Get to know your customers
Understanding customers is no easy task by any means — often, customers don’t understand their own tendencies and habits, making it nearly impossible for retailers to measure them. Instead, the solution is often one of buckshot marketing: create a great idea or enticing promotion and hope it strikes a chord.
But, in the fight to understand customers and treat them accordingly, one critical tool is often overlooked: semantic site search. On-site semantic searchacts as a universal translator by way of taking direct customer demands and doing two key things:
1. Acting as an expert salesman to generate spot-on search results. Customer needs and wants go into the search box — no matter how convoluted or vague — and applicable products are returned to help push a seamless sale.
2. Understanding, correcting and overcoming natural human errors to connect the inquiry to products. Even when customers aren’t quite sure what they’re looking for or can’t express their needs, semantic site search provides a helping hand in guiding them.
Now, the above examples are simply surface benefits of semantic site search when it comes to understanding your customers. In those ways, on-site semantic search is a passive tool: you simply place it where customers can use it and it does the rest.
Semantic search also has an active side to deciphering customer needs and trends: providing you with mountains of data that can be quantified, qualified and assessed to delve deeper into different segments of your consumer base.
Data mining through semantics
Want to know how many of your customers are spelling a product name wrong? Looking to figure out if it’s worth bringing on another product variation? Want to bolster your site’s SEO using keywords common to your shoppers?
Semantic search data can help you decipher all of these things and more, giving you a better understanding of your customers. And, when that data is applied to different facets of your e-commerce site, it means you’re actively working to treat your customers like people, not just visitors.
Mining and extrapolating data from your e-commerce site’s semantic search function creates a direct, pedagogical opportunity for retailers. By decoding search terms, phrases, products, habits, brands and just about anything else typed into the search box, you’re afforded some golden opportunities:
- You can cherry-pick select statistics and data segments in regards to an idea or planned campaign you have, to create reasonable expectations for the success of that campaign.
- When exploring new product opportunities, you’re able to evaluate searches for similar products, competing products and other applicable variables that might dictate not only how successful a new product is likely to be, but also if it will detract from other product sales.
- In seeing frequent search terms, you’re better able to optimize the on-page content of your products — answering customer questions, emphasizing certain traits, using appropriate keywords and so on.
- Search terms will give further insight into which products customers might have trouble finding, allowing you to better highlight them within your inventory, place them front and center or include them in locations where they might generate better revenue.
- Identifying commonalities in many searches will allow you to pair products to create add-on sales and bundled campaigns, to increase the dollar figure per order.
Customer data, even in the minutia, is core in breaking down the behavior of your customers: semantic search gives you this data. How you choose to use it is up to you, but the concept remains the same: having direct customer data usually means understanding your shoppers, which means running a better business.
