Product recommendations: the complete guide to boosting your e-commerce site

Product recommendations are a powerful marketing tool for increasing your company’s online conversion rate. It’s simple: Amazon implemented it in 1998, and today it generates more than 35% of its revenue (source). Many brands are doing it today, in every sector, and I can only recommend (quite literally) that you join the trend. This is one of the tips for increasing your online store’s conversion rate. In this article you will find: 

• The important concepts to know 
• The benefits of using product recommendations 
• A practical checklist to support you with implementation 
• 3 concrete examples of online stores that use recommendations

Definitions  

Product recommendation refers to recommending other items to a visitor on an e-commerce website. It is generally an automated process powered by an algorithm that can draw on different sources. The goal of all this is simple: grow your business on the web.

Here are the three recommendation approaches you should know:  : 

• content-based recommendations
• collaborative filtering 
• hybrid approaches 

In the first case, the idea is to offer visitors items similar to what they liked most. This can come from frequently visited pages or ratings the user has given. 

When it comes to collaborative recommendation, the suggestions are based on the preferences of similar users. For example, if someone visited the same page as you and bought another product, that is the one that will be suggested to you. This amounts to offers such as “Best-selling products.” You can also combine these two cases to create a more accurate recommendation for your site. 

Ultimately: 

3 good reasons to automate product suggestions

1. Increase your conversion rate

A customer brings in more than a prospect. In fact, a customer has a 70% chance of buying when they are on your online store, whereas a simple visitor is only at around 20%. When you know this, you need to understand the difference between the two. Trust, first and foremost, but also the habit of coming to familiar territory to make their purchases. With product recommendations, you put the product your prospects are looking for in front of them, making their journey and search easier. You therefore maximize your business’s conversion rate.

Info:  A visitor who clicks on your product recommendation is 5.5 times more likely to convert! (source: barilliance) 

    2.Increase your average order value 

These recommendations aim to offer attractive items at key points in the buying journey. More specifically, the goal is to offer your contacts items that match their expectations. Whether in an email, a pop-in, at the bottom of a product page, or in other online content, you need to target and arrange the recommendation so that this visitor clicks and buys. Depending on the campaigns, you can use several levers for your business: 

• upselling 
•  cross-selling
• add-on selling

These upselling and cross-selling techniques should be analyzed to understand the results of your e-commerce site. They help increase your average order value. In one case, you lead your prospect to buy a product from the range above; in the other, you encourage them to add other products to their cart that could be useful. 

3) Give visibility to your catalog 

As I explained above, trust and habits are essential for building customer loyalty to your company. It may therefore be worthwhile in your marketing strategy to familiarize them with your entire product catalog. Indeed, if you sell sports accessories as well as food designed for athletes, you can highlight them thanks to product recommendations. Generally speaking, the more your customers know about all your products, the more they will automatically come to shop online on your e-commerce site. 

To sum up, the benefits of this e-commerce practice are: 

• An increase in the conversion rate, 
• an increase in the average order value
• improved customer loyalty 
• increased traffic to your website 

Also read: X tips for your e-commerce site

How do you create product recommendations? 

When you start using a recommendation engine, you need to think about the marketing strategy. 

As we will see next, you can recommend different products through different channels. First, let’s look at which products to suggest, and each time the information to display on your product. The prerequisite for implementing product or service suggestions is to create top-notch product pages and an online storefront. 

1. Personalized recommendations 

Your prospects like to feel privileged and to have a quality relationship with your brand. Personalization is an excellent way to build this. With “recommended for you” sections, the click-through rate is 200% higher than for a non-personalized recommendation. To do this, you can rely on the pages recently visited by your visitor to offer them other equivalent products. It is also possible to suggest items from the same category as a recent purchase. For example, someone who recently bought a bike on your online store might be interested in a helmet or specialized shoes.  

To display: 

• A personalized title: “Roger, you might also like:” 

• The product photo: Roger, who is wondering about the best barbecue for his garden, is very likely to click when he sees a barbecue recommended for him

• A short description, to convince the future customer that you have targeted their search and that you can help them 

      2.Statistical recommendations 

Some of your products perform better than others depending on the period. On the other hand, 80% of consumers say they look at reviews before buying online. Highlighting the best-selling and most-viewed products can prove to be a very effective strategy.

This is easier to implement: you do not need to know more about your visitor. 

 To display: 

• The product photo 

• A description 

• The average buyer rating, or an engaging statistic such as: “bought X in the last hour” 

You can also highlight product combinations with categories such as “They also liked” or “frequently bought together.” It is a good compromise between best sellers, which do not target your future customer’s search, and a completely personalized recommendation. 

 To display: 

• The product photo 

• The price, especially for add-on selling.* 

Here, prefer low-priced products or services

Example: Recommendations that work

You can recommend your products everywhere on your websites: by email, on your site, on landing pages, in pop-ins, on your home page, on a product page that describes the service, in the cart, on a 404 page, etc. 

However, you should not display just any product offer in just any place. Here is a summary table to know which product or service to recommend through which channel

You now know how to recommend services or products on your e-commerce site! 

By following all these marketing tips, there is no doubt that you will increase your ROI very quickly. To study a concrete product recommendation case, click below. 

Tools : which solution for your recommendations? 

Webmecanik Automation is a marketing automation tool. Based in France, the solution supports you in your digital marketing project by helping you collect, analyze, and manage your data, segment it to nurture your leads and increase your conversion rates. In this tool, a recommendation feature dedicated to e-commerce sites allows you to implement the advice listed in this article. By setting up product categories and templates, you can then display them automatically in emails or in different places on your websites.