Let us tell you something. Simply having a great product or service these days isn’t enough to guarantee your success.
Your customers crave experiences. They want you to know their needs and recommend solutions to them. It’s how they feel valued as a customer and stick around for long. It’s a personalized buyer experience in action.
In the competitive landscape where customers have a ton of options, personalizing the solutions you recommend to your customers can be your ultimate differentiator.
Buyer experience encompasses every interaction a customer has with your brand, from the moment they discover you online until they make a purchase and even after. Personalized recommendations help you elevate this experience.
When you recommend solutions based on your customers’ needs or preferences, you make it easier for your customers to make a smart buying decision. In return for being genuinely helpful, you acknowledge increased conversions and undying loyalty.
Don’t know how to pull it off? Don’t worry. In this guide, we’ll show you how to tailor buyer experience with personalized recommendations.
So, let’s get started.
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What is Buyer Experience?
Let’s talk about buyer experience first. The buyer experience represents every interaction a customer has with your business. It starts from the point your potential customers hear about you and lasts to the point of purchase, even beyond.
Let’s have a look at a standard buyer journey to understand the concept in more detail. It comprises four different stages.
The journey starts with the awareness stage. Here, your potential customers discover your brand through a recommendation or relevant marketing channels like social media, email, search engines, and communities.
The consideration stage comes next. In this stage, your customers learn more about you. They explore your website, read reviews, and compare your solutions with competitors.
The decision stage follows. If your strategy is spot on, you’ll end up scoring a conversion in this stage. Otherwise, your prospects will keep looking till they find the right solution provider for them.
The final stage encompasses the post-purchase experience. It’s where many businesses drop the ball. You must remember that acquiring customers isn’t that difficult compared to retaining them. You don’t chase one-time buyers but rather loyal fans. And it requires work.
You must be thinking to yourself, where does personalization fit in? Well, everywhere.
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Do you think you’ll be able to convince your potential customers to try your solutions if you have a generic website?
The same goes for your social media promotions. Would you be able to pique the interest of potential buyers without displaying the right solutions to the right people?
Even your customers won’t recommend your solutions to others if you fail to offer them personalized experiences.
You must prove to your customers that you understand their needs. You’re not here to sell solutions but to help them find solutions to their problems. A personalized product recommendations strategy comes in handy here.
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Why Should You Offer Personalized Recommendations?
Personalized product recommendations are essential to ensure an enhanced buying experience for your customers. They help you score increased conversions and undying customer loyalty.
It’s not easy for people to make buying decisions. They consider a lot of things before buying your products. Plus, they often hesitate due to the fear of making a bad purchase.
Sometimes, the availability of too many options overwhelms your potential customers. Other times, they just don’t know what’s right for them.
When you provide your prospects with a few options that are tailored to their interests, you make the buying process effortless for them. By doing this, you showcase that you know what your customers want and that they hold significant value to you.
Think of it like this. You go to a local coffee shop that you visited a few times before. You call out a server, and they greet you by your name and ask you if you’d like to have what you usually order or something else. Wouldn’t it make you feel special? Personalized product recommendations work the same way.
When your customers know that you value them, they keep preferring you over other alternatives. Personalized buyer experience may lead to higher repeat purchases, increased customer lifetime value, and an enhanced average order value. The strategy fuels your growth from different dimensions.
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Always Tailor the Buyer Experience
Now that we have talked about the significance of personalized recommendations let’s see how you can tailor the buyer experience by using them.
Collect Useful Data
You can’t offer personalized product recommendations without the right data. You must gather important information about your customers through reliable data sources.
You can start things off with website analytics. You can use Google Analytics to explore information like pages visited, products viewed, time spent on pages, and navigation paths. It gives you an idea of what interests your customers and what doesn’t.
Your CRM is the goldmine when it comes to customer information. You can access customer details, previous purchases, chat interactions, and other useful information for your analysis.
The most effective way of them all is that you ask your customers directly about their preferences. You can consider using online surveys to gather customer feedback or web forms to know your customers or learn about their interests.
Social media monitoring may also come in handy. You can explore relevant platforms for useful insights about your audience demographics and their interests. The content your audience publishes or interacts with tells you all.
You must be responsible when collecting customer data. You must be transparent about how you intend to use that information. It ensures your compliance with the regulatory guidelines and enables you to earn your customers’ trust.
Segment Your Audience
Data collected? Awesome. You must put it to work by dividing your customers into different segments. It’s like dividing your customer base into more manageable groups for targeting.
We already established that generic targeting never works. Personalized recommendations are the way to go. However, you can’t offer different recommendations to every single customer. You’ll be complicating things and get overwhelmed in the process.
Therefore, creating groups of people with similar characteristics is a viable approach. Offering personalized recommendations this way is much more manageable.
You can segment your audience based on demographics, purchase history, behavior, product interests, order value, engagement level, customer lifecycle stage, and many other distinguishing factors.
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Display Personalized Recommendations
You have collected relevant data and created different audience segments using it. Now what? Now, you start displaying personalized product recommendations and leverage all relevant marketing channels to do so. If you use cross-channel marketing, that’ll have an additional impact.
There are many options you can pick to display personalized product recommendations on your website. You can display custom product suggestions on product or cart pages, as order bumps, and through well-timed popups or sliders.
If you leverage e-commerce solutions like Shopify or WooCommerce to sell your products, displaying recommendations will be easier as they offer you built-in capabilities to do so.
Your website isn’t the only channel through which you engage your customers. Sending personalized product emails is also a viable approach. To get started, you must segment your email list based on demographic and psychographic characteristics.
You can also consider past order history to create different email lists and send personalized messages to the recipients, along with custom product recommendations.
Your segmentation data also helps you create targeted search and social media ads. Rather than displaying random products, you can carefully feature the specific products your potential customers viewed in the past or similar recommendations.
Test and Optimize
Offering a personalized buyer experience through custom product recommendations isn’t something you set and forget. You need to test and optimize your strategy constantly to get the best results.
The needs and interests of your customers may change over time. So, the recommendations you display now may not be relevant in the future. Your recommendations may be data-backed and well-thought-out, but they require ongoing refinement.
In fact, you shouldn’t even assume that the product recommendation strategy you came up with is the absolute best. You can’t know for sure without A/B testing different variations and seeing which one gives you optimal results.
Testing and optimization apply to everything. You should assess different recommendation methods, placements, and even copies to grab customers’ attention. You can’t offer an enhanced buying experience with a one-time strategy.
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Let’s Sum It Up
To grow your business amidst fierce competition, you have to make sure that the buying experience you offer stands out.
Knowing your customers and making it easier for them to purchase products that align with their needs boosts your conversions. Plus, it becomes easier for you to ensure lasting customer relationships.
Displaying personalized product recommendations speeds up the buying process. You show solutions to your customers that may pique their interests, which minimizes the friction from the buyer’s journey.
In this guide, we told you how you can tailor the buyer experience you offer to your customers through personalized product recommendations. With well-thought-out research and effective implementation, the strategy may work wonders for you.
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