Tag Archive for: best practices

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Voice Search Energizes your Marketing Campaigns





Here at EasyAsk, we have been predicting the breakout success of Voice Search for eCommerce for years. Whether your customers are using voice with their mobile phone or with an Alexa or Siri enabled device, voice search is finally taking its place as a key technology for 2018 and beyond.

Check out this great article by Jayson DeMers of Forbes that elucidates this growing trend. In fact, he uses a quote we often site from ComScore “50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020.”

EasyAsk is your trusted advisor to get you ready for the 2018. When it comes to search, EasyAsk is going to drive more revenue. We guarantee it.

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eCommerce Industry News You Can Use





Every year, eCommerce pundits share their predictions for the coming year.  As a whole, eCommerce sales continue to show remarkable growth, particularly exciting is the explosion of sales on mobile devices.

Here are some articles that are “must reads” to ensure that your website is maximized to take advantage of all 2018 has to offer:

E-Commerce in 2018: Here’s What The Experts Are Predicting (Forbes)

From $0 To $1 Million: How To Scale Your E-Commerce Site (Forbes)

How to Humanize e-Commerce (Forbes)

E-commerce market may cross $50 billion mark in 2018 (The Hindu Business Line)

The Rise of Voice Search: A How-To Guide (Business2Community)

EasyAsk is your trusted advisor to get you ready for the 2018. When it comes to search, EasyAsk is going to drive more revenue. We guarantee it.

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EasyAsk Releases Guide to Increasing Customer Conversion through Better Product Findability

New EasyAsk guide offers ways to optimize sites for five important e-commerce customer behavior patterns

BURLINGTON, MA – March 5, 2014 – EasyAsk, the industry leader in e-commerce site search, navigation and merchandising, today announced a new best practices guide that shows how e-commerce sites can increase their customer conversion through better product findability. This new guide examines five critical customer behavior patterns on e-commerce sites, and offers specific ways in which e-retailers can optimize their sites to support these behavior patterns.

Shopping involves three stages – find, decide and purchase. Yet, most E-commerce sites measure their success based on conversion rate and abandonment rate, which are measured in a simplistic manner – did a visitor complete a purchase after placing items in a cart, or did they leave the site and abandon that cart? This simplistic view can often mask other problems with the e-commerce site, in particular all the activity up until placing items in the cart. This is why many practitioners are now advocating measuring, understanding and tuning your site across this entire process.

Since “find” is the first stage in the purchase process, understanding how customers find products on your e-commerce site is critical to adjusting the site to match their needs. To understand the “product findability” on your site, you must put yourself in the visitors’ shoes and understand how they behave. The EasyAsk guide examines visitor behavior and defines five very common customer behavior patterns for e-commerce sites.

“Understanding customer behavior on your site, in particular how they find products, is critical to optimizing the purchase path,” said John Morrell, Vice President of Product Marketing at EasyAsk. “Site optimization requires more than just understanding – you need the tools to deliver the richer customer experience. Our guide not only gives you the ‘what’, but also gives you the ‘how’ – how to tune your site effectively for your visitors.”

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk is the leading provider of natural language software and solutions for e-commerce and business applications. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional search, allowing users to simply ask questions in plain English and receive highly tuned results. EasyAsk uses this unique technology to deliver industry-leading website search, navigation and merchandising solutions that boost online revenue through increased conversion rates, improved customer experience and agile merchandising. Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Europe, EasyAsk has customers such as The North Face, Samsonite, Anna’s Linens, Journey’s, Coldwater Creek, Lillian Vernon, Aramark, True Value, Andertons Music and Harbor Freight Tools that rely on the EasyAsk software products to run their business and eCommerce operations daily. For further information please visit www.easyask.com.

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Gartner Best Practices in E-Commerce Search – Part 1

July is “Best Practices” month here at EasyAsk – where we describe good search, navigation and merchandising techniques that can help you convert more customers.  As you and your teams ramp up for busy back-to-school and holiday seasons, we want to help you convert more visitors into sales.  Over the course of this month, our team will show different best practices in search, navigation and merchandising and how they can impact customer experience.

While EasyAsk has many lessons to share, we always like to recognize best practices from independent firms, especially when they align with our vision. Gartner, a preeminent research firm, recently released a report called “Best Practices in Strategically Combining Search, Content Analytics and E-Commerce“, written by Whit Andrews and Gene Alvarez – two of the brightest minds in e-commerce and search.

Among the findings in this report, the Gartner analysts clearly stated the value of search, navigation and merchandising to an e-commerce environment:

  • Search is the means by which shoppers most nakedly reveal their needs and wants (as they themselves perceive them) to sellers.
  • Search is, therefore, a particularly powerful way to promote, relate and reveal products in a shopping experience.

The analysts went on from there to lay out two very important best practices in e-commerce search:

  1. Offer Effective Definition-Matching and Handling of Ambiguity in Query Terms
  2. Use Search and Content Analytics to Fulfill Shoppers’ Desires Through Merchandise, Related and Suggested Offers, and Advertising

These two best practices highlight the unique advantages natural language technology delivers in an e-commerce search environment.  Since natural language understands both the intent of the search and the content being searched, visitor searches are more accurately matched and the search engine seamlessly deals with ambiguity – misspellings, tenses, stemming and when to relax terms.  Natural language also understands the relationship between terms in a search to derive contextual meaning and further eliminates ambiguity.

In addition, the actionable analytics and natural language business rules in EasyAsk make it easy for your business people to better merchandise your site with context-driven offers, promotions and ads.

In the next two blog posts of this series, I will drill down into each of the two Gartner best practices we discussed above.  I will examine the best practices, detail how natural language fulfills the promise of these best practices and show customer sites where these practices are applied.

The most valuable best practices typically come from experts that have visibility into the widest spectrum of implementations – learning how smart people across the industry approach problems differently.  We’re always happy to confirm when EasyAsk best practices match those of top-tier research firms, such as Gartner.

Ready to see how EasyAsk's eCommerce solution can help you? Request a demo!
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