“How to increase online sales?” You may have searched several websites to find the best answer. But usually won’t find anything except ideas about discounts, website improvements, and paid ads.
Today, I want to pull a rabbit out of my hat. It’s called Wishlist. A magic tool that helps you read your customer’s mind.
I’ll show you how different businesses use wishlists to increase sales and offer you some ideas to try on your online shop. Also, you’ll learn how to add wishlist button in woocommerce. But first, let me prove this magic is not fake.
Magic or Fake: Do Wishlists Really Increase Online Sales?
You might say, “Well, it should. If not, why would I keep reading?”. You’re right. But if you wonder how wishlists increase online sales, here is a brief explanation.
✅ Improve user experience
If your visitors feel satisfied through the shopping process, they will make a purchase and definitely come back later. Wishlists can improve customer experience by
- Simplifying the shopping process: Save items for later and find them easily.
- Comparing prices: Create lists in different stores to look for the best price.
- Sharing favorite items: Share gift suggestions on special occasions.
✅ SEO optimization
What is better than being a top-rated website on Google? Wishlists enhance your rankings by :
- Decreasing bounce rate: Spend more time on site to find favorite items
- Reducing cart abandonment: Add to wishlist instead of the cart
- Managing ghost orders: Keep wishlist items available to buy for other leads
Now that you have some information to use wishlists, it’s time to test magic wishlist ideas to increase online sales. Let the Houdini show begin!
Become a Magician: Ideas to Increase Online Sales with Wishlists
We don’t use swords or chains here. You need plugins and marketing strategies to be a sales magician. Let’s gather these essentials through this long journey.
✅ Use Wishlists to Build Customer Loyalty
Turning visitors into customers is like your first goal in a football match. It’s hard to acquire, but there are many ways to maintain it. One of them is utilizing wishlists.
Wishlists are a positive step toward becoming a trustworthy brand. They open shortcuts to increase sales and loyalty that you didn’t know existed before. I’ll show you some of them below.
🔸Encourage your customers
Customers should create an account to save their wishlist. It means you have both their email and favorite items. So there is a wonderful opportunity to bring more information about their wishlist items.
This information falls into two categories:
♦ Product information
Any data that refers directly to your items come here. It can be an additional description, price update, or product suggestion. The only rule is that each data should cover the customer’s favorite items completely. Look at what Udemy does in this case.
Udemy finds your favorite topics based on the courses you added to your wishlist. It usually offers some of your liked courses besides similar items at a lower price. Then it shows what you viewed recently and suggests other courses you may be interested in.
You may ask how to implement this idea. I recommend using TI WooCommerce Wishlist Plugin. It enables your customers to add products to their wishlists and share them with friends and family. Besides, it offers several types of promotional emails, which is great for increasing online sales.
♦ Useful content
What is useful to customers? Any information that helps them with their favorite items. Archdaily is a website about the construction industry. See how they engage customers with content.
Archdaily sends you weekly updates based on the projects customers mostly saved to their profiles. First, they show you their recommended articles. Then you will face the most favorite content in each category.
To get the best result from this strategy, you should prepare related content. These contents can be:
- Blog posts
- Social proof
- How-to videos
Try to promote your items with at least one of the mentioned contents. For example, if you run a clothing store, publish posts about fashion, and include your items smoothly.
🔸Use reciprocity
A simple example of reciprocity in everyday life: Your sister does the laundry for you if you lend your clothes.
Reciprocity is exchanging something with buyers for mutual benefit. “Something” usually is the useful content that customers like. These contents strengthen the bond that exists between you and existing clients.
LinkedIn is a great example of using reciprocity. They provide a 30-day free trial for their Premium membership, enabling free access to LinkedIn Learning courses and a double chance to get hired. This makes it hard for people to stop the payment when the free trial ends.
But you may wonder how wishlists can help increase online sales through reciprocity. Here are my ideas:
- Collect users’ birthdays. Offer discounts on some of their favorite items as a gift.
- Ask for the visitor’s email. Send testimonials about their wishlist items.
- Consider a special option for adding to the wishlist. Price comparison or extra information looks good.
Other ideas work the same way. Just be careful to be the first to give.
✅ Personalize loyalty programs
When it comes to loyalty programs, Kendrick knows it all.
It’s a secret society
All we ask is trust
All we got is us
Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty
Loyalty programs make customers feel valued, and personalization is a great way to make that happen. Wishlists can be an impactful tool here. You only need answers to 2 questions.
♦ What information do you need?
No matter what business you run, name and email are essential data you need to start. But, there are additional pieces of information that can enhance the level of personalization.
- Age
- Gender
- Profession
- Marital status
Do you offer products for different ages or genders? Consider how you want to divide your customers. This can indicate what information is most valuable to your business.
♦ What to do with this information?
With customers’ personal data and their wishlist items, you have 2 types of information. So, you should personalize your loyalty rewards based on a combination of these pieces of information.
Let me explain with an example.
Assume you run an electronics store and this is one of your client’s info:
- Age: 23
- Gender: Male
- Profession: Programmer
- Wishlist items: FIFA 22 video game, MacBook Pro
With a deep look at this information, you’ll find out each wishlist item is related to one of the customer’s personal info. A young dude that loves video games and a professional programmer that wants to improve his working tool!
So you can personalize your offers in 2 ways:
- Items based on age or profession: It can be other video games or laptops you sell.
- Items based on age and profession: A gaming mouse, additional keyboard, or streaming headphones are good options.
The key to success here is to gather the demographics of customers’ valuable data. Just search for a loyalty plugin that is powerful with data management. It does the rest for you.
✅ Manage Your Out-of-Stock Products with Wishlists
Three sentences describe your shop’s rock bottom: Customers visit your product page. It’s out of stock. They visit your competitor’s site to get what they want.
I can’t say wishlists increase online sales in this case, but they surely reduce lost customers. Wishlists help you to manage out-of-stock items in two ways.
🔸Let customers track items’ status
Fortunately, wishlists have a simple feature that allows customers to save any item they want. You can create a dashboard for them to check their overall info or simply show items’ status directly in their wishlist. as they do at Finnish Design Shop.
They mentioned in the wishlist when items would be back in stock. This quick trick will retain your customers and saves them from confusion.
🔸Inform customers when items are back in supply
Many customers will forget about their purchases or favorite items. This is where you should notify them about your inventory updates.
Email is the common way to inform customers. If you own a separate application for your store, in-app notifications are also a good option.
This task is one of the main features of every wishlist. So don’t worry about needing additional plugins.
✅ Try wishlists as social proof
Psychology beats everything in marketing. It means you have to prioritize ‘social proof,’ where people’s behaviors are influenced by the actions of others.
The added advantage that wishlists can bring as social proof is notable:
- Gaining more reviews
- Becoming more trustworthy
- Grabbing users’ attention
Check out how Francescas uses these advantages to increase online sales.
Each item shows the number of people who’ve added it to their wishlist. This is a simple way of highlighting the most popular items in your online shop, and it really works well.
MC WooCommerce Wishlist Plugin by MoreConvert is a great tool for using wishlists as social proof. It has a fully customizable appearance, and besides a smart display of product details, it enables you to define conditions and email automation.
✅ Improve offers with wishlist data
If sellers knew how much they could increase sales with categorized data, they wouldn’t be looking for strange ways to attract customers. Wishlists provide you with the data you need.
🔶 What does wishlist data show?
Sales data doesn’t always tell you what items your customers really want, but wishlists can. Let’s break it down.
♦ Wished but not bought
The most wishlisted item may not necessarily be the top-selling item, for a number of reasons:
- High prices
- Technical problems
- Usability
- Product cards
These products often have a low conversion rate, and you should troubleshoot them.
♦ Bestsellers
These products are your trade book. People love them and also buy them. If your most-wished items are your bestsellers, promote them in different ways to increase online sales:
- Promote them via email campaigns
- Place them on your homepage
- Implement cross-selling with them
Make sure to have these items enough in stock as they sell very fast.
🔶 How to analyze wishlist data?
You should note that considering an individual’s wishlist doesn’t provide useful insights. You need to collect hundreds of wishlists to get results about:
- Which product descriptions engage better
- The best price range for every product
- The most converting offers
To find these results, these few steps would help.
♦ Gather enough wishlists
Usually, you’d need to analyze at least 200 wishlists. But depending on the amount, half of your customers is a good number to get valuable insights.
♦ Track the emerging trends
After peeking at the wishlists, a range of valuable trends will appear. These trends originate from customers’ saved items, bestsellers, and purchases amount.
♦ Identify the most important items
As I told you previously, wishlists define two types of products, bestsellers, and wished-but-not-bought. Use the trends to identify each group. Both are influential in your marketing strategy.
♦ Find your customer’s way of thinking
Now you can study why your potential customers are not buying your products:
- Are prices high?
- Do they need more information about the product?
- Are they waiting for special offers?
You can answer these questions by focusing on your bestselling items. Find out why are they working well. Then utilize your best strategies on the low-selling products with an A/B test to get the finest result.
♦ Optimize your strategy
Finally, compare the patterns in your customers’ wishlists. These results help you to inform promotions, adjust prices, and optimize your marketing decisions.
Wishlist data is a clear indicator of your buyer personas. Which helps you make a deeper relationship with your customers, and ultimately, increase sales. As you know, it is easier to persuade your customers to buy if you know exactly what’s on their minds.
✅ Optimize Sales Funnel with Wishlists
Wishlists in the sales funnel? So underrated! Just google the term “sales funnel optimization” and see how different articles are suggesting similar ideas. But magic never makes you disappointed!
Wishlists have a simple mechanism but can increase online sales in ways you can’t imagine. I will mention three main issues you may face in the sales funnel.
🔸Reduce shopping cart abandonment
Poor UX design, flawed product details, or high prices, each one can cause cart abandonment. But sometimes, it happens when customers can’t find a place to save products while they are comparing items.
A wishlist is what shoppers need in this condition. Wishlists can reduce what is measured as lost revenue in 2 ways.
♦ Avoiding ghost orders
When buyers add items to their carts, they will be reserved for sale. So they are removed from the shop’s available stock. However, a wishlist item remains available for others who actually want to purchase it.
♦ Alerting customers about wishlist items
Although saving items is a good option for buyers, they still have to register to use wishlists. However, there are other ways to make the process easier. Look how Dharma Bums manages to retain leads and get their email address with wishlists.
They add a visible wishlist button next to each product card, so you can add any items you like to a wishlist without a user account. When you’re about to leave the page, they show a pop-up message to save your wishlist in exchange for your email address.
Having a potential customer’s email address beside their favorite items means you have a great opportunity to start targeted ads.
🔸Increase Conversion with Targeted Ads
I bet your mail inbox is full of generic emails you’ve ignored. Because in today’s marketing climate, customers are clever enough to figure out whether you understand their interests or you have a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
Customers are likely to open an email relating to products they like. With the help of wishlists, you can build your email marketing strategy based on the products customers are interested in.
There are several types of targeted emails you can start when a wishlisted item is:
- On sale
- Getting low in stock
- Back in stock
- At a different price
Or you can use personalized offers for their wishlisted items:
- An applicable coupon
- Related products
- Free shipping
These promotional emails are a basic part of every wishlist plugin, but there are limited plugins that give you personalization features.
YITH Wishlist has a wonderful user experience when it comes to email marketing. Using this plugin, you can send promotional emails with a few clicks.
Also, the management options and layouts that the plugin offers make it a reasonable choice for every WooCommerce store.
🔸Attract New Customers by Wishlist Sharing
Good for you; customers handle this one. Gift shopping is a famous trend that is used among people’s family and friends nowadays. Customers share wishlists on social media to help others with their gifts on special occasions.
Birthdays, Christmas, and holiday seasons are the best time for sharing wishlists. But how to let customers share wishlists is what you need to know:
- Choose a wishlist plugin to enable sharing
- Allow customers to choose whether their wishlists are private or public
- Provide a URL they can copy and paste wherever they want
- Add a sharing button for different social media
This sharing option becomes interesting when people visit your store to buy a friend’s wishlisted item: They usually stick around and become new customers!
In fact, the shared wishlist is a kind of social proof here. They believe their friend’s choice is reliable, and they may like your products too.
Wow! You’ve come this far. I see you are a talented magician. Are you ready to learn some great master’s experiences?
What Great Magicians Did? Useful Wishlist Experiences to Increase Sales
Giving ideas? Easy. Execution? That’s the problem.
No matter how much you are dominant on a concept. As long as you don’t see comparable results, you can’t successfully perform your idea.
I believe getting familiar with different wishlist experiences can illustrate your path to increasing online sales with wishlist.
✅ Wishlist sharing: Target
Target allows customers to save products as “Favorites”. Then this favorites list can be shared with others. Each shareable wishlist contains up to 20 items, and users can share them either as individual items or as a complete list.
The Favorites list feature is available to those who register on the Target website. After registration, they have additional benefits like special offers and money-saving deals through Target Circle.
✅ Personalized Offers: Shein
Whenever you add an item to your wishlist, Shein makes a wonderful product recommendation based on your saved items. Instead of random suggestions of unrelated products, you’ll see 2 types of personalized offers.
Shein offers a “Find Similar” button directly over the product image. By clicking on this button, you’ll face a new page created particularly for that item with suggestions similar in design, material, and price.
Another recommendation is shown below your saved items. This section contains more general offers and usually shows items that are complementary to your saved items. This is a great place to run up-sells and cross-sells.
✅ Lead Generation with Wishlists: ASOS
What is the best way to encourage potential customers to browse your site and keep finding their favorite items? Removing friction!
ASOS allows shoppers to add items to their wishlist without signing in or registering. On the same device, wishlist items remain visible whenever the customer returns.
Setting up an account usually takes time. If customers want to do an ordinary search, it will make them frustrated. ASOS builds customer satisfaction by removing this friction.
✅ Improved Wishlist User Experience: Abercrombie & Fitch
When it comes to wishlist user experience, Abercrombie does a great job. They have designed a user-friendly interface that instantly acts when someone clicks on the “save for later” button.
Once you click on this button, it changes to display “saved!”. This is important because customers usually reload the website after saving an item, and showing the “saved” message confirms the item has been a favorite.
After saving the item, customers face a pop-up that can show their wishlist items. This icon remains visible while customers are scrolling through a product listing page. This way, they can see their favorite items without having to leave the page and go to the wishlist itself. Another advantage for Abercrombie’s UX.
So we should say you’ve officially become a wishlist magician! As the final word, let me reveal amazing tricks that people always fall for.
Magic Tricks Revealed: Wishlist Best Practices
Creating a good user experience is the key to increasing online sales with wishlists. In all shapes and sizes, there are vital features they should all have to make a memorable customer experience. Here are the most important things to focus on.
- Make the wishlist icon easily recognizable. Above or near the add-to-cart fold can be a great location.
- After saving an out-of-stock item, immediately notify customers and ask if they want to get informed when the item is charged.
- Bundle offers are a great option for saved items. Use it to increase the average order value.
- Allow your customers to create multiple wishlists. This becomes critical when they want to create separate lists for every occasion.
- Utilize pop-ups to encourage visitors to use wishlists. The prime time is after they spend some time on a product page or when they are about to exit.
Conclusion: Say Hi to Our Newest Wishlist Magician!
Wishlists are one of the few chances both customers and sellers find them useful. Sellers get important data and targeted marketing opportunities, and shoppers find a place to save their favorite items until they’re ready to buy.
As a wishlist expert, you know that you don’t need to have a big eCommerce company to start using it. So get ready to use your powers to attract new customers and increase sales!
By the way, please inform us whenever you try one of these ideas. The magical world needs your opinions. Or if you got more Magic Tricks, let us know in the comments below!
