Learn With Searchspring: Live Demo Series

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Learn With Searchspring: Live Demo Series

Join Searchspring as we dive into all things Search, Merchandising, and Personalization with some of our favorite ecommerce experts.  

We’ll provide three quick, 15-minute live demos of Searchspring to show you all of the key features you need to maximize your ecommerce site.

Part 1 | Deep Dive into Search

Part 2 | Deep Dive into Merchandising

Part 3 | Deep Dive into Personalization

Learn more about Searchspring’s solutions and get ready to unlock your ecommerce site’s full potential with these insights.

» Watch On-Demand!

Deep Dive into Ecommerce Search – Webinar Transcript

 

0:00

Welcome to our first of three Searchspring live sessions.

0:06

Today, we’re going to specifically dive into e-commerce Site Search.

0:15

As I mentioned, this is the first of three sessions.

0:18

We’ll be doing one next next week, same time and then in two weeks, we’ll do another one.

0:26

The next two sessions will be focused on Merchandising and Personalization.

0:30

Again, today, today’s session will be focused on Site Search, specifically.

0:39

My name is Charles Summers. I’ll be your host today, I’m going to mostly get out of the way here in just a second letter, but our experts do their thing. But I’m the head of growth marketing here at Searchspring.

0:52

You can see my e-mail address there.

0:54

You’d like to reach out to me after the, after the webinar is over with any questions, feel free to do so.

1:01

one thing I’ll mention before I move any further is there is a Q and A section in your control panel.

1:09

So if you have any questions while we’re going through today’s material, feel free to put it in there. We’re going to set aside some time at the end to go through any questions that you might have.

1:22

All right.

1:22

So, I want to welcome both Matts, Matt Jarman, and Matt Barber. Feel free to turn on your cameras. Take guys, I’m gonna kick it over to you to introduce yourself.

1:36

So, Matt Jarman, I’ll let you go to you first.

1:40

Everyone. I’m Matt Jarman, strategic sales manager at Searchspring. I work with our incoming prospects who want to learn a little bit more about Searchspring and how we can help up.

1:51

I’m Matt Barber, I am a Senior Customer Success Manager at Searchspring, been working in the marketing space for about the last seven years, and right now, I’ve primarily focused on our top tier customers and how the monopolist strategy and going into those out of their search for an account.

2:10

Thanks, guys.

2:12

All right, so I’m going to quickly go through today’s agenda. So first, we are going to have a couple of, just, real quick, 32nd poll questions.

2:22

We’re going to dive into site search. We’ll do a walk through.

2:27

And then we have, you know, basically five different areas that will kind of go through, helping shoppers find what they need quickly and easily, understanding and satisfying shoppers, intent, leveraging product discovery opportunities, increasing conversion, and then we’ll also talk about some of the some of the things that are new, A search for you, if you haven’t checked this out in a while.

2:48

So, we’ll go over to our first poll here.

2:52

one moment to pull it up.

2:56

All right. So, first poll is on your screen right now. We’ll give it NaN. The question is, do you use a search tool outside of your native platform?

3:06

Select one of the following. Yes, I use Searchspring. So, your customer, welcome.

3:12

Yes, I use the search tool outside of my native platform.

3:16

Know, I use the search function inside of my native platform, or, no, I’m not, currently using any type of site search tool.

3:24

Give it about 10 more seconds here.

3:30

Alright. Cool, alright. We’re gonna go ahead and close it up, and I’ll share the results.

3:36

OK, so 25% of you already use Searchspring.

3:41

25% use a search tool outside of your native platform, and the other half of you are using a search function within your native platform currently.

3:50

All right, I’m gonna hide the results there and move on to the next poll.

3:55

Pull that one up.

3:58

All right, so you should see that on your screen now. How satisfied are you with your current Site? Search Tool?

4:03

Select one of the following, so very satisfied, satisfied, fairly satisfied.

4:09

Not satisfied.

4:13

Give it about 10 more seconds here.

4:22

Right?

4:28

I don’t think all the results came through. I think maybe something was wrong with the pull there. But I’ll share it anyway. So, everybody, I think it was only counted a couple of people, so I apologize that it didn’t pull up, pull up everything. But fairly satisfied, so we’ll just go ahead and move on here.

4:48

All right, so, all right, so I’m gonna go ahead and take myself off the screen and take the slides off.

4:55

Matt Jarman I’m going to pass controls over to you, and you can kind of start doing your thing.

5:00

So give me one moment here, and I’ll give it to you.

5:07

Styles. And over that, that, the search for users did not vote. They were data. They were not represented in poll number two.

5:20

All right. Good thing.

5:23

Great minds.

5:25

All right. Yep.

5:31

Dead trees. It’s good.

5:38

I am present a little bit.

5:40

Not good.

5:44

All right, can see that.

5:46

Yep, looks good.

5:48

We’ll do, so, Electron said we’ve got about five things to talk about: keep it pretty, high level, informational. Thanks everyone for hopping on. First of all, I’ll talk about just the importance of Site search.

5:58

And, I have, 3, four, or 5, 6 combos, a day of all sorts of industries ranging from fashion and apparel, automotive, B2B, home goods. You name it.

6:11

And, one of the consistent things that I see is, or that we see in the market, is the importance of site search as it relates to your bottom line.

6:21

Sometimes we’ll see you customers, or prospects, with traffic using 5% of our traffic using site search, or 10% of the traffic.

6:31

You can say search, but it always shows, it’s always shown that 20, 30, 40, 45% of their bottom line revenue is attributed to site search. So it’s wildly important. And for those who, know, maybe you’re using a native search, or maybe you’re using a platform, that’s, you know, just maybe something in an app store or something like that. It’s, it’s akin to saying, no, I don’t really care much about 30 or 40, 50% my bottom line. So it’s, it’s really important.

6:59

And I think there are some, some tips that not search string related that can get your site search uses job. Because they’re high intent customers. They care about your your website, they came to your website for a specific reason, they’re looking for something in your site.

7:13

So, I want to bring in that barber to speak about some of those things we could do to get people to use site search more. What do we, what do we see, Barbara?

7:24

Yeah, the two things that we see kind of at the top of the funnel, if you want to save for Search, specifically, would be to get your shoppers to use it, right.

7:32

And so the two things that I see with my customers, that end up leading to increases for search usage, as one is providing a positive search experience.

7:43

So if your shop for today is utilizing your search, and we’re not producing consistent results, or, more importantly, wrote relevant results to what they’re searching for, They’re less likely to come back and noodle. I search in the future, but then also second, and this is a little bit outside of what? you know, searchspring controls. But really on any and all of your website’s designing your search bar to be easily found and also easy to use. So.

8:11

You know, I know sometimes for design sake, you know, the search bar might be hidden behind like a menu button, especially on a mobile device, but again, just making it easier for, your shoppers, find it and use it, tended to increase the number of shoppers who are engaging with search and leading to those higher conversion rates.

8:30

And I think, Barbara, you were referencing maybe this blog that you’re going to sit outside? I think, well, we’ll send this out after the webinar, but those are small changes, where you can increase the, the white space in the search bar, to ensure that visitors can see the search bar and small things like that. That can really cause drastic increases to conversion rates, and drastic increases to your bottom line. So just a small tip there.

8:53

Now, regardless of the search tool you use, whether it’s Native, or if it’s search branding, or if it’s one of the other hundred search tools that are out there, ultimately the search tool is only going to be as good as the data that you’re pushing into the search tool.

9:10

And this varies widely across industry, too. There are some industries like fashion and apparel that the data is often quite good. It’s quite easy to use. And there’s some industries like automotive or B2B or industrial, where you’re getting data from, 100 different vendors. And you’re a retailer, and you’re selling so many different products in your site.

9:31

And you don’t know what you’re gonna get and you have a Lean team and you can’t really normalize the data.

9:35

So, uh, Barbara, what are some tips around the data and how can we help, and how can we, guide, and what, what should customers be done?

9:46

Yeah, absolutely, And you hit it right on the head is. There’s a wide range of experiences that we’re working with. And so as a company, we try to be flexible.

9:54

But when it comes to data, more than anything else, consistency in naming conventions, consistency, and tagging is going to allow you for consistent results. And again, relevant results for those searches that are happening.

10:12

So, you know, just a bad example of consistency, or, I guess, yeah, inconsistency would be, if you’re utilizing black, blanket shirt for one product. But then, maybe another product you’re calling it, Blanket shirt in Ballou.

10:30

That’s a lot of inconsistency there. And so it can make it more challenging to provide relevant results. And consistency there, then, in certain circumstances where, maybe you don’t have control over the naming conventions For the titles, there are alternative fields that we can add we can look at within your data.

10:51

to help, again, provide really consistent and relevant results, sell a lot of different options, sometimes more challenging than others. But consistency, really, as King.

11:02

I want to piggyback on that. So, you’re thinking about some of those industries where it’s like, There’s so many examples, But let’s say they named their products. Something very weird or they name it something in a different language or they name it is, we know these things that don’t describe the product. Because that’s what they do and that’s their style?

11:19

Or if it’s maybe a B2B company that says, no, it’s a ***** dash, 316 seven inch dash for this, what, what can be done in those cases? Or how can we make the relevancy better than what it is today?

11:35

Yeah, Absolutely!

11:36

So, what we do is we generate a product type based on typically the product name or the product title.

11:44

And so, what we’re actually able to do is to strip out certain parts of that name, to get to the, the true object, to the subject, of what the product truly is. So, you know, when someone might be searching for a specific drill, but also might come with certain sizes or voltage or something like that, you know, we can kind of ship certain parts of the name out to get to the root of what that product is. And that’s ultimately a drill?

12:12

Now, what’s great is that we don’t get rid of it entirely. We still allow it to be found within the searchable data. So, if someone is specifically searching for 12 volt no drills, we can produce specific results for that product despite shipping it out from what we determine as the product type.

12:31

I think that’s important, and I’m just going to pivot over to this screen. I think it’s important, especially for something that comes to mind. You say, We want the data to be consistent.

12:42

And, you know, oftentimes, I’ll see websites using, to your example, dress in pink, dress in blue, or dress death, dress, dress, dash, pink.

12:54

And it’s consistently done that way, which is really good for us, Because we can strip out that dash or Drip strip out anything after the word in. So that we know we’re getting to the root of what they’re looking for, which is addressed.

13:05

And I think that’s a good segue into the next point, is, if you’re using maybe a native, or if you’re using, maybe a search app that’s free in the app store or something like that. Oftentimes, the relevancy or which products are showing up is going to be determined based on keyword matching, or something that’s heavily used in document search that says, I’m going to search for address. And we’re gonna look for the product that has dressed the most times in its description, and that’s the most relevant product.

13:36

But it may not be the most relevant problem.

13:39

And so going back to that thought of a product typing, I’ll search, bring, does it, is we take that naming convention. We do what we call product typing or product awareness, which is us, just looking at how people actually search in real life.

13:52

People are programmed by Google and other search engines to search in a very specific way, which is the way they talk. And so we do that and we look at where the adjectives are, the nouns are and the subjects. And ultimately, that’s going to be the difference in the example I always give, searching for milk chocolate versus chop them up on is Hershey’s. And one is, next quick. We’re not looking for the same thing. In other words, are the same. And so an example I’d like to give is the source, our test store, looking for a blanket where the store also carries blanket shirts, and it’s one of their best sellers. And so in this example, we can search for blanket and see that the blankets are populating at the top of the results, because that’s ultimately what we’re looking for. It’s the product type.

14:34

But as I scroll down and look towards the bottom of the results, I can find the blanket shirts, and if I were to search in Bursley, like, shirt, I’m not gonna see blankets, littering, or cluttering the top of the results. And I was actually just talking to a store yesterday, who sold cowboy hats. And when I search for cowboy hats on their site, I got cowboy hat bands in the first 20 results, which means a customer, I’m not looking for a couple of events, looking at probably, hats.

14:57

So that relevancy piece is extremely important, because if customers aren’t finding what they’re looking for quickly, they’re out of here. They’re not going to stick around.

15:06

Um, I want to quickly pivot too, the search preview that search bring offers or I call it the backend searcher, Uncovering the curtain, pulling back turn on the Wizard of Oz.

15:17

This is us saying, Hey, there’s no black box to search.

15:21

And making it very simple for someone with you could have a ton of tech co occupant, or you could add zero a technical document and be able to fix your search.

15:29

And so if I were to go into our backend and search the exact same thing. So search blanket here, and I get my results and I get now the checkerboard and the red and the blue over here. I can go into our backend and get the exact same result set, but ultimately figure out why these products are showing up in the position that they are in the search result that they are.

15:49

So to take a quick look at this, if I were to look at, going back to that product type, these are all called blankets, and with that, they’re getting five point relevancy for us, and the way Searchspring looks at it. These are all relevant, because they’re all blankets, Some vendors, or some search partners will say this is a 5.1 blanket and a 4.9 and a 3.2. And it doesn’t really make sense in the context of e-commerce because I search for a blanket. I want to see the blankets.

16:15

Barber.

16:16

Any anything to talk about around, OK, well, my data’s just not that clean. What can we do to optimize some things or, you know, to put band-aids on things where we don’t have to completely overhaul the data just to make it work?

16:32

Yeah, for sure. So I think there’s a few things that we’re able to do to help with this challenge, because it is very, very common challenge that we deal with. And so there’s certain things that we can handle right within the data that we’re working with. So sometimes we might find, you know, the keyword. in the name, sometimes we might not, so we need to make other fields searchable. And so we can look at it from that perspective. But also, on top of that, I think that there’s gonna be times in situations where maybe your shopper doesn’t call it a blanket they might call it a quilt, or something you know.

17:04

You use another form, or fashion to describe that product. And so we’re able to help bridge the gap between those two, utilizing things, like synonyms, both groups and one-way synonyms for different scenarios, as well as redirect. So maybe, you know, it doesn’t make sense to try to utilize in other word that you call it in your data versus what your shopper might call that product. Sometimes it might make sense to redirect them to a page, whether that’s for our return policy, but also we could return them to a specific brand page as well to help manage that process.

17:41

So yeah. I mean, so there’s definitely situations, you know, where we’re going to try to do our best to format the data and consistent sort of format. And sometimes it’s maybe even using another field. So I know for, for instance, Shopify customers, they have a field called the product type.

17:59

And so if there’s just a lot of inconsistencies in the naming conventions, and we just can’t work with it there, I’ve worked with customers to look at that product type field instead.

18:10

And again, we’ve, we’ve already mentioned, but we could ship out certain portions of that, all to help produce relevant and consistent results, which go back to the beginning of our conversation, right? Of search usage, and trying to provide positive shopping experiences for the shoppers who have typically an intent to purchase, which leads to higher conversions.

18:31

It’s good stuff.

18:33

I think it’s important to know, when thinking about applying all the synonyms and applying all these redirects, it’s important to think about the analytics behind all this, and being able to not spin our wheels on the things that people actually aren’t searching for. So it’s very common to come in and think, you know, I asked to make a million synonyms because top can be called all these things, and she can be called all these things, but ultimately, it’s about what your actual shopper is looking for. So it’s quite easy to jump into some, some analytics to figure out, hey, what are people actually searching for my site by volume? Let me spend some additional time on top 10, or top 20 or top 50 search queries. In and create the synonyms, I need to create the redirects I need to, and also merchandise in the way I need to, you know, being able to say, Hey, the relevancy is one part of the equation, and maybe your current search vendor is showing relevant products. And there’s a Sort by relevancy option, which doesn’t really make sense, because All product relevant products irrelevant.

19:31

And so I think the additional layer, which we’ll talk about a little more next week, is going to be the merchandising component, which says, hey, Search Rank, show me every relevant product, In this case, Let me every single dress. OK, now, we, as a business, want to merchandise these dresses in a way that makes sense to us as a business.

19:47

And so, this is something that could be automated, Could be dynamic. It could be manual, can be personalized, and just having more control over that actual search experience.

19:55

Because, again, we’re now talking about 30 or 40% of our bottom line that we need to have control over.

20:02

Barbara, any additional quick kit or thoughts on search as we go into the holiday season?

20:07

Why it’s impactful and in ways that we can help?

20:12

Yeah, absolutely.

20:14

Know, so one of the things I forgot to mention is, you know, a lot of the merchandise is I work with time is the biggest challenge, and so finding ways to automate these processes, to provide positive experience for the shoppers. one of our newer releases is Interim integrated spell Correction, which looks at merchandisers product, data as the dictionary essentially for the spell correction. So you don’t have to go through And create every single last synonym for every possible variation of a misspelling.

20:46

And he said, we’re gonna look at your product data, look to write an exact example here and we’re still going to produce those relevant results. Because we’re finding blanket again, in the data, we’re finding that subject position. And again, if they added sure and they misspelled that, again, we would, we would automatically make those connections happen for your shoppers, define the products that they’re looking for. And then I think ahead of, you know, the seasons that are coming up, thinking through, you know, really optimizing, right? Going through, providing, you know, making sure your data is clean, if that’s a project that you have the bandwidth to invest in.

21:29

In addition to that, start thinking through the campaigns that you have planned to run. And we’ll touch more, probably next time. But the merchandising campaigns, you can schedule out and run thinking through those experiences for your shoppers and optimizing it this.

21:45

It’s gonna allow you to capitalize on those those key moments of the year.

21:51

That’s good stuff.

21:53

If there are any questions, I don’t know if any of came in, or if anybody has any questions to ask. I think we’re a little over time.

22:02

Yeah. So I’ve got a couple of just quick ones here.

22:06

And then we’ll, we’ll bring it to a close here after another couple of minutes, OK.

22:11

So and John Muir, you kind of talked about this briefly.

22:17

But why is this better than native search tool?

22:21

Maybe just re-iterate it there, just a little bit.

22:25

You know, I always say, it’s because of the control that you have over your search experience in a native tool. Now, there are a lot of bells and whistles that Searchspring can offer, but ultimately, it’s the control of experience because innovative tool.

22:39

There really isn’t that granular layer of control. So if I search for something on the site, it’s, whatever you see, what you see is what you get. It may be good, it may be bad, it may be relevant, maybe not.

22:50

But ultimately, Searchspring is gonna give you that ability to say, hey, I want my search experience to be this way, because this is what I know about my shoppers, and this is what I know about my business.

23:01

Awesome. To mark quick questions.

23:06

What considerations need to be made from a data privacy perspective?

23:12

Specifically, the question is, how safe is it from data privacy?

23:16

So I’m not sure, Jeremy, you get that question a lot when you’re doing demos.

23:22

But, you know, maybe just talk about how, how that all works.

23:30

So, there are a few ways to go with the question, so I’m not sure if this will answer the question, but search thing is going to be compliant with things like GDPR, TCPA. Any other data privacy laws that are out there?

23:46

Spring doesn’t carry any personnel personally, identify our Bible information. So I’m thinking about things like, hey, my customer information or my customer data, everything’s gonna be hashed. So if you haven’t gotten to this, but if we’re thinking about something like personalization or for thinking about how we personalizing the search experience or giving this customer personalized recommendations, nothing’s personally identifiable.

24:09

So I may be customer 1 2 3, or customer ABC, and that’s how we know this customer likes these certain things.

24:16

But beyond that, it’s, it’s first party data, it’s your cookies, share data, and we’re not able to identify people based on that.

24:26

Cool, awesome.

24:28

Yeah.

24:29

To the person who asked that question, if you need more context, just let us know. Feel free to follow up with us after. the last question is, how long does Searchspring take to implement? Could we be live by before Black Friday?

24:45

You could. So there are a few ways you can implement.

24:48

Searching is going to be one of the only vendors that can implement for you. So, I will just note, Searchspring a fully custom implemented solutions, or not an app in the app store where you can start tomorrow. Typically takes about eight weeks if we’re handling the implementation. our development team. So a signature today, it looks like a go live mid September.

25:07

Now you do have the option of implementing yourself or implementing with an agency. So that would be up to their resources and their timeline. We’ve seen it in four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks. So, you have options. If you don’t have a dev team or any access to resources, then we have that option available.

25:25

Awesome, Just gonna pull up this final slide here. I just want to thank everybody for joining us today. Quite a few people join.

25:34

So really appreciate you coming and learning today.

25:38

If you want to have a follow up conversation, you can connect directly with Matt that German NetSquared. But yeah, German, you can, you can scan this QR code here on your screen, and otherwise, when the survey pops up at the end, when you leave, There will also be a link in the question that’ll take you to, to his calendar to schedule some time. So feel free to do it that way, as well.

26:04

That’s it. So thank you, everyone. Thanks, Matt and Matt. And we’ll see you all next week.

26:13

Thank you, guys.

Deep Dive into Ecommerce Personalization – Webinar Transcript

0:00

Hi, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar.

0:06

Thanks for joining us for our final session session of the Searchspring live series.

0:12

Today, we’re going to take a deep dive into all things, personalization.

0:22

I am your host for today’s webinar. My name is Anthony Krajec, I am a Marketing Campaign Specialist here at Searchspring.

0:32

I’ve also included my e-mail on the side, as you can see, if at the conclusion of today’s webinar, there’s a question that you have. Please feel free to send it over to me and I will get you an answer as fast as possible.

0:47

While we’re on the topic of asking questions, I did want to remind everyone that everyone has the ability to ask questions live through the chat during today’s webinar.

0:59

So, if one of our panelists mentioned something and you want them to dig in a little bit more on it, please feel free to fire it off in the chat and we will make sure that we get to it.

1:12

Speaking of panelists, I want to go ahead and introduce Matt Jarman and Matt Barber. Again, thank you both for being here, and I wanted to give each of you a moment too.

1:26

Introduce yourself and your role here at Searchspring. So, gentlemen out and if you want to kick us off.

1:32

Thanks, Anthony. My name is Matt Jarman, strategic sales manager at Searchspring. I’ve been here for almost two years. I’ve worked in e-commerce tech for five years.

1:40

I have a two year old daughter and happy to be here.

1:48

Yeah. My name is Matt Barber, I’ve been with Searchspring for just over a year now.

1:54

I’m a senior customer success manager I work with our top tier customers and building out strategy for merchandising how to manage personalization as well.

2:05

I’ve been working in the marketing vertical for the last seven years, and expecting a baby girl on the way.

2:13

So, excited about that.

2:17

Wonderful, thank you again for being here. Thank you both of you for being here.

2:24

And before we kick things off, wanted to go ahead and do the run of the show, the order in which we’re going to do things today to kick it off. We’re going to start with some poll questions.

2:38

These are very brief, just to get you thinking about the, your personalization strategy, and your goals around it.

2:46

After that, I’ll go ahead and turn it over to Matt Jarman to kinda go through the walkthrough of personalization with the Searchspring platform.

2:58

And then I mentioned that you can ask questions live on the chat.

3:02

Today, if we don’t get to your question right away, no worries. That is what the Q&A portion of today’s for. With that being said, I’ll go ahead and dive into our polls.

3:18

First poll question is, Do you use a personalization tool outside of your native platform?

3:23

A: Yes, I use Searchspring B, Yes, I’m currently using a personalization tool outside of my native platform. C, No, I use the personalization function in my native platform.

3:34

And D, No, I’m not currently using any type of personalization tool, so I will go ahead and get that poll launched.

3:55

Waiting for some attendees here to go ahead and put in their answer, we’ll give it a few more seconds.

4:01

If we don’t get anything in, then completely understand.

4:09

So, knowing, put in the answer for this question, but, again, hoping that everyone on the call is, at least thinking about their personalization strategy, and the tactics that they’re using. We’ll go to pull two.

4:25

We’ll launch that one as well just to give people the opportunity to voice their opinion or situation.

4:33

How satisfied are you with your personalization tool, very satisfied, satisfied, fairly satisfied, or not satisfied?

4:48

Again, similar, similar type of result here.

4:53

But hopefully that the people on the call that gets you in the right frame of mind to talk about personalization.

5:01

So with that being said, I will go ahead and hand it over to Matt Jarman seconds.

5:09

You can go ahead and take us on the walk through.

5:15

I should have it now.

5:17

Appreciate it.

5:19

No, I may not have answered that poll either, because personalization right now is a huge buzz word. Nobody really knows what it means. The talk, Everybody has personalization. All the vendors personalized, it’s all the rage for. What does it actually mean? So today, we want to go through, what does personalization? What can search bring bring to the table, and why does it matter for my business.

5:42

Just some thoughts on personalization for me.

5:44

I have several conversations a day with e-commerce leaders around new strategies to implement and personalization is one of those that seems like it makes sense for certain niches are certain industries, fashion and apparel, home goods, cosmetics. But all really personalization applies to everyone whether you are in one of those niches. If you’re a B2B or industrial manufacturing, your plumbing store, or you’re just a B2B catalog, with no commerce, Searchspring going to have options. That will influence the customer journey, and that’s what it’s all about. So, as we jump into.

6:23

Just to show a few different ways that Searchspring can bring personalization to the table. There are really three different ways on site recommendations, which we’ll talk through some examples. Those recommendations can also live with an e-mail. So we’ll talk through some examples there, then personalizing the navigation experience as it relates to actually discovering products or personalized search and personalized merchandising.

6:44

First piece to talk through is personalized recommendations on sites.

6:48

So, when thinking about that, or when thinking about these options, these are going to be the modules or the carousels that you see when you’re navigating through different e-commerce sites. that are customers also view. Customers also bought, You may also love similar products, recently viewed trending products. A lot of different options and a lot of different opportunities to influence the buyer journey, influenced the bottom line. So when thinking about these, from a search string perspective or from features, these recommendations can live anywhere on your site.

7:15

So anywhere that a snippet of code can live, these recommendations can live, will typically come with 7 or eight best practices, which Barbara will talk about here shortly, for where recommendations should live on the site. But these could be on the homepage, the product page, the cart page checkout for for error, zero result, anywhere again, that you would want to influence the customer journey. These recommendation modules can live and then we can accomplish a lot of objectives here as well.

7:41

These, you know, on a homepage, maybe we may see a trending product. We may see a personalized product and these may differ based on who’s actually coming to the site so it’s a brand new user. We don’t really have any information on what they like or any of their affinities. We might show a trending product module based on what people have looked at and bought in the last 90 days as they begin to look around a little bit. And click on some products, and add some products to cart. We may start to show them a personalized module on the homepage, or on the product page, or elsewhere on the site that takes into account? what does that person looked at? What do they like, what they add to their cart, and now, what are some products that maybe they didn’t find, or maybe they haven’t seen yet, or we think they may love?

8:24

And so when thinking about some of the metrics we’re influencing, we’re now talking about the the AOV per portion, which is, Hey, I have this thing in my cart, but I need to buy this other thing. So, we’re trying to influence that piece, the journey, But, sometimes, more importantly, is influencing conversion rate altogether for the person that they come to your site. They click around on a few products. They haven’t found what they’re really looking for, But we now influenced them, but some similar products, or some products, they may also love to say, hey, actually, like this product, Let me continue my journey, instead of bouncing.

8:56

Um, I will just note, there are opportunities here, as well, to have your own influence on the recommendation modules. So this could be totally automated, Totally black box driven by Searchspring’s personalization algorithm, where you just set them and let Searchspring do its thing.

9:12

They could be totally manual on the other end of the spectrum, where you’re wanting to say, hey, if somebody comes to this product, I want to show them these 10 products every single time, then, there could be happy medium where we have an automated module, and it’s a cross sell. And Searchspring looking at, hey, this person’s looking at a shirt. They’re probably also going on, like, the similar shirts. But, we want to apply some context to these modules that say, don’t show them products that are out of stock, or don’t show them products that are on sale, or if they’re on a sale page, show them other products that are on sale. Lot of opportunity to apply your own flavor to these modules, as well.

9:48

Barbara, and talking about some of the on-site recommendations. I want to pivot to you and talk through some of the best practices that you have here, as well as, just other general advice you typically give around recommendations.

10:02

Yeah. Absolutely. So, when it comes to recommendations, typically the way we look at these is we want to keep the shopper shopping.

10:10

So, this is how we’ve built out this list of priority, page placemen, along with recommendations type.

10:19

So, for instance, in the conversation of keeping the shopper shopping, our first priority is going to be actually showcasing a recommendation on a PDP.

10:31

Now, this recommendation is going to be based on Are similar products type.

10:35

And the reason for that is, let’s say that, you know, recently our shopping for some, you know, workout type shoes.

10:42

Well, if the shoe that I’m currently looking at is not the one that I end up purchasing, I want to recommend a similar product to that one to help them continue to make That first initial purchase, Right.

10:53

So to your point we’re helping with conversion rate to that point and helping your shoppers find products that are relevant to their their interests then from there as I’ve already made my commitment to a product now I want to sell Maybe something that’s complementary, right? Products that are often purchased together. So, maybe if I’m purchasing a pair of shoes, maybe a pair of workout shorts or a shirt or socks would be really relevant to maybe increase the AOV for that purchase. Again. So, we’re keeping them shopping and that way. And then, also to, we want to make it really easy for them. You know, in a store, you can pick up different products and look at them side-by-side.

11:36

Virtually, it’s harder to do that, so when you’re looking at a bunch of different products and comparing them, we want to make it easy for them to go back to that first product that they maybe started their journey on.

11:46

So that’s what we looked at recently viewed.

11:49

From there, we move into, like, other general pages, anything from our homepage to zero results, and 4 or 4 pages, where normally, maybe they wouldn’t see your product there. We actually have session based recommendation types which are going to look at, what is your shopper actually shopping for? Which products are they engaging with from a brand perspective, maybe A certain category certain color that they might be looking at.

12:14

And we will take those things into consideration. So maybe the next time they go back to the homepage, it’s now very personalized to that individual shopper based on that session.

12:24

And then last but not least, we can go a step deeper when your shoppers are typically logged in.

12:29

We can look at their order history and now personalized recommendations to that individual shopper and the proxy they typically purchase from you. So a lot of different ways to go about it. These are the best practices that we’ve found. And trying to help with conversion. Keeping them shopping, and increasing your average order value.

12:52

Good stuff.

12:54

Um, thinking about these recommendation modules that we’ve just gone through for our customers that are on Shopify, and use Clay View as their e-mail service provider. These recommendation modules can also live within their e-mail campaigns and triggers. So thinking about some of these placements, the post purchase, the welcome, the abandoned cart, the browser, abandon Any kind of newsletters that are going out.

13:18

Typically in the CSP, there are standard recommendation modules that don’t really take into account how shoppers browse, how they behaved what they’ve looked at any of their affinity, so to continue that customer journey. And as Matt said, to keep them shopping, let’s say someone comes to your site, They add that shirt to the cart, they leave and cleo sends out that abandoned cart message. We now want to take into account, what are the products they’ve looked at.

13:42

What are the products they added to the cart? Potentially, what maybe did they buy before? What have they bought in the past? And show them 10 or 20 products that they may also like, or products that are relevant to the products that are actually in their cart. And so really easy to set up that integration have these same types of rec modules to continue that customer journey, to get them back to the site to shop.

14:04

Because ultimately, we’re trying to get customers to the PDP to the cart and encumbering as quickly as possible.

14:11

So, again, with Claudia writes, really easy to select where it’s going to select the recommendation type, add that snippet of code to any of those flow builders in Colombia or the e-mail Better Enclave. You can keep it going there.

14:25

I wanted to quickly go back or just quickly talk through some of those exclusions, or the context that can be applied to personalization. And these are just three quick examples. But, there are more things our team can do on the backend. But, thinking about, OK, you know, I want to have control over this, influence of my customer journey. I don’t want it to just be Blackbox modules, but, I also don’t want to have to put in a ton of work to the personalization piece. This is where you would apply some of those exclusions, contextual, or global, or any kind of groupings to say, and we can go through these examples. If products out of stock, we don’t want to recommended in the module very general example, but something that is typical for our recommendation users. Contextual exclusions, if somebody is on a sale page, I want to show on sale products, if they’re not on a sale, PCP, I don’t want to show on sale products. So again, another way that we can say, hey, if they’re here, continue that journey through with what they’re probably looking for.

15:23

Then we have contextual groupings, which is just a way for you as as the customer to apply additional context to the recommendation profile. So, basic examples here.

15:33

If somebody is looking at strength of this material, display other shirts of this material, but some of these contexts can get very in depth, where, customer could say, if somebody’s looking at a shirt from this collection, I want product position one to be, from the pants collection, position to, to be short, less than three DB accessories. And position before to be shorts or shoes. And then fill in the rest. And so if you’re wanting to get a little more granular and spend a little more time on this, this journey, and have a, complete the look type, experience, but have Searchspring fill in the products, that’s something totally optional as well.

16:09

one last quick thing, thinking about the B2B customer, the industrial customer manufacturing, who, know, where customers aren’t there to be personalized are tailored to. They typically know what they want. They’re searching for something by SKU, they’re hitting the product.

16:22

In those examples, you’re going to have products that maybe a customer has to buy in conjunction with, their, buying their sewing machine, and they need these parts.

16:30

They’re shopping for this automotive, this vehicle, and they need these products parts to be recommended with. So a lot of ways that we can still influenced that customer journey if it’s a commerce site, or if it’s not. And it’s just a catalog, but they’re looking for something, they don’t know what they need, and we need them to find the product to be able to call us in order the product.

16:51

Barbara, any other last quick notes on recommendations on-site or e-mail?

16:58

I just think that you have a lot of people who have a lot of different responsibilities, and sometimes, tasks like this can seem overwhelming. But I mean, with the way that our algorithms built out, you really can lean on the technology for it.

17:13

But to your point, in those one-off situations where you want to have that level of control, it’s there, as well.

17:20

But people are looking for personalized experiences.

17:23

So to leverage a tool like this, I think, helps you meet the expectations of shoppers in 20 23.

17:35

So the next big way that Searchspring can impact the personalized experience is through the navigation and discovery, through personalizing the search experience, and personalizing the merchandising or the category collection experience.

17:47

When thinking about this, you know, this is an area where a brand new search for customer may come in and not really trust the personalization aspect, and so I always talk through AB testing, personalization as a part of the strategy overall.

18:01

If, Let’s say, you have a full merchandising team and they have a manual way that they like to do things, that’s something where you can test. The manual strategy. May be against an automated rules based strategy. We’ve talked about last week against a personalized strategy that would say, and this example, hey, when Matt comes to the all shoes collection, We know based on that cookie that we have on that. That he has clicked on Nike often and Adidas often. Just to brands are always clicked on the this the boots collection often and the dress shoes collection open, or whatever it may be. So when he navigates to the all she’s collection, let’s test that personalization, that says, when Matt’s here, he’s like, these things in the past, he’s added these things to his cart. We’re gonna go ahead and boost the products that we think Matt may like, based on the similar attributes between all those products. And so that’s something that could be AB testing. Or it could just be used across the site, or on certain segments are uncertain through certain merchandising campaigns.

18:57

This is an area where, again, customers are, or shoppers are expecting that personalized experience. We’re in it to really make their shopper experience easier, make the products that they are looking to discover easier to find.

19:11

A quick example of personalization live is on our test site, but we check it out. So, bocachica.searchspring.com where we have to personalize shopper profiles and you can see that these two profiles are different. one is a little more rugged enjoys the mountains enjoy outdoor sports and things like that. one enjoys bright colors and painting and things of that nature. And they’ve shown that in their shopping journey, the affinities they have for certain products. So if I were to load Tyler, for example, if I were to load Tyler’s affinities and preferences, so I clicked and most Tyler, it loads Tyler’s Cookie and its products in his cart. And I come up to our autocomplete. And I search for a shirt, We’re gonna see some of those records, church. We’re going to see the blanket shirts, which are, you know, more fit for outdoor and hiking and things of that nature, And if I were to, excuse me, go to a blanket shirt PDP, we’re going to see some similar products that Tyler may like.

20:07

Inversely.

20:09

If I were to jump out and click out of Tyler’s profile and click into Ashley’s profile and complete the exact same search, once she loads here, I’m going to see a different set of products. Products that are more suited to Ashley House, you shopped throughout the site what she’s looked at. What’s in her car currently. And the same thing holds true with those recommendation modules, where I can see that I’m on a sales shirt. It’s Ashley’s products that she’s shown an affinity for, and then we’re also showing products you may like, But they’re also all sale products, because I’m currently shopping for a sale product. So again, a good way that we can influence the customer journey.

20:47

Starting in the autocomplete, where they’re trying to get to a PDP, they don’t really know what they want, but they have an idea. That’s where the Searchspring’s search piece comes in. Then, we have the merchandising component.

20:57

Which boost certain products based on you as the business owner or the merchandising team, the way you’re trying to promote products, then you have the personalization layer, which is the third layer, which says, Hey, we’re showing the correct products for merchandising the way we want, And now we want to personalize that experience within those first two things, Barbara, as it relates to personalized search and personalized discovery. What are some things you say are some best practices for this process?

21:28

Yeah, absolutely.

21:29

I think, when it comes to merchandising, you know, sometimes merchandisers really want certain colors or certain products to be grouped in a certain row, which I kind of see the benefit for those things.

21:43

And it’s not That’s just saying, That’s the wrong approach, but you’re making it easier for your shopper to find what they’re looking for, And if we’re able to customize these things to each individual shopper on your site, it’s just going to improve the overall experience. Which then in turn, leads to more conversions? And no average order value, and things like that going up. So, I mean, to your point, I think AB testing is a great way, right?

22:11

If you’re kind of hesitant to explore this this avenue, we have the ability to AB test, and see which campaign performed better from a conversion perspective. So, if you are concerned about those things, there’s ways to test.

22:26

And usually, when you use the word test, there’s little more freedom and trying things out with leadership.

22:33

But anyways, you know, I think that, you know, the proof’s in the data at this point. So if you’re not sure, give it a shot.

22:42

Try it out, and what the results speak for themselves.

22:48

Cool deal.

22:50

Anthony, we can, if any questions have come in, or we can turn it over to general Q&A?

22:58

Yeah, we had one question come in. How do you balance What are best practices to balance between going from manual merchandising versus a personalization approach?

23:13

Yeah, I can definitely jump in to help with that one.

23:16

So, I would say, generally speaking, we wanna look towards personalization. There might be specific situations where, maybe it’s like a staff pick or something that you’re using to kind of educate your shoppers on, maybe specific products that you guys have.

23:34

Neither newer products, things like that, new things are not aware of, and you’re trying to draw attention to those things. Manual merchandising the great opportunity to do to do that.

23:44

You know, again, maybe there’s a brand new collection that you’re releasing, and you want it to show in a specific order.

23:51

You have those levels of control there.

23:54

But I would say, generally speaking, shoppers are expecting personalized experiences.

24:00

And so, when you’re able to do that, you’re helping them with the ability to, essentially, efficiently shop.

24:09

I know, for me, and my experiences, when I’m shopping, if I go to the 20th page, try and find what I’m looking for.

24:16

It’s just a really frustrating experience for me. So, if that was personalized that those results should be showing up on the first page, so, those would be some of the best practices I would recommend following.

24:30

Gotcha, wonderful. Well, it was all the questions we had that came in.

24:34

Again, thank you both for giving us your time today and lending us your expertise. Everybody joined. Again, thank you for giving us some of your time.

24:46

If we touched on anything today that caught your attention, or you want to learn more about something, this QR code that we are showing on the screen right now, will take you right to Matt Jarman’s Calendar.

25:00

He’d be more than happy to talk with you about any questions that you might have.

25:06

So, with that being said, again, thank you to everyone for joining, And we hope that you have a great rest of your day.

Deep Dive into Ecommerce Merchandising – Webinar Transcript

 

0:10

Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining today’s webinar.

0:15

Today, this is our second session of the Searchspring Live series. We’re going to focus on e-commerce merchandising in this particular webinar.

0:30

As I mentioned today, or this is a part of a series that we are running, today we are focused on merchandising. However, next week, we’re going to take a deep dive into personalization.

0:44

So, if personalization is an area of focus for your team, or will be an area of focus for your team.

0:52

Feel free to go ahead and scan that QR code, it will take you right to the registration page, and you can go ahead and register for that session.

1:01

We will also be sending a recording of today’s session, and with that, we will send the registration page for next week as well.

1:12

My name is Anthony Krajec, I will be your host for today.

1:17

I am a Marketing Campaign Specialist here at Searchspring.

1:22

I’ve also included my e-mail on the slide, as well, as you can see.

1:27

If, at the conclusion of today’s webinar, you have any questions that you want to ask, please feel free to send them over to me, and I will get you an answer on the topic of asking questions.

1:39

I do want to remind everyone that each attendee has the ability to ask a question live throughout the session today.

1:49

So, if one of our panelists mentioned something that you want them to dig into a little bit more, feel free to go ahead and ask that question in the chat, and we will try to get to, and we will get to it on this session today.

2:04

Speaking of our panelists, I am joined today by Matt and Elise.

2:11

So Matt and Elise, thank you again for joining today. I wanted to give each of you a few moments to introduce yourself and your role at Search spring. So Matt, why don’t you kick us off with that?

2:24

Exactly, and he’s measurement, as you can see, sales manager at Searchspring. I’ve been here for two years. I worked in e-commerce technology for five years. And I have a two year old daughter.

2:37

Awesome. I’m Elise Johnson. I’m a customer success manager here at Searchspring, based in San Antonio Office. I’ve been here for about a year and a half, So really looking forward to covering all the topics around merchandising until today.

2:50

Wonderful. Thank you both again for being here. All right, To get us started, wanted to go over the agenda, how we’re going to run things today.

3:02

We’re going to start with a couple of very brief poll questions.

3:07

These are just to get you in the headspace to think about your merchandising strategy and your merchandising goals.

3:13

From there, I’m going to turn it over to Matt and Elise and they’ll give you the walkthrough. For today, we’re going to talk about several different things. How to give shoppers more options on your site. How to boost different products, Thinking about grouping other products, and then displaying relevant products.

3:33

We’ll also touch on some new capabilities in terms of the search for your platform, when it comes to merchandising as well.

3:42

And like I mentioned earlier, you do have the ability to ask questions live through the chat.

3:48

If we don’t get to your question right away, no worries. That is what the time at the end of the session is for.

3:54

Just to answer any questions that we did not, we did not get to.

4:00

So to get us going, I will go ahead and start off our first poll question.

4:07

Do you currently have a merchandising strategy for your sites?

4:13

We will go ahead and launch it.

4:16

The options are, yes, I use a searchspring.

4:20

Yes. I use a dedicated resource for merchandising tactics. Yes.

4:24

I use that merchandising function in my native platform, and no, I’m not currently using any merchandising tactics.

4:32

So I’ll go ahead and give everyone a couple of seconds, see if we can get any more answers in.

4:41

And we’ll go ahead and close out that poll.

4:50

Sure.

4:51

Sorry, A couple of technical difficulties.

4:56

And there’s the shared results.

4:58

As you can see, everyone who answered the poll, we had 100% on, yes.

5:03

I use that merchandising function in my native platform, and I’ll go ahead and go to the next poll, as well.

5:15

How happy are you with your current merchandising strategy?

5:20

We have a very happy Be Happy.

5:25

See. Barely Happy. Indeed, not happy.

5:31

Give everyone a couple of seconds to go ahead and vote, And we’ll see if we can get a couple more answers in there.

5:44

All right. I think we’re good to go ahead and close that out, and we will share those as well.

5:50

We have 100% Not happy.

5:53

So sorry.

5:54

You’re not happy right now, but hopefully, we can give you some information, and we can boost up that merchandising strategy.

6:02

So with that being said, I will go ahead and turn it over to Matt and Elise to begin the walkthrough.

6:11

So Matt, you should have control now.

6:16

Cool deal. Thanks, Anthony. Well, before I show my screen, just want to talk through a couple different points.

6:23

Thanks everyone for hopping on. I think the first thing I want to cover is, what does merchandising you didn’t mean?

6:29

So in my role, I talked to a lot of prospective Searchspring customers.

6:33

And that isn’t a range of personas, industries, roles, from anywhere from consumer goods and fashion, apparel and home goods and stuff you’d see in a mall to B2B stores and automotive stores.

6:46

And this really obscure thing.

6:48

So, within that, you know, some people have dedicated merchandisers who that’s all they do, and some had one person running the entire company and have no idea what I say. What I’m talking about when I say, well, what is much so much amazing for me, when I describe it is how your range of products and your site. So it’s pretty straightforward. Explanation when someone goes to your site and navigate to a category, or when someone goes to your site and they search for something.

7:14

How do you want those products to be arranged or sorted?

7:18

And then thinking about, why is that even important? I try to liken it to a brick and mortar store. So if you haven’t brick and mortar, if you’re on today and you have brick and mortar stores, if I walk into your store today, what do you have in front of the store? What sales banners you have in the front window? Where do you put the sale products in the store? What do you have in CAHPS?

7:37

What I see when I’m at the register, Searchspring’s focus is giving you that same control of your online store.

7:45

I’m fortunate to be joined by Elise who works with our customers day in and day out on their merchandising strategy, so truly the expert on the call on what best practices are as it relates to merchandising, at least, on those two topics. What is merchandising or why is it important? What would you say?

8:04

Yeah, I mean, are in great point on just the wide range that we’re working with here at Searchspring. So it’s, it’s so fun to just sit down with everybody and really get into your particular business strategy.

8:16

So whether it’s, we have a high turnover rate, you really wanna see a certain in stock person is towards the top, or we’re really focused on best sellers, in, post your newest push to the top, It’s very, a very particular to your particular business, you know. So we’re going to have that conversation when workers bring anyone. And to me, the ultimate goal, and I think to All of us, is to make sure that we are showing the shoppers the most relevant items at the top of the page. So, you know, that comes native, was searching. But there’s so much more that we can do with the Merchandising Tools to really ensure that people are seeing things that are not only the most relevant, but there are going to really resonate with them, based on, you know how well that you know your shoppers. So we’re taking all that into consideration as we’re, as we’re putting different merchandising logic into, into place here. So, you know, again, it’s gonna be really depending on the particular business and your strategy, but that’s our job is to help you kind of work through that and put that in place within, within merchandising in search.

9:11

Thanks. I think you hit on a good point when thinking about some of those things like you’re in stock percentage or the newness of products.

9:18

I think one of the big benefits of working with a search spring is being able to leverage that data in ways that, know, if you’re on Shopify, Magento or me or net speed or some custom card, you can always leverage all that good data that you have in order to put something in a certain place. So going back to that, maybe brick, and mortar example, you put something on an end cap, because you’ve just got it in stock and you can put that new and stock sign that. You print it off at the UPS and FedEx kinko’s side, your store really easy. But you can’t do that typically in a native. So just talking about, really quickly, the importance of data. I always bring up this page, because within searchspring, if the data exists either within your e-commerce backend, if you’re on top fire Magento or BigCommerce, or move our net suite.

10:05

Or if you are able to provide that data to us in a custom feed format, we can use it.

10:10

So we’ll go through some merchandising examples where this data, whether it be something like in stock, yes, no or stock percentage or number of units in stock or whatever you’re sending us can be easily leverage within that strategy or you’re putting together.

10:26

Elise, what do you anything around importance of data or data consistency are just things you talk about as it relates to merchandising within the data?

10:36

Yeah, so data consistency is really important for us. You know, we’re gonna, we have essentially a whole kind of relevancy scoring logic that’s coming into play in the background of searchspring. So we have a lot of conversations around, how is your data showing up in your, within searchspring? How is it? How are we kind of comparing with the shop research, or to where we’re finding that wording in the product data. So it’s gonna be really crucial, and I do want to pinpoint. I love that you’re bringing up this page, because I do think it shows you have a lot of control over what we’re using the data for. So whether it’s we’re trying to set up a merchandising roll around data or whether it’s going to be a filter or a storage option that we’re setting up, I think it’s really important that, you know, our customers feel empowered to utilize this page. Because there’s so much that you can do with the data that you’re getting. And I think just being in touch with knowing what data you’re passing us in the first place is going to set you up for such great success when it comes to really utilizing the tool within searchspring. So I’ve covered this page with all of my accounts, and it’s it’s a very empowering page things. So, again, we’ve got, we have a lot of conversations around data and data usage.

11:37

I think it’s important to note, you know, it doesn’t really if your data’s in your cart, we can use it, So that’s your core fields at, your custom field.

11:44

variant fields, meta fields, custom fields across BigCommerce, tags, Shopify, so any of that data pulls right in here. We’re able to then leverage it. So wanting to, today, talk about a few ways we can leverage that, some of that data within your merchandising strategy, starting with something we call Global Merchandising. That’s your general site wide merchandising strategy. So if you have search, bring on your search pages, and on your category pages, or your collection pages, or sub collections or brand pages, this strategy would apply to all of those pages, if you don’t do anything else on the page.

12:16

So this could be, and there are lot of use cases here, if you’re a one man band, one woman show, and you don’t really have a lot of time to manage a strategy like this, this is going to take care of 75, 80%, 85% of the work where you can come into Global Merchandising Campaign. Let’s say you have Searchspring on your search pages, and on your collection pages, your Shopify store, like this test store today.

12:39

This is where you can come into, set up your boost rules, or your very loose variables, and that’s just how you want your products arranged on the site dynamically. So thinking about that previous screen, where we looked at the data. You can now come in and say, Alright, this is my data. So this is our test data here, but this is my data, and here’s what matters to me as a business.

12:57

And so, going back to at least this point, different businesses have different strategies, and that could be based on, if I’m fashion and apparel.

13:04

And I care about stock, status, and newness and sale, or not and seasonality, or if I’m maybe a B2B manufacturer and I care about the margin of products and promoting my house manufactured brand because of those margins.

13:15

So a lot of stuff can go into this, but, again, it’s your general logic that can say, Hey, first, we want to look at boosting products that are in stock. Very basic rule that most businesses are going to use. So, if I go to your site today and I search for dress, and 500 products show up in 250 or in stock, those are going to be the first 250 based on this rule. And that’s.

13:35

That’s going to be dynamic based on whatever happens. So for one of those stresses, because out of stock now we have 249 in stock, 251 out of stock, so really easy to set up, things like your stock status. We talked about newness of a product, some fashion and apparel company. And I care about showing products that are new. Because I have a lot of repeat customers and they want to see the new stuff on my site when they come to the site.

13:56

A Searchspring will actually take, typically a date published field and Shopify, turn that into a days since published field within searchspring. And then newness to you could be seven days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. So you’re able to easily define, a new product to me is less than two months old, and I don’t want to sell products on my site, because I’m not really getting a lot of margins from those. And, oh, yeah, I also want to do this by seasonality.

14:21

So let’s say these are my four dynamic global merchandising rules. I don’t really touch these off in a kind of evergreen, the only thing. That’s not as my seasonality. This would apply to anywhere that Searchspring on your site.

14:32

This could be the merchandising rules piece. It could be using marketing collateral within your merchandising strategy across the entire site.

14:40

I’ll show an example of that, and then it can be scheduling all of this out. So if you’re going back to that example, one woman show, and you don’t have time for this, and the only thing you want to change is by season.

14:51

Go ahead and schedule your seasons out June, July, August to summer, September, October, November is Autumn, Winter. It’s really easy to schedule that and have things going.

15:01

Without needing to touch that.

15:03

Elise, global merge.

15:06

What types of strategies do you typically put in place or what are some things that we may not think about these types of strategies?

15:13

Yeah, absolutely, and just to really emphasize to me, that scheduling tool is one of the most important things that I see tend to be underutilized here. And that is just so beneficial. I have a lot of people that come over from, from, you know, different platforms are different providers where you’re having to go in and manually make changes every time.

15:31

So this is really beautiful when we’re talking about Black Friday season or any sort of similar promotion that you’re running, the ability to schedule something out in advance, so it’s it turns on and at your particular time and shuts down reverting back to that end up in the Evergreen. It’s just such a time saver for people. So just to really emphasize that. But just when we’re talking about our overall strategies here, I think about this in sort of an 820 approach. So I think about 80% of what we’re trying to accomplish on the site can be done with just maybe 3 or 4 a very general rules, apply to the global campaign. And we’ll get into, I know that’s the next portion of this is sort of those individual pages that we can merchandise. And those I would like to keep within about 20%. So, to meet the goal here is whether it’s we want to see newest across the site, Oregon, on sale items demoted to towards the bottom, or out of stock at the bottom, or seasonality push. Those very general rules can really make or break just a seamless feel throughout the site.

16:23

So I think you covered some of the basic ones that I’ll see used, but, again, let’s try to approach this from an 80% of the site, kinda standpoint, is how I like to start it. So, making sure that we’ve got a pretty automated approach to the majority of our site.

16:36

But again, that scheduling feature is just so beautiful to me. I love it when people really utilize that.

16:44

So talking about that 20%, for different businesses, that 20% is going to be something different. But often, it’s going to be 80% of the sites taking care about taking care of by this Global Merchandising.

16:57

That’s for maybe some of the 80% of the searches that no one’s really searching for, but if they do, I want to make sure that’s covered. It’s for the collections that, either collection for a reason, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time manually merchandising those things. And then when we think about the 20, now we’re going into maybe searches that matter the most that are getting the highest volume.

17:16

Maybe we’re talking about the collections that matter to you, new arrivals, sale, and their men’s shirts, and your women’s shirts.

17:22

And the ones that have the bulk of products, and where you’re getting a bulk of your revenue coming from, in, in merchandising those is just as easy as merchandising the global campaign, And I think thinking about, you know, what matters to us as a business search spring.

17:37

one of the big benefits is having that full control to say global takes care of this, but I want to spend an hour a week, or couple hours a week, or whatever. It may be on the specific areas. And that’s where we can get into some things like AB testing. So, jumping back into our console, let’s say, the all shoes category is a biggest revenue driver, or whatever it may be.

17:58

It’s really easy for me to come in here and say, OK, I’ve done my global merge, But when people go to my shoes collection, I want to do some different stuff. I want to set up some different roles and what I’ve just done, because that was more general and maybe I want to do some AB testing here, that could be maybe a for variation test.

18:13

Rare variation A, that’s going to be based on some different roles and so maybe we change the newness a little bit. We change the seasonal push a little bit. Maybe we do sale products and said, you know, do some things here.

18:24

Variation B, maybe that’s where we want to do some of that. manual merchandising so you can see that I have some things pinned already, but I take all those off. and I want to drag and drop, or doubleclick products, depend, then this is where I want these products, at the top of the collection, no matter what. Maybe it’s because you have Overstock. Maybe it’s because you can just pushing these products. Maybe it’s because you’re working with an influencer, whatever. But no matter what I want these products pinned at the top, I’m going to test that strategy. Maybe Variation C is testing, personalization. And we’ll talk about that more next week. But that’s where, hey, Matt comes to the sitemap Click on my shoes collection. Is clicked on these few things before, let’s boost products that Matt May love.

19:02

Then maybe we test out some banners. And so all that can be done within the context of a certain collection or a certain search result, or a certain segment, which we’ll talk about. And all the things you can do globally, you can do here as well.

19:14

Along with a few other things, Elise, when thinking about, Hey, let’s get into the granular aspects of merchandising.

19:22

What types of things do you typically make sure that all customers too? And then what are some other strategies?

19:27

Yeah. So, as I especially love these to be built around a particular promotion or a particular sale on the site.

19:33

So, the way, and this is getting very granular again, but if we’re going to do, you know, maybe an e-mail blast for around a particular promotion. or if we’re promoting a certain product or a new collection on social media. I think it is so helpful if we can go in and on the relevant pages. Make sure that those particular products being promoted are pinned or push towards the top of these individual pages. Because if somebody has just gotten an e-mail from you, or if they’ve just seen, you know, an Instagram post, we want to make sure that there, that’s the first thing that they’re seeing on those pages as well. So, again, the goal being, let’s make sure that we’re putting the most relevant results at the very top of the page for the shoppers just to make it easier for them to find and really push on their conversion rate for those particular promotion. So, that’s a strategy that I love to see.

20:20

On the other note here, two banners.

20:23

I love an inline banner contents. We’ve got that banner tool right there. And you can kind of add that in here. Exactly. Yes. And this is really helpful for cross promoting throughout the site. So again, we can get really smart with making sure that we’re putting relevant banner content on other pages, driving them to other pages throughout the site, really pushing engagement or on the side as well. I also love it or an infinite scroller. So if we have a much bigger product catalog, placing an inline banner further down the results, that can really kind of where you grab that shoppers attention as they’re scrolling through our product catalog, so I love that tip as well. But as you mentioned, for somebody’s individual campaigns, are best practices tend to be, you know, for your top 10 search terms, or maybe your top 5 to 10 category, or collection pages. Let’s make sure that we’ve got a campaign built out for those. Were really going to drive conversion rates on those pages a little bit further than they already are. And so I think that’s always a best practice, is to make sure we’ve got those pages really tailored for a particular experience for the shoppers.

21:19

But again, I love and am I in Banner, I think that’s one of our more underutilized vehicles as well.

21:24

Then bacteria AB testing point two. I think that’s helpful, you know, I have a lot of people about sign in search spring and they’re just not sure the best route to merchandise.

21:32

So I love an AB test from the get go to say, Pay is our, Our shoppers resonate the most with just Searchsprings, you know, relevancy logic running in the background, Do they resonate better with a really curated pins experience? Or should we set up, you know, a bunch of different boosters and kind of sorting option combos, so I think just when we’re asking the question, what’s the right way to merchandise? These can be really, really helpful with with having a lot more knowledge And kind of putting our actions are on merchandising towards a more, you know, knowledge based informed approach. AB tests are great as well.

22:04

Awesome, that’s good stuff. So, as we get a little more granular, so we’ve talked about the global, and that’s kinda the first thing we’d like to set up, and then we talk about maybe those top 5 to 10 clicks in, search results now, There are other options that open up as customers want to test their strategies more. And so, one of those is going to be segmented merchandising.

22:23

Where how I describe it is if you can tell us, you, the customer can tell searchspring, this customer is a part of this segment because of this behavior, and I want them to have this experience, then we can do that. And so some common examples, I usually give. I want the experience on my site for a new customer to be different than a return or a new customer comes to the site. I want to boost. My best sellers And for return comes to the site. I want to boost my new arrivals because they’ve been here and they’ve already seen a subset of bestsellers.

22:52

This can be really done with anything that you can define that behavior for, that’s men versus women. If it’s something as granular as a customer searched on my site three times and on that third search, I want them to see an inline banner because they’re highly engaged. So, a lot of stuff that can be done, at least with something like a segmented campaign, or what are some other studies?

23:14

you’ve seen, use, What are maybe some unique things you’ve seen done, I think that tends to be where, you know, and I will go ahead and say, this is a great time to sit down with your customer success manager, and we can kind of talk through it. It’s been, again, vary depending on your certain strategy. But, again, I think those, I think you kind of hit on the top scenarios that, we see that, you know, gender wise, or whether it’s, you know, a particular experience for newcomers versus you know our longtime returning customers, those tend to be the sort of the best practices. But, again, I’ve seen them used, and some really granular ways, as well. So, another, Another important note here, as long as you’re passing, is the data for your segment. We can really segment anything, so, again, just that note, as well, we can, there’s a lot of power in, segmentation, if you can pass that data over to us, So, again, I think a great opportunity to sit down with your CSM and just talk through what your strategy is around that. But I think you hit on the big points there.

24:05

Right on 1 last 1, I will share, got about five minutes, is the ability to merchandise or the landing page and a lot of use cases for this as well. Ultimately, within search for a landing page is going to be a tag search page. So this is an area where we need a formatted URL. Maybe we’re sending out an e-mail campaign, or running an advertising campaign. We don’t wanna create a collection. We don’t want to send someone to a search page, so that could be a use case. I’ve talked about, or, I’ve talked to, customers about using this as a B2B merchant, and I need to send out a purchase order, and I want the specific products on that purchase order.

24:40

We’ve actually done a on our test store here. “Maya’s Picks” is the fake influencer we’ve worked with, and she needed her own landing page URL. And this is Maya. And these are the products that she’s picked to promote.

24:53

And so if you sit now sending this out on social media, so a lot of stuff that can be done here. And it’s as simple as saying, you know, an example, I always like to running a Valentine’s Day campaign. And I want to come in here, and I want to send out some red dresses. Whatever it may be really easy to say, OK, these are my red dresses. Here’s how I want them arranged. Maybe I want to AB test, and send out this link, match store dot com slash search equals whatever it may be.

25:18

So just another easy way that, again, you can leverage Search Spring to make your life easier, but also to be strategic with where you merchandise, Couple minutes to go, at least any other tips or notes on either landing pages or just in general merchandising as we wrap up.

25:33

Catherine engages in particular, it’s helpful for, you know, when we’re focused on what we’re merchandising, but also to with who were merchandising too. So, to me, this one I use, a lot of you have like a VIP list. Because essentially what we’re doing here is it’s, it’s giving you kind of a hidden page, so we don’t have a way to navigate this unless you’ve got access to that URL generated within this, this campaign. So, that’s, I think, a really crucial point, as long as, you know, as we’re going into, maybe more promotional, have a time of year in the holiday is this one is really helpful if we have certain people that we’d like to see a really curated selection for, but maybe not necessarily applicable to our people outside of the VIP listserv. You know, whatever, you remember, groupings are there, but, again, really helpful as we go into our promotional time of Year two. So, I’ll give my one note on landing pages, I utilize a law for that.

26:22

Cool deal. Anything else to wrap up?

26:26

At least, if not, we’re close to time getting Q&A.

26:31

Know, again, just to really emphasize, you know, where it’s so particular to your business, and it’s lovely for us to be able to work with such a wide range. So again, really utilize your customer success manager here. We can really develop a particular strategies for your business. So it’s one of my favorite features within Searchspring in something that it really hits home when it comes to driving conversion rates off the site itself, we’re looking for talking with you guys.

26:58

Yeah, thank you guys for that walkthrough. That was great. We did have a couple of questions come through for the Q and A section.

27:08

The first one was, how is Searchspring different from a native platform functionality? So if you guys could dig in on that a little bit.

27:18

Yeah, I’ll start off with, Depends on your cart. Of course, depends on your native platform. But, for the most part, native Platform Merchandising Functionality. It’s gonna be pretty bare bones. It’s going to be you clicking, dragging and dropping through 20 pages of products without any real automation. Automated control, personalized control. Neural insights around health strategies working, so, pretty barren where.

27:44

You’re not able to say, this is how I want this experience to be on this specific page, at least anything to add there.

27:51

I would say, do you love searchspring, or the team that you have when you join on? So, again, I think, really, utilize your CSM here. I think that’s going to be the difference here between people coming from others or from other service providers or from a Native platform.

28:05

Again, there’s a lot more we can do with your particular business strategy that, I think tends to be beyond the capabilities, such as a native provider, Sir.

28:16

Great. And then the final question we had was, how much time do customers typically spend on merchandising?

28:26

Pleased to tell you.

28:28

I guess you. So, again, very dependent on your business. If it is just you versus if you’ve got a team of 15 to 20 people on the merchandising stop, those are all things that we work on. So for me, that’s one of the first questions I ask when I have a new account. Is, what is your team look like? What kind of time do you have to contribute to this throughout the week? And from there, we really develop your strategy.

28:49

So, I’ll create a threshold of like, maybe you spend 10 minutes on a Monday, looking at, you know, this particular, you know, campaigns that we can build out around search terms. So, it’s very particular to your team and the time that you have to spend. So I would say, let us know that, and we can really help you build out a plan to get the most out of the time that you have to spend with searchsprings.

29:09

So, very dependent, I gotta have people that are teams of one that have maybe an hour to spend each week, versus a team of 20 that’s in there every single day that can build out, you know, all kinds of things. So very dependent on your, on you and your business.

29:24

Wonderful, well, thank you both.

29:26

for those answers, and also, again, thank you for joining us today.

29:32

Um, I know that we’re wrapping up, We’re near the end of our time. If Matt or Elise touched on anything that piqued your interest at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. This QR code right here Will take you directly to Matt’s calendar if you want to continue the conversation.

29:51

We will also send the recording of this session to you in a follow-up e-mail with a link to my calendar as well. So you can join there as well.

30:02

Matt and Elise, thank you again for joining us, and everyone who joined from the attendee side.

30:10

Thank you for sharing your time with us, And we hope you have a great rest of your day.

30:15

Thank you so much, Sarah.