Five tips to increase your site conversions

What’s more irritating than boring ads, cookies and annoying chatbots? Too many choices and not being able to find what you’re looking for is certainly at the top of the list.

The journey from product discovery to purchase can be complex, long and dull leading to lower engagement and lacklustre conversions. So, how can you optimise, improve engagement, and ultimately increase site conversions?

In this blog, we’ll provide five tips to quickly improve your product discovery journeys. But before we begin, let’s clarify what product discovery actually is.

Product discovery is how shoppers find and explore your products as well as your content online using different devices and channels. Optimising the product discovery journey for ecommerce requires a set of tools capable of understanding the multiple touchpoints a shopper can interact with. These tools include powerful onsite search, consistent personalised recommendations and smart merchandising strategies.

The goal of product discovery is to show relevant products for each customer without compromising the business requirements. For example, push products you have in high stock that are relevant to the shoppers journey or promote new arrivals, avoid zero result searches and suggest visually similar products. By optimising product discovery, you’ll not only increase customer loyalty, but also your sales and conversions.

Five tips to improve your product discovery and increase conversions

#1 Simplify product discovery for your shoppers

86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. It’s a key brand differentiator but it can be a challenge to get right, particularly as expectations continue to spiral.

Start by simplifying product discovery. Guide your shoppers through the navigation, surfacing personalised suggestions based on their behaviour and your product information. Leverage the powers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithms to increase relevancy of results and on-site personalisation over time.

Don’t forget to narrow down the options to avoid overwhelming your shoppers. Keeping it simple and your products easily accessible will increase engagement and conversions from the first search.

#2 Optimise your site search experience

93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. So make sure to give your shoppers a fantastic first impression.

Try not to overwhelm them with endless results or worse, no results at all. And use synonyms, autocomplete as well as autosuggest to save their time. You can make the most of automation in other ways with natural language processing (NLP). This enables you to speak your customer’s language, regardless of how complex or long-tail the query may be.

You can also increase conversions by boosting and burying products with merchandising rules. For example, bury products the shopper has already purchased, last viewed, and already added to cart to provide more relevant experiences. Being agile and responsive to your customers encourages repeat purchases and brand loyalty.

Since implementing Crownpeak's AI-powered search, Superdry can provide more accurate and relevant results at ease, even with the most complex and unstructured search requests. Not only are they increasing the conversion rate of affected searches by 35%, but they are also increasing commercial value per affected search by 37%.

#3 Engage shoppers with personalised experiences

We can all agree that the more personalised the shoppers’ journey, the more they will engage, convert and return. In fact, according to McKinsey Digital, personalisation can increase revenues by 5% to 15% and efficiency on marketing spend by up to 30%. So replace a one-size-fits-all approach with individualised product discovery experiences.

Offer relevant search results and recommend products that fit your shoppers profile and behaviour. Why not suggest products at checkout that the customer has previously clicked on or recommend products in the order confirmation email the shopper has been searching for? This is a very simple quick way to increase Average Order Values (AOV) when you have the right tools.

One-to-one personalisation or individualisation is an incredibly powerful way to boost conversions. Using effective segmentation, data enrichment and high-performance algorithms to support your segmentation strategy is key to success.
The result is curated and individualised shopping journeys where shoppers can find exactly what they were looking for, from initial search to final purchase, on the web, app, phone or social.

#4 Automate, but remain in control

This all sounds like a lot of work, but, by employing algorithms to do the heavy lifting you can operate more efficiently. Start by finding the right algorithms that work for you, apply merchandising rules on top and you will have more time to curate your online store in a way that doesn’t cause conversion challenges, customer churn and/or stock problems.

If you’re already an Crownpeak customer, you can leverage the wide range of our algorithms in our library or bring your own. Identify the most effective strategies using A/B testing at the model, algorithm and merchandising levels.

Algorithms can be used for all retailers, large and small. You don’t need to be an AI and algorithms expert or a data scientist, you can let the algorithms do the manual and time-consuming work while you add the creative touch to deliver the most engaging and personalised experiences.

#5 Scale as you go

Our final tip to improve your product discovery is to find the right technology for your business. As your company grows, you want the technology on the back-end to flex and grow with you.

With Crownpeak you can start with one solution at a time. For example, you might want to start with an upgrade to your recommendations capability. From there you can select other solutions such as smart search to employ as and when you need. What’s more, our dedicated team of Customer Success Managers help our customers grow by sharing industry knowledge, benchmarking you against other customers, set up strategies to improve performance, and provide advice on what features to unlock at every step of growth.

Key Takeaways

1. Simplify your product discovery starting with site search. Use search solutions powered by AI for ultimate accurate and relevant results.

2. Personalise to engage, inspire and convert. Go beyond the most popular or most trendy recommendations. Use high-performance algorithms to help you with truly personalised shopping experiences to increase AOV.

3. Save time by automating recommendations without losing control. Leverage AI to fulfil your ecommerce goals whilst remaining in full creative control to meet your brand strategies.

4. Find a solution that helps grow your business and grows with you. Easy to scale up, fast to go to market.

Ready to learn more about how Crownpeak can help with your product discovery and conversion? Schedule a demo.

Not quite sure yet? Check out our brand new guide that further explores how you can increase conversions with the right product discovery platform.