How To Keep Customers Engaged

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As I discussed in my last post, “2012: The Year of the Tablet”, what’s hot in online retail this year seems to be trends that began bubbling up over the past several months.

We already discussed ways to address the social and table crazes. Other popular trends this year include personalization and video. Here are some tips for how to showcase these in search:

Make it Personal

When your site looks like it remembers people – their brand preferences, purchasing history, location – it goes a long way towards creating a personalized experience. For example, a “Recent Searches” box shows people the keywords they used previously, in case they want to search for something similar again. You can see this on FTD.com’s website, where the “Recent Searches” box shows “chrysanthemums” and “yellow roses” as previous searches. You can also localize results based on a visitor’s zip code, like Tractor Supply does, and deliver product availability and pricing information based on location. Multichannel retailers can also include information about the closest store for in-store pick-up.

Use video to bring products to life

The benefit of having product videos on your site goes beyond increasing engagement and conversions, they can also boost your SEO rankings. Extend the value of your videos by including them in site search results – put video icons next to items with related video content, as you can see on the Etrailer.com website. Also, you can rank the items with video higher on the search results page, and you can also display banners highlighting video content when visitors search using specific keywords.

While you’re coming up with creative ways to incorporate these trends into your marketing strategies, don’t forget to include search and navigation in your plans, given these pages are often the highest converting on your site.