Importance of relying on ecommerce platform add-ons

in this last post, I mentioned the importance of not relying on free ecommerce platform add-ons. Today well take this idea a step further and focus on how sophisticated product recommendations engines incorporate real-time customer insights with merchant rules to create a truly personalized experience for your customers.

#5 Way Retail Marketers are Leaving Money on the Table: Recommending Products Only By Using Personas or Wisdom of the Crowds Solutions

For some retailers, the next step up from manual merchandising is to use recommendations engines that rely primarily on wisdom of the crowds or personas to make product recommendations. However, when customers are shopping your site, every click made and every page browsed is giving you valuable insight into their wants, needs, and preferences.

Why stop at wisdom of the crowds when the data is there to make truly personalized recommendations that are unique to each individual shopper? Whether home-grown or purchased through a third party, an automated product recommendations engine allows you to gain customer insights based on individual data to deliver automated product recommendations in-real time.

Understanding the Difference Between Persona-Based, Wisdom of the Crowds, and Personalized Product Recommendations:

• Wisdom of the Crowds: One of the most basic forms of automated product recommendation systems is wisdom of the crowds," which utilizes crowd-sourced intelligence to monitor how most customers interact with your site. These systems then recommend products based what they predict the overall group will respond to best.

• Personas: Another basic forms of automated recommendation relies on "personas," or fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set. For example, an apparel retailer might use a persona called Maria-a stay at home mom in her early thirties with a strong passion for fashion, as well as a bargain shopper who never pays full price. If a retailer is trying to engage the Maria-type persona, they may consider including a banner about their latest sale in the next email campaign, as well as highlighting fashionable sale merchandise on the product page onsite.

• Personalized Product Recommendations: Personalized product recommendations are the most sophisticated type of product recommendations. By collecting data about your customers and analyzing behavior using powerful algorithms, marketers can create personalized product recommendations based on an individual shoppers profile. As with email marketing, relevance is key to delivering product recommendations on your site. Invest in an engine that captures a wide variety of data points about an individual, including click, browsing, purchase behavior, demographics, and social profile data. Use that information and marry it with wisdom of the crowds data to deliver recommendations that are truly tailored to the individual. Interested to see a great example of how to leverage a true cross-channel persoanlzation provider?

Merchant rules allow you to further customize your homegrown or third-party engine to fit your business needs. Retailers can add rules that align with merchandise and inventory plans to push or preserve specific merchandise, while maintaining relevant, targeted recommendations. For instance, an overstock situation or vendor-specific promotion could increase the likelihood that a specific SKU will be recommended. The merchant rule feature includes flexible controls to accommodate these types of adjustments.

Time and again, automated recommendations help marketers take personalization of their ecommerce site to another level. Avoid the hiddens costs of manual merchansiding-invest in a personalized product recommendation solution that will enable you to create an engaging customer experience and increase conversions.

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