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Improve E-commerce Conversion Rate with 5 Critical Enhancements

Posted by Bob AngusCustomer Experience, eCommerce, Merchandising, Navigation Tips, Personalization, Recommendations, Rich Auto Complete, Site Search Tips, User Experience

Your e-commerce business is full speed ahead. But that’s not good enough. You’ve been tasked with higher and higher growth expectations.

ecommerce sales buy button

And now you have even more at stake. You are likely spending more and more to drive traffic to your site. You can’t let that big investment in advertising fizzle with diminishing ROI.

Good news. You have a high-impact driver you can execute against right now.

Improvement to your conversion rate is the greatest lever at your disposal. Even a small conversion rate increase can generate big revenue gains.

This comprehensive guide to e-commerce conversion rates helps you build a winning game plan for your online store, including:

  • What e-commerce conversion benchmarks to use
  • How to analyze your conversion rate
  • How to optimize 7 critical conversion rate drivers

Let’s start by understanding how you can best measure conversion rate.

What is a good e-commerce conversion rate?

Online retailers track many conversions throughout their customer experience. Any action goal can be considered a conversion. A click on your email, a click on an advertisement, or a newsletter signup are considered conversions.

The conversion metric you really want to focus on is a purchase. Your sale conversion rate is calculated by simply taking the number of purchase transactions and dividing that by the total unique visitors to your online store during a time period.

That’s pretty straightforward. But what is a good conversion rate to set as your target goal?

This 2017 holiday shopping to date, average e-commerce conversion rates are showing growth: desktop 4.5% (up 10.6% YoY), smartphone 2% (up 12.3% YoY), tablet 4.3% (up 9.3% YoY), according to Adobe Digital Insights.

And Amazon boasts an amazing 74% conversion rate for its Prime members and 13% for non-Prime visitors back in 2015, based on a Millward Brown Digital study. In comparison, the same study showed the average conversion rate for Top 500 merchants is 3.32%.

Are those the right conversion rate benchmarks for you? Probably not.

It is interesting to set an aspirational goal against Amazon or other leaders that compete in your industry. However, you are best served by benchmarking where your own store is now. Then set a course for continual improvement to drive conversion optimization goals and strategies.

Measure your overall sales conversion rate for your entire website the past year. That’s your starting point. That’s the number you want to beat in 2018.

Then the key is to drill down into your sales-rate performance for different contributing factors and customer segments. That’s where your actionable insights really happen.

Now let’s explore the best way to analyze your conversions to enlighten your growth plans.

How You Can Analyze Your Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is a very useful metric to track. But the real impact to your e-commerce business is analyzing and understanding what is driving your performance and why.

That deeper conversion analysis helps you:

  • Determine what segments are contributing to your overall conversion rate
  • Identify the root causes
  • Prioritize and track success of your optimization game plan

The first step is to build a dashboard that tracks and trends your conversion rate. Google Analytics and many e-commerce platforms provide a dashboard that lets you see your conversion rate over different periods of time.

SLI Systems also has a very powerful dashboard built into the Commerce Console. You get an helpful view of your shoppers’ activities and conversion rate through their shopping journey.

Ecommerce conversion rate dashboard - SLI Systems Commerce Console

Or you can simply use a spreadsheet. Capture your monthly unique visitor metrics and plug in your corresponding sales transaction data to calculate your conversion rates. Again, simply divide transactions by unique visitors to get the conversion rate percentage.

Next you’ll start the drill down analysis.

What Is Driving to Your Conversion Rate?

Your overall conversion rate calculation is an average. Many different factors drive that single number. Some factors contribute significantly more than others. It’s your job to break down those key drivers to find growth opportunities.

Start by segmenting your conversion rate data into categories.

The most common way to split up your data is by different customer audiences. Different types of customers have a different relationship with your e-commerce business. They may also have different purchase intent, which directly impacts your conversion rate.

Your analysis can uncover those segments that likely have differing intent to purchase. Then you can calculate the conversion rate for each segment. And you’ll see which audiences have the greatest influence on your overall conversion rate.

Here are several helpful ways to segment your audience.

  • First-time visitors vs. returning visitors – First-time visitors often make up a big majority of online traffic. But it stands to reason that those first-time visitors who may be unfamiliar with your brand are less likely to purchase than returning visitors.
  • Acquisition channel – Where visitors come from can help tell you how likely they are to buy. Segment by channels like organic search, paid search, social media, advertising, and affiliates.
  • Device – The device visitors use may indicate different intent as shown in the Adobe data insights mentioned earlier.
  • Location – Are you a global brand or do you sell domestically? Traffic coming from different international locations may be browsers, not buyers.
  • Other demographics – Google Analytics can help you analyze other demographics like gender, age, or interest affinity groups.

Other popular segmentation you can use to uncover key conversion rate drivers include:

  • Product category – Conversion rates may be higher for different products based on the volume sold, price range, or deliverability. For example, you would expect the online conversion rate to be lower for expensive furniture than easily shipped lower-priced home decor.
  • Promotions and seasons – Different discounting periods or traditional shopping seasons may affect conversion rates.
  • Website elements – You can track conversion rates by different elements of your customer experience.

Make sure you look at your conversion rate over time. Don’t just take a single snapshot in time to make your decisions. A single data point or particular shopping season can skew what you see and may lead you to incorrect decisions.

Calculate your segmented conversion rates into monthly or weekly increments. Go back in time as far as you can. Then you can chart trends and make year-over-year and month-over-month comparisons.

Starting with one segmentation method is also recommended. Add that to your dashboard. Keep tracking that segmented data to see how you are performing. Then expand your analysis to other segment categories.

Your conversion rate analysis helps you find your growth opportunities. But it doesn’t tell you exactly why those different segments are performing the way they are.

Why Is Your Conversion Rate Increasing (or Decreasing)?

Now you can dig a little deeper to understand why your conversion rate is increasing or decreasing. Find the root cause by adding a second dimension to your analysis of a particular segment category.

What is the behavior or characteristic about a given segment that is likely causing sales to go up or down?

The best way to do this is to add one of the other segment categories as that additional dimension. For example, if your primary segmentation is based on acquisition channel, then you can drill down using product category purchased or device used or location demographics.

Analyze that data. Look for trends. Make comparisons.

Maybe your conversion rate was 6% coming from Google Adwords. But the Adwords conversion rate for desktop users was 8% versus 2% for smartphones and 4% for tablets. Now you have an understanding of how the device contributes to that channel’s conversion rate, taking the volume into consideration.

And how did that paid search channel breakdown compare to your other channels? For example, smartphone conversion rate maybe 4% from your emails and 1% from social media.

Identify big shifts and changes. Discover anomalies.

Using the Google Adwords example again, maybe starting in July you see an increase from 5% to 7%. And that higher rate seems to have continued for several months.

Then hypothesize. Ask “why?”

That increase in July may have corresponded with an increase in your PPC bids or budget. Or maybe you launched a new set of keywords for a hot brand. You could hypothesize why the increase happened and continued.

This additional lens into your primary segmentation can uncover the root cause. You are now ready to take action with that data-based knowledge in hand.

How to Prioritize Your Optimization Plan

You are armed with lots of data and valuable analysis. You can now more easily prioritize the action you want to take and build an optimization game plan.

Typically you’ll want to pick one to run every quarter. That single-focus test approach helps you isolate the incremental sales and conversion rate you’ve achieved. You also give enough time to achieve improvements, validate the results with enough traffic, and eliminate most anomalies by running the test for a longer period of time like two or three months.

Which tests should you run first?

It’s always good to start with the test you feel can have the biggest financial impact. Estimate the revenue impacts for all the top activity ideas you have identified. How much would sales increase by each incremental tenth of a percent increase in conversion rate?

Then look at the level of effort and investment cost of running the test. If an activity may have a high-revenue upside while requiring little extra work, then you’ve found a great place to start.

Let’s look at some of the highest conversion boosting opportunities you have.

5 Critical Enhancements for Bigger E-commerce Conversion Rate Optimization

The best conversion rate optimization tests consider the customer experience journey. Understand the different interactions from the first moment a shopper lands on your website, through finding and choosing a product, and all the way to checkout and completing the purchase.

You make many different enhancements to your online customer experience. Here are five design improvements proven to increase conversion rates:

autocomplete site search to increase ecommerce conversion rate

1. Win More High-Purchase Intent Shoppers

Arguably one of the best ways to increase your conversion rate is to win more sales from visitors who already have a high intent to purchase. So how do you know that someone comes to your site with the intention of buying?

Shoppers signal their intent when they use your site search.

SLI studies have found visitors that use search buy at a 2.7x greater rate than visitors who just browse.

Make the act of searching even easier by enticing those visitors who have a specific purchase in mind.

Position your search box in the header and in the center of every page. Provide an engaging prompt to search in the search field. And make the box large and distinctive from other forms. Don’t tuck the search box into the corner or hide it behind a magnifying glass icon that searchers have to click.

Speed up the search by suggesting possible terms as visitors start typing the first letters of a keyword. This autocomplete functionality draws from your product feed to indicate that productive search results are available. Better yet, you can rank the autocomplete terms by the most popular keywords by clickthrough and purchase data, not just keyword matching.

Pro Tip: Enhance your autocomplete feature by presenting specific products in the search suggestions. Display the product name, image, and price for the most relevant products. Boden speeds up the purchase process doing just that.

This enhanced functionality helps your visitors identify products they are looking for even more quickly. Then send them directly to the product page. Skip the extra category page browsing. Bypass the search results page. Get high-purchase intent shoppers directly to a product.

2. Wow Visitors with Visual Merchandising

The key elements of a product landing page are designed to showcase the product so that customers can easily make a purchase decision – product title, descriptions, specs, purchase options, ratings, reviews, and, of course, pricing and discounts.

This product feed information gives shopper the facts. However, we humans actually make purchase decisions emotionally much of the time. Shoppers love the wow factor. That’s where online visual merchandising excels.

e.l.f Cosmetics shows off their eye shadow products with beautiful images and attractive videos from Instagram. These social media images inspire shoppers. Better yet, many of the pictures are user-generated content from customers.

ecommerce visual merchandising with instagram - e.l.f. Cosmetics

Similarly, fashion sites often display extra images since shoppers can’t actually hold the item in their hands. Visual merchandising best practices, like model videos, product pictures from many angles, and custom images that change with color selection, can help drive more sales.

Pro-Tip: Help customers visualize what their experience will be after they make the purchase. Show action shots and product videos that depict how the product is used, what the buyer gets in the box, or how to install it.

3. Merchandising that “You May Also Like”

The top job of merchandising is to promote the products a visitor is most likely to buy. One of the best online merchandising techniques is to use a “You May Also Like” product recommendation strategy on the product page.

Showing alternative products that are similar to the product being viewed is proven to increase conversion rates.

Unfortunately, many e-commerce sites determine the recommended products using simple category and keyword matching. This approach focuses on the product feed data only.

Fortunately, online stores have massive amounts of behavioral and transactional data in addition to product feed data. “You May Also Like” product recommendations that include actual customer behavior are more likely to convert.

For example, Dancewear Solutions recommends several contemporary dance dresses on a product page. It also merchandises complementary products that go with the dresses based on what customers had made purchases in the past.

ecommerce product recommendations engine - Dancewear Solutions

Pro Tip: Customers love a personalized shopping experience. In-store salespeople give a personal touch to help customers get exactly what they want. Now artificial intelligence is helping online stores create a similar personal customer experience.

E-commerce personalization uses machine learning to sift through massive amounts of behavioral data to quickly provide smart product recommendations. Contextual personalization can display products that customers are even more likely to buy based on gender, size, brand preference, or the shopper’s location.

4. Help Shoppers Get What They Want Faster

ecommerce merchandising category page buy now button - Allen's Boots

Smart e-commerce companies create as few steps as possible to get to checkout. Customers are more likely to complete their purchase when you allow visitors to add products to shopping carts or go to checkout directly wherever they are on your site.

Don’t limit the use of “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” buttons to your product pages. Anywhere you merchandise products, even your homepage, is an opportunity for customers to commit to purchasing without an extra click to the product page.

Pro Tip: Include “Add to Cart” button directly in the your category pages and search results pages. That’s what Allens Boots did. This quick enhancement helps speed the conversion, particularly if your customer knows exactly what they want.

5. Eliminate Rational Roadblocks with Content

Don’t rely solely on the product description provided by the manufacturer to influence a buyer. Inform your customers about what a product can do. Offer how-to articles, demo videos, and comparisons against other similar products.

Content has a strong influence on e-commerce conversions both rationally and emotionally. How-to content helps remove rational doubts or questions that make shoppers hesitate. Video content in particular also has an emotional trigger for sales as customers can visualize themselves using the product.

Dollar Tree uses videos to show shoppers curated product ideas and demo top-rated customer favorites.

video merchandising for ecommerce - Dollar Tree

Pro-Tip: Include a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on the product product. Ask your customer service team for questions that they get about the product. Review common reasons for returns. Think of questions you would have if you were going to pay your own hard-earned money. Then create a strong set of FAQs written in the language that customers use.

There are hundreds more conversion-rate tips that you can test. Make sure to download these best practice e-books to find new ways you can improve your conversion rates:

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

Retail Executive Brief: Customer Experience Trends for 2018

Posted by Bob AngusAnalytics, Artificial Intelligence, Customer Experience, E-commerce Research, eCommerce, Merchandising, Mobile, Mobile/Tablets, Personalization, Reporting and Analytics, User Experience

Customer Experience - Convert Buyers with a Great Customer Experience

The pressure is on for retail businesses to deliver on big sales growth expectations. That’s in the face of slow consumer spending growth combined with the tectonic shift in traditional retail channels.

You need to turn more shoppers into buyers. You can’t afford for your investment to bring more shoppers in the door or onto your e-commerce store that leave with an empty cart.

That’s why optimizing your customer experience is more important than ever.

This retail executive brief helps you better understand:

  • How customer experience strategies are evolving
  • What customer experience metrics to track and analyze
  • How to improve your customer experience using top trends in 2018

Let’s first dig into how customer experience is changing.

What is Customer Experience Today?

In the past, customer experience strategies focused on the discrete interactions shoppers had in the sales process. These touchpoints took on even greater importance with online retail channels simply because it was easier to track and optimize each webpage leading up to a sale.

However, this touchpoint-focused approach to improving customer experience can easily miss one critical element… the customer journey.

The journey is the customer experience.

The overall journey can still disappoint customers, even if your online store design, in-store layout and staffing are executed well on individual touchpoints.

Understand the customer journey in your shoppers’ terms. Customer journeys include many things that happen before, during, and after the actual purchase experience.

The journeys can be quite long, though the purchase decision can be extremely fast. Consider the multiple channels, devices, and, yes, direct interactions that may occur over days or even weeks.

Put yourself in their shoes. You buy products for yourself all the time. Think about your entire experience and why you made a purchase or didn’t.

Ask questions like:

  • Where and when did you first learn about a store?
  • What was your first impression of the brand?
  • What triggered you going in the store or to the website?
  • How easy was it to find what you wanted?
  • How did you feel about the product price and value? Product quality? Selection for you?
  • How did you feel about the shopping environment in-store or online?
  • What sales help, customer service or employee interactions did you have?
  • How did the purchase transaction go? Was it fast and easy?
  • How did you get your product? Was shipping fast? Did you need to exchange or return?

Always be asking how you can improve that journey.

Next you need to figure out if you’re on the right path to improvement.

Customer Experience Measurements for Success

How do you know you are improving your customer experience? You’ll want to look at the numbers.

It’s very tempting to dive right into the weeds. Retailers now have so many powerful analytics tools. And data collection is getting easier.

However, direct contribution to macro financial metrics and sales trends can be difficult. Remember, your customer experience is a holistic journey. So your best customer experience metrics are more macro. They are not necessarily analyzing and optimizing discrete touchpoints.

Start by measuring key customer experience outcomes, customer feedback, and employee feedback.

Financial Metrics

The most common outcome metrics are financial. Let’s assume you are already tracking total revenue, profit, and transaction volume. Great financial indicators of your customer experience is Revenue per Customer and Average Transaction Value.

Make sure to also track Revenue per Visit (RPV) for your online channel or if you are a pure e-commerce business. This metric estimates the incremental value of each visitor to your online store. Simply divide your total online revenue by the total number of unique visitors to your website.

Customer Satisfaction

You also need to measure your Net Promoter Score (NPS) to capture how customers feel about you. NPS is a fantastic customer satisfaction metric to track over time. Customer experience and customer satisfaction are closely correlated.

But the most actionable customer experience metric in your NPS comes from the answer to the follow-up question – “Why did you give that rating?”

Categorizing the results of this open-ended “Why” question helps you measure the impact on different factors in the customer journey in your customers’ terms. For example, you may group results by broad areas like customer service, products, or pricing. Or you can go more granular into the touchpoints like checkout experience, shipping, or return policies.

Learn more by further breaking down your NPS by customer segments. You can segment by geography, gender or age demographics, order revenue, or purchase frequency or recency.

Employee Satisfaction

Lastly, you should also measure your Employee NPS. Employee satisfaction is also highly correlated with customer experience. Happier employees lead to better customer experiences.

After all, your employees are most responsible for delivering a great customer experience. All your employees contribute. Even someone behind the scenes in HR, the warehouse, or web development have an impact that trickles into the experience.

Here again, look closely at the “why” to measure and track the drivers that influence your employees’ feelings. Those feelings result in behaviors and actions that directly and indirectly impact your customer experience. Listen to what they say and recommend.

Track these financial and satisfaction metrics consistently. That’s how you will know your customer experience is on the right path.They are your “North Star” numbers.

Once you’ve established those customer experience measurements, you can then go deeper into specific success metrics for operational improvement initiatives. Use Google Analytics and e-commerce platform results for your online channel.

Now let’s look at the latest trends you can leverage to boost your customer experience metrics and sales.

3 Technology Trends that Help You Improve Your Customer Experience in 2018

Retailers continue to leverage technology to improve customer experiences. Much of the change comes from consumer technology use as a pulling factor. For the first time ever, more people say they plan to shop online (59%) than in big box stores during the 2017 holiday season, according to the NRF.

Here are three technology trends that help brands connect better with customers and improve their overall customer experience.

1. Rapid Growth of Mobile Shopping

Mobile Traffic and Sales Statistics - Black Friday 2017 Cyber Monday 2017

The continued rapid growth of smartphone use is undeniably impacting retail sales. Similar to how e-commerce is the growth engine of overall retail, mobile sales are powering e-commerce.

The rising tide is driving much of that growth. Mobile traffic from smartphones and tablets peaked on Black Friday and Small Business Saturday (56% of traffic). Then leveled out to 46% of traffic, almost equivalent to desktop traffic (54%), through Cyber Monday 2017, according to Adobe Digital Insights.

However, the mobile shopping experience is a challenge for retailers. Smartphones and tablets earned a lower percentage of overall sales (30% versus 70% for desktop) and lower conversion rates through Cyber Monday.

Retailers can close more sales with mobile shoppers by continuing to improve their mobile customer experience. Shoppers now find mobile as an easy way to check emails (hopefully your emails), find store locations and hours, get product information, snap and share photos, and compare prices.

Optimizing mobile product discovery and mobile payments are the biggest opportunities for retailers to improve the mobile customer experience.

2. Personalized Merchandising with Artificial Intelligence

Customers want a personalized shopping experience. Sales people help shoppers in the store. Now application of artificial intelligence are helping online stores create a similar personal customer experience.

Online stores have massive amounts of behavioral and transactional data now. The challenge is to harness that data to power real-time merchandising decisions.

That’s where artificial intelligence excels.

Fifty-four percent of e-commerce sites have already implemented or plan to add AI in the future, according research from the Q3 2017 E-commerce Performance Indicators and Confidence Report. And 20% expect to add AI within the next 12 months.

The top application is personalized product recommendations. Eighteen percent of online retailers report they are already using artificial intelligence in their product recommendations strategies. But that number will swell dramatically in 2018 with 38% planning to implement within the next 12 months.

Personalized Product Recommendations Engine - King Arthur Flour

Artificial intelligence can parse user activity, preferences, and sales trends. The result is smart and timely product recommendations that are personal. For example, this type of contextual personalization can be tuned to gender, clothing size, brand preference, or shopper’s location.

Even better for online retailers, this personalization can be experienced by first-time visitors just as well as returning shoppers. So the shopper does not have to take any additional actions to receive the customer experience benefits.

3. Always on Customer Service with Chatbots

Chatbots were introduced as a new technology on the horizon for retailers in our 2017 e-commerce trend webinar. In 2018, chatbots are a must-have element of your online customer experience.

Ecommerce Chatbots - Retail live chat is always on

Think of chatbots like your online version of a sales associate or employee. Except they are always on 24/7/365.

A chatbot is an enhancement from the online chat communication channel. The old chat program still required a human sitting there typing in replies. Those employees had regular shifts. So sometimes customers weren’t getting their questions answered.

Now a chatbot is an always-on program that simulates the conversations your customers have with you. It answers questions, handles specific requests, helps shoppers choose the right product, and executes customer service procedures.

Your customer experience impact is shoppers have better and faster access to what they want when they want it. That’s a huge win. And you win more sales.

Customer adoption, and the resulting better experience and sales, is the biggest reason why chatbots are growing in e-commerce. Additionally two technology drivers are accelerating the deployment of chatbots – smartphones (again) and artificial intelligence (again).

Smartphone use is leading to speaking with a chatbot. Talking is easier than typing. Just say what you need and the chatbot tells you back. Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are all voice-enabled chatbots that are quickly growing is use.

Artificial intelligence is helping chatbots be more effective. The chatbot can repeat existing information easily and can be taught to mimic decision-making patterns. But artificial intelligence makes a difference by helping chatbots to actually learn. So your customer experience is continuously improving.

Design Your Customer Experience to Win More Sales

Planning and executing your customer experience strategies is a process of continuous improvement. Deeply understanding your customer’s journey sets you on the right path.

Take advantage of the key trends and technologies. Then test your innovations, measure, and optimize for the satisfaction of your customers and for the results that matter to you.

Ultimately, you can achieve what creative executive Loie Maxwell calls “designed serendipity”. Orchestrate the experiences that produce a customer journey that gives them a winning feeling. Your customers will love it. And you will win more sales.

Is Your Customer Experience Leaking Sales?

Most businesses are leaking online sales in at least 7 critical elements of their customer experience.

The Customer Experience Scorecard grades your e-commerce site using a 42-point checklist proven to increase sales, including:

  • Quickly finding products shoppers are most likely to buy
  • Personalized product recommendations
  • Mobile path to purchase

Want to find your leaks? Find out your quick-win opportunities to take your conversion rates to the next level.

How Connection Links to Conversion: Converting the Shoppers of Today Into the Buyers of the Future Requires a New Twist

Posted by Loie MaxwellArtificial Intelligence, Customer Experience, Uncategorized, User Experience

Artificial intelligence was once an aberration found in the most sinister of sci-fi novels and cinema – how could you ever forget Hal? Today, AI is a part of our everyday lives and even invisible to most of us. There is big business in what many believe is predictive selling, targeting of buyers vs. shoppers, and the elevation of customer service. The ultimate in service is knowing what your customer needs before they do. Being at the forefront of this technology is the core principal of designed serendipity. Orchestrating experiences for your customer that predicts their wants and needs not only relieves stress and effort, but can give them a sense of good fortune. That winning feeling and rush consumers feel with a bargain or added perk is very sticky.

Sure this technology can almost seem spooky to some people, but the ubiquitous evolution of customer experience will nullify the fear and highlight the benefits. Already a generation of millennial consumers expect the ‘magic’ facet of designed serendipity to occur day to day. Why wouldn’t an e-tailer know exactly what I need when I need it? Predictive selling and service has become the absolute norm, what will be next to surprise and delight?

Planning for the future of consumer expectations requires innovative thought and above and beyond creativity.

Where will your shoppers be next? What will be driving their conversion? How will you capture their hearts and wallets? In the coming 2-5 years you will be challenged to read the crystal ball in an ever changing convergence of commerce, technology and entertainment. So what next? Invest and deploy the facets of designed serendipity where you can win. Applying the framework (a new twist, shared connection, magic, jackpot and give/get love) will help bring focus and heighten creativity. Shared connection through unique experiences and high perceived value is critical.

Get to know your audience not only as consumers of goods but as consumers of media.

An authentic ability to connect requires robust knowledge of the psyche of your most valuable consumers. What are their fundamental needs and how can you help them find solutions not only through product offerings but through original content that they value, share and anticipate. How can they get the maximum benefit from their purchase? Provide continuous learning and the latest advancements in your category. Educate them on trends and where to find them. Offer complementary lifestyle experiences in travel, beauty, fashion, cuisine, wine, decor. Even if your product is a finite tool or service, build confidence in their buying decision by sharing your brand story and why you make the difference in the causes you support, the labor you use, fair trade sourcing and new advancements in technology.

Investing in the development of a media pipeline and how to maintain one is key.

You cannot feed the content beast enough. Only a few years ago social media was taking hold. The employers I witnessed who jumped in, redirected their budgets and invested in the necessary talent to execute on this growing need are winning today. They took the risk and learned quickly. They are now the leaders in the social space. Today, the opportunity is for companies to employ content creators and strategist who can shape the conversation about the brand with your customers. Producers, writers, directors will be common place in organizations and may not report into marketing. They may be an entity unto themselves as this won’t be marketing, this will be growing connection and conversion. You must “give love to get love” and customers who are in love with your brand is good for business. There may be a “Chief Content and Conversion Officer” in the future.

In light of all the change, the focus on messaging value and deals won’t quietly go away. Loyalty programs and value propositions will be more robust and engaging through original content and advancements in technology. Your most valuable customers will be stickier if you know how to connect the dots between value, connection and service. While every brand has varying needs, the “jackpot, magic and connection” ecosystem must be built or you may be caught off-guard. Investing now in technology and talent should be on the agenda of every 2018 planning meeting and by 2019 you will either see the glowing results or be prepared to know exactly how to pivot. Exciting times require courageous actions.

For more from Loie Maxwell on how to create magic for your customers, check out the on-demand webinar, Designed Serendipity: Win Over Your Customers With a Little Luck.

Results Pour In As Zachys Improves E-Commerce Experience

Posted by SLI SystemseCommerce, Success Stories, User Experience

Do you have a favorite online store where you shop for specialty items and always find something that fulfills your desires? For lovers of high-end wine and spirits, Zachys Wine & Liquor is a popular destination. Because Zachys’ customers largely know what they’re looking for when they visit the site, they don’t spend lots of time browsing different pages and products. As Zachys’ E-commerce Director Victor Castro explained, customers tend to search, find what they want, and purchase — 1, 2, 3 — which also means if they don’t see something that grabs their interest right away, they’re gone.

Zachys knows the importance of delivering site search results that are right in line with shoppers’ expectations, which is why the company turned to SLI Systems not long ago. Since implementing SLI Learning Search, Zachys has seen 33% more visitors use the search box, and conversion rates and per-visit values for search users are twice those of non-search users.

zachys RAC for blogZachys also uses SLI Rich Auto Complete and learning-based navigation pages to boost those results, and now sees Rich Auto Complete results producing a 10x higher conversion rate than the site average.

For long-tail search terms that tend to have higher conversion value, Castro’s team uses SLI Site Champion to create dynamic SEO-optimized landing pages. The optimized landing pages get higher rankings in Google and Bing, which drives more high-converting traffic to the site. Another key to Zachys’ online success is the use of extensive refinement options in search results, along with merchandising banners for popular terms.

If you want to learn more about Zachys’ e-commerce success using SLI, read the Chain Store Age article or the press release. And if you need to put in place a strategy for generating higher revenue from search and navigation, similar to what Zachys has done, feel free to reach out to us at discovery@sli-systems.com.

Boden, LED Hut and SwimShop Talk ROI at Internet Retailing Expo

Posted by SLI SystemsConferences, Search Conferences, Success Stories

This week at the Internet Retailing Expo in Birmingham, England, thousands of e-commerce retailers are attending presentations, browsing the exhibit hall and taking part in workshops to connect with peers and gain insight into how they can improve their business in a multichannel ecosystem. Among the 60 retail speakers at the event are several SLI customers.

MarkSmearPrezIRX14In a presentation on the topic of connecting shoppers to the products they’re most likely to buy, Keith Scott of LED Hut and Mark Sear of SwimShop spoke to an over-filled room about the results they’ve seen using SLI Learning Search technology and other SLI e-commerce acceleration solutions. LED Hut is the UK’s largest retailer of LED lighting products, while SwimShop is the Swim Specialist for Sports Direct, the UK’s largest sports retailer.

 

Here are a few comments from their presentations:

  • “SLI is giving us an estimated 400% to 500% ROI.” – Mark Sear, SwimShop
  • “My recommendation: I would implement SLI.” – Mark Sear, SwimShop
  • “Keyword suggestions with images and descriptions help our customers find what they’re searching for.” – Keith Scott, LED Hut
  • “The technology learns from visitor behavior to deliver the most relevant products.” – Keith Scott, LED Hut
  • “We use SLI search to examine the customer journey and improve the user experience.” – Keith Scott, LED Hut

In a separate presentation, Boden E-commerce Manager Paul Knutton presented a session on best practices for offering your e-commerce site across multiple countries and languages. Also speaking to a standing-room-only crowd, Knutton provided examples and metrics on how SLI Systems has helped with Boden’s international reach. His comments included:

  • “What SLI does particularly well is make sense of non-English languages.”
  • “Our search users convert at 1.77x the rate of non-search users and spend 2x more than what non-search users spend.”

To read more about how Boden, LED Hut and other leading companies around the globe use SLI to increase their profitability, take a look at our case studies.

If you’re at IRX today, stop by to see us on the show floor or in the Top 500 Lounge. Otherwise, keep an eye on our Events page to see where SLI will be in the coming months.

Do Your Search Results Pages Drive Customers to Buy or Bounce?

Posted by Kemberly GongSite Search, Site Search Tips

Search results pages are usually the place where online shoppers convert or leave. If your search really works and shows visitors the products they’re looking for, you’ll strengthen loyalty from those shoppers – or, if your search delivers a jumble of results that have nothing to do with the search terms used, it’s likely that shoppers will make a quick exit.

Search results pages need a little TLC so they can do the best possible job of showing off as many relevant products as possible, while allowing customers to adjust their view of results according to how they want to browse and shop. Here are a few tips to make sure your search results pages lead shoppers to buy, rather than bounce.

Create a consistent look and feel: Search results pages should not look dramatically different from the rest of your online storefront. It’s important to reinforce your brand in every element of your site, especially on the pages where visitors are making a purchase decision. Your results pages should mirror the look and feel of your overall website, brick-and-mortar stores and social channels. When all of these elements are properly coordinated, they create a positive brand experience.

Keep the search term in the search box: It is good practice to leave search terms in the search box, even when visitors are already viewing results. They may realize that they should add more descriptive words to their search terms or correct spelling errors. Some might want a reminder of what they just searched for. Whatever the reason, it’s helpful and saves time if visitors don’t have to retype their search terms.

Show a breadcrumb trail: A breadcrumb trail displays the search term and any refinements that the visitor applied to search results. It helps visitors understand where they are and how they arrived at the current page. It also makes it easy to remove search refinements and go back to a wider range of results. Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the webpage, but they can go a long way toward helping visitors navigate through search results.

There’s much more you can do to make search pages easy for visitors to browse, including allowing visitors to select the number of results they want to see on a page, or adding infinite scrolling so that visitors never have to click on a new page to see more results. For these tips and over a hundred more, download a free copy of the 2014 edition of the Big Book of Site Search Tips.

King Arthur Flour’s Recipe for Rising Revenue

Posted by Dawn MortenseneCommerce, Success Stories

What percentage of your online revenue is driven by your site’s search function? Is it anywhere near 50%? If attributing half your sales to search sounds crazy, consider the testimony of one of SLI Systems’ customers, King Arthur Flour.

“Search has jumped from 17% of our revenue to almost 50% of our revenue,” said Jeff Wilcox, eCommerce Producer for King Arthur Flour, who cites results from working with SLI in this new 30-second video.

Headquartered in Vermont, King Arthur Flour is the oldest flour company in America and the number-one seller of whole wheat flour in America. Although most would not consider five-pound bags of flour to be the ideal item to purchase online, the company has turned KingArthurFlour.com into an incredibly popular site for bakers – both amateur and professional – to share recipes and purchase baking products.

The wealth of knowledge on King Arthur Flour’s website flows from the company’s commitment to developing a vibrant community around their products’ users. Their Norwich, Vermont headquarters has become a destination for cooks and connoisseurs with its retail store, state-of-the-art bakery, and a Baking Education Center that holds courses for bakers of all levels.

Part of the genius of King Arthur Flour’s success is their ability to combine aspects of their rich community and knowledge base into their eCommerce site. With SLI Systems’ help, King Arthur Flour has made it easy for site users to search from thousands of enticing recipes, then read reviews, shop for ingredients and link to related videos or blogs.

In my first search on the site, I typed “gluten free pie crust” into the search box and found a recipe that’s rated five stars and has been pinned to Pinterest more than 1,000 times. The site offers the kind of start-to-finish help that gives me confidence that I’m not going to screw up the pie; just one simple search, and I have the recipe, the ingredients I can purchase right from their site, cooking tips from the experts, and reviews from 59 people who have tried it. This is the kind of user experience that creates serious fans. And now I’m one of them.

King Arthur Flour Gluten Free Pie CrustThere’s advanced technology that goes in to making the search and user experience this successful – and you can read more about it in a previous blog from King Arthur Flour’s Customer Success Manager at SLI. But what shoppers see is what I found – an easy search that delivered relevant and accurate results, along with valuable content that created confidence in my decision to buy the ingredients. There will be gluten free pumpkin pie at my house for Christmas!

In both baking and business, the secret to success is often in the ingredients. Just as King Arthur Flour’s quality ingredients help ensure their customers’ baking success, the SLI Systems technology that powers their online community and store ensures visitors find and buy exactly what they need.

“SLI has very intuitive tools,” said Wilcox. “They implement new features quite often, so as they become available to us we consider implementing them immediately. We know that it’s easy to do and the results are very good.”

No wonder King Arthur Flour has increased its conversion rates from 3.7% to almost 6%, and has grown its search-based revenue to nearly 50% of its business. They make it seem as easy as pie.

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