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Ecommerce success hinges on various factors, including product quality, customer service, and website design, but an increasingly significant element is personalized product recommendations. Market research and personal shopping experiences underscore the increasing significance of personalization in ecommerce. How often have you reflected on the products you’ve purchased online, realizing that a significant portion of them stemmed from recommendations? Chances are, it’s around 50% or more.
If you’re a seasoned ecommerce marketer, you’re likely pondering, “How can I stay ahead in this game? How can I lead the pack in ecommerce recommendations?” This article is crafted with you in mind. It outlines key developments in ecommerce personalization, enabling recommendation engines to provide customers with captivating, conversion-boosting experiences on your online store.
1. Push Notification Product Recommendations:
Personalized push notifications stand at the forefront, particularly for SMB online stores. While industry giants like Amazon and Wish have fine-tuned their push notification strategies over the years, smaller businesses may feel they’re lagging behind. However, there’s no need for discouragement. SaaS personalization platforms are increasingly offering this service to SMBs at an accessible price range.
Think of personalized push notifications as the “tweet” equivalent of remarketing emails—concise but impactful. Yet, there’s a caveat: you must be strategic to avoid overwhelming users. Personalization is your ally here. By tailoring notifications, you can send fewer, more relevant messages, sparing users the annoyance of irrelevant alerts. Imagine a clothing site where a visitor buys a Northface jacket. With push notification personalization, you can send a message around the jacket’s estimated arrival date, showcasing matching boots with a compelling note like, “These boots would pair perfectly with your new Northface jacket—just like 41% of our customers did.”
2. Next Page Navigation Recommendations:
This innovative approach presents recommendations as popup navigation tabs on product pages. On the left, you find the last product viewed, and on the right, the next one. Hovering over these tabs reveals more product details. This feature offers a unique, guided user experience while allowing the freedom to explore other parts of the page. Simplicity often surprises, as many customers appreciate scrolling through preset recommended products, finding what they like, or conveniently backtracking using the “Previous Product” button on the left.
3. Social Proof and Urgency Ecommerce Recommendation Add-ons:
Leveraging social proof in recommendations can significantly influence purchasing decisions. Incorporate visual elements like a text field at the bottom of each product or a ribbon on product images, indicating facts like, “150 customers in your city bought this item” or “Fellow Shoppers’ Choice.” These cues harness marketing psychology to instill confidence in shoppers when they observe others making similar choices.
These features can also be used to show other information about products beyond social proof, such as “Only 9 items left in stock!” or “New Item!” These similarly harness marketing psychology to create a sense of urgency, that may be just the edge you need to push the customer to follow through with their purchase, rather than wait for a later time (which may never come).
4. Pioneer New Product Recommendation Strategies by Unleashing Your Creativity:
Unleash your creativity by strategically employing feature-rich personalization tools. With the ability to create diverse website content, including recommendation widgets, banners, popups, forms, sliders, and countdowns, your personalization possibilities are boundless. A robust targeting and recommendation engine empowers you to innovate and tailor customer experiences limitlessly.
Some examples include pop-out recommendations via a tab on the side of the page, providing forms to allow users to tell you themselves what they are interested in seeing in their recommendations, or a button that allows customers to “give me recommendations based on this item,” which then opens a new recommendation based on the clicked item.
With sufficiently robust product recommendations and ecommerce personalization solutions, your imagination really is the limit.
Conclusions
In the realm of ecommerce recommendations, these developments pave the way for more engaging, conversion-boosting, and checkout-maximizing experiences on your online store. However, these suggestions merely indicate the leading edge for many SMB online retailers, with much more profound possibilities existing beyond that horizon with the right tools at your fingertips. Regardless of how experimental you want to be, it’s guaranteed that embracing the power of full-scope ecommerce personalization, which is increasingly available to businesses of all sizes, is one of the primary ways to stay ahead of the curve in 2023 and beyond.
