Learn how to use data from Shopify wishlists to engage and convert consumers.
A wishlist is an extremely helpful feature for customers. It enables shoppers to save products of interest for later. It’s a common habit of most shoppers – to bookmark products they don’t want to buy at the moment for later.
But the wishlist feature is equally or more important for ecommerce stores, too. It’s a data mine for businesses, which they can leverage for better marketing.
Let’s look at some of the different ways in which you can use the data capture in wishlists.
What is a wishlist?
Wishlist is a feature (mostly found on the customer account page) on ecommerce sites that enables shoppers to add products they are interested in, but may want to buy at a later point.
For example, shoppers could add items that are out of stock, products that they like but want to wait a bit to buy, items that they might want to buy during sales, etc.
This is the section that customers can go to to revisit products that they had selected on your site. Hence, one of the best places to have the wishlist page is your Shopify customer account page.
For ecommerce stores, the wishlist section is a goldmine for data. Here, marketers can access data about the products that are of shoppers’ interest. Segment customers, run targeted ads, and more.
Simply put, you may not be able to read too much into it if one customer adds an item to their wishlist. But if many customers add the same item in their wish lists, that can give you various insights into what the customers are thinking.
But wish lists won’t work on their own. Shoppers aren’t going to keep visiting this section to make purchases. For all you know, they’d forget about the wishlist within a day or two. And that’s why you need to know how to use wishlist data.
8 ways to use your Shopify wishlist data
1. To segment customers based on interests
As your online business scales, the number of your customers and shoppers will keep increasing. Now, it can get difficult to follow what each and every customer is doing on your site and following up individually.
But, there’s another way to follow up with customers – customer segmentation. And this is where the wishlist feature is immensely helpful.
Suppose some customers have added baby products in the wishlist. Some others have added pet products. Some have added kids’ school bags.
You can categorize these different customers into smaller groups or segments based on the items they’ve added to the wishlists. Because they have something in common.
For example, most probably they are new parents, pet parents, or have kids who go to school. In short, segmentation helps you understand your customers’ interest and intentions.
Now, once you categorize them into different segments, it would become easier for you to come up with marketing campaigns, offers, and target them as a segment.
80% of customers expect a personalized experience from ecommerce brands. Segmentation can make personalization doable and possible.
2. To personalize communication
Consider these stats:
- 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that offer personalized experiences
- 70% of consumers base their loyalty on how well brands understand their individual needs
Now, here’s where data from wishlist can help – to provide personalized experiences to customers.
The idea is to integrate wishlists in your marketing campaigns across channels. Here are some ways to do so:
- Send personalized communication via email, web push, SMS, Messenger, etc. channels
- If a product on a customer’s wish list is low in stock, inform them via email that the product won’t be available for too long
- Use urgency and FOMO to increase sales of products in wishlists
- If a product on a wishlist is back in stock, send a notification to the customer saying ‘the item you are waiting for is back in stock’
- If customers don’t revisit their wishlist, send them a reminder. For example, ‘items in your wishlist are waiting for you’
When you use wishlist data to personalize your marketing messages, each customer would feel a personal touch and that your brand cares to understand their personal needs. This not only helps boost sales, but also enhances customer loyalty.
3. To run retargeting ads
Once shoppers add products to the wishlist, it’s possible that they may revisit the section, or completely forget about it.
The truth is, just because they added items to the wishlist, doesn’t mean they’ll surely come back for it. They might lose interest in the item, might buy it from another store, or simply don’t feel motivated enough to purchase it.
Unless, you remind them and entice them.
This is where retargeting ads on social media can help.
- By running ads of those particular products, you can remind shoppers of the products they were interested in
- You can also motivate them to purchase the items by offering a discount or some other incentive, such as free shipping, reward points, etc.
- Finally, you can also use retargeting ads to upsell and cross-sell. For example, if the customer has already bought that item, you could show them an alternative product or a complementing product.
Retargeting ads can help increase conversion rates by 150%. Wishlist is one of the best places to gather data required for retargeting.
4. To run remarketing ads
Another effective way to use data from wishlists is to run remarketing ads. Similar to what we discussed above about retargeting on social media. So, how is remarketing different from retargeting?
Remarketing primarily used channels such as search engines, third-party websites, email, SMS, web push, and Messenger to re-engage customers who have added items in their wishlists.
Through remarketing, you can run campaigns on different channels to entice customers to go back to your site and make purchases. You can follow customers where they go on the internet and show them ads of the particular products that they added in their wishlist on your site.
You can run personalized remarketing campaigns for individual customers as well as campaigns for different customer segments.
5. For better inventory management
Inventory management helps Shopify businesses determine which products and how much to re/stock and when. And wishlist data can help guide these inventory decisions. Shoppers add items to wish lists for many reasons:
- They are interested in an item but cannot/ do not want to buy it at present
- An item is out of stock
- They want to think before buying and may not buy it
Here’s how wishlist data helps better inventory management:
- By getting a sense of how many customers have added the same item in the wishlist, you can assess how many you already have and how many you’d have to order to fulfill orders
- Based on the wishlist data, if you want to run upselling or cross-selling campaigns, you will get to know which items you should stock in your inventory and how many
- Many customers wait to buy items from their wishlist when there’s a sale/ discount. Hence, you’d know how much you should restock before you start your sale
- Finally, wishlist data simply helps to understand how many products are added to a wishlist and how many actually got bought. This helps with inventory management
6. For better business decisions
For ecommerce retailers, the most important business decisions are around their products.
- Which product to stock more
- Which product to eliminate
- Which new products to add to the site
- Which products to modify
- Which products to group together
And when you have a clear idea about customers’ product interest, you can make these decisions in a way that maximizes revenue.
And this is where wishlist data helps. You can take all the above business decisions based on data from wishlists.
Moreover, wishlist data also helps to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Say for example, you launched a new product and ran ads, promoted it on social media, etc. Now, one way to measure the result of your marketing efforts is to check how many people have added that item to their wishlist.
You can also know which of your marketing tactics works and which doesn’t work. For example, if you were running a discount, free shipping, reward points etc. on different products, you can check which product has the highest additions in wishlists. Based on that, determine which promotional tactic you had used for that product.
7. To make product pricing better
60% of shoppers consider pricing as the first factor that affects their purchase decision. As we discussed above, the reasons for shoppers adding items to their wish lists could be many.
- The product is expensive and shoppers are waiting for a discount
- Shoppers are expecting more value on their purchase
- Shoppers are exploring other sites that may be offering the same product and comparing prices
If your wishlist data shows that products are being added to wish lists but not bought, one of the biggest reasons could be the pricing.
And when you have this insight, you can easily plan out marketing strategies such as discounts, deals, free shipping, etc. to improve conversions.
8. To offer better shopping assistance
You might wonder how wishlists can help you enhance shopping assistance to customers. The thing is, no matter how thorough you are, you might miss out on some information.
For instance, there could be a product that’s quite popular in wishlists, and yet, it’s not getting sold. Why? This is where wishlists can help you help customers make purchases.
Maybe the price of the product is too high, maybe the product isn’t going on sale, maybe the quality is not too great, maybe customers are waiting for an upgraded version of that product, or maybe the customer doesn’t have enough information about the product.
Once you identify such products in the wishlists, you can figure out a way to find out the reasons why it isn’t converting to sales.
That way, you can offer assistance and come up with different solutions to drive sales.
Shopify wishlists – Best practices to give customers a better experience
- Build a positive experience around wishlists so that customers enjoy the feature
- Enable customers to share many wishlists, not just one
- Enable customers to share wishlists with their friends and family members
- Plan marketing strategies around wishlists
- Make it easy to find wish lists on your Shopify site – the customer account page
- Use pop-ups to boost the use of wishlists
How do you use your Shopify wishlists page data?
As you can see, wishlist data has a huge opportunity to boost sales. However, simply gathering data isn’t enough. You have to first collect data, then analyze it, and then act on the insights you draw from the data. You’ll have to make things happen with the help of that data.
This is where Flits customer account page app for Shopify stores can help you a great deal. The best Shopify customer account app, Flits, you can add your Shopify wishlist page into the customer account page.
That way, you can make your wishlist page more visible and increase the probability of sales. When handled well, your wishlist data can turn into a powerful purchase driver.
Install Flits customer account and wishlist app on your Shopify store.
