How to Create Relevant Product Recommendations to Increase Average Order Value?

The ultimate goal of every business is to boost sales and what if you can increase it with product recommendations? Isn’t that the best idea?

To make this work you need customer insights to send relevant product recommendations that can help you boost sales. Sending out-of-box product recommendations will not only irritate customers but also lead them to unsubscribe from you! I am sure you don’t want that!

We all love shopping and sometimes we need a nudge to make a decision. Relevant product recommendations work best by nudging people to shop more or add more relevant products to the cart. 

Studies show that product recommendations could increase up to 32% AOV. 

In the eCommerce business, every Shopify store owner is trying something different to lure the customer. It becomes challenging to keep engaging your existing customers and attract new ones. Considering eCommerce platforms like AiTrillion can help you to stay ahead of the crowd by simile automating all your eCommerce marketing activities. This will help you to know your customers more closely and send them exactly what they are looking for.

Netflix has increased the personalization expectation among people. Now customers want hyper-personalization in the messages or services that they received from the merchant. Otherwise, they don’t think twice to simply move to another store.  In short, Personalization is a key and cloud-based marketing app that automates and simplifies the delivery of customer experiences can help send personalized product recommendations. 

“According to a study by Barilliance, when a shopper interacts with product recommendations, they’re 550% more likely to purchase”.

Enhanced automated workflows help Shopify merchants to work smarter and faster, empowering brands to personalize every customer experience. Leveraging AiTrillion’s automation and integration with 11+ must-have Shopify apps, brands can automatically deliver the right content to the right individual. 

In this piece, we will discuss how personalized product recommendations impact your store, increase average order value and how to use them efficiently both on-site and in your email marketing.

Product recommendations mean sending products relevant to your customer’s previous shopping and browsing history.  You can display product recommendations onsite, send in emails, or in other marketing messages.

No matter whether you’re recommending products on your online store or in your email campaigns, if the product is relevant to your customer, they’ll be more likely to buy the product. And for increasing the average order value and store revenue, it’s important to get it right.

“Product recommendations can even reduce cart abandonment by as much as 4.35%. Considering that 7 of 10 carts are abandoned, recovering even a relatively small percentage of those sales is significant”.

By linking product recommendations with segmentation and personalization, it becomes a more powerful tool to significantly impact your store revenue.

Product recommendations are nothing but customer data. “DATA” that they left behind while purchasing online or simply browsing something that they want to buy. The data can be previously purchased product type, product value, location of the shopper, how he came to your website, and many others. All these touchpoints can help you design a personalized product recommendation for your customers to increase the product value.  

Dig deep into the different stages of your customer’s journey and think what recommendation will be the most relevant to your customer at that moment?

Look at these examples of product recommendations that you can use on your site.

1. Display Product Recommendations Above the Fold

When visitors land on your eCommerce website, the first thing they observe is the website’s above the fold. This is the best place to showcase your best-selling products, especially for those who visited your website for the first time.

If you have any sales or promotions going on your website, you can recommend them as well. Many eCommerce stores utilize the above-the-fold section to display a mix of seasonal items and promotions.

Nicci mentioned summer combos in the above-the-fold to help navigate their new customers towards curated items for the summer season.

For returning customers, product recommendations at the top of the store with a timer also help them to think again by creating a feeling of urgency. 

2. Display Product Recommendations Below the Fold

Below the fold is also an essential area to cover for personalized product recommendations. Here you can include your best-selling products or products that are high in demand because of occasion or based on particular weather. For example, display popular products here which are “Selling-out quickly!”

You can also mix essential items with popular products to recommend the best suites of products to your customers. If the price was what made your customer leave the product in the cart, then show the product with some offers or similar products of low price.

3. Product recommendations Inspired From the Browsing History

Category pages offer an excellent opportunity to show related products that have recently been browsed. Displaying “What others are browsing” and “Shop the look” in category pages also work best to sell more to your valuable customers.

Amazon offers an “Inspired by your browsing history” of product suggestions to remind customers what they were looking for.

4. Cross-Selling with Product Recommendations

Cross-sell recommendations are a great way to increase AOV from the product page. It might even be the best way to convince the whole look. Here you have an opportunity to showcase all the related products to his/her purchase. This increases the chance that customers might purchase the whole look. 

Consider this: your customer wants to buy a summer dress and she is browsing it on your website. Show her summer dress along with the accessories that will complete the look. You can recommend footwear, handbag, or even sunscreen to protect skin from sun rays. Knowing they can buy one package and have everything they need to complete the look might be what drives them over the finish line.

This method not only will increase your AOV but also gives a better overall experience to your customers. Take a look at H&M’s product recommendations. “Styled With” suggestions give customers an easy bundle to get everything they need, in this case, to enhance the overall look of the pants.

5. Product Suggestions In Your Check Out Page

Use your checkout page to offer personalized product recommendations. This is the best moment where you can cross-sell with product recommendations. Amazon offers similar products, and recently browsed products that may have been forgotten at the checkout page. 

These are just a few ideas that you can implement to create relevant personalized product recommendations on the Shopify eCommerce store. The success of all these product recommendation ideas are depending on where they are put on and your overall product line. It’s also suggested to keep trying new positions and layout to display recommended products to get the best.

Similar to your website, you can also use email marketing to present unique product recommendations that are targeted and relevant to your customers. Every brand is using email marketing today—to stand out, use personalized product recommendations to become relevant to your customers.

Before sending product recommendations through email marketing, keep these points in mind:

Send recommendations based on previous purchase

Use your customer data including their response to your marketing campaign to design personalized email campaigns for your customers. Those days are gone when businesses use one message for all customers. Now customers are very selective about their shopping and quickly unsubscribe you if they find you irrelevant. 

Be timely and engaging

Use the time and occasion like birthday or anniversary when your customers are already in that shopping mindset to offer product recommendations to fulfill their needs.

Be smart and add uniqueness: 

Email marketing gives you an opportunity to directly engage with your customers. Use this opportunity mindfully. Don’t just bombard products at them, add some good reasons and benefits of those product suggestions into emails to give them a proper reason why they should consider buying your product.

The best way to start sending product recommendations into your emails is to use automation with the customer lifecycle. With automation, you not only can offer products relevant to your customers’ tastes but also to wherever they are in their shopping mood.

1. Welcome Series Automation

Market researchers witnessed the highest open rate in the welcome email series. As your customer signs up to receive emails from you, this moment gives you the best opportunity to serve the best in front of your subscribers. Product recommendation works well when combined with the incentive you used for sign-up.

Add popular products and bestsellers in welcome series with coupon codes and percentages off to encourage customers to buy the product.

2. Browse Abandonment

Use visitor information to send product recommendations for browser abandonment. Use targeted product recommendations with the items your customers were checking out on your website.

Highlight the products they were browsing with a few other products of the same categories. Adding the same category product will help influence their decision. Some fashion brands show a few of the styles the customers were browsing, plus related products in case they don’t like the browsed products.

3. Product Abandonment

For product abandonment, your customers reveal more intent than browser abandonment. They’ve found a particular product that amuses them, which means you have a reliable idea of their interest.

Smart recommendations would cover the abandoned product plus a few similar products and accessories that would pair perfectly. 

For example, if a customer abandoned a product to buy a jacket then show them the abandoned product with the latest piece of your jacket collection along with jeans or pants to complete the look. 

Alternatively, if your customer is browsing a product that has accessories, sending your bundled products in a suggestion is a great way to show your customers that you can provide everything they need in one place.

4. Cart Abandonment

For cart abandonment, there might be a reason the customer found the same product somewhere else in a great deal, or might be he is no longer interested in the product. 

Sending an email with a price drop alert will help you to influence the customer’s decision. You can also add some similar product or best seller product of the same category to show them that you have more than what they saw.

You can also show your customers the item they’ve added to their cart, plus attach a few others that they’ve browsed to keep them engaged and conceivably bring them back to your online store.

Using AiTrilion’s pre-built templates to add cart abandonment products with some personalized product recommendations as well.

5. Post-Purchase

Post-purchase is the biggest missed opportunity that most eCommerce stores failed to utilize. In fact, order and shipping confirmation emails have some of the highest open and click rates across automation workflows. Use this opportunity and add personalized product recommendations on the post-purchase email series.

Post-purchase email series allow you to keep engaging with customers even after the purchase. This opens many new opportunities for your brands to engage with them through multiple campaigns.

By Adding “Top Picks For You” with shipping information, Nike has created the best way to convert recent purchasers into repeat purchasers. 

There is no fixed rule to utilize the power of product recommendations. You can use this method at every stage of the customer journey to create a personalized experience. Whether your customer is just browsing your website or opting-in to receiving emails from you, the perfect product recommendation that fulfills your customer’s needs always works best to increase the order value.

By being timely and relevant to your customer, you can get the best results from product recommendations to increase sales.

Send the perfect product recommendation every time!