Different Approaches to Product Recommendations

Imagine walking into a store, being greeted by name and having the staff guide you around, showing you only items that you actually like and have a genuine interest in buying. What if they knew your favorite colors, styles and tastes? What if they could streamline your shopping experience without any of the hassle of digging through the stuff that doesn’t interest you?

You can stop imagining. That vision is already here.

Ecommerce personalization makes all of this possible, by pairing artificial intelligence with data analytics to gather data on the visitors to online stores. Online stores can enlist the help of platforms like Segmentify to create a unique shopping experience, offering people the right products at the right time to turn visitors into customers.

While some people may not like the appearance of ads while they are browsing, studies show that 81% of customers want brands to get to know them better. Brands have listened, and the results speak for themselves. When Amazon, the most famous online retailer on the planet, attributes 35% of their revenue to product recommendations, it’s hard to deny the impact.

Why are they so important for ecommerce success?  

Amazon is a giant in ecommerce. But when it comes to garnering success from personalized product recommendations, they are no anomaly. As ecommerce personalization finds its way into the mainstream, more marketers are reaping the rewards.

Most people won’t click on their first visit to your site, but 7% will. That might not sound like a lot, but research shows that 7% goes on to drive an incredible 26% of your revenue. The main reason for this is because people who click on product recommendations are closer to the end of the buying funnel. Once they view your tailored products, they get closer to a purchase. Typically, this leads to more impulsive purchases, which drives the average order value up.

Over 78% of customers will only engage offers if they are personalized to them. People don’t want to waste their time anymore. If you can’t speak directly to your customers, you risk fading into obscurity amid the competitors who are getting personal.

Six Effective Techniques for Product Recommendations

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to ecommerce personalization. By starting off slow, you can collect data and optimize your strategy as you go along, discovering what works best for your brand and your customers. Here are some of the best ways to boost your online sales with product recommendations:

Complete the Look

Upselling is not a revolutionary sales technique. However, fashion sites such as ASOS are using it to great effect by offering shoppers the chance to ‘complete the look’. This simple strategy drives average order value, which is great for the bottom line.

Show Best-Sellers

Ecommerce sites can leverage the brand loyalty that many customers feel by showing product recommendations of the best-selling products in the store, especially of the same brand that a visitor is currently considering. This widely used tactic can convert many undecided visitors.

Others Also Viewed

Many people have a desire to fit in. Ecommerce stores who realize this can tailor their product recommendations based on a correlation between similar shoppers. This is one of the amazing abilities that AI offers to ecommerce marketers. This very tactic has been known to increase online sales by more than 25%.

Questionnaire

As research by OptIn Monster indicates 48% of people spend more when their ecommerce experience is personalized, it makes sense for more companies to try and personalize things from the word go.  Companies are putting surveys and questionnaires to excellent use, getting more information on their customers, which makes it easier to cater to them.

Create Urgency

The scarcity principle denotes that people will consider items that hard to attain as being more valuable. In modern times, marketers have learned how to play on people’s fear of missing out. Nobody likes being left behind, which means FOMO is a powerful technique to use in ecommerce. So much so, in fact, that a conversion optimization company called Use Fomo exists. When they teamed up with Pura Vida Bracelets, they helped the artists skyrocket their revenue by over $30,000 in a month.

Frequently Bought Together

Another technique that leans on people’s innate desire to fit in with the crowd is to show items that are frequently bought together. Similar to the ‘complete the look’ strategy, this provides shoppers with options that are well suited to the items already in their cart. Encourage impulsive buys at the checkout is a clever way to boost your bottom line.

Out-of-Stock Does Not Mean Out of Luck

A mistake many ecommerce websites make is thinking that when items are out of stock, their sales will have to fall. 65% of customers who encounter such problems end up leaving the site to shop from a rival. The reason is because ecommerce sites don’t set up their sites to deal with this inevitable issue, using poor techniques like automatic redirects to 404 pages or the home page with little explanation. The reality is, sold-out products do not have to mean lost customers. They actually provide more opportunities for personalized product recommendations.

Shopify advises ecommerce businesses to take the chance to keep customers informed on that product and when it will be back, before guiding them to products they might like. Through landing pages or email sign-ups, you may be able to turn a sold-out product into a qualified lead or future sale.

Keep the Human Connection

While machine learning and AI are the backbone on which marketing automation and ecommerce personalization is based on, businesses must make sure not to forget who they are selling to.
Allowing AI to take over micro-managing and tactical changes is smart, allowing you and your workforce more time to focus on the strategy for creating a personalized experience. By keeping your customer in mind at all touchpoints of the buying journey, you can maximize online sales and enhance their shopping experience, so they come back time and time again.