Amazon, 8tracks, and Apple are all doing this. Are you?

On 30 June 2015, Apple announced to release iOS 8.4, which includes a newly revamped Music app. I have always been a fanatic of Apple, and this time they totally stroke me hard when I received the Music app newsletter:

Finally they’ve made it: a personalized music recommendation feature – FOR YOU. Very succinct and capturing, “Hand-picked recommendations based on what you already listen to and love”.

Here they go, into the era of Personalized Product Recommendation.

You must have known that Amazon.com is so long famous for their product recommendation engine. 70% of their homepage is dedicated to product recommendations, divided into many categories: Related to Items You’ve Viewed, Best Selling Items, What Other Customers Are Looking At Right Now, etc. And there is a long list of other big websites currently exploiting this strategy: Agoda.com, 8tracks, Spotify, etc. to name a few.

On my last week’s article, I took a deep dive into automation emails as a building block of marketing automation. Along with that, product recommendation also takes a big part in the overall success of marketing automation strategy for eCommerce businesses of any size. Product Recommendation uses big data technology and smart algorithms to make personalized recommendations for individual customers based on their browsing, viewing and purchasing behaviors and sales history of the store.

Now that you know what product recommendation is, through this post I will shift my focus on why it works so well for eCommerce and why you should apply the same to your store.

A higher level of upsell and cross-sell tactics – Personalization takes its turn

You are supposed to well know about cross-sell and upsell strategies in marketing: to get your customers spend more money by offering them more products in bundles. Let’s say, if a customer picks up a laptop, you may suggest him a mouse at a discount price if he buys all in a bundle. But what if that customer needs a laptop bag, while another may prefer a keyboard cover?

Here is where product recommendation does its trick: it gives individuals personalized relevant choices. While cross-sell and up-sell alone just suggest a specific product to everyone, product recommendation suggests the right one to the right person, increasing the chance that the customers will pick-up recommended products and give you more money than they previously plan.

Build brand trust and love, keep loyalty from customers

I guess you, as a business owner, must be struggling some time about how to promote your brand and make your customers become loyal forever. Whether it is traditional or modern marketing, the core concept that wins is that building a brand should be based on emotions. Customers are deeply touched when being given personal and unique love and care. In the highly saturated and competitive market, products are commonplace but brand feelings are unique and key to fostering trust, love and loyalty from customers.

With its focus on personalization, marketing automation is so far the best option for most eCommerce business of all sizes to achieve this goal. The two building blocks: product recommendation and automation emails combined give customers a touching sense that their preferences and needs are understood and fulfilled. With the help of other tools (gift rewards, website optimizations, instant customer service…), marketing automation has now become the key driver in the industry. Results have been strongly proven by the success of Amazon and other big players.

Reach Out To Every Of Your Thousand Customers

How can you offer your personal care to every unique customer, finding out what they love and hand-pick recommended products for them? Let’s say you have a thousand customers, each of whom with different tastes and preferences, can you possibly do that? No for sure, without the help of automation to some extent.

In this era of big data technology, product recommendation is automated based on smart algorithms. Regardless of the customer database size, generated recommendations are data-driven and feasible on large scale. Amazon has hundreds million active users, but they do it excellently with automated product recommendation.

Final Goal: Boosting Your Sales To The Next Level

With all those advantages, recommendation system can greatly help with driving up sales of any ecommerce business, regardless of sizes, industry and capacity, as it boils down to tackling 3 important metrics of your store’s performance.

• Increase the average order value: By giving your shoppers a targeted list of items they might want based on what they have viewed and searched, the system increases the chance that shoppers will buy more than they previously plan, thus enlarge your store’s average value of an order.

• Reduce cart abandonment: If your customers have added items to their cart but failed to check out, they are very close to making a purchase decision. Interactions with customers at this last step can save lots of orders for your store. Recommendation systems will follow customers to the the last minute to convince them of making the purchase, reducing the rate of abandonment and improving conversion rates and ROI.

• Improve customer retention: Customers stay when they feel connected and belonging to. Giving your customers a personalized experience is always hard but worth the most when it comes to retaining customers with your brand forever. Product recommendation with the aim to provide customers with personalized suggested items is exactly the method to go with if you want to turn every visitor into not only paying but also loyal ones of your store.

How to apply to your business?

Amazon has nearly 270 million active users but they do personalized product recommendation extraordinarily well because they have a gigantic in-house engine system behind with hundreds of marketing and technical gurus. If you are all alone doing your business from A to Z, with no sales teams and limited resources for marketing activities, you can still achieve the same goal with the help of specializing marketing automation apps from Beeketing. Now that both the marketing and commercial worlds are quickly changing, it’s high time you kept up with marketing automation and win prizes for yourself.