Combine Merchandising and Site Search to Convert More Holiday Shoppers
This is the crucial time of year when most online retailers are doing everything they can to ensure their products get in front of holiday gift-giving shoppers. Both online and in-store, that means clever and stylish merchandising of products. And since a site's search function is what high-converting shoppers often use to find what they're looking for, using advanced site search tools for merchandising is a great way to promote your holiday products.
Site search can be a retailer's best friend when it comes to merchandising, given the large amount of information search provides on consumers’ preferences, buying habits and trends. When your visitors use the search box, they're telling you in their own words what products they want. This language informs your merchandising efforts and also improves the relevancy of your marketing messages. You can also use site search data to quickly identify changes in the market, like which products are in high demand and which are no longer current.
A robust site search should also allow you to customize search results to highlight sale or promotional items, which can encourage more shoppers to click through on results.
Banners in site search results are one of the easiest ways to merchandise products and promotions. Search results pages are places where shoppers are receptive to such messages, and these banners can incorporate keywords commonly used in search terms so that the ad is as relevant as possible. For example, if a visitor is searching for "holiday gifts," banners can display special holiday promotions like free gift wrapping or discounted delivery, or the banners can showcase other products related to the brand or type that the person is searching for.
For example, Motorcycle Superstore uses merchandising banners to promote storewide discounts on popular brands during its summer liquidation sales. These banners can also be used to highlight time-sensitive messages like a flash sale or daily deal.
"Ribbon overlays" are another smart way to promote special deals in search results. These overlays are essentially "digital stickers" that can be dynamically applied to search results to highlight something special about the product — e.g., best sellers, in-stock or out-of-stock items, free shipping, newly added products (see image below as an example), etc. Ribbon overlays are also a great way to highlight the availability of product videos, which can help improve conversions. With an overlay that indicates a video, visitors have more incentive to click and watch. Seeing a product in action can convey useful information such as fit and size much more quickly than by reading product specs.
Along with using ribbon overlays, you can draw shopper attention to deals and popular items by "tuning" search results, which means moving certain products to the top of the results page. You might choose to do this for several reasons, including promoting seasonal or new products or highlighting high-margin or high-inventory items.
Another highly effective promotional idea is the generation of custom landing pages that load when a particular term is searched, like a brand name or type of product. For example, if you want to showcase some holiday-themed products, you can create a landing page that loads when users search for the word "holiday." At the same time, you can create a dedicated link that directs shoppers to that page, then send this link to customers as part of your email marketing and paid search campaigns. Our customer Jelly Belly experienced an 85 percent increase in email open rates when it started using this tactic.
The combination of merchandising and site search can add strength to your marketing efforts and impress consumers by presenting products and brands they actually want to buy. As the holiday season gets underway, that can be a big differentiator for gift buyers.
Geoff Brash is the co-founder of SLI Systems, a provider of on-demand site search software.
