Every e-commerce marketer wants to make the customer experience seamless, convenient, and delightful. And while it is true that you should get a wishlist to enable customer convenience, that’s not the only reason why e-commerce marketers love wishlists. 

Wishlists also present a treasure trove of insights that allow you to personalize and improve the content of conversation-starters with your customers, which will lead to increased revenue. 

In this blog, we’ll break down easy ways to increase your revenue using the Swym wishlist feature and look at examples and case studies of companies who have gotten this right.

Top revenue-focused wishlist moves in 2024

1. Accelerate Sales With Wishlist-linked Alerts

When customers add a product to their wishlist, they’re telling you they love the product. But countless barriers can hinder that desire turning into a sale for your e-commerce store. Customers could be holding out on purchasing because they want to think about their purchase. Or they could be researching items for an upcoming event, vacation, or gifting occasion. Perhaps they want to compare prices with another store. They could be waiting for pay-day. Or maybe they just added the product to their wishlist while they were browsing casually. 

While the reasons for postponing a purchase are endless, your goal is to nudge the customer to make the purchase without being overbearing, and without sounding naggy. 

Your wishlist feature can help with this because you can use wishlist items to accelerate wishlist-linked purchases with reminders, low-stock alerts, back-in-stock alerts, and time-based discounts. 

Let’s imagine a scenario where a customer has added a tracksuit to their wishlist, but hasn’t gone ahead and hit that buy button for a few days to a week.

You can try any of the following moves: 

Reminders: 

Your message could, for example, say: 

<Customer Name>, forgetting something? You added our xyz Tracksuit to your wishlist.

Don’t forget. Working out is more fun when you do it in style. 

An ad served via social feed: 

This personalized ad could feature the wishlisted item, a series of similar items that might pique their interest, or an offer that features the wishlisted item. 

An SMS with a 24-hour discount code:  

You could try something like: 

It’s your lucky day, <customer name>, the xyz Tracksuit you love is eligible for a 5% discount as part of our WednesdayShoppersDay offer. Don’t miss out, buy today! 

A low-stock emailer: 

This might say something like: 

<Customer name> you’ve got great taste! The XYZ Tracksuit that you selected is a

hot-selling favorite. Hurry to make your purchase while stocks last!

A simple low stock alert: 

Only 3 pieces of XYZ tracksuit remaining 

<Buy Now Button> 

Want to know which type of move to try when? Read this helpful resource to find out what type of message is most likely to trigger customers to buy. 

2. Ramp Up Databases, Demand, and Social Proof Wishlist-linked Contests 

You know how valuable reviews and testimonials are for your brand, especially when you’re a nascent brand and yet to garner trust, but pretty much throughout your brand journey. Moreover, getting people talking to each other about your brand is always going to be excellent marketing. 

A wishlist-sharing contest, like the one conducted by our client Popflex (more on this in the section below), can be just the catalyst you need to get these conversations flowing in a way that looks and feels fairly organic. 

When you get customers to add a pre-defined dollar value of products to their wishlists, here’s what you effectively achieve: 

1. You draw your customers back to their stores and wishlists, effectively getting their attention 
2. You encourage other customers to create customer accounts and wishlists 
3. You funnel your social-only audience into your email messaging audience because you can ask for email addresses as part of the campaign 
4. You create social proof in high volumes. New customers learn about your brand, or remember your brand, or develop a higher level of affinity with your brand as they observe friends and family sharing wishlists of their most-loved products as part of your wishlist sharing campaign 

For example, you might run a campaign on email, WhatsApp and social asking customers to add $500 worth of products to their wishlist, and enter themselves into the contest. 

In doing so, you could drive all your social and WhatsApp audiences into your email marketing funnel, and maybe even add customers to your WhatsApp marketing funnel. You could also urge other actions at this point. For example, you might let customers “gain extra points” for creating customer accounts, or referring friends. 

You can picture regular folks sharing their wishlist, each influencing small clusters of their friends and family positively about your brand. Maybe Michelle’s colleagues learn that you’re the brand where she gets her silk shirts that they often compliment her on. Or Jeff’s friends learn that you have really great leather belts.

Moreover, you can turn up the dial on your wishlist-sharing by using collaborations with influencers and celebrities to drive aspirational social proof and a wider reach. 

3. Improve CX, Messaging and Conversions With Data-based Segmentation And List-Sharing  

Your wishlist app gathers, and organizes customer data based on their wishlist activities and also their browsing behavior on your website. This allows you to personalize your customer accounts page and greet customers with a view of their wishlisted, recently viewed, saved to cart, and previously viewed products that are now back in stock. 

A customized customer accounts page drives convenience because shoppers don’t have to click a few times or search for what they came back to find. It also drives purchase intent because instead of seeing products at random as they “walk into” your e-store, they are welcomed by what they are already fascinated with. 

All that wishlist data and other on-site behavior can also help you segment customers effectively. For example, your Swym Wishlist Plus app lets you segregate customers by product categories that they explore, the channels they are most active on, frequent vs one-time buyers, browsing vs ready to purchase shoppers, shopping for themselves versus shopping for gifts and more. 

You can then use that data to reignite purchase intent, cross-sell and upsell, effectively bringing your customer back to your store. In a nutshell, this is what it might look like: 

Cross-sell: Use a wishlisted, heavily browsed product (or even a product from their purchase history) to recommend a related product.

Upsell: Use a recently purchased product to sell another product or prompt an upgrade. For instance, you might promote a pair of sneakers to a shopper who purchased workout attire. 

Reignite purchase intent: Use wishlisted items to create recall, with reminders that start something like “Forgetting something?” 

Push for conversion: You can also use heavily browsed items and wishlist data to encourage FOMO-driven purchases by sending low-stock alerts, back-in-stock alerts, price-drop alerts, or limited validity discounts. 

Activate social selling: Have a list-sharing campaign that promises discounts or the chance for shoppers to win all the items on their wishlists and watch your followers conduct all your marketing for you. Check out a winning example of this in the next section!

Read these helpful pointers to learn more about how to craft data driven marketing messages that actually convert, using your Swym Wishlist Plus data. 

Case Studies And Examples Of Brands Optimizing Wishlist-based Marketing 

Case studies from the Swym stable

1. POPFLEX Wishlist Giveaway Campaign 

Goal: Drive social subscribers to retention programmes 

Wishlist move used: Win Your Wishlist campaign

Outcomes: 

• 90,000 participants in the Wishlist campaign
• 45,000 new contacts for POPFLEX’s email marketing audience 

Read more about the campaign here. 

2. The Block Zone 

Goal: Connect customer preference data to marketing communications 

Wishlist moves used: 

i) Wishlist Plus’ native integration with Klaviyo: To create personalized flows based on customers’ wishlist actions, coupled with inventory triggers. 

ii) Advantage+ catalog ads (previously known as Dynamic Product Ads): To remarket to customers using Wishlist Plus’ Meta Pixel integration

iii) Data-linked streamlining: 

• Used wishlist data to identify which pages high traffic but low revenue, thus zeroing in on pages that needed work (better quality images, complete product descriptions etc) 
• Launched product bundling practices using wishlist data that pointed to the most popular products, and help them find correlations between these products. 

Outcomes:

• 35% increase in AOV through wishlist
• 6% lift in revenue
• 9X increase in conversion rate

3. A women’s fashion brand 

Goal: Get email subscribers to download its new mobile app. 

Wishlist move used: Win Your Wishlist Campaign

Outcomes: 

• 45% boost in wishlist actions during the campaign. 
• 1.3% overall increase in mobile app conversions. 
• 40% increase in revenue for the month following the campaign compared to the preceding month.

4. An online fashion boutique 

Goal: Improve social media following and engagement 

Wishlist move used: Win Your Wishlist campaign

Outcomes: 

• 27,800 wishlist actions in the campaign month, amounting to a 50% increase over the previous week’s 18,800 wishlist actions. 
• 60% increase in wishlist actions and a 100% increase in revenue compared to the preceding month in the post-campaign month.
• 2x engagement rates on campaign posts compared to regular posts.  

Examples from leading brands 

5. Tiffany’s Holiday Wishlists

Tiffany & Co taps into celebrity affiliates and trending influencers and publicizes their wishlists to drive aspiration and demand around the Holiday gifting season. 

6. Amazon’s Baby Wishlist

Amazon procures valuable customer data by offering a “free gift” upon creating a wishlist and adding at least Rs 750 worth of items to it. Its sharing features benefit the shopper-mom-to-be because she can expect items that she wants (and avoid duplicates), and also Amazon, because recipients will very likely simply buy the items from the mom’s 

wishlist, or in other words, shop more on Amazon. 

3. Nike’s Wishlist With A Twist

This example might be a few years old, but maybe that will mean that people won’t remember that Nike did it before you. It’s also too good to miss. 

Nike added aspiration, a sense of pride around achievements and the overall essence of its “Just Do It” slogan to its wishlist campaign by urging participants to share an amazing achievement coupled with a wishlist to win everything on the wishlist, “and more”. Besides creating aspiration around Nike items, the brand effectively tapped into “leaders” who people would look up to because they were specifically speaking to an audience that “made something happen” or “won a race” or “finished one against all odds”. Moreover, since they were speaking about sporting achievements, they also tapped into an audience that would be ripe for their shoes and sporting apparel, 

Strap In For Revenue Take-Off

As you’ve observed in this blog, getting a wishlist feature is good for your customers and for your business. Besides driving customer convenience, there are countless ways to tap into all the data that customers share with you when you offer them a wishlist feature. From driving purchase intent with customized customer accounts pages to creating FOMO with low-stock alerts on wishlisted items, contextualized friendly reminders, related product recommendations and more, you can get really creative with how you can use your wishlist’s features and data. 

Try Wishlist Plus to see the difference, like all the Swym customers on this list. You can start by watching how it works here.