Online retailers are constantly striving to get to know their customers in order to create more effective sales techniques and pursue more advantageous marketing campaigns. To do this — especially in a superficial environment like the Internet — means cultivating a boatload of data and interpreting this data with a keen eye for patterns, trends and points of interest. In this way, having an on-site search feature that’s powered by natural language processing (NLP) can help you learn more than ever about your customers.
The writing on the wall
What would you say is the single most important piece of information you can obtain from your customers? Some might argue it’s their email address: you can constantly maintain open communication with them, marketing sales and products at will. Others believe it’s all about their demographic traits: knowing what age, gender, race, ethnicity and income of a person are means knowing their shopping habits.
While the above data sets are supremely important, what’s even better when it comes to getting to know your customers is understanding their exact wants: It doesn’t matter what John Doe’s email address is or how old he is if you know he’s looking for a black, leather, ergonomic desk chair with adjustable armrests. In using this information to provide him with exactly what he’s looking for, you can successfully provide him with numerous potentials for sales, all of which will directly appeal to his precise need.
But how do you get such precise and accurate information? Easy: by compiling the data from site search. Customers quite literally type in exactly what they’re looking for, giving you insight into how they intend to spend their money when shopping on your website.
Extrapolating the data
Now, John Doe’s chair example is narrow in its focus — most e-commerce retailers are looking for a broader solution to conversions when it comes to interpreting data. Natural language processing shines on every level, however: whether you’re focused on a small niche of customers or evaluating your entire shopper base. By extrapolating the raw data given to you by your customers, you can discover highly prolific trends such as:
Highest searched terms and all of their corresponding variations. Searches for “drone,” “RC helicopter,” remote control helicopter” and “quadcopter,” for example, will all be intuitively understood as similar via NLP site search, to paint a more complete picture of products, rather than just keywords.
Misspellings, brand names and colloquialisms that may be tossed out or parsed by keyword-based site search algorithms will instead be appropriately grouped with relevant products through NLP’s intuitive processing.
NLP recognizes the structure in which searches are executed, meaning you can see common questions, specific ideas or recurring trains of thought that might be fueling your customers to search in one way or another.
Through NLP site search, you can actually refine the demand for individual products down to their unique variables, to determine if certain versions are more sought after than others. “Blue Knit Sweater” might be selling better than “Red Cashmere Sweater,” but you might have a tremendously high volume of searches for “Blue Cashmere Sweater,” which can signal the need to start stocking that product for optimal sales!
There’s a nearly infinite range of observations that can be derived from site search data, however having a search that provides a complete overview of that data means having natural language processing on your side.
Putting search data into practice
In taking the time to a) update your site search tool to an NLP algorithm/semantic tool and b) refining data to understand shopper trends, you’ll have the opportunity to cut through the runaround and guesswork in making a sale and instead, get straight to the point. It’s the equivalent of walking into a sales meeting already knowing what your prospect wants, how to talk to them and how to illustrate the right selling points.
You might say that the on-site search data gleaned from NLP is the new secret to being successful in sales.
