Why personalize your customer journey?

The average visitor spends 54 seconds on a website and browses through 4.9 pages.

Every second that they spend on your website, and every piece of content that they read on it are precious.

The problem is that if your website is "static" (if it isn't personalized to different visitor Personas), then it is bound to display irrelevant content to some of your visitors, in other words, waste some of those very precious seconds.

Here are a couple of examples of such situations:

• Displaying a "10% off your first order" home page banner to a visitor who already purchased multiple times.
• Displaying a footer sign-up form inviting to sign-up to email marketing to a visitor who already subscribed years ago.
• Displaying a pop-up showcasing "free shipping in the US and Canada" to a visitor who had 100% of its past orders shipped to the U.K.

Put simply, if you were to run a brick-and-mortar clothing shop and that one of your retail associate was to greet Anna, one of your top-tier RFM customers, as if she was a complete unknown, and show her the Mens section as a first touchpoint, you wouldn't keep this retail associate for a very long time.

Merchants should feel the same about the website experience that they provide to their visitors. Irrelevant banners and content sections prevent your visitors from finding what really matters to them. It wastes away some of 54 seconds/4.9 pages, and in turn lowers your conversion rate.

Shopify has flagged Personalization of storefronts as being a major part of the future of eCommerce, going as far as saying that over the next 5 years, successful brands will be the ones setting themselves apart from the competition with personalized website experiences tailored to each of their visitors' journey.

With this shift, in 5 years from now, as a visitor, it will seem that visiting a website that doesn't show you content that is relevant to you will be as old-school as visiting a website from the 1990s.