At Movable Ink, we’re dedicated to helping marketers create the kind of scalable, highly-personalized campaigns that engage customers and ultimately drive results. We know how important it is to drive efficiency, save time, and make the most out of your existing martech stack – especially in today’s economic climate.
As part of our ongoing Inkredible Integrations blog series, we’re highlighting the many ways our clients are leveraging Movable Ink’s partner integrations to get the most out of their tech stack and adapt their marketing communications to their customers’ changing behaviors.
In this post, we’ll look at how marketers can create relevant experiences and build trust with personalized recommendations, ratings, and reviews.
Drive More Purchases with Personalized Product Recommendations
A customer-centric marketing strategy is essential for brands looking to drive retention and LTV. But your customers’ preferences and buying habits are always changing. As a brand, how can you keep up with their changing needs while continuing to drive value in all of your marketing communications?
Personalized product recommendations that automatically update at every moment of engagement ensure that you’re always sending your customers relevant content. You can incorporate your customers’ recent browsing behaviors, customer attributes, product affinities, and algorithms to create a personalized experience that drives them to buy.
One example of this for retail apparel brands is the popular “Complete the Look” functionality that shows shoppers how they can complete an outfit based on their previous purchase or browsing behavior. This is incredibly helpful for shoppers since it surfaces new products that they may not have otherwise known about.
Movable Ink’s partner integration with FindMine helps marketers do exactly that, using AI to help shoppers style outfits based on their preferences. To learn more about FindMine and why personalized recommendations are key in a post-pandemic world, subscribe and listen to our vodcast episode with John Swords, Head of Customer Experience at FindMine.
Use personalized recommendations based on your customer’s previous purchases.
Use personalized recommendations in loyalty campaigns.
Influence More Purchases with Customer Ratings & Reviews
Social proof is powerful for driving conversions. According to Trustpilot, over 93% of consumers said they read reviews before buying online from an unfamiliar company, and 95% of consumers lose trust in a company who deletes or hides bad reviews. There’s no doubt about it: online reputation is everything, and consumers want to see ratings and reviews before they make a purchase.
That’s why authentic, real-time ratings and reviews within email are powerful for boosting conversions. One of the most compelling ways to do this is to include top-rated products, along with their star-ratings, into your email promotions like Screwfix does in this example.
Of course, authenticity is always key, so it’s important to include reviews that come from a trusted, consumer-facing brand. Trustpilot, a powerful review platform, recommends including the customer’s voice into your campaigns along with ratings to further drive authenticity. This is another powerful way to convince and compel people to buy. In the example below from TaxSlayer, the brand includes their best ratings and testimonials from a trusted source within their emails – and it drove incredible results.
Coupling customer reviews and ratings with recently browsed, abandoned, purchased, or pre-selected products is one of the best ways to create a relevant shopping experience. This is a great way to provide value in your email campaigns, since the customer doesn’t need to go searching for reviews of the products they’re interested in.
Use ratings to help your customer complete a purchase.
Use ratings in loyalty emails.
Bonus: 3 tips for gathering meaningful user-generated content
Including ratings and reviews within your email campaigns is one thing, but gathering them from your customers can be a challenge.
Furthermore, as the eCommerce landscape continues to evolve, having basic user-generated content is certainly helpful but isn’t enough to win over savvy shoppers. Brands that are looking to take their marketing to the next level need to focus their efforts on collecting more influential UGC that convinces and converts.
Yotpo, a leading eCommerce marketing platform, recommends these three advanced strategies brands can use to gather more meaningful UGC:
- Guide customers to leave more informative reviews
While a one-word review can be helpful, shoppers crave more detailed feedback to help make informed decisions. Instead of sending a general review request, nudge shoppers in the right direction by being specific about the topics you’d like feedback on. Include prompts for topics like quality, functionality, and overall customer experience into Mail After Purchase emails and ask multiple-choice questions for even more structured feedback.
Greats shared multiple-choice questions to tackle two specific topics: comfort and size
- Encourage shoppers to submit high-quality images
It’s no secret that customer photos images are extremely useful for shoppers. However, it can be tricky to get shoppers to send in authentic photos that are on par with your brand’s professional photography. To strike the right balance, ask your customers to submit photos that follow specific guidelines to generate on-brand UGC that matches your aesthetic.
Steve Madden did just that, and the resulting images are both authentic and on-brand
- Maximize Engagement Through SMS
Most brands rely on email to connect with customers, announce promotions, or ask for feedback. However, as shopping becomes increasingly mobile, brands can adapt to meet shoppers where they already are by adding SMS to their marketing mix. With 98% of text messages being read compared to only 20% of emails, SMS is a highly-engaging channel that drives ROI, while creating the personalized experiences that shoppers crave.
Movable Ink has a number of partner integrations for recommendations and reviews. To learn more, visit the Exchange.