Driving lots of traffic to your ecommerce website? Great. But the work doesn’t stop there. A good ecommerce site doesn’t just attract visitors; it converts them into paying customers.

In today’s crowded digital landscape, competition is fierce and keeping a new visitor’s attention is vital to maximise ROI from your acquisition marketing.

So, how can you reduce bounce rate and friction in order to convert those new visitors?

Read on for five ecommerce personalisation tactics to hone your customer journey for maximum conversions and download our Ultimate Ecommerce CRO Lookbook to find out how 21 ecommerce brands personalise the customer journey to boost conversions.

1.   Dynamic banner

The hero banner is often the first thing that visitors see when they arrive at your online store. Think of it as the headline for your website: the bit that grabs customers’ attention and tells them very quickly if it’s worth staying. Transforming your banner into a piece of dynamic content allows you to show new visitors the image that’s most likely to spark their interest, build their confidence and keep them on your website.

When it comes to new visitors, contextual data is everything. Personalise your hero banner with product recommendations that fit the current weather in the visitor’s location or provide delivery details tailored to the visitor’s country and local currency.

2.   Product recommendations

Offering product recommendations is a tactic as old as retail itself, and for good reason – product recommendations work. In fact, product recommendations can generate sales uplifts of up to 11%.

Nudge new visitors towards your product pages by showing them products that are likely to spark their interest. Display your trending products and best-sellers. Without the ability to try on, touch and see products in the flesh, customers are more likely to be swayed by other shoppers’ opinions. You could also recommend new arrivals, playing to our built-in expectation that something new must be better than what came before.

As your visitors browse, personalise your recommendations based on their real-time activity. For example, clothing brands can change their homepage recommendations depending on whether the visitor has been browsing male clothing or female clothing.

3.   Data capture

In order to understand your visitors and provide them with a tailored customer journey, you’ll need to capture their data as soon as possible. One way to do this is with well-timed, behaviour-based popovers.

Once your visitors have spent some time browsing your site, consider displaying a popover with a discount in exchange for email details. Try personalising the offer and messaging, for example highlighting a student discount for your student visitors.

4.   Social proof

Your visitor has made it onto a product page. Nice! Now you need to encourage them to add that product to their shopping cart. Use social proof to make their purchase decision quick and easy and keep them from bouncing before adding the item to their cart.

Add user generated content (UGC) to your product pages to help customers imagine how the products will fit into their life by showing inspiring images of real people using them.

Research states that one in two consumers will extensively research and compare options before making a purchase and over half of consumers look for star ratings when making a purchase. So make sure you ease purchase anxiety by showcasing customer satisfaction with real-time star ratings and reviews, giving visitors the confidence to complete their order.

Ramp up the FOMO and create urgency with popularity messaging by showing how many other shoppers are looking at or carting that particular product right now.

5.   Countdown timer

Once your visitor has added a product to their cart, it’s time to speed up the purchase process. A countdown timer alerting shoppers to an express or next-day delivery deadline can work well here, providing your soon-to-be customer with useful information and avoiding cart abandonment.

Learn more about these ecommerce personalisation tactics and find out how 21 ecommerce brands personalise their customer journeys to boost conversions in our Ultimate Ecommerce CRO Lookbook (with real-life examples and stats to inspire you). Download here.