Office Hours: Personal Recommendations
On Jan 18, 2024, we held Office Hours to discuss Personalized Recommendations along with best practices. I hosted the meeting along with Tina Towers who is our Recommendations expert with over a decade of experience studying and consulting brands on how to best leverage Recommendations.
Recommendations Overview:
We started by discussing an overview of what recommendations are and how our AI allows merchandisers to be confident about showing the right products at the right time to keep their shoppers engaged in shopping.
Merchandisers can simply pick the type of recommendation they want to use and where they want the recommendations to be placed, and you’ll get a custom-generated snippet of code that can be easily dropped on your site. Once that’s done, you’ll have recommendations that constantly evolve and learn from your shoppers’ experience, where each shopper will see a personalized set of recommended products that are based on their individual behavior.
Personalized Recommendations uses AI models to gain deep insight into behavioral data and display hyper-relevant products that engage shoppers and boost conversions.
Recommendations Types:
Next, we discussed each profile type along with the best practices for each of them throughout the shopping journey. See below for recommendation types and best practices for each of their placements.
- Cross-Sell: Recommend complementary products that a shopper is likely to buy in addition to the product they’re viewing
- Cart Cross-Sell: Recommend complementary products that a shopper is likely to buy in addition to the products in their cart
- Similar: Recommend related products that a shopper may want to purchase instead of the product they’re viewing, with an option to boost products at a higher price point
- Personal: Recommend products that the shopper is likely to purchase based on their order history
- Session: Recommend products that the shopper is likely to purchase based on their recent activity on the site
- Recently Viewed: Show the shopper the products that they’ve recently viewed
- Trending: Recommend popular products from across the site or within a category
Recommendation Opportunities:
While the majority of our conversation was focused on Recommendation carousels that can be displayed on your site, we also discussed Messaging Recommendations that can be used in Email and SMS messages to your shoppers. Currently, we only support Messaging Recommendations for customers with Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento 2 for their e-commerce platform and Klaviyo or Dotdigital for their email marketing platform.
This is how Messaging Recommendations work: Whenever shoppers visit a site, they provide information about their interests in the form of pages they visit and the products they view. Every time a shopper views a product or adds a product to the cart, Searchspring’s personalization algorithm learns from those actions to better understand the shopper’s intent and makes predictions about what that shopper wants to buy. Those predictions generate recommendations that are used in Messaging Recommendations.