How You Can Increase Sales With Smart Product Recommendations
Find out how personalized, smart product recommendations can help your business increase conversions, and grow your customer retainment rate at a breakneck speed.
Pairing a delicious meal with the right wine or a stunning outfit with shimmering eyeshadow and a pair of sunglasses is an authentic part of our brick-and-mortar shopping experience. Most of us end up with more items than we'd initially planned when in line for the shopping cart, and automated product recommendation seeks to replicate this experience online.
Luckily for you, there are ways for smart marketing campaigns to offer assistance in unison with every user's unique behavior.
In this article, we will pick apart an on-site digital marketing campaign that successfully led over 10% of clients to add more items to their shopping carts.
What Is Product Recommendation?
In simple terms, it is a marketing strategy you can find in any store, where the salesperson tries to make more sales by offering complementing items to shoppers. The goal here is usually to enrich the shopping experience.
A person who has shown a clear interest in buying an eyeshadow is also likely to want a brush, and/or an eyeshadow primer, that offers an excellent base for long wear. Even a makeup setter could come into consideration, depending on the individual.
The same goes for any eCommerce website: the only difference is that smart digital marketing campaigns replace human interaction. Relevant customer data such as browsing behavior, traits, and the context of the brand industry, all work towards building a unique, personalized marketing campaign.
A user that's browsing a webpage and adds an item to their shopping cart has shown more interest in converting than one that does not. This is where businesses with a diverse and large product portfolio can interrupt the customer journey, and try to pitch additional sales.
You May Also Like
A website visitor already has an item from your website in their shopping cart. Your website has already calculated their subtotal, with shipping and taxes calculated at checkout. Is this the time to get enthusiastic about their future purchases? As exemplified by the Women’s Health Network, it sure is, and it works.
Check out the video below to find out what this looks like in practice:
Video 1 – Product recommendation, You May Also Like
In the example above, you can see a video of a typical user experience on the WHN website. A person with one item in their shopping cart is at the checkout point, in their customer journey. To the left, they can see a marketing campaign offering a larger number of similar products.
The You May Also Like heading in the marketing campaign matches the soft green color present in the brand logo, as well as in other CTAs on the website. Purple, green, and turquoise brand colors, as well as a simple, white background, make the campaign an organic addition to the website. An orange CTA says simply "Add To Cart," pulling clickable product details from other website pages.
The Marketing Benefits of Dynamic Content
The dynamic content (aka adaptive content) ensures that this marketing campaign only appears to particular users. Only showing the campaign to website visitors who have already added an item to their shopping cart is a type of targeting. The ad changes based on the user's behavior, preferences, and interests.
This is how automated, web-based marketing tries to replace human interactions. In a brick-and-mortar store, a salesperson has the advantage of communicating in a wide variety of ways, including tone of voice, body language, and even friendly chit-chat. In this environment, product recommendations can feel much more natural, soft, and even warmer. To replace all these social cues, the smart marketing campaign in the example above uses exquisite design and copywriting know-how, as well as technological savviness.
All this makes the marketing campaign in the example above relevant, personalized, and convenient, even more than an average brick-and-mortar shopping experience.