Relevancy Beats Randomness

It is said that a good sales person is someone who can read the customer’s mind way beforehand.

Fortunately, the digital age has made it a lot easier for us to be a good sales person! With the help of analytics and a few observations we can very well find out our customer’s preferences and purchasing habits. We can then use this behavior information to better serve the customer and increase sales.

In this “Howto”, we will cover only customer’s product purchase history. And how we can use Smart Offers to configure offers based on what the customer has ordered in the past (because customer’s purchase history matters a lot). Remember, this is much more powerful than offering any product, and will boost conversions greatly.

But before we get into technicals, let’s understand the psychological factors influencing purchases first.

If we ponder, we will see that every customer has a particular pattern of purchasing.

If Jeremy is a technical person his product purchases/searches will skew towards technology/electronics/gadget related items. So it makes more sense for us to offer him an electronic item rather than a painting brush.

Similarly, if Amy bought an A-line skirt earlier, we can create an offer for a side slit or pleated skirt.. Or if she purchased grey colored skirt, we may want to offer matching blouses at 20% discount.

We will certainly increase the chances of Jeremy and Amy buying another product if we made such an offer.

Strategies

Smart Offers – our popular marketing plugin for WooCommerce – lets you define flexible, rule based offers and create a complete sales funnel.

Here are some of the strategies we can use to target repeat customers, based on their purchase history.

  • Offer a Bundle: If someone had purchased a shirt for $25 earlier, we can offer a bundle of 3 for $55.
  • Free Gifts: If a customer has purchased more than $1500 with us so far, we can give her a free gift – something that she will like.
  • Loyalty Offers: For customers who signed up a while ago, and have spent $500 with us, we can show discount coupon or store credit in the Smart Offer description. This will even trigger additional purchases!
  • Upsells: We can show an offer for a higher priced, higher value product, for a discount, if the customer has ordered a lower priced product earlier.
  • Complete the Package Offers: For all customers that bought trousers and shirts, but haven’t bought a belt yet, we can show a special offer to encourage them to “complete the package”!

Rule Setup

Here are a some possible rules while creating Smart Offers.

offer-rules-based-on-product-purchase-history

upsell-a-paid-version-to-free-customers

Offer Display

We can show these offers on My Account page, Cart page or Checkout page. We can decide what will be the best place to show the offer – if the customer was buying some laptop accessory, and he purchased a laptop already, we can show him promotional items on the cart or checkout page itself. Or we can show a store credit on My Account to encourage additional purchases.

Here’s how a Smart Offer may show up…

A Smart Offer

Create A Funnel

One of the other benefit with Smart Offers is that we can setup a full sales funnel. We can select what should happen when the customer accepts or skips the offer. This way, we can either show thank you messages or offer additional promotions to maximize conversions.

Let’s Win Customers!!

Making Smart Offers using customer’s order history is a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal! We wish you the best results!

Additional Documentation

Checkout Smart Offers Additional Documentation