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Our Favorite Tactics for Website Recommendations

With Fresh Relevance, you have unlimited use of Product Recommendations.

We know that tactful placement of Recommendations across touchpoints both enhances the customer journey as well as revenue, but where to start?

In this Article we look at our favourite touch points to enhance your marketing, and our recommended tactics and best practice for each.

If you have any questions about how to implement these tactics, please contact [email protected]

OUR BEST PRACTICE GUIDANCE

Here are some of our Best Practices for all Recommendations, regardless of the touchpoint

  • Harness the Power of Social Proof – Combine trust signals such as reviews with popularity or urgency messaging is a quick way to increase efficacy of Recommendations
  • Optimize Data Sources & filtering – Every customer base is different, as will be the most successful combination of tactics for each Brand. Try A/B testing different Data Sources or filters to find what works best. Signup for your personal Optimization plan here
  • Exclude specified products or categories – Consider excluding products or categories which you don’t want to promote, e.g. low margin products, already high selling Brands, Gift Cards
  • Maximize Product exposure – Exclude products you’ve recently recommended, minimizing repetition and increasing range.

How to maximize your ROI

Your Website Review

Before adding Recommendations, it’s worth reviewing your website to see where these will most aid your customer, as these will likely see the highest ROI. Understanding your customer journey is crucial to effective design and prioritization. Some examples questions to ask yourself:

  • How long is your path to purchase? Do you have a long consideration phase? Help the customer pick-up where they left off
  • Are your products one-off or repeat purchases? Show previous purchases for easy carting
  • What common objections do you have? Consider displaying products to address these e.g. if Price points are highly compared, show lower priced or price dropped products
  • Do you have high levels or Brand or Category affinity? Filter Recommendations to the customer’s preferences, or product being browsed
  • What trends can you find in your website Analytics? Address bounce rates with our Price Affinity Predictor. Increase time on site by ensuring a wide breadth of recommended products

Remember that you can use multiple SmartBlocks of recommendations on the same page e.g. on Product Pages, show Similar Products and Recently Browsed

Your Touchpoints

Homepage

Your homepage is often your customers landing page, and we know how much first impressions count. Showing recommendations on your homepage is a great way to:

  • Personalize on the customer’s behavior by using one of our AI data sources to predict the most relevant products for the visitor based on their website behaviour.
  • Personalize to a customers Brand/Category Affinity by using our Best Tag Value filter, which dynamically limits recommended products to a customer’s most active categories
  • Showcase your Best Sellers by using our Frequently Purchased Data Source, consider using a shorter time period for ‘Hot Right Now’
  • Celebrate New Products automatically by using our New Products data source. This will automatically display the latest products to have been added to your product database in Fresh Relevance
  • Help Customers Pick up where they left off by showing their previously Carted or Browsed products. If you have high levels of repeat purchases, consider showing the customer’s last cart.
  • Reduce Bounce Rates by accurately predicting a customers price point. Add our the Price Affinity Predictor filter to your recommendations
  • Automatically highlight Price Drop Products with the Behavioral Targeting Module by building a Segment as your Data Source, dynamically showing products that customer browsed that have dropped in price

Top Tip!

Use data source fallbacks to use the same SmartBlock for both new and returning visitors. E.g.:

  • Primary Data Source: Last Cart.
    This would only retrieve enough products if a purchase has been made previously
  • Fallback 1: Best Sellers with Best Tag Value (Category) filter
    This would display to visitors who are yet to make a purchase, but that have browsed enough products to determin a preference
  • Fallback 2: Best Sellers with the Price Affinity Predictor Filter.
    By defaults, this would only be triggered by new visitors

Product Details Pages

Much consideration occurs on the Product Details Page. In the case that the current product is not for them, it’s great to suggest viable alternatives, such as:

  • Similar products (Product on Page) Data Source will use textual AI to select similar products based on their names, descriptions and product Tags
  • Category restrict products by filtering to the same category as the product on page
  • Increase AOV by showing products of a higher price point. Simply combine our Similar Products Data Source and Price filter. Consider applying the price filter to Recently Browsed
  • Leverage AI to show what other products customers go on to purchase by using our ‘After viewing this, people buy’ Data Source
  • Upsell related products by showing products that are regularly purchased together using our ‘Purchased Together’ Data Source

Top Tip:

Use our New SmartBlock flow to automatically exclude the product on page. Note that the approach is the same in the old flow – ensure the Merge Parameter prid is included, then using the Product ID filter, exclude the syntax {{ merges.prid }}

Cart Page

We suggest that the Cart Page is your last opportunity to upsell to customers, as exposing products after this stage may distract customers from purchase.

  • Encourage customers to cart more items to reach a Free Delivery threshold by dynamically price filtering recommendations
    See our handy guide here
  • Highlight ‘Impulse Buys’ by using that Data Source, showing products that have highest conversion rates for the number of times the product is browsed
  • Show products that are ‘Purchased together’ by using our AI Data Source based on your live purchase data

Product List Pages

With Fresh Relevance’s Site Editor, you can place our recommendations within a Product list itself.

  • Personalize to a customers Brand Affinity by targeting the Brand Tag group our Best Tag Value filter along with the relevant Tag (Category) filter
  • Showcase your Category Best Sellers by combining a the relevant Tag (Category) filter with our Frequently Purchased Data Source
  • Show category Products that are ‘Hot Right Now’ by combining a the relevant Tag (Category) filter with a short time period on a Crowd Sourced Data Sources e.g. Frequently Browsed
  • Automatically celebrate New Products in the category by combining a the relevant Tag (Category) filter with our New Products data source. This will automatically display the latest products to have been added to your product database in Fresh Relevance with the relevant category

Top Tip!

Hide or reduce the number of products being displayed on mobile devices.

Make your Recommendation SmartBlock look and feel different to your PLP break up the page and make them stand out.

Website Abandons

Whilst not a specific page of your website, we can consider the action of abandonment as an additional touchpoint, and deliver a popover that shows on Exit Intent. 

Show this only to customers using the Has Carted or Has Browsed Marketing Rules, or use fallbacks to make the products relevant to those who are yet to browse enough products

  • Remind customers what they’re leaving behind by showing thier current carted products
    Top Tip! Fallback to ‘Freqently Browsed (dynamic)’ Products for those who are yet to cart
  • Personalize to products the customer is most likely to buy by using our ‘People like you Buy’ AI Data Source
  • Show most popular products by using Crowd Sourced Data to showcase what other people are buying

Top Tip:

Consider combining with an incentive for customers to convert. This could be targeted to a subgroups, such as:

  • Repeat Abandoners – Combine the Sessions with Has purchased Marketing Rules to identify customers who have abandoned the website multiple times without purchase
  • Customer Segments – Using the Behavioral Targeting Module you can create or import segments which you’d like to help to convert e.g. low income customers
  • Specific Page abandons – only show discounts when customers are abandoning high margin product pages

Page Not Found

Turn a less ideal customer experience into a helpful touch point by recommending relevant products.

Some of our top tactics:

  • Recommend a visitors previously browsed products to keep customers engaged with other products they may have been comparing.
    Top Tip – Fallback to a crowd sourced Data Source to show best sellers for those with no browse history
  • Showcase products the customer is most likely to buy by using our ‘People like you Buy’ AI Data Source

Top Tip:

Record your website Bounce Rates before implementation to measure the reduction