We’re fairly accustomed to having a welcome offer – typically 10% off – dangled in front of us when we arrive on an e-commerce website for the first time. 

And if you’ve ever edited a standard abandoned cart workflow, they typically end in a discount offer, too (provided the customer hasn’t purchased during the duration of the workflow).

A 10% discount will be just what some customers need to get them off the fence and convince them to place that first order. 

But it won’t work for everyone – and you may also end up giving away discounts to people who didn’t need incentivising in the first place. If everyone placed an order with a 10% discount, you’d need to make around 30% more orders to achieve the same profit – so this is not something to overlook casually. 

Price isn’t the only barrier to purchase

Instead of offering a blanket welcome offer to all visitors, start by dividing your customers and prospective customers into three different personas based on their behaviour and habits: price-sensitive customers, shipping-sensitive customers, and indecisive or casual browsers. 

Personas	Their characteristics	How to tailor your messaging
Price-sensitive	They gravitate towards sale products, seek out offer codes, or prefer using Buy Now Pay Later options.	Offer exclusive or limited discounts, emphasise Buy Now Pay Later payment options, and free or easy returns.
Shipping-sensitive	They seek out information on the shipping costs, or they may get through the first phase of the checkout before abandoning their cart when the shipping cost is shown.	Offer complementary or cheaper shipping, or lower the minimum shipping threshold for these customers.
Casual or indecisive	They leave and return to your website frequently, add and remove different items from their cart, and spend a fairly long time browsing overall.	Address common concerns clearly (such as sizing and your returns policy).

From there, you can tailor your messaging to their specific pain points – from the checkout page, right through their abandoned cart sequence.

The challenge of building segments that cover everyone

But most brands already understand that segmentation is important; what they lack is the data to create them. Understanding how people interact with your site isn’t always easy, and then comes the challenge of setting criteria for each one, and capturing a large enough cross section of your audience with each segment. 

A specific criteria for a ‘shipping-sensitive’ shoppers may capture 30% of customers on one e-commerce website, and 3% on another. And the boundaries should be fluid, changing with customer behaviour, with people also able to shift from one segment to another as their relationship with your brand alters.  

FERO sorts all of your customers, or prospective customers, into one of the three personas we covered above. We draw on 430 unique data points for each person to take a call on which persona they match best, so every one of them receives the communication that resonates with them, and makes them more likely to complete their purchase. This information plugs directly into Klaviyo, so you can easily build out a different abandoned cart sequence for each one, and track how they perform. 

We’ll also show you how to tailor your checkout page to address the pain points of each segment before they’ve even had a chance to abandon. Try it free for 30 days.