How Your Search Box Can Inform Marketing Strategy

Gaining insight into how your customers think and behave is essential for an effective marketing strategy. Yet customer research can be expensive and time consuming. Should you hire focus groups? Conduct customer surveys? Enlist help from a data analyst?

While each of those methods can be useful, the starting point to gathering customer intelligence should be easy and inexpensive for online retailers, who already have a window into customer intent and behaviors through the search function on their website. Site search data reflects what visitors actually do on your website — the search keywords they use, which products they click on in response to search results, and whether they buy the products for which they've searched. This is real data direct from consumer fingertips, not some educated guesses.

Missed Opportunities for Marketers
According to SLI Systems’ latest e-commerce survey, the majority of online retailers aren't taking advantage of the opportunity to tap into site search data for real-time information on what consumers want. In the survey of 160 global retail organizations, 57 percent said they don't use site search reports and information to improve marketing programs. Half of the respondents said they don't use site search data to enhance any business programs or processes.

One thing the survey does show is that retailers consider site search to be an important component of their online storefronts. Respondents said that site search is one of their top three priorities for 2014. However, not many businesses go the extra step to use search insights to improve how they communicate with customers. Only 25 percent said they integrate site search data into emails to create custom campaigns, and just 27 percent said they create search engine-optimized landing pages populated with search results.

This is clearly a missed opportunity. Weekly or even daily reports on top search phrases can guide your decisions on what products to focus on for merchandising. Reports on "no results" pages can uncover products people want that you may not have, but could start offering in response to demand. For example, U.K. retailer Lovehoney became the exclusive distributor for a line of "50 Shades of Grey" merchandise due to a high number of searches for products that matched items in the popular book before it became a mainstream hit. Search data is also useful for knowing keywords to add to press releases and web pages for maximum SEO. The following are examples of retailers who are using site search data to make an impact on their marketing and merchandising efforts.

Ian MacDonald, former vice president of marketing for PartySuppliesDelivered.com, used top search phrase reports a couple months before Halloween to get an early read on the top costumes and supplies the retailer would need to keep in stock as the holiday approached. He also used a report of the top searched keywords to maximize SEO efforts and online ads.

Candy leader Jelly Belly also pulls commonly used search keywords from site search data to add to press releases, emails and other marketing content. To attract customers to a Cinco de Mayo promotion, the company used search data to create customized landing pages for search terms "tres leches cake" and "Mexican hot chocolate," and used these pages to showcase recipes incorporating some of Jelly Belly's products. The URLs for these dedicated landing pages were added to display advertising, retargeting ads and emails. The use of site search data paid off: Jelly Belly saw an 85 percent increase in open rates for its direct email campaign.

Motorcycle Superstore, a top motorcycle gear and accessories retailer, also uses site search to maximize the effectiveness of its marketing efforts. The company uses site search data to create merchandising banners that appear when someone searches on Google using a relevant keyword, and then clicks on a result from a Motorcycle Superstore listing. Searchers then see a product detail page with merchandising banners highlighting other site search results for that keyword, which helps draw attention to a broader range of products than the searcher would have otherwise seen. These product detail pages and banners provide an average conversion lift of 2 percent to 5 percent for the featured products.

Plans for Search-Driven Marketing in 2014
From the examples above, it's clear that many retailers recognize that search has tremendous value for their businesses. SLI's survey confirms this, with nearly half (47 percent) of respondents saying they plan to incorporate more features, functionality and data from site search into their marketing programs in 2014.

If you're one of the businesses giving some serious thought to revving up your use of site search data in the coming months, there's evidence that it will have a positive effect on your bottom line. Forty percent of survey respondents said their site search pages convert at a rate two times to four times higher than standard navigation pages.

Site search can do far more for your online business than simply guide visitors to the right products and content. By closely monitoring search and how your visitors use it, you'll be a smarter marketer and get more out of your investment in your search solution.

Geoff Brash is the co-founder and vice president of business intelligence of SLI Systems, a provider of on-demand site search software for online retailers.