Why a better search experience builds your brand

Whether they realize it or not, customers want a personalized online experience. Even subconsciously, people are more likely to open emails if their name is included in it. Why? Today’s consumers want to believe that a company is tailoring its searches, results and content specifically for their preferences. This demand stems from the fact that a multitude of other companies provide this experience so consumers have come to expect it from everyone else.

The benefits of personalizing online experiences are ten-fold for businesses: more impulse purchases, increased basket size, higher brand loyalty. If there was a time to start personalizing the online experience, now would be it.

But, it’s impossible to totally personalize the online experience for your customers without knowing exactly what type of information and data your customers want. Providing a smooth search experience encompasses understanding exactly what your customers are looking for and providing the best options based on past behaviors, preferences and more. I have had the pleasure of working with Coveo for Sitecore and I find the once-arduous task of personalizing search experiences in Sitecore invaluable and the machine learning capabilities of their cloud platform are unparalleled.

Through my experiences with Coveo for Sitecore, I have learned some realities that remain true, no matter your CMS.

1. Helping visitors find what they need faster is essential in building brand loyalty

One of my favorite features of Coveo for Sitecore 4 is Automatic Relevance Tuning. This feature uses a visitor’s behavior pattern to prioritize the most relevant content for that user.

Instead of trying to mislead visitors to pages that don’t appeal to them, providing the most relevant content gives your visitors a painless experience. And this experience ties directly to brand loyalty and trust. They will continue to come back to sites where it was effortless to find the content that applied to them.

2. Visitors often don’t know what they want until they see it

As a user is typing in a search query, Coveo for Sitecore uses machine learning to remove duplicates; match partial, fuzzy or exact characters; and include relevant search queries based on that user’s behavior.

Say Jill is looking for boots on an ecommerce site, and her past behavior has included searching for clothes for cold weather. With Coveo for Sitecore, the search engine can suggest snow boots knowing that the specified query is relevant to her. Jill gets a great experience and you get an increase in sales. It’s a win win.

3. Showing related content doesn’t just mean an increase in revenue.

Okay, showing related items to a visitor can result in up-selling or cross-selling, which is great. But, that’s not the only purpose.

Placing related articles at the end of a post can help you reduce your bounce rate. A lot of times, one of those related articles is actually what a visitor was searching for, so they stay on your site instead of going to a competitor’s.

And, this lower bounce rate can evolve into repeat visitors who choose your website over others because they find the content that applies to them. While an increase in revenue is great, brand loyalty is increasingly important in today’s world. And brand loyalty often comes full circle to more purchases: “Customers that continue to support your brand over time will spend 67% more than new customers.”

The bottom line

Personalization is important, if not essential, for today’s digital navigator. Though this era of personalization may have started with simple tactics like auto-filling names into email subject lines, technology has heightened the standards of customer experience and loyalty.

Coveo for Sitecore gives you the capacity to not only provide that personalized experience customers now expect, but also the capacity to utilize machine learning capabilities for customer and enterprise benefit. And, I am reassured knowing the platform simplifies these capabilities, bringing newfound simplicity to a once intricate process.