Boosting Sales in B2B: How to Leverage Product Recommendations

Customization manually can be a time-consuming and tedious task, especially in the case of B2B organizations with tens of thousands of stock-keeping units in their catalog. However, with the help of product recommendations, B2B companies can offer the right product to the accurate customer at the right point in time.

Table of Contents

1. What is a product recommendation?

2. How does product recommendation work?

3. Benefits of product recommendation

1. Drive engagement 
2. Build efficiency
3. Boost revenue
4. Customer satisfaction

4. Ways to boost sales through product recommendations

1. Machine learning
2. Upsell, down-sell & cross-selling‍
3. Home page recommendations 
4. Deals page
5. Category Recommendations
6. Product page recommendations
7. Shopping cart recommendations
8. On-site search result recommendation
9. Order confirmation recommendations
10. Personalized email recommendations

5. Conclusion

What is a product recommendation?

Product recommendations are part of an eCommerce customization strategy. Products are dynamically suggested to a user on a web page, application, or via email, based on the browsing behavior of the customer and shopping attributes, providing a customized shopping experience. Therefore, product recommendations are vital to companies that have a diverse product catalog. 

How do product recommendations work?

Product recommendation software and solutions are considered essential & vital for online retailers. It’s pretty basic to get started with the implementation. However, while retailers use them for an extended period, personalized recommendations can be challenging to deploy due to lag in data processing, limitations on compound data sets, and some solutions'  incompetence to display offers across all customer touchpoints. 

Machine learning helps to ease the obstacles faced above with the ability to extract real-time behavioral context from all mediums and use it to give out recommendations and suggestions at the moment.

Benefits of product recommendations

Here are some of the key benefits of product recommendations:

1. Drive engagement

‍One of the most impressive benefits of search engines is boosting sales for online vendors and merchants. With multiple recommendation drives such as ‘recommended for you’, ‘people who bought this product’, ‘also bought related items’, ‘bestsellers’, and more, online platforms can offer web browsers more choices when customers are browsing and shopping. Simultaneously, these methods pave the way to the rise in the number of products and the value per order.

2. Build efficiency

By implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning to boost product recommendations, You allow the Algorithm to optimize for the best product without requiring you to establish manual rules that are time and again demanding to create and difficult to sustain. Instead, you can focus on other responsibilities while you let the Algorithm run through the website. Additionally, the product Recommendations dashboard gives your team vital insights that help you optimize your products and, in turn, your location. Thus, you can quickly and easily identify emerging trends and better understand your products that serve specific customers. 

3. Boost revenue

‍By upgrading your cross-sell and upsell strategy, you can boost revenue for your company. There are several ways product recommendations can help boost a company's revenue, Evaluate margin by-products, increase lines per order, increase conversion rate, and grow revenue. 

4. Customer satisfaction

Product recommendations tend to create a sense of gratification among customers during their searching session and even after it. When they enter specific keywords to search for the products they want, the algorithms will inspect multiple criteria like keywords and history of purchases to predict customer preferences. Therefore, visitors of the website can receive appropriate suggested products when they are shopping. When they finish purchasing a product, admins of the shop can also send recommendations to customers via their emails or their next shopping session. The apt suggestions at the correct time make it easier for web browsers to find out what they want. This is how product recommendation engines produce customer retention for all the visitors of their website.

Ways to boost sales through product recommendations

Here are some simple  product recommendation techniques to boost sales:

1. Machine learning

Machine learning-based product recommendations use this real-time multi-medium data to acknowledge and act on patterns displayed in the behavior of the customer—for example, using data from the thousands of shoppers who have purchased on your platform to reason the purpose of new visitors. For visitors returning, such solutions can display products based on the profile of the customer—including preference of categories, favorite brands, and even colors and sizes of items—which the product recommendations engine can learn and adapt over time. 

2. Home page recommendations

‍If a customer is new to your website, they will begin to see recommendations based on the shopping patterns and products of previous buyers on your website. After purchasing, if the customer revisits your website again and signs in, they will find customized suggested products on the homepage catered for their browsing habits from the past.

3. Deals page

‍Include a Deals page that automatically displays all products being offered at a discount rate in your online store.

4. Category Recommendations

‍Category page recommendations create algorithms to offer product categories most suitable to shoppers based on their previous browsing history or history of purchases. Online retailers often fail to recognize that optimizing their product category pages can improve their overall sales.

5. Product page recommendations

‍The most obvious way to put your customized product recommendations are on the product page. Designing the most efficient way to showcase your products is a vital part, as it could either manipulate your shoppers to checkout or away from your online platform. As your customers dive deeper into your product pages, you can find out their real interests by collecting data on how they browse and search for products. Then remodel your product recommendations to adapt to the products that they are looking for.

6. Shopping cart recommendations

‍An online store's shopping cart is the last step to achieve successful conversion as this is where customer payment and information regarding the shipment process takes place. And so, some online merchants have a one-step checkout process to achieve a faster conversion rate. However, this poses a problem as steering away from specific marketing strategies like product recommendations in the shopping cart will stunt you from maximizing higher sales opportunities. Shopping cart product recommendations tend to boost the conversion rate nine times more. So, if you negate adding recommendations to your shopping cart, you're also steering away from higher conversion rates. To maximize your conversions, try implementing upselling and cross-selling techniques.

7. On-site search result recommendations

‍On-site search results can exponentially be an excellent source to recommend products. If a visitor on-site is searching for a particular item, make sure that your on-site search results page will suggest the right things based on the search keywords that the visitor has entered. If you showcase relevant products and recommend similar products, your platform can potentially have an extra 2.3% sales.

8. Order confirmation recommendations

‍If shoppers have purchased products from your online store, you don't want to stop there. The order confirmation section, which shows the items they bought, can still be an excellent place to recommend products they may find interesting and relevant to maximize chances of another purchase. 

9. Personalized email recommendations

‍Email marketing has proven to be one of the most effective marketing strategies from time to time. Email marketing is easily by far one of the most cost-efficient strategies to boost sales. But, traditional email marketing has been upgraded to facilitate more personalization. With customers wanting to receive relevant and customized messages related to their preferred product of interest, customized email recommendation is trending now. The more the shoppers receive relevant email content, the higher the email open rates, site visits, and the higher the chances of potential purchases.

10. Upsell, down-sell & cross-selling

‍Think of upselling, down-selling, and cross-selling as efficient suggestions that help your B2B customers to make the right purchase in your eCommerce platform.

Upselling is the process of driving a customer to buy a more expensive item or a product upgrade or an add-on to the initial product they are added to the cart. Thus, upselling is an effective way of increasing the value of the order. With a down-sell, you offer a different product at a lower price when a customer is not sure about purchasing.
Down selling is an efficient way to develop brand loyalty with new customers and increase the chances of purchasing customers.
Cross-selling is the process of suggesting products that are related to the item the customer is deciding to buy. Thus, Cross-selling is an effective way of increasing both order value and customer lifetime value.

Conclusion

While there are “N” number of techniques & strategies to boost sales and revenue of a company or organization, Product recommendations are an efficient technique to offer the right product to the right customer at the right time. All B2B online stores must implement product recommendations to understand the customers and showcase them with relevant products. This helps them to boost their sales and revenue while also making the customer’s experience pleasant, thus leading to better customer satisfaction. Good Luck!