2010 Holiday E-commerce Solution #2: Offer Targeted Recommendations

DoublePlus is pleased to present this highly informative series of the 10 BEST solutions to put in place with your e-commerce store for the holiday season. Click here to see the entire series.

As we stated last time, it’s already September and if you haven’t started yet, it’s time to start prepping for the holiday season. These series installments are meant to outline a number of problems we see many retailers falling into and to identify key solutions that can help take your store to the next level…the point of this series being that we want to help retailers identify key areas that they can and should explore to not only help bring more visitors in, but ultimately to convert more visits into sales.

Better Recommendations by Knowing Your Customers

In our first installment of this series, we discussed knowing your visitors and spelled out a number of different scenarios in which you may want to target these customers. In this segment, we are focusing on making the products you sell more relevant to their needs.

Knowing your customers is one thing, especially where you can discern their buying patterns and habits, but whether you can tell directly what they care about, or whether you need indirect information to understand them, both are likely to affect the types of recommendations your store should make.

Making the Best Recommendations

There are two methods for determining this information – implicit and explicit means. Implicit information would be the pages they view, the time spent on those pages, the items they click on and place in their basket and finally the actual purchases they make. Explicit Information would be the orders they place, the types of products they tell you they are interested in, the questions you ask and that they answer on the website.

This is a key factor for Click2Customer: NEVER ask a question unless you are prepared to do something with the answer. If you ask a visitor to “tell us how we can make the store better” and they give you a laundry list that you ignore, that visitor is not likely to be happy about future inquiries from you. Switch it up and make the changes that that visitor mentioned, or explain to them afterward which ones you did implement and why you didn’t do others and watch that visitor become a customer quickly!

But this post is supposed to be about making targeted recommendations, so let’s get into that in much more detail. To be sure, both implicit and explicit types of data factor into making targeted recommendations, but there’s a third consideration and that’s finding like-minded people to better enhance the recommendation process. The C2C system uses all three of these paradigms in creating the very best targeted recommendations for your customers.

Not all scenarios are created equal. Creating recommendations is more than just saying, “Customers who bought X also bought Y”. This 1st level recommendation merely states that other people bought a couple of things like the thing you’re looking at…other than that, we’re not being any more intelligent about what you might want or need than that. This is hardly the best recommendation to make and usually equates to a failed conversion.

Generating Targeted and VALUABLE Recommendations

The C2C Recommendations Engine uses over 30 different facets such as time of day, number of pages visited, the types of pages (category or products), and the actual pages themselves, the number of visits and/or past purchases, the location of the buyer, where the buyer came from and many other factors, all of which contribute to making the most valuable recommendations possible. The problem, of course, is that no human being can or wants to go through all that data to figure out whether product A will sell to Customer Y better than product B, but thankfully recommendation algorithms can be constructed to make this easy for the retailer.

Targeted Recommendations

Ultimately, targeted merchandising comes down to making the very best “guess” possible with all of the available information as to what the customer wants and putting it in front of them early and often during their visit. Making this a reality for your store will depend in large part to your commitment to being all things to all people.

Most targeted recommendations vendors will claim to have “the solution” for targeted recommendations, but regardless of the algorithms that they purport to have that are highly specialized for your industry and store, the bottom line is that they all basically do the same thing. Personalized Recommendation Solutions, such as the C2C Essentials Recommendations Engine, collect on-site analytics based on the pages your visitors are traversing, your product catalog data and mix it with their “secret sauce” to create targeted recommendations.

The details, or efficacy is in the “secret sauce” — the shopping algorithms they employ to identify and create targeted recommendations. Most algorithms offer standard “Customers who bought X also bought Y” capabilities, but more detailed analysis and discovery of trends are what will truly raise your conversions. Profiling your customers/visitors is a key component to this type of solution, because it’s at least as important to understand what people are NOT buying as to discover what they are. There is never a test that does not yield some result that is valuable in one form or another.

With C2C Essentials, you have a number of options to do this. You can employ our flat rate Quickstart module that provides some “out-of-the-box” setups and ready-made integrations with your store, so that you can take advantage of just these recommendation features, or you can use more of the integrated feature sets we have in our Professional or Enterprise offerings which include email marketing, shopping cart abandonment and many other features, all of which provide avenues for adding targeted recommendations based on the buyer’s individual purchase history, as well as, what your other shoppers on your site are viewing and buying. In the end, adding targeted recommendations to your site and customer communications gives you yet another opportunity to drive sales, which is why we recommend them to any retailer who is looking to increase their sales conversions and/or the average order value of their sales.

Click2Customer Quickstart

Next week, we’ll focus on keeping the lines of communication open and how continuing to engage with your customers and visitors is the best way to keep your brand alive in their eyes.