By John Turner, founder of SeedProd, the most popular coming-soon page solution for WordPress used by over 800,000 websites.
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Product recommendations are a powerful way to connect with your audience and increase sales. We’ve all browsed through our suggested purchases on Amazon and marveled at how they manage to recommend the right product at the right time.
You should know that product recommendations are more than random offers that marketers show to their visitors. There’s a strategy that goes into suggesting products to customers, and that’s what we're going to talk about today.
My goal is to show you several ways to increase your sales, engagement and website traffic by creating personalized product recommendations for first-time visitors and long-term customers alike.
Let’s get started!
1. Create multiple landing pages.
The first tip I want to talk about is reaching new visitors with personalized product suggestions. At first, it doesn’t make sense; how can you personalize content and offers for someone who has never visited your website?
The simple answer is you create multiple landing pages that showcase your various products and services. Homepages are still a common way to find businesses, but many people discover a company for the first time by finding one of their product landing pages.
If you have multiple landing pages set up that are all geared towards a specific customer persona, you’ll have a much better chance at connecting with the right customers at the right time.
For example, if your business offers five different SaaS marketing tools, you want to create value-packed landing pages for each product. If someone is searching specifically for an email marketing tool, it makes sense that they would find your personalized landing page before your homepage.
2. Send more personalized emails.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to send personalized product offers. There’s a good chance you’ve already segmented your audience and know about their specific goals and pain points. If you haven’t, I'd suggest allowing new subscribers to self-segment by answering a few optional questions when they sign up.
Now that you know what subscribers are struggling with and what they hope to achieve, you can recommend products through email to help them reach their goals.
Let’s go back to the example I used a little while ago. The owner of multiple SaaS products would create dramatically different recommendation campaigns because each product has a unique audience. Someone interested in growing their email list might not care about getting more Twitter followers and vice versa.
3. Bundle products that are frequently purchased together.
Amazon has a feature where shoppers can see products frequently purchased with the item they are thinking about buying. You can dramatically boost sales by adding this feature to your online store.
If your main product or service has smaller add-ons or paid features that give it more value, include a suggestion to visitors on your checkout page. You can even include a few blurbs on the product so visitors can determine if the addition is worth the time and money.
You can prepare your visitors for the upsell by writing blog posts that tie complementary products together. My team and I like to write articles that help customers achieve a specific goal using all of the tools offered in our suite of products. Once visitors make it to the checkout page and see our suggestions, they immediately know how that addition will add value to their purchase.
4. Work with social media influencers.
It’s possible to expand your reach and give potential customers product recommendations by working with social media influencers. Simply put, influencers are internet personalities that have unique audiences and create content tailored for their subscribers.
When influencers recommend your product to their audience, there’s a good chance their followers will click their link and check out your business. This type of suggestion is a form of social proof. People trust their favorite internet celebrities and assume that they will like their product recommendations.
There are plenty of ways to work with influencers. For this marketing strategy, I'd suggest partnering with smaller influencers who have less than 100,000 followers. These people tend to have a more niche audience, which means you’ll have an easier time figuring out if their viewers need your product or service.
5. Refine your strategy over time.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that your product recommendation strategy will need to be refined from time to time. You’ll encounter instances where your audience subsets may develop different goals or pain points. If you’re there and paying attention during these moments, you can change your product recommendations and see if the test leads to more sales.
It’s hard to stress the importance of monitoring your sales data and engagement. As your product recommendation campaigns go out to customers, look for patterns that will help you plan future offers. For example, if a campaign has an exceptionally high engagement rate, review the data and pinpoint why it was so successful.
Testing various elements of your promotions is a time-consuming process but worth pursuing if you hope to skyrocket your sales using product recommendations.
