The Smart Guide to Product Recommendations: Retail and Ecommerce

The Smart Guide to Product Recommendations: Retail and Ecommerce

If our 90’s and 80’s counterparts were to travel to 2021, there’s a high chance that the task of shopping would be difficult for them to complete — simply because the way we shop has been revolutionized. Even comparing 2019 to 2021, so much has changed about how and where we shop. And more importantly, the marketer’s role in all of this has morphed as well. Consumers are both blessed (and cursed) with almost infinite options and it’s fallen upon marketers to help guide the shopping experience both online and offline.

In our “always-on” world, marketers are increasingly being asked to step up into the world of customer experience and deliver the same “brand experience” on traditionally marketing-owned channels like email, paid media, and more. It’s up to retailers to capture the fleeting attention of shoppers with relevant, timely marketing that hits home. And while delivering hyper-relevant and brand-minded experiences to your perfect customers may seem like a tall order, there’s one tool that proves invaluable in the fight for consumer attention: product recommendations. Product recommendations are the 21st century equivalent of having super personable, mind-reading sales associates on the floor, selling your brand. They allow you to bring that extremely relevant, thoughtful shopping experience to anywhere your customers interact with your brand.

To help marketers looking to understand how they can use product recommendations to drive sales and loyalty among customers we’ve made an addition to our Smart Guide series. The Smart Guide to Product Recommendations: Retail and Ecommerce is here to teach marketers about the different product recommendation themes, how to select the right ones throughout your customer journey, and best practices to add relevance across every interaction with your brand.

Why you need relevant recommendations to remain competitive

Recommendations are no longer a “nice to have” for ecommerce and retail brands — they’re a must-have. Consumers have been spoiled by the likes of Amazon and now over 80% of shoppers want (and expect) personalization from brands. But not only is there a ton to lose by not offering personalized experiences and product recommendations, but there’s also a ton to gain by doing it well. In fact, Amazon credits its recommendations with driving at least 35% of its revenue.

And while competing with the likes of Amazon can seem daunting, you don’t need their sizable budget or neverending resources to use and succeed with product recommendations. In fact, while Amazon’s recommendation remains proprietary, there are omnichannel recommendation systems on the market that rival what they’ve built. Thanks to advancements in technology and marketer-friendly AI (leveraged in platforms like Blueshift), it’s possible — and dare we say, easy — to pull off 1:1 product recommendations across your entire brand experience. You just need the right tools and knowledge. And that’s where Blueshift and our Smart Guide to Product Recommendations: Retail and Ecommerce can help.

What you’ll learn from our Smart Guide to Recommendations: Retail and Ecommerce

In this Smart Guide, you’ll learn about:

  • The various types of product recommendation themes you can leverage
  • Best-practices for how to leverage those themes at different points of the customer lifecycle
  • The creative, channel, data, and catalog considerations to make sure your recommendations are relevant and resonate with customers, every time

The future of recommendations and ecommerce are one in the same — recommendations and personalized experiences are now an industry standard. Recommendations are the key to creating a stellar omnichannel shopping experience that feels cohesive and relevant, regardless of which channels customers interact with your brand across.

Key Takeaways from the Guide:

  • You’ll need the right tools to fully unlock your data to power product recommendations and personalized experiences
  • Recommender systems are nothing without solid data, which means your product metadata and catalog should be unified, organized, and always up-to-date
  • The right recommendations strategy should be tailored to your business goals and customer engagement channels, not a carbon copy of what’s worked for other retailers

Intrigued? Chat with one of our ecommerce experts to learn more about how we’ve already helped countless brands successfully implement 1:1 product recommendations — and how blueshift can help you.

More about our Smart Guide series

Our Smart Guide to Product Recommendations: Retail and Ecommerce is just one in a series of Blueshift Smart Guides that are available to access, now. We created these guides to educate marketers about the topics that are critical to business success today. In this series, we cover top tools, like Customer Data Platforms, up-and-coming technology, like marketer-accessible AI, and so much more.

You can discover our full library of Smart Guides here, and be sure to check out some of our companion courses on Blueshift Academy.