We hope that our recent blog posts have inspired you to make changes to your eCommerce site and improve your bottom line during the Holiday Season. Creating an optimized shopping experience for your customers will be a gift to your business accounts as well as your customers. This blog post is the third in the series of posts that will lay out best practices and tips as you prepare your eCommerce site for the biggest commercial period of the year.
Redirects
When done right, Redirects have the power to inform and invite your customers towards more relevant content. Running a text-search for their queries may not be the most appropriate next step in their journey through your eCommerce site. Sometimes, it is more appropriate to show a different page or set of results. And customers who realize that your search engine is intelligent and intuitive in this way will trust you with their time and money.
How can I use Redirects?
There are many uses for Redirects in eCommerce and we like to define them in three ways:
Web Page Redirects
A Web Page Redirect redirects a search term to a specific web page instead of performing a search. It is useful for catching queries, such as ‘delivery’ or ‘returns’. For example, a customer may enter ‘delivery’ into a search box to find out about the company delivery costs or policies. When a Web Page Redirect is set up for ‘delivery’, the customer is redirected to the delivery web page rather than the engine running a search. This kind of redirect can be set up to recognize queries such as, “Where’s my order?” or, “How much does delivery cost?”
Web Page Redirects are also valuable for when you wish to direct customers to a specially-created landing page. For example, you might set up a redirect for a particular brand that takes customers to a brand page that includes brand information, cross-sells and other content. Perhaps you would like customers who search for party dresses over the coming months to be redirected to a ‘Christmas Party’ landing page that displays dresses, jewelry, shoes, and other accessories.
Search Page Redirects
A Search Page Redirect redirects from one search to another search. For example, there may be searches for which you wish your customers to only see a specific set of products that you have defined. Instead of seeing results for their original search, customers will be redirected to a different results page. Perhaps when users search for a particular brand, you would like to drive them to a particular set of products with a special deal or a higher profit margin.
Conditional Definitions
This tool, unique to the EasyAsk solution, is an incredibly useful way to avoid ‘No Results’ pages for products that are out of stock. If a business identifies a popular product that frequently goes out of stock, it is possible to use Conditional Definitions to show the specific product if it is in stock, but a different (defined) set of products, should the requested product be out of stock at that time. Our previous blog in the series, ‘Reducing No Results’, covers this in further detail.
Take Control
By using Redirects in conjunction with data from their search analytics, retailers can take control of their customers’ experience. When customers use the search box, they don’t always need or want the search results for their query. Redirects allow flexibility over what pages and products are put in front of customers. Redirects are just one of the many tools that are part of EasyAsk’s intuitive search solution.