Show me what I want: Personalized Recommendations

Your users are unique and their wants and needs align to your organization in many different ways. While you can delve into the analytics of the activity on your website and manually extract a few gems information, wouldn’t it be easier to automate the process and dynamically target each and every user who comes to your site? Of course! Why not deliver the most relevant content to users as they browse your site and customize each user’s experience? Why not make it personal? Amadesa’s RecommendR engine learns from real-time visitor behavior and automatically adjusts the content being presented based on onsite activity. This allows you to improve the user’s experience and your website’s strategic value by maximizing such things as click-through rates, unique content viewed per visit and revenue per visit. By automatically delivering relevant and timely recommendations your website’s users are more deeply engaged with the site, which builds user satisfaction, brand loyalty and repeat visits. The applications are endless, but let’s look at what types of recommendations that could be included on an e-commerce site and where they should go… Home Page: Best Sellers Most Viewed Products on the Site Goal: A highly trafficked page on your site needs to be relevant to multiple personas. You want your users to get into the buying cycle as quickly as possible. Having a dedicated place to feature your best sellers and the most viewed products are great ways to immediately engage users. Here is a good example from Petco.com: Category Page: Most purchased products in the category Most viewed products in category Goal: Improve user experience by providing direct paths to what they’re looking for (ASAP). Whether your category pages feature products or simply links to sub categories, there is an opportunity for users to move deeper into the buy cycle. By showcasing the most purchased and viewed products in the category, users can click directly to a product detail page without having to dig around. The Product Detail Page: Similarly viewed products Ultimately bought products Products bought together Previously viewed products Goal: Keep users who are not ready to buy from leaving the site. These users are either going to click the “Add to Cart” button or they won’t. What do we do with those who won’t? Give them options! Offer an opportunity to find something they’re looking for without hitting the “back” button or searching through the main navigation. The last action that we want is the visitor abandoning the site for a competitor. The product detail page is a great place to feature alternative recommendations based on the experience of other shoppers’ views and purchases. By placing recommendations below the product information and vertically on the page you increase the opportunity for a sale and satisfied user. 404 or Results Not Found Page: Most viewed products on the site Previously viewed products Goal: Help users get where they wanted to go. Your 404 page likely has one of the highest bounce rates on your site… So how do you improve your users’ experience here? First, offer users a way [back] into the site by featuring some of your users’ favorite products. Additionally, if they were already in the site, show them what they were just looking at as an incentive to go back and not abandon. Second, look at the potential ROI of just adjusting the 404 page. Just think if recommendations were added...!. Search Results Page: Most viewed products in the searched for category Most Purchased products in the searched for category Previously viewed products Goal: Supplement search results with relevant information corresponding to on site activity. Your search results page is most likely one of the most visited pages on your site. Supplementing search results with relevant merchandising zones may assist some users in finding the right product. Cart Page: Previously viewed products Products brought together Goal: Personalize recommendations based on the user’s visit and increase average order value(AOV). One of the best places to feature recommendations is in the cart – think up-sells and cross-sells. When users are in the cart they are farther along in the buying cycle, they are engaged and want to be reassured before they pull out their credit cards. There are two very important recommendations to feature in the cart: Previously viewed products and products purchased as a group. Reminding users of what they’ve seen on your site or offering bundles based on actual purchases made by other users (with a discount), you can increase the chances of multi-item purchases. Recommendations are an invaluable element to the modern web experience. Your users expect it. The information gathered from RecommendR gives your entire organization an advantage over the competition by showing users what they want, when they want it, and providing you with vital information that more effectively targets the overall strategy of your organization. CLICK HERE to contact an Amadesa optimization expert and learn more about Amadesa’s RecommendR recommendation solution.