Let’s face it, customers don’t want to go through a plethora of irrelevant options before buying something, and they love that personal touch, whether they’re being addressed through marketing email, a text, a website or an in-store recommendation.
Recommending personalized products to the customers at the touch points of the shopping process will make them feel more understood and give an impression that your business really cares about its customers. Not only will your conversion rate accelerate, but customer retention and the number of orders will also significantly increase.
Let’s take a look at how can your store implement this process and how it gives a competitive advantage to your customers:
How Do Personalized Recommendations Work
Product recommendations aren’t merely a guess, they are based on repetitive customer behaviour and companies often use Customer Relationship Management Systems to study and analyse customer behavior regarding a specific product which helps them create graphs of what a potential customer might be looking for. A big amount of data is collected from different sources, customer purchase patterns, previous buying history, browsing history etc to predict customer behavior.
Data collection and personalization process might look like rocket science to you but there are modern tools to take care of that. One of the most useful tools we came across is Engage by Zubi which collects, analyzes and personalizes your customers’ data for you.
This saves a lot of time for business owners because they don’t have to get into technical details of everything and customers as well by saving them the trouble of browsing through irrelevant stuff.
Let’s take a look at how product recommendations help increase customer retention rate:
1. Better Customer Relationships
With so many brands offering the same thing, converting leads to paying customers and holding on to the old customers has become a marathon. When companies use CRM tools for studying customer behavior and help them accordingly, it creates a positive relationship between the business and the customer.
Especially when using email marketing for this purpose. No customer wants to see email campaigns that aren’t relevant to their interests and all that effort put into marketing is most likely to go into spam. But not with personalized recommendations!
2. Automated Email Marketing
Converting leads through email marketing is gaining popularity once again, and through automated marketing you can add the touch of personalization to your campaigns, making them more targeted and interesting.
There are tools available that help you study customer purchase and interests and help create automated email campaigns that are most likely to get the customer’s attention. You can send mass emails, all containing different recommendations suited to each customer’s needs. Convenient isn’t it? And such an email will definitely catch the customer’s attention!
3. Increase Session Time
We all have fallen prey to the rabbit hole of scouting for products while shopping, spending a lot of time on products we might not even need. Businesses are able to get the attention of customers this way by interest based recommendations.
They click one product and see a few other related products that other people purchased with that product, and the session goes on. There’s a 90% chance the customer will end up buying a few more products along with the one they were actually looking for. This helps to keep customers on your site longer and make them likely to come back soon.
4. Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment
At times customers change their minds and leave the site without purchasing anything, and other times they might accidentally close the site and lose the items in their cart. But it is now possible to save the customer’s cart and send reminder emails or texts to take a look at the items that were left in their cart.
This is a clever marketing strategy, because oftentimes people get second thoughts about buying something and leave it in the cart, and being reminded about it or seeing it again on their social media will most likely get them to change their mind and they will end up purchasing that product after all. This is the kind of marketing that increases customer retention!
Retail business has gotten very competitive over the years, and getting the customers to stay with your business over a long time is harder than ever. Personalised recommendations is one of the most powerful tactics used for customer retention and lead conversion, and will make your business stand out among customers.