Why no single popup can solve all your problems?

Based on this data, you can create segments (often called homogenous groups) and craft personalized messages for each group. 

Here are a few practical ideas for personalizing your messages based on these data points:

• IP, Location: If a shopper’s IP address is from Germany, you can show them a popup informing them that you ship to Germany.
• Campaign parameters: If a visitor arrived on your site by clicking a Facebook campaign targeted at 25 to 35-year-olds, then you can assume they are in that age range. You can make similar inferences based on all your campaign parameters.
• Keywords: If a visitor googled a “how-to” question and landed on your store, you can assume they’re already problem aware.
• Browsing history: If a visitor reads your blog posts about racing bikes, then you should probably show them an ad for a racing bike.
• Cursor movement, scrolling: If a visitor has been on a page for a full minute and scrolled through 80 percent of the content, you can assume they were interested in the content and actually read it.
• Form data: If a visitor fills out a “How to select a bike” quiz and selects “from a city” and “woman,” you can send them content related to these characteristics.
• Interests: If a visitor has bought iPhone accessories several times before, they presumably have an iPhone and therefore you shouldn’t recommend Android accessories to them.
• Price sensibility: If a visitor has only ever bought products during your sales and special promotions, they are probably very price sensitive, which means you should draw their attention to new promotions. The same goes for visitors arriving from shopping engines like Google Shopping and Shopzilla.

These are just a few examples. 

Depending on your industry, your store, and even the marketing platforms you use, different data points will be more or less useful to you than they would be for another store. The limit is usually your creativity and the amount of time you’re willing to invest in personalization.

How much time should one invest in personalization?

There’s not really a single, fixed answer. The more traffic you have, the bigger impact personalization (even on a smaller scale) will have.

Whatever your current situation, it’s important to get your priorities right. Many companies put a lot of effort into personalizing emails so a few thousand email subscribers will get better, more personalized emails.

However, those same companies often shy away from investing the same resources into creating more personalized on-site messages. Crazy, since doing so would improve the experience of the same number of people—every day!