Yesterday we announced that WEBS has implemented our Learning Search to power the site search on its all-things knitting ecommerce site Yarn.com. Aside from strengthening its online brand visibility and improving the customer experience, WEBS has discovered another benefit to an effective site search solution – more productive employees. According to owner Steve Elkins, employees are better able to find information on the company’s more than 15,000 products, which helps them market them better.
Elkins also said that they use our site search to create special landing pages for groups of products, and direct recipients of WEBS marketing e-mails to these pages by individual URLs.
I interviewed Elkins recently on our Ecommerce Podcast. Steve talks about how he and his wife took over the business from Steve’s parents and shares some interesting marketing techniques that have helped grow Yarn.com’s traffic (like podcasting). He also talks about the key technologies (like site search) that have improved their website. (Side note: you may be surprised to find out what Steve’s first online purchase was. Hint: think little blue box.)
