centralizes subscriber and customer data within a platform that also brings together your marketing, service, and analytics.

When you only need one piece of software to gather data and use that data, the personalization tactics we’ve highlighted here are a lot easier to execute.

Ecommerce personalization FAQs

Why is ecommerce personalization important?

Ecommerce personalization is important because it creates a better customer experience. Personalization can help people find and purchase the products they want quickly, reducing frustration and increasing satisfaction.

Personalization also improves website, email, SMS, and mobile app engagement, boosts conversion rates, and fosters customer loyalty by delivering tailored recommendations, dynamic content, and seamless interactions. When shoppers feel understood and valued, they’re more likely to return, ultimately driving higher sales and long-term business growth.

What is the difference between personalization and customization?

Personalization is when a brand tailors content, recommendations, or experiences to a customer based on data such as browsing behavior, purchase history, or demographics. It happens automatically, without requiring the customer to make adjustments.

Customization, on the other hand, is when the customer actively modifies their own experience. They may select product features, adjust settings, or choose preferences.

How can I measure the effectiveness of ecommerce personalization efforts?

You can measure the effectiveness of ecommerce personalization efforts by A/B testing them on your website and in the messages you send. Start by implementing something simple, like a first name populated in a form, and measuring click and conversion rates on that asset. When you have a solid amount of data, try implementing more personalization across your site and in your messages to increase conversions.

What technologies are used for ecommerce personalization?

Ecommerce personalization relies on a combination of advanced technologies to tailor shopping experiences based on customer data. Key technologies include:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning: These analyze customer behavior and predict preferences to deliver personalized recommendations.
• B2C CRMs: CRMs centralize customer data from multiple sources, allowing businesses to create unified customer profiles for targeted personalization. Platforms like Klaviyo combine their CRM with marketing automation to help brands deliver personalized emails, SMS, and other communications based on behavior and segmentation.
• Behavioral tracking tools: Website analytics and heatmaps track user interactions, helping brands optimize personalized experiences.
• Dynamic content engines: These adjust website elements in real time, such as personalized banners, product recommendations, and email content.
• Recommendation engines: AI-driven algorithms suggest products based on past purchases, browsing history, or similar customer behavior.
• Chatbots and virtual assistants: AI-powered chatbots provide personalized shopping assistance and customer support.

By integrating these technologies, ecommerce brands can create omnichannel, data-driven personalization strategies that enhance customer engagement and drive conversions.

What are the challenges of implementing ecommerce personalization?

Ecommerce personalization comes with some challenges if you don’t have the data infrastructure to collect and analyze customer behavior. As an added layer, you’ll also need the right marketing integrations to translate that data into a personalized experience on your website and in the messages you send.

What is Klaviyo Customer Hub?

Klaviyo Customer Hub is a one-stop shop for your customers to:

• Manage their account
• Track orders
• View favorites
• Get support
• See personalized recommendations

These features are ready-made and integrate with your omnichannel marketing stack easily.