With all of the retargeting options available to online retailers now, the creation of banner ads has become a regular task for creative teams. Coming up with fresh creative can be a challenge but knowing that our audience visited our site can make it a little easier. Better yet, if we know that they visited a specific category of product and we are able to target just those visitors, we have an even better chance of creating something that will attract their attention. The more we know about our audience, the better able we are to design an advertisement for them.

This retargeting technology is amazing but what if we could know exactly what someone was looking for at the moment in time that we were able to deliver them a banner ad. Imagine how we could surprise or delight them with a creative that speaks to what they are thinking at that moment. A banner that can read your mind.

Believe it or not, this mind-reading banner delivery technology actually exists. And, it’s available through the SLI Systems Merchandising Console. Now, you might be thinking oh yes, we already use that. You may for instance be using it to deliver a branded header banner for your specific branded search terms. And that is a fantastic use. But, what else could you do? What ways might you surprise and delight your customers with a graphical message that really speaks to what they are looking for?

I challenge you to put on your guerrilla marketing hat and create a banner campaign that’s unique, engaging and thought-provoking. For fun, I grabbed my guerrilla marketing cap and came up with these ideas in about 30 minutes. While these may not be the most thought-provoking, imagine what your creative team could to with more time.

For this exercise I thought about the creative from the perspective of a person searching for “rubber ducks” on the Century Novelty website. All of these ideas could be interchangeable with other products. Think of each idea as if you were going to create 50 or more individually targeted banners based on high volume search terms. The key here is to think like a guerrilla and create a campaign that is at a large enough scale to impact a significant number of your searches. This way, you’ll have a better chance of generating some buzz and a much better idea on how well it influences sales.

Duck Love – Feature a photo of a staff member of your company holding their favorite type of rubber duck and include a quote about what they love about this duck. Be sure to include the person’s name and position at your company. This will send the message about how passionate your entire company is about the products you sell and coincidentally the products your customer happens to be searching for.

Duck Deals – Surprise your customers with a “Surprise Search Coupon” for extra savings on rubber ducks. of some larger than usual percentage off rubber ducks. For added customization make the coupon code the exact term you are targeting.

Grade A Ducks – When your value proposition is based on having the highest quality products, create a series of ads that feature these products with a message like “Highest Quality Rubber Ducks Money Can Buy.”

Duck Duck Goose – Identify the most complimentary product to a rubber duck and feature it as a cross-sell item. A message like, “Shopping for a Rubber Duck? Well, don’t forget the Goose to go with it” could help drive additional sales and increase your site’s AOV.

Duck Calls – Give your customer service team a compliment and create an ad that promotes how knowledgeable your call center staff is about rubber ducks. Include your phone number and encourage your customers to talk with a rubber duck expert now. This will give your shoppers confidence that they have found product experts for exactly why they are looking for.

Duck TV – Create a short product video about your best selling, top rated, most liked, etc. rubber duck and promote that video in the banner. The video would give you an opportunity to show your rubber duck expertise and provide a more personal experience.

5-Star Ducks – Find your top rated rubber ducks and feature a compelling quote from an actual rubber duck review. Include an image of the rubber duck reviewed along with the 5-star rating.

Sea of Ducks - If you stock a wide variety of rubber ducks as Century Novelty certainly does, trumpet your great selection in the banner with a specific message of exactly how many varieties of rubber ducks you have to choose from.

Disappearing Ducks – Create urgency to buy with a banner that features a rubber duck that is in short supply or in high demand and stress how a very limited quantity of these special rubber ducks are left.

I hope that this inspires you to get your own guerrilla marketing brainstorm session going and launch an even more engaging keyword-targeted banner campaign with the SLI Merchandising Console.  When you do, be sure to share your ideas and success with others here by posting a comment below.

As I discussed in my last post, “2012: The Year of the Tablet”, what’s hot in online retail this year seems to be trends that began bubbling up over the past several months.

We already discussed ways to address the social and table crazes. Other popular trends this year include personalization and video. Here are some tips for how to showcase these in search:

Make it Personal

When your site looks like it remembers people – their brand preferences, purchasing history, location – it goes a long way towards creating a personalized experience. For example, a “Recent Searches” box shows people the keywords they used previously, in case they want to search for something similar again. You can see this on FTD.com’s website, where the “Recent Searches” box shows “chrysanthemums” and “yellow roses” as previous searches. You can also localize results based on a visitor’s zip code, like Tractor Supply does, and deliver product availability and pricing information based on location. Multichannel retailers can also include information about the closest store for in-store pick-up.

Use video to bring products to life

The benefit of having product videos on your site goes beyond increasing engagement and conversions, they can also boost your SEO rankings. Extend the value of your videos by including them in site search results – put video icons next to items with related video content, as you can see on the Etrailer.com website. Also, you can rank the items with video higher on the search results page, and you can also display banners highlighting video content when visitors search using specific keywords.

While you’re coming up with creative ways to incorporate these trends into your marketing strategies, don’t forget to include search and navigation in your plans, given these pages are often the highest converting on your site.

Ed Hoffman just pointed out an interesting search box on the LA times site. When you click on the search box it pops up to a larger box and includes a link to their advanced search.
Before you click

After you click

As part of our site search tips – we recommend making the search box large enough to handle most of your queries. If you’re just not able to afford the real estate then this is a nice compromise. Note: There are other benefits to having a large search box – the most important being a large search box is easier to find. You want it to be easier to find to encourage people to search because typically people who search will convert 2-3 times better than people who don’t.

I think search is less important on a news site than, say an ecommerce site. I think the LA times approach of having a small search box that gets larger when you click on it is sensible. Nice work LA times!

Most e-commerce sites, and even non-ecommerce sites, have customer ratings and reviews. The ratings give people a quick view at how well a product (or content) has fared among people who’ve already purchased it, and ratings offer a more detailed explanation of a product’s pros and cons. If you’ve already gone to the trouble of having this content on your site, you should maximize its value by making sure it’s included in your site navigation. There are many ways you can go about this, depending on the lay-out of your site and the products or content you feature.

To get you started, below are a couple of suggestions to consider. You can find more by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips” which we just released last week. And be sure to check back, as we’ll post more tips from the Big Book in the coming weeks.

1. Show ratings and review information in the navigation — You can add ratings and reviews as part of the product information displayed on the navigation pages. This highlights early in your customers’  interaction that you provide ratings and reviews, and it’s also good practice to show the number of reviews for each product to illustrate which products have reviews and to help put the ratings into perspective.

2. Provide options to navigate through reviews — If you have a lot of reviews for some of your products, it can be cumbersome for your visitors to read through them. To help your visitors find the information they’re looking for efficiently and improve their user experience, you should offer ways to navigate through the reviews. For example, you can help them quickly access the positive reviews. You can see in the Abe’s of Maine example that the site allows visitors to navigate reviews by pros, cons, best uses and to sort by newest, oldest, highest rating, or most helpful. This is extremely effective, and reduces the amount of steps visitors will take before making a purchase decision.

During the internet boom/bust years companies such as boo.com were criticised for trying to sell apparel online. Common opinion was that the internet wasn’t mature enough and business models (or execution thereof) were not robust enough to cope with the notion of selling clothes online. Broadband didn’t even exist in any meaningful way and most people were struggling to identify how best to harness the opportunities presented by the web. Here we are nearly 10 years later and according to a report from IMRG the UK e-retail market was worth nearly £50billion in 2009 with ecommerce showing 15% year on year growth (for clothing that jumps to 18%) and the UK in particular now has a seemingly insatiable appetite for buying clothes online. The apparel industry has seen a lot of success online where you’d imagine that most people would be more inclined to try before they buy.

So what is it that is driving this trend and why has it attracted the likes of companies like Google and countless others? Some of the answer lies in technology adoption, infrastructure improvements, generational shopping habits and accessibility but all of that is for another blog. The main answer lies in usability. It is no coincidence that the most successful and fashionable brands online have taken the extra care to focus on one of the central planks of shopping for apparel online – the user experience. It is also no coincidence that a recent Forrester report cited navigation and site search as the top two initiatives towards improving online performance. More than any other sector buying online in the apparel industry relies heavily on the emotional part of the user experience and the behaviour thereof. If you want to buy a 32″ tv and have a poor online shopping experience you can easily find an alternative website and buy the same brand (or an alternative) knowing that fundamentally you’re going to end up with a 32″ tv that looks and operates as you’d expect. That sort of scenario doesn’t lend itself so readily to fashion where looking and feeling unique is part of the aspirational sell. Therefore the speed and ease by which products are navigated, presented and then experienced is critical to the success of a fashion brand online. Other factors like logistics and customer service are also crucial but it’s the area of findability that continues to drive these important business processes within the fashion sector.

It still perplexes me why a business will spend a fortune acquiring and engaging new customers only to provide them with a poor site experience. The two standout areas to review in order to correct this are relevance and usability (with imagery not far behind). Whilst this may seem obvious there are many brands (large and small) who struggle with this. For example why show shoe sizes as a refinement when someone has done a search for shirts? When you realise this problem why then spend a small fortune and wait weeks/months to fix it when it can conceivably be addressed within minutes or prevented from happening in the first place? Speaking of refinements these are a vital part of the search results page as are other features such as zoom options, video, alternative viewing angles, reviews, blogs etc. The experience can be further enhanced with best of breed solutions like recommendation engines, personalised email, outfit makers, multivariate testing, surveys/polls and social media. Add to this the commercial opportunity that a mobile strategy can bring (without costing a fortune) to your fashion brand and it becomes all the more apparent that the time to look sharp and be smart with your site search experience is now.

For retailers selling online, the question of “Grid View or List View?” for results pages is a common struggle. As Linda Bustos points out on her “Get Elastic” blog, “When presented with a list of search results, people often click the first result – paying attention to the top 3 or so.” And as “Get Elastic” reader Bob points out in his comment, “Grid views are predominantly used on sites selling merchandise when the visual appearance matters to the customer (i.e., clothing). List views are used when the text is important like a model number or more technical info is what matters (i.e., printer ink, computer RAM).”

Over the last three years I have had hundreds of conversations with retailers, and the overwhelming preference is to show site visitors results pages in grid view. Having also conducted a few A/B split tests to see which view performs better, the evidence suggests this as well. Our argument for why grid view performs better is that retailers can show more products “above the fold,” meaning that website visitors see more items in the browser window without having to scroll down. However, an argument for list view is that it gives you the opportunity to showcase additional descriptive text – good for shoppers who need product descriptions in order to make a buying decision.

The glaring problem with list view is that on the average laptop or desktop monitor, the visitor typically sees only two products above the fold. Given this conundrum, we’ve created a new view – called “hybrid view” – that incorporates the best of both worlds, offering pages that show more products, as in a grid view, while also including the additional descriptive information for shoppers.

Let’s look at a site search page from Sports Unlimited as our example. In the image below you can see how Sports Unlimited (with our help) has created a results page incorporating the best aspects of both list and grid views, and the results have been positive:

• 271% increase in revenue (directly from the landing page)
• 16% increase in Average Order Value (from the landing page)

If you have any questions about hybrid view for search, feel free to post a comment here or contact us at (866) 240-2812 or sales@sli-systems.com.

With the holiday shopping season well underway, there is talk of recent ecommerce site failures and anticipation of how these failures will impact online businesses during this season’s shopping frenzy. Nearly one year ago, Internet Retailer reported on major site failures experienced during Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) – two of the busiest shopping days of the season. Often, these outages are caused by the high volume of site visitors during peak shopping times and servers that can’t keep up. Or, they may be caused by natural disasters, power outages or software glitches. When entire sites go down there is tremendous impact: business is lost, customer loyalty suffers and a brand’s reputation is seriously compromised.

While site failures are extremely costly for online retailers, there are also individual aspects of a site that can lose functionality and also impact the online experience for shoppers; for example, site search, the shopping cart, product videos, etc. For these functions, it makes sense to entrust your site to a hosted services (or SaaS – software-as-a-service) provider so you can offload that traffic to a 3^rd party – particularly one that has built-in redundancy in its architecture and implemented business continuity policies, to protect you from these types of failures. For example, SLI Systems has implemented redundant servers in multiple data centers around the world to ensure that if a server goes down for any reason, another will step in to take over.

The Internet Retailer article from last year indicates that according to web performance measurement firm Gomez, Inc. the top 50 retail sites have an average of 97.60% availability, and an average site response time of 2.25 seconds (Gomez also says research shows there is a 2-second “standard” – referring to the length of time the average person will wait).

Like most retailers, you’re probably turning up the volume on your marketing efforts to drive as much traffic to your sites as you can in the coming weeks. But are you certain your site will be able to perform – and respond quickly? It’s not too late to offload your site search to a 3^rd party expert if that’s an area you have concerns about or haven’t looked closely at. Have questions? Feel free to comment below.

One of the best things about site search is that almost everyone is familiar with the concept of being online and starting their journey with a keyword search. The search results page is one of the most frequented pages of a website and yet all too often is the case that you’ll perform a simple search only to be shown ‘product not found’ ‘article doesn’t exist’ or be served a page of totally irrelevant results. Today’s internet user has very little patience when it comes to this kind of user experience and will usually be off to a competitor’s site within seconds.

In the current economic climate it is crucial that you invest in areas of your online business that can deliver and deliver quickly. Furthermore, anything that assists the innovation of your site whilst engaging existing customers and attracting new ones gives your brand the opportunity to rise above the competition and improve the performance of your online business. Of course there are a number of technology areas worth considering but I’d strongly advocate that you consider investing in a dedicated site search solution for two simple but very important reasons: the effects are tangible and immediate.

There is no doubt that site search is one of the most important ways to understand the shopping behaviours of your visitors. Users who type a search phrase are more likely to convert versus a user who browses (typically using navigation) the site. Site search users are ‘objective focused’ – that is to say they are looking for something specific and are telling you in their own language what they want. If you show them what they are expecting to see (relevant results) they are much more inclined to add the item to their shopping basket.

This is proven through another important area of site search – the data. To be sure your investment is working for you the ability to measure the impact via site search analytics and online analytics is vital and will provide genuine insight into how your site performance is improving as measured against your KPI’s (key performance indicators).

Site search needn’t be difficult to implement either (SLI Systems use a product data feed) so you shouldn’t have to employ a development team or change your ecommerce platform to accommodate it. On the contrary, the site search solution should easily bolt into your existing ecommerce infrastructure and run seamlessly with the site you already have. If you opt for a SaaS (software as a service) model there are no hardware implications either so why not test your own site search to see if the results are what you were expecting to see. If the results are not relevant then you are very likely losing out on the opportunity to improve your conversion rates and other vital metrics.

For more information on how to improve your site search please contact SLI Systems on 0800 032 4783 in the UK and (866) 240-2812 in the US. Alternatively please click here for a free Site Search Critique. The SLI Systems Christmas Guide (UK version), the SLI Systems Holiday Guide (US version) and Big Book of Site Search tips can also be downloaded free of charge.

Lately, we’ve been beating the mobile drum pretty loudly. A few weeks ago, we announced our new SLI Mobile solution to help retailers quickly create a mobile version of their websites. And just last week, we announced that one of our customers – Century Novelty – worked with us to create its mobile site in a matter of days, in order to capture the growing numbers of mobile shoppers the company was already seeing.

Some in the industry think it’s just too early for companies to be worrying about mobile. That’s not our take, based on the experience many of our customers have had in seeing a steady growth in numbers of visitors to their sites from mobile devices. As Ian MacDonald of Century Novelty explained to us, over the past year they noticed a small percentage of sales actually coming from mobile devices. The amount wasn’t significant, but it was enough that they couldn’t ignore it.

Last week, the results of a recent NRF survey on mobile shopping were published by Evan Schuman in StorefrontBacktalk, showing that our thinking is correct – as many American consumers say they expect to shop by mobile device this holiday season. According to StorefrontBacktalk, exact numbers are hard to pin down due to the possibility that respondents may not have answered the questions in the same way (e.g. some may have treated social networking recommendations or texting friends as “conducting research” while others may not have), or because some people may not think today that they’ll shop via mobile device but come December they might. Still, the data is compelling. Of 8,767 consumers surveyed, 26.8% said they would use their smartphones to either research or make a purchase during the holidays this year; and of those in the 18 to 24 age range, 45% said they would.

Evan also mentions that his site conducted a survey with Forrester Research that showed an “alarmingly high percentage of retailers (21.3%) who said they have no plans for any M-Commerce programs in the next 18 months. And almost half of those surveyed choose ‘none of these’ when asked if they allow customers through a mobile site or a dedicated application.” In our own M-commerce survey from earlier this year, we found that 80% of retailers surveyed say they have no mobile commerce strategy in place, while at the same time, 83% of those surveyed said that between 1-10% of site visitors come from mobile devices.

While the numbers vary from survey to survey, one thing is clear: there is an audience today on the mobile platform, and that audience will only continue to grow in the months ahead. Retailers who choose to sit on the sidelines until this market is more mature may miss out on an opportunity to garner more sales, and possibly lose customers along the way.

For retailers who are eager to get started but are reticent to spend a lot of time and resources on a mobile site, a solution like SLI Mobile is ideal – it can help you create a site in a week or less, with minimal involvement from your team. And the expense is nominal. If you’re hesitating, don’t. We’re ready to help you today. Contact us now.

Each year it seems the online holiday shopping season starts earlier than the year before. Consumers are already flocking to the web to get a jump on their holiday shopping, yet many retailers are still getting their sites ready or are altogether unprepared. If you’re one of them, register to attend our free webinar – “Seizing the Remaining Season: Find out What’s Selling and How to Sell Yours” – taking place next week, featuring online customer experience expert Susan Aldrich of the Patricia Seybold Group.

During the webinar, Susan will offer insight into what consumers are search for and buying this season, across several categories, including apparel (men’s & women’s), electronics, jewelry, cosmetics and more. She’ll also discuss ways you can take advantage of these buying trends and improve your site’s search and navigation to increase customer engagement and conversions on your online storefront – for example, by incorporating social media content into site search, and extending the search experience to mobile devices.

The 30-minute webinar takes place on Wed., Oct. 27 at 8:30 a.m. PDT / 11:30 a.m. EDT. When you register , you’ll receive a copy of SLI Systems’ Holiday Guide : 10 Steps for Preparing Your Online Retail Site Search for the Holidays.