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Is Your Merchandising Working?

Posted by Amy LindseyMerchandising, Site Search, Webinar

Just as in brick-and-mortar stores, the importance of designing your online site to sell most effectively can’t be overstated. Building online merchandising equivalents of in-store experiences promises that shoppers will not only find what they came to your site to find, but will discover products they didn’t even know they wanted, until you showed them.

Good brick-and-mortar merchandising can:

  • increase traffic by offering attractive visual experiences
  • increase sales by featuring products through promotions and displays
  • build loyalty through appealing, easy-to-access settings

The same principles apply to online merchandising; it’s just the implementation that’s a bit different. As you build out the merchandising functionality on your site, keep these best practices in mind.

Let Your Data Drive Programs

Knowing what your shoppers are interested in helps you respond to current trends and anticipate future promotional opportunities. When customers search, they’re telling you exactly what they want. Leverage data from search keywords and browsing behavior to power your search, navigation, email and advertising campaigns. With customer-generated data behind you, you’ll get the most traction for your time and money.

Everlast uses customer data to create highly relevant search and navigation results, as well as personalized recommendations. Once a personalized list is generated, the company uses it in targeted email and advertising campaigns. Techniques like this have brought Everlast 6x higher conversions site wide.

everlast-personalized

 Make Discovery Easy

Isn’t it helpful when you enter a store and a sales associate helps you find the exact item you’re looking for? Make the same true for online experiences. You can do this in a few ways: first, offer search that provides the most relevant products in the first couple rows. Second, show the most relevant products visually as the search query is entered. And third, tie the most popular keywords to promotions that you feature on your home page.

Pet360, an online retailer of pet supplies and pet health products, uses patented Rich Auto Complete technology from SLI Systems to not only give searchers suggestions based on the first few letters they type, but also show images, descriptions and prices for the most popular products based on those letters, right in the search box drop down menu. Rich Auto Complete tehnology has made discovery so easy for Pet360 shoppers, that they’ve seen a 20% increase in revenue from search.

pet360-richautocomplete

 Roll out the Banners

Merchandising banners are the perfect way to highlight specific offers and time-sensitive messages. As you’re planning a banner strategy for your site, consider trigger banners that that load when certain search conditions are met. Use shopper’s most popular keywords to trigger the display of highly relevant messages or calls to action. Banners on search results pages can highlight specific brands, seasons, holidays or other specials promotions.

Enhancing merchandising with relevant product banners on search results pages has paid off for UK clothing retailer Boden. For example, a search for “coats” returns a highly relevant results page where product tiles are preceded by a banner shown only when customers search for coats, cleverly utilized as an additional, easy-to-use navigation menu.

boden-banners

Including dynamic product banners on search results pages has increased Boden’s sales by 10%.

If your site sells multiple brands, appeal to your brand-loyal customers by making your top-selling brands stand out. Brand-specific banners can be configured to appear automatically when a customer searches for that brand, giving your customer just the shopping experience he or she is looking for.

Give Shoppers a Soft Place to Land

Enhance seasonal or brand promotions further with curated landing pages based on shopper’s likely search terms. For example, if you would like to promote a series of special holiday products, create a landing page that loads whenever the word “holiday” is searched. Landing pages give you more control over the way products are displayed, allowing you to give your shoppers what will feel like a custom-tailored shopping experience.

Landing pages aren’t just useful for site searchers, either. You can drive users to your landing pages through your email marketing and social media campaigns. That way, if you want to promote different sets of products within different channels, you’ll have full control over what users see the minute they land on your site, making conversion much more likely.

Merchandise Across Channels

As you’re building out your merchandising functionality, don’t forget the mobile experience. A streamlined mobile experience that works around the physical constraints of a mobile device will make it easier for shoppers to find (and buy!) what they want. For instance, keeping your search box front and center on every page is critical to keeping shoppers on your site so they don’t waste time navigating an entire site. Additionally, adding refinements in large, tap-friendly dropdowns lets shoppers narrow down to the most applicable results. And don’t forget to creatively use banners on every page to highlight promotions.

Currently, about 30% of e.l.f. Cosmetic’s online traffic comes from mobile devices. So creating an optimally merchandised mobile experience is essential. e.l.f.’s mobile site is designed for easy search and navigation, and simple, relevant banners appear on every search results page to increase the likelihood that mobile shoppers will convert.

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elf-mobile-nav

Focusing merchandising efforts on site search is working for e.l.f. Currently, conversion for mobile visitors using site search is four times the rate of mobile users who don’t use search. Mobile sites that neglect merchandising opportunities around site search are missing out on higher sales.

Manage Your Merchandising

All online retailers want to merchandise in ways that work. It’s the time commitment that brings us down. We know how you feel. Merchandising can be your team’s biggest time suck. Analyzing data, constant tweaking, and sending requests back and forth to your IT department can be a full-time job…or multiple full-time jobs. What could your team accomplish with that time and manpower if merchandising could be automated?

With the right tools, much of it can. E-commerce software powered by machine learning, with a user-friendly interface, allows e-commerce managers to easily spot trends in user behavior, then capitalize on those trends with custom banners and landing pages for use on their websites, mobile sites, email campaigns and pay-per-click campaigns—all without the need for IT. Products can also be easily moved and highlighted to respond rapidly to shopper behavior and promotional opportunities. Your merchandising console should put the power to create and curate at your fingertips, with the data and tools you need to drive sales and stay ahead of the curve.

Hear how Jamie Buroff, digital merchandiser, uses many of these techniques to make merchandising work for Frontgate in this short video.

 

 

 

Aim for Holiday Merchandising Perfection

Posted by Dawn MortenseneCommerce, Merchandising, Mobile, Webinar

There’s a great deal of science behind online retail, especially this time of year. Holiday shopping projections and results are measured by every retail organization and publication from August through February. Smart retailers analyze these numbers to create merchandising strategies that maximize their conversions.

webinar brontoAt SLI Connect last month, Jim Davidson, Head of Research at Bronto Software, shared his latest findings on what retailers believe shoppers want versus what consumers actually expect for the 2015 holiday season. Following are a few interesting points from his presentation, “Creating Holiday Perfection Online,” which he will share in an SLI webinar next week.

Highest Converting Holiday Promotions
Bronto surveyed retailers and shoppers to learn which holiday promotion messages work best for online buyers versus in-store buyers. One of the discoveries was that 38% of shoppers will not buy if free shipping isn’t offered.

Mobile Shoppers: Browsing or Buying?
We know there’s an increasing trend toward using smartphones or tablets to shop online. However, because some retailers are slow to make their sites mobile-friendly, many mobile shoppers still turn to their desktops or go to a store to make the purchase. Bronto found that 22% of shoppers plan to actually make a purchase on their smartphone this holiday.

Even with holiday merchandising in full swing, there are plenty of digital promotions yet to be executed and much fine tuning to be done in the next two months of 2015. Listening to the retail analysts, along with optimizing your site search and mobile search, can help you achieve perfection.

Learn more by registering for the webinar “Creating Holiday Perfection Online” on Tuesday, October 27, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Is Your Merchandising Working?

Posted by Kemberly GongMerchandising, Site Search, Webinar

As important as it is in brick-and-mortar stores, the need to design your online store to sell most effectively can’t be overstated. Building online merchandising equivalents of in-store experiences promises that shoppers will not only find what they came to your site to find, but will discover products they didn’t even know they wanted, until you showed them.

Good brick-and-mortar merchandising can:

  • increase traffic by offering attractive visual experiences
  • increase sales by featuring products through promotions and displays
  • build loyalty through appealing, easy-to-access settings

Likewise, good online merchandising can increase traffic, increase sales and build loyalty with the same techniques, but with slightly different implementation. As you build out the merchandising functionality on your site, keep these best practices in mind.

Let Your Data Drive Programs

Knowing what your shoppers are interested in helps you respond to current trends and anticipate future promotional opportunities. When customers search, they’re telling you exactly what they want. Leverage data from search keywords and browsing behavior to power your email and advertising campaigns to get the most traction for your time and money.

Use shoppers’ behavioral data Pet360.com Rankings for the top-searched or top-purchased products rise to the top of results, and it is easy to spot any unusually high results. With Landing Page Creator™, we can easily create campaigns and pages that target specific customers with specific deals.

 

Make Discovery Easy

Isn’t it helpful when you enter a store and a sales associate helps you find the exact item you’re looking for? Make the same true for online experiences. Again, it all begins with data. Track your shoppers’ search terms and browsing behavior to discover which products are most popular for top search terms on your site. Then, when customers search for those terms, display the most popular products in the first couple of rows. You’ll be more likely to show shoppers exactly what they want right away, which means fewer clicks, higher sales, and repeat customers.

Go above and beyond your shoppers expectations by tailoring search results to your shopper’s personal preferences. For example, implement tools that learn from individual shoppers’ behavior to automatically refine search and navigation results based on gender, size, or brand preference.

Since personalizing search and navigation results to individual shoppers, Footwear, etc. saw a 10% increase in revenue per visitor. They also saw a 5% increase in conversion rate and average order value (AOV).

 

You’ll give shoppers the feeling ofSecond, show the most relevant products visually as the search query is entered, through rich autocomplete. And third, tie the most popular keywords to promotions that you feature on your home page.

Zachy’s Wine and Liquor provides an enhanced customer experience using patented Rich Auto Complete™ technology from SLI Systems. As shoppers begin typing into the search box they are immediately presented with pictures, descriptions and pricing of relevant, popular products displayed right alongside the search suggestions. Since implementation, Everlast’s revenue from search grew from 1% to 10% of total revenue.

zachys

Merchandise Across Channels

Don’t forget the mobile experience! A streamlined mobile experience that works around the physical constraints of a mobile device will make it easier for shoppers to find (and buy!) what they want. For instance, keeping your search box front and center on every page is critical to keeping shoppers on your site so they don’t waste time navigating an entire site. Additionally, adding refinements in large, tap-friendly dropdowns lets shoppers narrow down to the most applicable results.

Management and Analytics

Sound like a lot of work? It doesn’t have to be. Thanks to the power of machine learning, you can automate all the best practices mentioned above, freeing up your time for other strategic projects. And with little to no intervention required from your IT department.

These ideas just scratch the surface of making your site a super-powered merchandising machine. We recently spoke with Sri PV, E-Commerce Internal Marketing Manager at Dressbarn, about how he puts these online merchandising fundamentals (and many more) into practice every day. You can hear the full discussion here.

How to Drive Sales from Popular Search Engines

Posted by Jason MillereCommerce, SEO, Webinar

Jason Miller will provide additional insight on this topic at IRCE 2014 at the E-commerce Accelerator Theater, Booth #601. Catch his presentation at 2 p.m. Wednesday, June 11, or at 11 a.m. Thursday, June 12. View other Theater information here.

I recently did a webinar about how online retailers can increase conversions – and lower bounce rates – through dynamic landing page banners. I find this topic very interesting since, in my previous position with Motorcycle Superstore, I had a lot of success using SLI Systems Dynamic Product Banners. What makes this concept highly effective is the use of a learning engine, like SLI Learning Search, to determine what products and content to show in the landing page banners, based on the behavior of previous shoppers.

It’s no surprise that people shop for different items in different ways. It is extremely valuable to have a learning engine that, in real-time, can analyze and aggregate data on how visitors shop your site for various types of products. Rather than making assumptions about how to best present relative products to your customers, you can use all the rich data and user behavior on your site.

For example, through a learning engine you can see which facets people typically select for certain types of searches, as well as what colors are most popular and what items convert at the highest rate. The learning allows the search itself to present results that best match people’s interests and deliver a better more relevant experience. This learning can be applied to on-site merchandising, autocomplete and product recommendations, to name a few.

When it comes to SEO, SEM and landing page optimization, some key performance indicators are conversion rate and bounce rate. The industry average bounce rate for e-commerce sites is generally agreed to be around 34%, though some large e-commerce sites claim bounce rates of less than 10%, according to the Q2 2013 Web-Analytics Benchmark study by ClickTale. (Note: If you happen to have an exceptionally low bounce rate, I suggest you check your analytics tagging, because you may have duplicate site tagging.) Among its many other negative impacts, a high bounce rate will obviously hurt conversion and make your SEM campaigns less cost effective.

Some common reasons why users bounce:

  1. Page content doesn’t match users expectations (this often happens with poorly managed SEM campaigns that aren’t targeted enough)
  2. Poorly designed UI, including sites that don’t properly handle tablets and mobile devices
  3. Site performance (milliseconds matter – users are not willing to wait)
  4. Out of stock or unavailable products

 

A few ways to reduce bounce rate:

  1. Closely monitor your SEM campaigns for relevant landing pages
  2. Use responsive design and a qualified UI team, which can help you optimize user experience on the widest range of devices
  3. Use a high-performance content delivery network such as Akamai to decrease page load times
  4. Take advantage of SLI Dynamic Product Banners, which use advanced learning algorithms to show relevant products on your product pages – even when the current product is unavailable or out of stock

 

As an e-commerce retailer, you may have very little control over what page Google ranks your site for a specific search term. However, you can still drive sales through popular search engines using Dynamic Product Banners to populate landing pages for natural and paid search. This approach has proven very effective for many SLI clients. If you’d like to view my recent webinar to see how e-commerce sites like Wine Enthusiast and others use Dynamic Product Banners, you can get it here.

Join Tomorrow’s Webinar with Folica!

Posted by Kemberly GongeCommerce, Site Search, Site Search Tips, Webinar

The best eCommerce websites understand the needs and buying behaviors of their customers. In the case of hair care and beauty products, shopping for the right product is very personal. Whether considering hair type, brand, or treatments being sought, being able to quickly sift through a wide variety of products and find the right one can be tricky.

Join our webinar tomorrow to hear Sylvia Zori, General Manager of Folica, a leading hair care and beauty site, share her strategies for improving customer retention and conversion rates with site search and merchandising. Learn how she’s pulled from user analytics and site behavior a streamlined shopping experience for customers.

You can sign up here to attend this free webinar. Don’t miss out on learning valuable tips to increase your sales volume with stylish eCommerce tools!

Don’t Miss our Upcoming Apparel & eCommerce Webinars feat. Tea Collection and Caché!

Posted by Terry CostaeCommerce, Site Search, Webinar

The fashion and beauty industries lead the way in eCommerce with innovative features and web design that are fun, modern and most importantly, useful. The customer experience has been thoroughly considered as retailers seek to mimic the in-store experience. You’ll learn firsthand from two apparel retailers what it takes to create a dynamic site that engages users and drives clicks and conversions.

Tune in to the first webinar tomorrow, Wednesday 23rd, featuring Michael Stearns and Celine Teoh of Tea Collection. You’ll hear “Insider Tips for eCommerce Apparel Businesses” and learn the best practices that help guide shoppers to a purchase. You can register for the Tea Collection webinar here.

Next Thursday, Jan. 31, you’ll hear from Kevin Metz of Caché as he details which site features are crucial to improving conversions. Register for the webinar, “How Caché Turns Browsers into Buyers,” here.

Whether you’re growing your business or looking to take your brand to the next level, this is your opportunity to ask industry-related questions and hear from experts who’ve managed and grown these successful companies.

Do you have a strategy in place to grow your business?  Let us know what your priorities are for 2013.

Learn more about the strategies and features the fashion and beauty industries are using in our industry brief, available for download here.

Master Mobile Commerce with our Upcoming Webinar

Posted by Terry CostaeCommerce, Mobile/Tablets, Webinar

Mobile commerce is experiencing explosive growth as more shoppers embrace making purchases through a mobile device.  Yet 79% of large online retailers still don’t have a mobile optimized site.

Where do you fall? Do you have a mobile site but want to improve it? Or are you looking to offer a mobile site, but not sure where to start? Don’t miss our upcoming webinar 20 Secrets to Improve the Mobile User Experience.

Whether you seek to enhance your existing site or are new to mobile, you’ll leave with a concrete understanding of the most important considerations that will keep customers on your mobile site longer, drive transactions and encourage repeat visits.

The bar for technology continues to rise, and mobile isn’t an exception. Mobile customers, new and experienced, expect a sophisticated interface that is streamlined and easy to use. With various applications, games, news and media available from mobile devices, it’s paramount that your mobile site keeps customers’ attention by being easy-to-navigate and surfacing the best products.

During this hour-long webinar, you’ll deep dive into the fundamentals of mobile user experience with SLI Systems’ founder and CEO, Dr. Shaun Ryan. He’ll show you the features that the most innovative mobile sites are using, including use of collapsible refinements, relevant site search and integrated ratings and reviews.

Start thinking about how you can make the most of this holiday shopping season by delighting your customers with a great mobile product that will keep your products within arms’ reach at all times.

Sign up now!

 

Our Weekly Webinar Series Starts Tomorrow!

Posted by Terry CostaMobile/Tablets, Webinar

Just a quick reminder that the first webinar of our weekly webinar series starts tomorrow! In each 30-minute session showcasing a different top retailer, you’ll get the inside scoop about what worked, what didn’t and how these retailers augmented their site to improve conversion rates, ROI and overall site usability.

Tune in every Wednesday from 8:30 – 9:00 a.m. PDT to learn how you can start boosting sales on your eCommerce site.

Register here for the first one.

Register for our Webinar with Susan Aldrich of Patricia Seybold Group

Posted by Terry CostaeCommerce, Site Search, Site Search Tips, Webinar

Each year it seems the online holiday shopping season starts earlier than the year before. Consumers are already flocking to the web to get a jump on their holiday shopping, yet many retailers are still getting their sites ready or are altogether unprepared. If you’re one of them, register to attend our free webinar – “Seizing the Remaining Season: Find out What’s Selling and How to Sell Yours” – taking place next week, featuring online customer experience expert Susan Aldrich of the Patricia Seybold Group.

During the webinar, Susan will offer insight into what consumers are search for and buying this season, across several categories, including apparel (men’s & women’s), electronics, jewelry, cosmetics and more. She’ll also discuss ways you can take advantage of these buying trends and improve your site’s search and navigation to increase customer engagement and conversions on your online storefront – for example, by incorporating social media content into site search, and extending the search experience to mobile devices.

The 30-minute webinar takes place on Wed., Oct. 27 at 8:30 a.m. PDT / 11:30 a.m. EDT. When you register , you’ll receive a copy of SLI Systems’ Holiday Guide : 10 Steps for Preparing Your Online Retail Site Search for the Holidays.

Sign up for Our Webinar with Brian Walker of Forrester

Posted by geoffbeCommerce, Site Search, Webinar

register_now2

On Wed., July 28 we’re hosting a free webinar featuring Forrester Research Principal Analyst Brian Walker. The webinar, “Unlock Powerful Customer Information to Generate Higher Conversions with Site Search,” will cover a variety of topics, among them –  how site search data can reveal valuable information about customers and their research and purchasing intentions, and what you can do with this data to improve other marketing efforts and ultimately, your business. Brian is a reputable expert on e-commerce technologies and the user experience, and he has great insights to share about how retailers can make more effective use of site search to deliver the type of content and information people require to make a purchase.   BrianWalker150

In the webinar, Brian will discuss things like how you can discover from site search information whether customers are finding products in stock (or not) or if they’re looking for products not available on your site that you might want to add, and what products are trending in popularity. Site search data can also reveal long-tail keywords that are useful for SEO and paid search campaigns, and can help you determine how best to guide shoppers to items they seek through behavioral features like Related Search suggestions and Auto Complete.

The webinar will also discuss how you can incorporate site search data into other marketing activities, like personalized emails; on-site merchandising, banner advertisements and promotions; and content development, and the role site search plays on the mobile platform.

We hope to make the webinar interactive, so if you plan to attend please come prepared with questions and comments. You can sign up to attend this webinar at https://blog.sli-systems.com/brian-walker-forrester-site-search-webinar.php.

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