eTail Phoenix
Next week we’re heading down to Phoenix, AZ for the eTail West 2009 conference.
This event is one of the largest conferences in the ecommerce industry and has an impressive list of speakers as well as a good mix of vendors.
SLI Blog
Incorporating video into site search
When I was at the Internet Retailer design show in Miami last month I noticed that more and more retailers are using video on their site. Fat Brain Toys president and co-founder, Mark Carson showed me an example of video on their site that shows kids playing with one of the more popular toys on their site – the Bilibo. Videos like this help potential customers get a much better sense of how the product works and how it looks. As well as improving conversions I’m sure they will also help drive traffic if the videos are posted on YouTube and the like.
In addition I had the pleasure of sitting next to Cynthia Morgan one evening. Cynthia is president of Quadras Integrated – an agency that now specializes in producing video for online retailers.
All this talk got me thinking about how we can incorporate video into site search. I started sharing some ideas with an engineer who was walking past my office and he informed me he had already implemented them and more for an existing customer, etrailer. It doesn’t seem that long ago that that I was intimately familiar with the search on all of our customers’ sites – including how they were laid out, how many searches they got per day, what the top search terms were and a host of other details. Now we are running the search for over 350 sites it’s just not possible to do – although this is a problem I’m happy to have. It’s nice to see that their is innovation happening that I don’t know about.
Here are the ways etrailer are incorporating video with site search using the example search sway-control:
- Products that have video associated with them show an icon beside the listing. In this case the icon is a fairly small “TV” icon. You can try something larger, more prominent if you want to highlight the video more.
- They show videos that are related to the products shown in the search results on the search results page. In this case they are shown at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the video takes you to a page where the video is played.
- They have a facet at the top that shows just the videos and articles when you click on it
SLI conducted a Trends in Ecommerce survey last year. 32 percent of the participating retailers indicated they intended to pilot online video in the next 12 months. If you are one of the retailers that is doing this – I recommend you look to highlight the videos in your site and navigation. This will make more people aware that you have the videos and should help with your conversions.
Interview with Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty
Yesterday we released a podcast interview with our customer Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty. During this interview Ian talks about how he started off as a stock boy while he was at school and is now General Manager.
Century Novelty started with a physical store in 1951 but is now is exclusively online. Focusing solely on their online store has given them some valuable experience. I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to Ian share some of the secrets he has discovered from this experience.
Also see our press release which summarises the ROI Century Novelty achieved from using SLI’s Learning Search and Site Champion services.
Free Webinar – Best Practices for CSE Marketing & Site Search
Merchant Advantage and SLI Systems are hosting a webinar this week on Best Practices for CSE Marketing and Site Search.
The 30-minute webinar will be held Thursday Feb 19, 2009 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern.
By participating in this webinar, you will learn:
- How Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) can bring you new customers – without bringing you tech hassles.
- How to select the most effective CSE’s for YOUR business out of the hundreds out there.
- How to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of your CSE choices and make changes in real time.
- How to improve customer satisfaction by reducing the time it takes a site visitor to find what they’re looking for.
- How to implement a system that learns from your visitors’ behavior over time so that you can better meet (and anticipate) their needs.
- How to list products in their predicted order of popularity and automatically optimize pages for search engine spiders.
Social tags and site search
Last week I spotted an interesting blog post by Anna Skaya and Adam Salamon – over at Bazaarvoice. They described how our UK based customer Boden is using social tags to enhance their site search. I’ve been a fan of integrating ratings and reviews with site search for some time and I think the idea of using social tags as refinements is a good one. If you’re using social tags I recommend you try surfacing them in your search.
If you’re an SLI customer then this is easy to try – the social tags are passed via the feed we receive from Bazaarvoice just ask your SLI customer success manager and they’ll make it happen.
SLI to Exhibit at SMX West
This week SLI is exhibiting at the SMX West Conference. The event is being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center which is nice as its only 15 minutes from our office.
SLI is exhibiting plus we are running a Theatre Presentation -Wednesday, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:20am on Internal Search & Navigation Best Practices & Their Impact on SEO.
Interview with Larry Kavanagh from DMinSITE
We have just released an interview with the CEO and founder of our partner DMinSITE, Larry Kavanagh. Larry talks about their SaaS ecommerce platform for catalogers and the experience they have gained from the 78 sites that they run. This includes information about improvements they made to the checkout process of one of their customers that increased their conversion rate by 16%.
Larry also talks about their approach to email marketing, in particular about how sending less emails to those who don’t open them can improve deliverability to all recipients. I found the conversation informative – I hope you do too.
Shop.org Innovation Contest Winner
We found out recently that we were one of five companies selected for Shop.org’s Innovation Contest as part of the Shop.org Strategy & Innovation Forum. Alongside companies like BazaarVoice (an SLI partner) and others, we have the opportunity to give a short presentation about our innovative idea – leveraging site search data to dramatically improve the results of email marketing campaigns.
Our “idea” was based on a few client projects where we teamed with our partner ExactTarget to create highly targeted, personalized email marketing messages tailored to individual shoppers at our clients’ sites. By incorporating site search data about visitors’ search activity and data about their shopping preferences and behavior, companies can create email messages that contain popular search results for preferred items (e.g. “women’s shoes”), brands and styles of each customer, and see amazing results. In some cases, our customers saw a 250% higher open rate, a 400% increase in click-troughs, and 300% increase in sales. They also saw a 400% decrease in un-subscribes, a pretty significant measure for email campaigns.
There is so much marketers can do with site search data beyond showcasing products in search results – and many marketers aren’t even aware. Using the data for highly targeted email messages is just one way to extend the ROI of site search and make it worthwhile for your business. If you have any thoughts to share about this, we’d love to hear from you. And if you’ll be at Shop.org in Orlando next week (Feb 2-4), drop by our booth (#307) or come hear us talk about our Innovation Idea. It might be something you can replicate too.
Interview with Mark Dirks from Beacon Technologies
This week we released an interview with Mark Dirks, president of Beacon Technologies. Beacon Tech are a partner of SLIs and we have a number of customer’s in common. Mark has a wealth of experience – he’s been working with web based applications since the early 90s. One of Becon Tech’s strength’s is their Google Analytics consulting – they are a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and Mark talks about the importance of analytics and some of the challenges their customers have.
Interview with Jeff Zwelling from YLighting
We posted this interview with Jeff Zwelling from YLighting just before Christmas but I was a little busy and did not get a chance to blog about it. Jeff is very entrepreneurial – he co-founded Ylighting and is currently working on an opportunity he sees to improve analytics for ecommerce. I’m sure you’ll find it enlightening :-).
Jeff discusses an print advertising campaign he is proud of called Life Illuminated. I’ve uploaded a copy of the Life Illuminated ads so you can take a look at them.
Jeff mentioned a Yahoo group that he has found to be a valuable resource. I’m pretty sure it’s called Web Advertising Roundtable. It is a retailers only group – so you aren’t hassled by any annoying vendors (like me).
