Recommendations are as ancient as the human race. Merchants have been recommending the right products to their customers for as long as trade exists.
Nowadays, the big shift is that more trade is happening online, and in-store experiences are diminishing.
This rapid revolution got even stronger with the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the 2021 European E-Commerce Report, leading webshops in the EU-27 witnessed an increase of 13% in web visitors in 2020 compared to 2019. In the first six months of 2021, web traffic grew by 8% compared to the same period in 2020 and 18% compared to the same period in pre-COVID 2019.
As web traffic grows, so do the opportunities for your brand that come with this growth. Implementing recommendation boxes on your website can help you replace your physical in-store sales rep with a digital one. It’s not a practice that can only be used in e-commerce. It’s an implementation that can improve the online experience of every industry.
Using recommendations the right way increases the number of visitors who convert instead of abandoning your website. Let’s dive into the beautiful world of possibilities.
How do recommendations work?
Your visitors bring tons of information with them. Once they accept your cookies, you can work your magic, start tracking what they are doing on your website and build further on this newly mined intelligence. All the data will be analyzed by underlying algorithms that will link relevant profiles to each other to see what works for them. The algorithm will then decide which visitors get to see what content in the recommendation boxes, and will constantly update and analyze its recommendations.
Many online marketers might be shaking by now when thinking about privacy measures and GDPR-lawsuits. Don’t worry, all this tracking and data storage happens completely anonymously and is compliant with all the GDPR-rules and privacy measures that are in force nowadays.
Simply put, every visitor will get a unique number to their data. What they have been doing on your website will be stored anonymously, and this data will then be linked to similar profiles.
Suppose the algorithm notices that numbers 10 and 65 are very similar in interests, surfing behavior, or page visits. In that case, it will start to compare them to each other and base its recommendations upon their similarities. You’ll never be able to say that Mary and Katy are both interested in notebooks, flowers, and candles. You can only label them as numbers 10 and 65.
Using recommendations gives you the power to provide some kind of direction to your visitors. Your audience might not exactly know what they are looking for and might be a little lost on your website. Giving them a sense of orientation benefits your conversion rate and improves the customer experience and engagement with your brand. On average, introducing recommendations on your website results in a 10 to 30% higher conversion rate.
Did you know that 80% of what people watch on Netflix comes directly from their recommendations?
4 powerful implementations
1. Improve your checkout page
One way to use recommendations is by implementing them on your checkout page. This gives you the option to cross-sell some of your other products the customer might not have previously noticed or thought of.
Be mindful of what you recommend, though, because it should be something that enhances the initial purchase and fits well with that product. Let’s say you’re a webshop that sells sports articles. When your customer adds boxing gloves to his basket, he might also be interested in bandages, glove cleaning spray, or teeth protection.
Recommending these items adds value to the customer’s initial purchase and his customer journey. On the other hand, recommended ballet shoes or swimming pants have nothing to do with the original purchase and don’t add any value to the sale.
Recommendations can come in as a handy tool on your checkout page to make your audience eligible for free shipping as well. Recommend small items that fit the initial purchase and get them to buy an extra item to get free shipping. These recommendation boxes can vary in price ranges to fit the missing value for free shipping.
2. Make your applicant’s job hunt easier
Imagine you’re an office manager looking for a new adventure and you’re browsing job websites. You get to see tons and tons of vacancies, but only a few out of the many are within your field of interest. However, the problem nowadays is that you’ll have to go through all of these irrelevant vacancies before finding the ones that fit your profile. Most websites already have filters nowadays, but these are often defined too broadly and aren’t tailored to someone’s specific profile. This results in job hunters often getting discouraged or overwhelmed when looking for a job.
As previously mentioned, recommendation boxes will build on your possible applicant’s interactions, interests, and conversions and link the data to other similar profiles. This way, the office manager will only get to see jobs suitable for her.
Using recommendations on your job website makes it a lot more relevant to possible applicants. As a recruitment office, it also allows you to recommend similar jobs or jobs requiring the same skills that the applicant might not have thought of at first or maybe wouldn’t have even found on the website.
Using recommendations in the recruitment industry makes visitors stay on your website longer and increases the actual online applicants by a staggering 29%.
3. Enhance your audience’s conversions
Another valuable implementation of recommendations comes straight after your audience has completed a conversion. You can recommend something like a blog article, how-to page, or anything that enhances their conversion right after it has taken place.
A useful example of this in e-commerce could be recommending blog articles that redirect customers to a user manual or a best practices page for that specific product or service. In other industries, it could be an article about how to nail a job interview, what to look at when doing a house tour, and so on. This keeps your audience engaged in between their conversion and the actual moment they’ll use the product or service.
4. Capture information
Recommendations can be used to capture information as well. Add a recommendation box in between a few general recommendation boxes on your landing page to increase conversions.
A great real-life example of this is the implementation of recommendation boxes on media websites. Recommending relevant articles on the landing page and including a ‘free subscription’ box in between doesn’t feel as invasive as straight-up getting asked to subscribe to the media outlet.
This way, possible leads might be more tempted to leave some kind of information because it’s a lot more subtly asked.
As you can see by now, recommendations have a huge range of possibilities for every industry. Are you ready to get creative with them and boost your conversions while improving your customer experience at the same time?
If you’d like to learn more about other tools and implementations to improve your customer experience, I’d like to offer you our new ebook for free!