Ecommerce product recommendations have now become the holy grail for modern-day e-marketers. It needs to act as the foundation of all your marketing activities, especially in industries like ecommerce, where it acts as the driver of marketing success.
Each customer has a set of unique wants, tastes, attitudes, and preferences. You must recognize each customer’s unique attributes and activities and serve up relevant experiences accordingly.
When customers see products that are tailor-made to suit their requirements, it not only increases the chances of purchase but also compels them to come back to your website for more.
77% of customers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized customer experience. This indicates that customers are keen on associating with brands that can understand their behavior and offer them a personalized experience at different stages of the customer lifecycle. Most customers are also open to sharing their data if your brand provides them a seamless end-to-end purchase experience.
As a customer, wouldn’t you love to see an e-commerce platform provide you with personalized content or product recommendations when you open their website?
The key to customer delight is through delivering a 1:1 omnichannel personalization experience to them.
The Paradigm Shift in Fashion E-Commerce
Before the global COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on businesses worldwide, the online fashion and apparel industry was thriving, benefiting from ecommerce product personalization as customers increasingly turned to online shopping.
With everything available readily on the website, it became convenient for customers to make their purchases online through a few clicks on their devices. However, like most industries, these fashion brands also had to undergo huge losses due to the pandemic.
As the economic situation started to pick up again, customers getting back to buying apparel improved.
This situation is playing right into online fashion brands’ hands as customers resume or start shopping online again.
- What can brands do to stay ahead of their competitors and ensure their customers are satisfied with their product offerings and overall customer experience?
- What would customers shopping online expect from the brands?
The answer to both these questions is Omnichannel Personalization.
Customer Data: The Foundation for Omnichannel Personalization
Omnichannel Personalization aids product discovery.
Each of your customers has to be treated individually. As a marketer, you need a thorough understanding of the customer’s persona by studying their behavioral patterns, shopping intents, purchase habits, and all other relevant actions and inactions to create a 360o unified customer view.
You need to gather and track the right customer-level data points to build a solid foundation. Each time a user logs onto your website, the following data-points will help you build a unified customer view:
- Demographic data: Customer name, age, gender
- Geolocation data: Place from where the website is accessed, timezone, IP address, etc
- Device-level data: Device type and model, browser type, OS version, etc
- Behavioral data includes products searched for, viewed, added to cart, or purchased or abandoned. Preferred payment method, response to previous multi-channel marketing campaigns, etc
At Netcore, we enable you to do all that and more. Our AI engine – Raman – also takes into account additional data points, such as clickstream data and customer eyeball data. This means that along with gaining visibility on what customers click and explore, Raman can factor in what customers ‘see-and-don’t click’ or ‘don’t-see-and-don’t click.’
The more the customer-level data-points being leveraged, the higher the degree of personalization.
All these diverse data points become the foundation for generating the most relevant and contextual ecommerce product recommendations – deployed through personalized widgets – across different pages of your website. This level of personalization improves product discovery and the probability of customers clicking on products that are most relevant to them.
Key Strategies for Effective Ecommerce Product Recommendations & Personalization
Let’s take a look at some solid personalization use cases that fashion e-commerce platforms can leverage:
1. Target New First-Time Website Visitors with Relevant Discounts or Promo Codes
Imagine a new customer coming to your website for the first time. This means that you have little to no behavioral data for any ecommerce product recommendations. You can leverage other data points such as geolocation, browser type, version, device, etc.
Based on such data points, you can offer such first-time visitors or unregistered customers discounts on certain products. There are few attractive pulls for a new visitor than getting a discount from the first transaction itself.
If the deal is enticing, the new visitor will likely register and be nudged into making his/her first purchase. This also gives you the chance to gather more data on such a customer – data that can be harnessed to personalize future experiences and interactions with your brand.
You can also choose to offer first-time visitors an enticing promo code to encourage first-time purchases on the website. By targeting only new website visitors and not repeat customers with such discounts and offers, you start personalizing their e-commerce experience from the start.
2. Show Relevant Product Recommendations on the Home Page
“Never judge a book by its cover.” This is a quote that we hear quite often. However, this is not the case for ecommerce product recommendations, as customers form an opinion of your website based purely on your home page.
Showcasing relevant product recommendations on the home page can increase CTRs by almost 90-120%.
An engaging home page will go a long way toward building a strong brand image in your customers’ minds.
3. Highlight the Most Contextual Latest Products
New products have a higher chance of selling faster. With the power of AI, Machine Learning algorithms can factor in the most relevant new products shown under personalized widgets to customers on your home page.
4. Deliver Product Recommendations through Web Push Notifications
When a customer lands on and begins browsing your website for the first time, you can encourage them to opt-in to receive the most relevant offers, discounts, and product recommendations via web push notifications.
On receiving opt-in, web push notifications offer you another important channel to provide personalized product recommendations.
5. Personalize the Navigational Flow of your Website
You can also leverage customer-related data points such as age, gender, browsing history, etc., to personalize the navigational flow by providing relevant product recommendations based on your customers’ tastes and preferences.
6. Personalize the Product Search Experience
It is important for customers to be provided with relevant product suggestions and for those products to be personalized based on the customer’s interests. If customers are not getting what they’re looking for, there’s a high probability that they might bounce off. Therefore, brands must direct their customers to what they want faster.
Parting Thoughts
These are some of the most effective personalization use cases you can deploy for your fashion and apparel e-commerce platform.
To truly scale your marketing efforts, consider leveraging a robust ecommerce marketing platform. Book a demo today to discover how it can transform your business.
1:1 personalization offers you lots of scopes to experiment. It has to be a well-thought-out strategy that extends across every digital touchpoint that your customer encounters.
You can deploy personalized widgets on different web pages and marketing channels and leverage omnichannel personalization power.
In the meantime, why not see the magic of personalization for yourself?
To understand how we can help your brand develop and deploy a game-changing personalization strategy powered by AI, get in touch with us today!
