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When it comes to e-commerce, personalization counts. A personalized shopping experience leads to happier customers – and ultimately, better conversion rates and more ROI.

Personalization is more than welcoming your returning customers to your site (“Hi, Marjorie!”) or remembering their purchase history. A great personalization experience bonds your customers to your store and keeps them coming back.

Here are a few of our favorite Magento extensions, designed to create an exceptional personalization experience for your customers (and some exceptional cash for you).

#1: The Personal Bar

Magento’s “Personal Bar” extension is available for free for smaller e-commerce stores (annual sales less than $500,000). The Personal Bar provides a live chat feature for your customers, and allows them to connect with you via social media. In addition, you can customize your Personal Bar with product launch announcements, discount promos and more.

#2: Product Personalization

This extension lets customers choose a personalized delivery time and date for their merchandise, as well as add any special instructions they might have. (Convenience for them, brownie points for you.)

#3: Automatic Cross-Selling

Amazon cross-sells its products, and now you can, too. The Magento Automatic Cross-Selling extension can automatically calculate how many products to display, based on customers’ purchases in the past. Is that cool, or what?

#4: Related Products Manager

This tool is really more for you than for your customers – it gives you a comprehensive look at their preferences and habits so you can create an increasingly personalized shopping experience for them in the future. Use this extension to learn more about customer behavioral trends, monitoring cross-sells, up-sells and pageview data. The simplest version of this extension (10,000 pageviews per month) is free, and the “Basic” version (50,000 pageviews) is only $30 per month.

#5: Abandoned Carts Alerts Pro

This extension isn’t free (it’s available for $89), but it’s really worth it. Automatically alert your customers via email if they started shopping and didn’t finish – and increase your overall sales by approximately 10%. (Because sometimes, they really did just forget, and they appreciate the reminder.)

#6: Zopim LiveChat

This is a free live chat extension with excellent reviews. The more feedback you can get from your customers – and the more personalized help you can give them – the more sales you’ll end up making.

Magento is a great platform, and you can make it even greater with personalization extensions. In a way, personalized e-commerce is like a friendly sales clerk or cashier: your customers appreciate it when the smiling person at the counter remembers their name. And they’ll keep coming back for more.