What’s New in Nosto: Boost Product Relevancy with Product Variant Affinities
Over the past few months, Nosto clients have shown interest in leveraging product variant data to serve a hyper-personalized experience.
You spoke, we listened! We’ve released the missing piece to build the most advanced customer experience: Product Variant Affinities. This new release extends our personalization capabilities to enable retailers to merchandise their online store with products that fit within their shoppers’ most preferred variants, like size and color.
Let’s dive into Product Variant Affinities and how they can enhance product relevancy and ultimately conversions.
What is a product variant and why should you care?
As a digital retailer, you certainly have products that have multiple options such as size, color, prints, materials, or even scents in your catalog. Those are called variants, but are also known as stock keeping units (SKUs).
Product variants are a crucial buying decision factor that can make or break a sale. A shopper who selects a T-shirt in size “L” is providing a precious indication of interest towards his preferred size, and there are poor chances that he’ll buy this product in other sizes.
However, it’s not unusual for shoppers to receive product recommendations that don’t fit within their individual preferences. In certain cases, this lack of hyper-personalization can lead to frustration on the shopper’s side, and missed opportunities on the retailer’s side.
That’s why in the context of product discovery, you shouldn’t always think product first, but variant first.
Boost relevancy by leveraging untapped product variant data
In order to deliver a hyper-personalized experience, it’s necessary to harness all the signals of interest your shoppers provide through their interactions on site, including common actions like clicking on a size or a color on a product page.
Unfortunately, variant details are often untapped because of the technical difficulties involved in collecting this information and then making use of it.
The good news? Nosto now empowers digital retailers to utilize this data goldmine with Product Variant Affinities support.
Product Variant Affinities enables Nosto retailers to feature products that fit within their shoppers’ preferred product variants on Product Recommendations across the site… And more to come!
What use cases can be solved by leveraging Product Variant Affinities?
Harness the shopper’s direct interactions
When a shopper interacts with a product variant, commonly by selecting a size on a product page, Nosto can ingest this last interaction and immediately adapt the product recommendations on the current page.
- On Product Page
Recommend alternative products that are available in a shopper’s selected size and/or color. The recommendation can be surfaced only when the variants are selected (see example below), or, simply auto-adjust recommended products on an existing recommendation slot.
On Araks online store, when the shopper selects a size that is out of stock, a recommendation immediately surfaces alternative products that are available in the shopper’s size.
- On Cart Page
Adjust cross-sell recommendations to display products available in the shopper’s preferred size or colors.
Harness the shopper’s known affinities
Nosto also remembers shopper’s affinities towards a variant attribute from product pages actions, cart actions, and purchases, which involve a product variant. As a result, experiences can be adjusted across all pages and during multiple sessions to match these buying signals without a direct interaction from the shopper.
- Auto-adjust any product recommendation to the shopper’s favorite variant across all page types.
Chelsea Peers enabled the known affinities option so that Nosto remembers the shopper’s preferred size to auto-adjust their recommendation on product pages with products available in the shopper’s size.
- Automatic variant weighting in the email widgets
E.g: In emails, only include products that are not only related to the shopper’s previous purchase, but also available in the same size or color.
Design tips that make a difference
- Display a ribbon over the product image to indicate that the recommended items are available in the shopper’s size. This will eliminate the frustration of unnecessary clicks on products the shopper won’t buy and ultimately enhance his experience.
- If you have alternative images for your different product variants, make sure to activate them in the Nosto backend with the Personalized Image option to switch the default product image with the image from the shopper’s preferred product variant.
La Blanca is not only showing products available in the shopper’s preferred size, but also surfacing the matching image resulting in a much more relevant experience.
Why should you leverage Product Variant Affinities?
- Provide unparalleled personalized shopping experiences while featuring products that shoppers are most likely to buy.
- Enhance product discovery relevancy at all touch points for better add-to-cart rate and, ultimately, higher conversion rate.
- Offer more efficient cross-selling, resulting in improved AOV.
- Get higher click-through rate on product recommendations that retain shoppers on site.
- Enhance brand image with a customer centric approach to build brand loyalty for a better repurchase rate.
Ready to get started?
If you’re an existing Nosto client looking to better utilize the new Product Variant Affinities capability within your personalization strategy, read our help article to get started or reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
New to Nosto? Check out the modules within our Commerce Experience Platform to see what you could be using to improve product relevancy and so much more! Or, simply request a demo today.
