8 Tips to Building Your eCommerce COVID Recovery Map
Tips to Building Your eCommerce COVID Recovery Map
Now that brands have felt the thorough disruption of normal day-to-day operations, how should they go about trying to right the ship and adapt their strategies for a completely revised post-pandemic landscape?
‘Business as usual’ holds no meaning in today’s current climate. This year has seen seismic changes in the way business is conducted across all sectors and industries and brands have had to be agile to continue to serve their customers through these trying times. With mandated quarantines, social distancing measures, and required shutdowns, ecommerce companies were forced to completely revise and rethink their strategies – and in very short order.
But, what’s next? Now that brands have felt the thorough disruption of normal day-to-day operations, how should they go about trying to right the ship and adapt their strategies for a completely revised post-pandemic landscape? Last month we connected with Erwin Seigel, Managing Director at Celebros Search, and Jeremy LaDuque, EVP of Marketing at Bridgeline, and discussed eight key strategies eCommerce brands should consider to improve their recovery efforts.
1. Leverage intelligent site search for better conversion
Your Google analytics will tell you how often your search is used by website visitors. We typically see anywhere from 10-30% of visitors use search. Outdated search functionalities will frustrate the user because they won’t find what they’re looking for. A powerful, AI based, site search will empower your customers to find what they are looking for.
2. Make your search smarter with NLP and AI
Advanced search capabilities, including natural language processing and artificial intelligence, help increase the relevancy of the results from each site visitor’s product search, which is especially important in this industry with such a large product catalog.
3. Ensure your technology understands your customer’s intent
Ensure search results are being presented accurately. If you’re disconnected with their customers, then simple confusion can lead to loss of a customer’s business. If the customer is looking for a table, it becomes frustrating if the customer is shown a table lamp instead. Make sure your search is intelligent enough to know the difference.
4. Use machine learning and AI to improve the customer experience
Level-up your results by leveraging previous user behavior and trends to intelligently rank and promote the most popular products. Instead of showing someone a standard list of tv’s, instead have your search functionality prioritize the most popular based on previous users of your site. Your search results will continue to evolve and maximize the probability of a purchase for future customers.
5. Encourage purchases with abandoned cart reminders and incentives
Often times, the total value of what is sitting in your visitors’ abandoned shopping carts equates to far more than your actual sales. Don’t give up on those sales! Setting automated emails that encourage shoppers to complete their purchase and even offer an incentive to motivate them more can change lurkers to purchasers.
6. Use visual merchandising to entice customers and highlight your promotions
Not every customer has the same interests and needs as the next customer – ensure you are offering them exactly what they’re looking for and what meets their specific needs. By merchandising your landing pages (search results, promotions, etc.) you can choose which items are promoted to entice customers to engage with that product. Create profiles for groups of people that control what they see to increase the likelihood of making a sale.7. Cross-sell your products and increase your average order value Expose your customers to products that would likely be complemented by the item in their shopping cart. The suggested product is not meant to replace the sale of the original product, but rather enhance the product and make the final purchase larger. Simply by exposing shoppers to more products, you increase your likelihood of a larger order.8. Automate landing page creation for Google
Create high-performing search pages that add to new, relevant, content to your website and show up in Google searches for the products customers search for most. By adding dynamic landing pages for searches, you’re giving Google the fuel to crawl your site and increase your rankings.
Conclusion
Although this pandemic has imposed cataclysmic change, there are many ways in which it has created equally sizeable opportunities for growth. There have been significant increases in online sales, new technology development and adaptation, and communication methods with customers. Now is the time for the great acceleration – reimagine your online sales strategies to better serve your customers.
Watch a recording of our webinar
If you are interested in learning more how to develop your roadmap and the strategies discussed here, you can watch the previously recorded webinar here.
