How On-Site Search Can Help Your Promotional Sales Strategy

The end of the year is a busy time for e-commerce retailers. From BFCM through to holiday seasonal sales, getting stores ready for the best chance of success takes a lot of care and consideration. It goes without saying that the more data you have access to, the better.

On-site search provides a really rich seam when it comes to this deep insight into customer behavior. Read on to learn more about how on-site search can help to inform your strategy as you head into sales season!

What if we told you that today’s on-site search data could help you win tomorrow’s sale season…

The Secret to Sales Season Success… 

As experienced e-commerce practitioners, we all know that the hard work of the sales season starts long before the big events of the online retail calendar actually roll around.

Investment and prep by retailers now will pay dividends when the busiest time of year arrives, and this extends to your tech stack. Ensure that you’re working with solutions that give broad-ranging benefits, that extend beyond their intended function.

A sophisticated on-site search solution like Klevu offers all this and more, with the ability to unlock a world of information, insight and strategy to those savvy enough to get it up and running in advance of the year’s biggest sales events.

This article will run through four key ways that data gleaned from the smart deployment of on-site search can give retailers a huge advantage when sales season comes around.

1. Create Better Informed Promotional Campaigns 

When you’re looking at the campaigns supporting your big sales events, you’ll doubtless be wondering where to place the strongest focus. Which brands and product lines should you be leading with when it comes to SEO and PPC promotion ahead of the year’s big sales?

Of course, you could look to your sales data — you know which names shift the most stock. But there’s another valuable source of information you could be leveraging too: your most popular search query keywords.

These terms and phrases can throw up some really helpful information. This is data that has the rare and valuable advantage of giving you insight into the exact way your target audience is likely to be searching for the products they desire. No other data source tells you as clearly what your customers want, in their own words.

It goes without saying that this is hugely helpful for those looking to run more effective promotional campaigns leading up to and during sales periods.

From inbound advertising to on-site promotional banners that can help channel interest to specific landing pages, by installing Klevu today, you give yourself the greatest opportunity to start collecting this information.

Our dashboard insights give an incredibly clear and succinct overview of exactly where you should be focusing your attention and marketing efforts to drive the most highly qualified traffic to your sales.

2. Enjoy Better Prediction of Seasonal Shopping

When looking to run promotional campaigns, timing is everything. You need to know when specific seasonal interest waxes and wanes. By having a clear understanding of when demand for a product is ramping up or dropping off, you can better time your annually recurring sales, or promotions.

Of course, your best-selling products give an indication of where your audience’s interest lies, but this is something of a blunt instrument. It only shows which products actually made it all the way to purchase — it doesn’t reflect the broader, underlying interest that may be bubbling away under the surface of your store as customers use on-site search to plan ahead and research certain products.

On-site search can provide a wonderful window into the shifting temporal interests of your audience. By examining how and when people search your store, you can gain invaluable advanced insight into their motivations and desires.

For example, observing when your audience starts to input search terms like “christmas gifts for…” or “easter dresses” helps you understand when to time your promotional offers or sales-based campaigns.

3. Benefit From Better Knowledge of Stock Expectations 

Of course, retailers hope they know their audience well enough to ensure that their buying strategy perfectly meets customers’ expectations of their brand. But on-site search data can shine a light not only on what your audience wants, but also on what they expect you to stock.

By digging deeper into your zero-result search terms, you may be surprised at the “gaps in the market” opportunities that on-site search can identify!

This may help you to refine your approach in terms of the items you promote most heavily. If high demand for a certain brand is evident, would you consider buying it in to help drive traffic and meet clearly signaled expectations? Should your promotional sale look to deplete stock of a rival product, clearing warehouse space for this new brand?

You might want to consider redirecting customers searching for these unstocked brands by customizing your No Results Found.  This means that when a customer enters a query that leads them to a dead-end, instead of losing a hypothetical sale, you’re able to suggest an alternative and redirect them to a similar stocked brand (or at the very least back to your sale pages) via a promotional banner.

4. Better Leverage of Landing Pages 

One of the most exciting new additions to Klevu’s feature list, especially when it comes to improving your sales strategy, is the new Landing Page Builder.

This tool combines easy drag and drop functionality (pages are easy to create, without development or design knowledge) with the powerful capabilities of AI.

These landing pages have the ability to reach the most suitable potential customers with the most highly targeted information. Even better, they replace static promotional pages with a dynamic, AI-driven alternative. Real-time data from your store can influence the range of products displayed, ensuring your collections are also perfectly positioned.

What does this mean for your approach to future sales and promotional activities? Pages can be linked to Google AdWords, and limitless campaign pages can be created across your entire site. Landing pages give you the ability to test out a range of approaches before sales season hits, so you can work out what messaging and product combinations drive the most traffic and conversions.

There’s endless scope for creativity with the new builder. While you’ll need a developer to deploy your pages to your store, there’s no technical barrier to any marketer or merchandiser rolling up their sleeves and starting to gain experience right away, before the pressure of sales season really starts to bite!

Start Informing Your Sales Strategy Through On-Site Search Today…

As once-regional holidays and sales events start to go global in our better-connected world, it can feel as though e-commerce is in a permanent state of sales prep.

While revenues continue to rise, so too does competition. The modern customer is ready and willing to shop around, and this is especially true of sales-based browsing. Because of this, it’s vitally important for retailers to capitalize on every advantage they can muster.

On-site search is a smart, safe investment at the best of times, boosting conversions thanks to smart merchandising, better product discovery and enhanced personalization. But the deeper understanding that the data it provides can bring is a real added bonus.

Klevu’s intuitive dashboard and daily search analytics reports combined with a powerful features list ensure you’ve got both the data and the functionality to really make an impact on boosting your sales performance.

The sooner you install Klevu, the better and more accurate the data you’ll get to examine – so for maximum impact, book your demo today.