Your customers are trying
As a retailer, it can be a struggle sometimes to bridge the gap between the items you sell and the customers who might buy them. So often you’re stuck in the middle with a product that a manufacturer has shipped to you along with the appropriate SKU and possibly a photo and a short description, and you have to figure out how to market that product so that your customers will find it on their first try when they get to your website.
One of the problems you have is that your customers aren’t looking up a formal SKU number — they’re going to your search box with the vocabulary they’re accustomed to using. If a customer arrives on your site and enters the keyword “strappy Choos”, will your search engine–trained to look for certain words from product descriptions–return any helpful results?. Sure, you sell plenty of strappy shoes, and you may even carry the Jimmy Choo brand she’s looking for, but if your search results can’t make the connection, you’ve just given your customer a reason to leave your site.
Matching meaning instead of words
If your customer was visiting a retail location, a sales associate would take her right to the Jimmy Choo section, or show her a grouping of equally fun party shoes. But how can you recreate this experience online?
eContext has a solution that’s powered by human thinking. We can take your customer query and map it to our deep taxonomy to help you deliver better search results. We’ve had humans curating our taxonomy so that the terms are accurate and reflect real English language speech. Our classification goes up to 21 tiers deep and features 450,000 categories.
When a shopper arrives at your site with a search term that’s puzzling to your search function, like “strappy choos”, pass that search term on to us. eContext looks at the search term in real time and returns category suggestions that your site logic can understand. Now you can deliver relevant options for your customer to consider, including “Jimmy Choo Footwear”, “Heels”, and “Fashion Sandals”. With intelligent classification, what might have been a roadblock that sends your customer to competitor’s site is, instead, an intuitive shopping experience and a new opportunity for a sale.
In addition to real-time search, you can use eContext technology to classify product descriptions and consumer reviews. By applying the same topic classification to all of your interconnected product and consumer data, you’ll be well-equipped to match customer requests with relevant results.
With eContext, you increase your opportunities to sell to customers. How many times do you think you’ve lost a customer due to poor search? People will use search terms that make sense to them and it’s up to you to get to the heart of what they’re asking for and deliver.
Additional options with eContext
eContext helps you build more flexibility into your site by connecting you with a deep taxonomy that can roll up or roll down as you need it to. For example, maybe you carry a wide variety of Jimmy Choos, but want to promote the top-selling subcategory of “Jimmy Choo Ivette”. On the other hand, if you don’t carry the Jimmy Choo brand at all, you can move up a few categories and offer results for the more general topic of “Heels”.
eContext also returns scores, confidence measures for fit of a particular document to a category. These scores can be used for ranking. So, if the consumer is searching for something in the sandals category, and the retailer has many product descriptions related to that category, the scores can be used to select the most relevant product descriptions.
Data-savvy retailers can layer in other types of analytics as well, such as integrating relevance scores with click-through or conversion rates to identify the best choices for use in search results.
If you can build more relevance into your site, your end-user will stay longer, and you’ve got a much better chance to covert. If the shoe fits…
