Many online shops are also offering a blog to generate SEO traffic and inform their customers of interesting updates. Blogs are a great way to make an online shop feel more human and up-to-date when updated regularly. But as shop owner the main goal of a blog is of course to bring traffic back to the online shop and also convert blog visitors to online shop customers.
Therefore here are the 5 reasons why you should offer automated product recommendations in an online shop blog.
Reason 1: Make Your Blog Posts Sell
Most of the blog posts in supporting e-commerce blogs are talking about new products, changes in style, product seasons, a sale etc. After or while informing your customers, they should always have the possibility to buy something, which is missing in so many blogs. In static blogs the visitor has to navigate manually to the online shop and then search for the products he read about. Always offer these products directly in your blog posts and also other fitting products like e.g. personalized recommendations. This is easily possible with automated product recommendations without additional effort. Your blog visitors will thank you with a higher conversion rate.
Reason 2: SEO Traffic is Worthier Than SEA Traffic
An e-commerce blog mostly exists to improve generic SEO traffic for your online shop. The visitors coming through this sales channel were searching for exactly the content you are offering in your blog. Also, these visitors regularly stay much longer on your site and the chance to convert them is much higher than with dumb paid SEA traffic in your online shop. Because of these reasons you should offer product recommendations on your blog pages to make this worthy high quality traffic convert.
Reason 3: Avoid Potential Customers Leave Your Site
How are you behaving when reading a blog post? If interesting, you probably completely read the article, have a short look at suggested links below the article and if you came from a search engine, you use the browser back button to go back to the search results and visit the next interesting result. That’s where you lose your conversion chance as a shop owner!
Exactly at this point you have to interrupt the user by offering interesting and perfectly matching product recommendations. Make your own products more interesting than the next search results on Google. Only when you convince your visitors to visit your shop here, you have the chance to convert them. And of course product recommendations don‘t only make sense at the end of your posts – offer them also in between and give your posts more product context and flexibility.
Reason 4: Your Blog as Starting Point for a Perfect E-Commerce Customer Journey
Think about the traffic of your online shop. There are lot‘s of starting points for your onsite customer journey:
- Paid SEA visits
- Returning customers
- Newsletter clicks
- Generic SEO traffic
Especially the last one, generic SEO traffic, is the one where your potential customers at first get in touch with your blog. So the starting point for your online shop‘s customer journey then suddenly is your blog! Then you have to ask yourself: „Ok, now I have lot‘s of generic SEO traffic, but how can I make them visit my shop?“. And one of the answers is: use the recommendation engine which is already used in your online shop. Then you have a win-win situation: on the one hand you improve the performance of the recommendations also with your blog traffic and on the other you use the intelligent recommendations generated by your shop‘s traffic in your blog.
Reason 5: Automated Product Recommendations are Always Up-to-date
You probably know this szenario: you are constantly creating great blog posts with static links back to your shop products. But with a season change all these products are gone. Or your products are out of stock. This can be really bad for your customer journey and also your SEO rankings. With automated product recommendations instead of static links you always only offer currently available products. You can also fall back to personalized recommendations if e.g. the season is changing. So you avoid additional effort to update old blog posts and dead links and therefore disappointed blog visitors will never be a topic on your todo list again.
Automate Your Blog Product Recommendations
With the 5 reasons above you‘ve learned why you should no longer pass on automated product recommendations in your online shop blog. You can completely automate the recommenced products, guide the traffic into your shop catalog and improve your conversion rate with this traffic.
If you are searching for a personalization solution offering this, try Recolize. Our unique cross-domain feature offers the possibility to integrate your product recommendations e.g. into your WordPress blog with 2 clicks. Furthermore you have the possibility to integrate your recommendations also on all your other domains like e.g. on your company website. Visit the reference page of our customer Resch&Frisch who does exactly this on his TYPO3 company website.
