The race is on for websites to offer as engaging a customer experience as possible – through fast and relevant site search, multimedia content, customer reviews and other tactics designed to keep visitors on the site longer. Along with raising the bar on the customer experience comes the need to serve visitors early in the shopping process and keep their attention until they turn into serious shoppers who’ll actually buy.
Today, I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on “Smarter e-Commerce” with Paul Sondregger of Endeca at the Gilbane Content Management Conference in San Francisco (Hadley Reynolds of IDC will be moderating). We’ll be discussing, among other things, how to engage buyers who have different intentions in terms of making a purchase on your site, depending on where they are in the buying cycle. For instance, someone who’s merely trying to gather information – if they’re shopping for an expensive product and need to know more before they commit to the purchase – needs to be impressed by the quality of information, and great customer service. This will encourage them to return when they’re ready to buy.
On the other hand, if visitors are ready to buy today, they’re much more likely to use site search, which means your site search feature needs to be fast and relevant if you want to convert that customer. And since we know that people convert at a higher rate when they use site search, it’s especially important that your site is designed in such a way that site search is rich and engaging and readily accessible.
If you’re attending the Gilbane conference, please stop by our session and discover more about what it takes to turn browsers into buyers. The session, “Smarter e-Commerce,” takes place at 3:30pm today as part of the Customers & Engagement track.
