The fashion and apparel industry is in continuous evolution, and brands not leveraging ecommerce product recommendations risk falling behind those that do. Modern-day marketers have also realized that they need to evolve and provide customers with exactly what they desire.
1:1 personalized experiences are what all your customers need and seek. Marketers need to ensure that customers are served relevant, personalized experiences that keep them engaged with your brand.
Importance of Personalization for Fashion & Apparel Ecommerce Brands
E-commerce brands rely on customers returning back to purchase more and more products. To ensure this can happen, customers will need to resonate with a particular brand to become repeat customers.
In a multi-channel era, capture customer attention by offering personalized shopping experiences with timely, relevant product recommendations.
Right from when a new customer enters your website for the first time, focus on gathering and processing all possible customer-level data points. You can leverage the data to provide your customers with the best possible experience.
How Can You Deliver Personalization?
Customers want to see the products that they are looking for at the earliest and with minimal effort. The solution to this is omnichannel personalization.
In the first part of this two-part blog series, we emphasized the role of ecommerce product recommendations in building a data-driven foundation for personalization. We also outlined how Netcore can help marketers personalize their customers’ journey by offering 1:1 discounts, showing relevant product recommendations across the website, and delivering a memorable shopping experience.
This post digs deeper to showcase more compelling use cases on how fashion and apparel eCommerce brands can maximize conversions through personalized ecommerce product recommendations.
1. Cross-sell complementary products through dynamic product bundles
Cross-selling is a commonly used marketing technique that encourages customers to buy more and increase their average order value per active session.
Our AI engine, Raman, analyzes historical and live customer behavior to come up with relevant complementary product recommendations that can go along with the product that is most likely to be purchased.
Cross-selling holds great potential in the fashion industry because the products are interconnected, allowing for easy provision of complementary ecommerce product recommendations to encourage customers to buy more.
For instance: Here’s an example of a customer who visited the page intending to buy a formal shirt. Once selected, product recommendations were given that included trousers, blazers, and accessories to complete the look.
Now, his intention was only to buy a shirt, but he may consider buying the trousers that complement the shirt. Such product bundles can trigger enhanced purchasing intent by tapping into individual customer’s tastes and preferences.
2. Upsell superior products to increase average order values per customer
To ensure value, upsell subtly by highlighting the superior product’s benefits over the product a customer is about to purchase or most likely to purchase.
For instance: Here’s an example of a brand showcasing similar shirts that are marginally more expensive. The right product recommendations displayed at the right time can open up upsell opportunities every time a customer transacts on your e-commerce platform. And the power of AI on Netcore turns that dream into reality.
3. Implement personalized recommendation widgets on different web pages
You need to design and deploy personalized widgets based on your customer’s interests, preferences, and behavior across different pages of your e-commerce website.
At Netcore, we empower you to deploy these personalized widgets on high-conversion web pages such as the Home Page, Product Listing Page, and Product Display Page.
These widgets group together a similar category of products as the more relevant recommendations. These widgets promise higher CTRs and conversions as these are tailor-made to individual customers.
Some of the common widgets include:
- Recommended for You
- Similar Products
- Recently Viewed
- You May Also Like
- New Arrivals
- Best Sellers
- Trending Products
- Customers Also Bought
When used effectively, these widgets can lead to an increase of 90-120% in the CTR of the web pages.
4. Showcase products most recently viewed by the customer
There could be occasions when a customer browses products without actually buying it. They also sometimes end up forgetting what they had viewed in their previous session.
In such a situation, you can display those products that the customer has viewed recently the next time the customer arrives at re-trigger purchase interest.
5. Create an exclusive personalized virtual storefront for every customer
Brands can rise the personalization mountain by creating ecommerce product recommendations, specifically curated boutique pages for each customer. Netcore AI engine, Raman creates such a virtual storefront based on past and real-time customer behavior – containing only those product recommendations with the highest probability of being viewed, clicked on or purchased.
Given the page’s high level of hyper-personalization, you need to refresh the product recommendations based on customer eyeball data dynamically.
Your customers need to feel that this was a page curated specially for them. They should also interact on this page by clicking on the ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ button to share real-time feedback about their choices and preferences.
And these are all actions and factors that we account for while enabling leading e-commerce brands to curate, such as personalized storefronts.
Building a personalized boutique page can actually enable brands to increase CTR by almost 120-150%.
6. Trigger exit intent web pop-ups
You can also trigger web pop-up messages when a customer lands on a certain pre-defined web page or is about to exit the web page. These messages are targeted at customers who may still be hesitant to buy.
Personalized product recommendations work best when showcased with an incentive, such as a discount or promo code, to entice customers into completing the purchase.
These pop-ups, when implemented effectively, can even lead to a 10% increase in the conversion rate.
7. Trigger relevant multi-channel messages on cart abandonment
There is always a chance that the customer is browsing products, has added a few to the cart for checkout, but has then dropped off without completing the purchase. In such cases, trigger a web push notification to remind the customer about the products added to their cart.
If the customer doesn’t respond to the web push notification within a specific time, trigger a personalized email to notify them of the abandoned cart. Additionally, implement cross-selling or offer discounts as part of the email campaign.
Such an approach leverages the power of data-driven marketing automation to drive personalized shopping experiences further.
8. Reactivate dormant customers to encourage re-purchase
As a data-driven e-commerce marketer at a fashion and retail brand, you need to focus on customer retention every single day. You need to ensure that your Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) exceeds your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).
There will always remain a situation where some customer segments remain dormant and don’t make a purchase on your platform for some time. These customers are usually re-targeted with a ‘We Miss You’ email, app push notification, or web push notification campaign.
This is a strategy to spike up the interest of customers who are dormant or likely to have churned. By providing personalized product recommendations, you can attempt to regenerate interest in a dormant customer.
9. Offer 1:1 product recommendations that take your inventory into account
There are cases where certain products remain in the inventory for too long. For numerous brands, inventory is the heaviest expense item that leads to the most financial woes.
You’ll gain insight into products that have been in stock the longest and understand what your customers are seeking. By leveraging this data, you can strategically promote products that have been in inventory for an extended period.
You will have greater control over how you want to ensure that they can catch the customers’ attention. You can offer customers exactly what they desire from a wider assortment of products- at more affordable prices. Achieve this by offering products at discounted prices or conducting sales to manage inventory costs more efficiently.
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted sales as customers were slow to purchase fashion and apparel products due to the cash crunch and the enforced lockdowns. This resulted in products lying in the inventory for an extended period of time.
In such a scenario, with an understanding of your brand’s situation and the customer’s interests, you will offer your customers relevant products that stand a better chance of leaving the inventory.
Key Metrics that Omnichannel Personalization Impact
There are a number of key metrics that you need to track to identify the effectiveness of your omnichannel personalization strategy. Here are the key metrics that would get impacted:
- Improve individual customer-level behavioral predictions by 20%
- Elevate website click-through rates (CTR) by 30-60%
- Increase add-to-cart rates (ATC) by 6-9%
- Increase e-commerce website conversions by 8-13%
- Uplift marketing ROI by 10-12X
The Exciting Future for Fashion & Apparel E-Commerce Personalization
The most exciting thing about omnichannel personalization for you, as marketers and customers alike, is that it is constantly evolving with technologies like Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. We may not have seen the best of it yet.
Personalization is all set to become an integral component of marketing. It is said to grow manifold over the coming years giving your customers exactly what they desire the most. 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.
Now that you understand the power of personalization and 1:1 product recommendations – why not see the magic yourself? To understand how you can deploy a game-changing personalization strategy powered by AI, get in touch with us today!
