Your Customers Are Talking, Are You Listening?
Rishabh Shetty
Ask me how I help growth/marketing leaders execute GTM strategy to fill the sales funnel with marketing leads that covert into new sales opportunities!! ?? || Growth Acceleration Expert
Do you know your customer's love language? Maybe not, but if you don't understand their search language you could be missing out on a long happy life together. Here are three reasons why you should know how your customers rely on the search bar, and how you can use that knowledge to power a more personalized experience, writes, Will Hayes, Chief Executive Officer, Lucidworks.
A quick preface: Don’t let me tell you how your customers are behaving. I’ve been working in search engine development for a long time and while I know a lot, I don’t know your specific customer segment.
Download MTA’s Free Ebook on "Identity Resolution for Winning Customer Experience "@ https://mta.media/iothm
By tracking metrics such as bounce rate, average order value, common search phrases, and add to cart rates, you can paint a more complete picture of how your unique customers prefer to shop. If you understand your shoppers’ behavior, you can make informed decisions about how to implement the following guidelines.
Keep Search Simple (and Smart)
As a famous playwright once wrote, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. However, calling rain boots “shoe water blockers” probably won’t fly with customers. If they can’t find it, they won’t buy it. Make it simple to locate items based on your customers common lexicon — what they really call things. Track their queries over time to understand how they prefer to communicate.
At a digital commerce meet-up in New York earlier this year, Katharine McKee, founder of Digital Consultancy, advised, “Be truthful and honest about your product and what the market thinks it is. Be firm in your brand equity but know that how you wish to view your product can be unhelpful and lead to missed opportunities. For example, if no one calls your lip gloss a lip glaze, it’s pointless to continue using that term in search engine description.”
Another way to help customers find what they’re searching for is with synonym detection capabilities. For example, garbage bin, trash bin, waste basket are all common terms that refer to the same item. An effective search engine allows you to update your search beyond just a basic text match to capture (and optimize for) these common phrases.
Make Real-Time Recommendations
Research from Accenture and the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) found that 63 percent of surveyed consumers are interested in personalized recommendations. According to Salesforce, 6 percent of ecommerce visits that include engagement with AI-powered recommendations drive 37 percent of revenue. Those numbers are too big to ignore.