Five Critical Features Your On-Site Search Tool Needs for a Successful Holiday Season

The Holiday season is rapidly approaching and for many ecommerce websites, this is a critical time of year to be successful in order to accomplish annual sales and revenue goals. Your website’s search and insights engine is going to play a huge role in converting mere visitors into loyal, returning customers. Here are 5 features that your on-site search tool needs to have this Holiday Season.

Relevant Recommendations

This optional feature available through HawkSearch essentially gives marketers the ability to make additional purchase suggestions to shoppers, based on their prior buying or search preferences. Relevant Recommendations empowers ecommerce sites to engage in suggestive selling, by displaying products under landing page headers that say “more like this” or “people also bought”. These items have a much greater chance of conversion since they are based on products that have already been proven to appeal to those specific people. If you show site visitors items that are similar to what they have acted upon before, the chances of their purchasing them is greatly increased.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is the technology that actually makes the Relevant Recommendations tool possible. A part of the artificial intelligence family, machine learning has the unprecedented ability to analyze a vast amount of data from website visitors’ search and behavior patterns. From this data evaluation, HawkSearch is able to make accurate predictions about what shoppers will most likely want to purchase.

Machine learning utilizes the data it processes to populate the products/items that appear from the recommendations engine. Suggestive selling can lead to increased sales by increasing the purchase amount of each ticket.

Visitor Targeting

Visitor targeting is a great tool in that it allows you to more accurately market the right products to a given audience. Unlike a highway billboard that sends the same message to everyone, visitor targeting empowers marketers to display products to specific audiences, based on known data about them. Whether that information be their zip code, gender or prior purchase history, your chances of converting that shopper goes way up if you can show them products that will appeal to them instantly. Research has shown that the fewer clicks a website visitor has to do, the greater the chance that they will buy right then. For example, if you are an ecommerce site selling clothing and your shopper is in Chicago during January, HawkSearch will show them winter coats and gloves instead of flip flops. Conversely, the shopper down in Miami would love to see light t-shirts and shorts as buying options. Visitor targeting is a great way to personalize search results to appeal to specific individuals, not the masses.  

Smart Autocomplete

When your shoppers start to type words into the search box, Smart Autocomplete takes over and completes the task for them. This HawkSearch feature takes site searching to the next level by predicting what the visitor is looking for and displaying the top products, searches and facets for that specific category. Smart Autocomplete removes the guess work out of visitors’ minds by gently guiding them to the exact products they want to see. This technology also reduces the amount of clicks that your shoppers have to go through, which will increase the rate of conversion. Smart Autocomplete gives your visitors the benefit of linking them with a vast amount of prior data that will predict the products/items that most likely will appeal to them the best.

Boost/Bury Rules

HawkSearch allows marketers & merchandisers to take more control of the search results their visitors see by boosting or limiting exposure to certain products. If you want to promote certain items in search results based on time of year, theme, subject or any other criteria, you can boost those products from the HawkSearch dashboard. Conversely, items that are out of stock, on clearance or discontinued will not be shown in search results, as you can hide or bury them. The Boost and bury functionality found within HawkSearch gives marketers greater ability to influence or guide the search results that visitors see, which can influence buying decisions.

The Holiday season is a critical time of year, that will greatly influence the overall success of your annual revenue. It’s very important to have a search tool that not only finds the products your visitors are looking for, but also helps you position your offerings in such a way that they have maximum appeal to the right audience. The many features found in HawkSearch gives marketers and merchandisers the help they need to provide personalized and relevant search results to every person. This not only creates a more satisfactory search experience for shoppers, but also a much higher rate of conversion for you.

Happy Holiday selling!