At the National Retail Federation’s Big Show this week, retailers are already looking at the coming holiday shopping season. The numbers are out for the 2015 retail holiday season and spending was strong. According to MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, U.S. retail sales grew by 7.9 percent year-over-year for the period of time between Black Friday and Christmas Eve.
The news was even better for online retailers. eCommerce grew 20 percent compared with last year, according to MasterCard.
With the rush of the holidays comes the chance to make or break annual sales goals in a matter of weeks. It’s an amazing opportunity for retailers, but can also be a source of terrible anxiety. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), holiday sales as a percentage of annual sales for the average retailer is almost 20 percent. With so much at risk, retailers need to pull from every available resource to sell during the holiday season.
Zeroing in on what customers want
Retailers put a great deal of effort into preparing for the holiday season, and as online usage increases — MasterCard says 70 percent of U.S. consumers reported doing more research online than before — it’s more important than ever to have good digital marketing practices in place, paired with an amazing search experience that keeps shoppers engaged.
Retailers have honed their online marketing skills and have become adroit at attracting visitors to their sites through online advertising, advanced email, and social campaigns, but keeping visitors there from the first click to the the final checkout can be difficult.
Even very sophisticated sites often have trouble translating product codes and descriptions into search results that meet exactly the intent of the shopper. Often, this is due to a product-centric classification system that is helpful to back-end developers, but delivers results to shoppers that make no sense. Have you entered a seemingly straightforward query into a retailer’s search box, only to be treated to a slew of obscure parts or irrelevant products? When shoppers get bad results on their first search query, and then again on their second, you can bet they’re going to shop somewhere else.
Delivering context to search results
We’ve developed a classification system that focuses on matching the meaning of a word, not just the word itself. So, if a customer arrives at your site with high hopes of getting a VitaMix blender, which perhaps you don’t carry, eContext is smart enough to look into its 450,000 categories and 21 tiers to understand that what your customer is looking for belongs in this deep category:
Home & Garden >>Home Appliances >> Home Appliance Products >> Kitchen Appliances >> Blenders, Juicers, Smoothie Makers & Frozen Drink Machines >>Blenders
If you don’t offer VitaMix, or if the price tag for a VitaMix is a bit high for your shopper (those professional-grade blenders are a bit pricey), eContext can help you deliver suggested results that are similar by drilling up or down a level. Now, you can deliver results that might better fit your shopper’s price range or intended use.
With this kind of advanced classification system, you can learn a lot from your customers’ searches. Layer on your own analytics programs to discover visitor behavior and develop new ways to present products to visitors, and use that same intelligence to deliver better ads to get visitors there in the first place. eContext is a universal tool, so it can be used to classify your product inventory or search data.
When does planning for next holiday season begin? Right now. Smart retailers are pulling all the data they can from this past season and analyzing it so they can start planning for next year. You should too.