Energize Holiday Emails with Site Search Data

We’re almost there; Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and every other day from Thanksgiving to Christmas will fill up with online shoppers looking for those special gifts. Online businesses will ramp up marketing efforts and website optimization to capture all they can from floods of consumers scouring their inventories. Big and small companies, alike, will be looking for the advantage that makes them stand out this holiday season.

In the email marketing world, we’re all aware of the massive amounts of segmentation available. We frequently segment with time zone, the list activity, purchase history, account type, geolocation, and other CRM variables. All of that data usage is an attempt to figure out the recipient in order to create more revenues; it’s a way for us behind-the-desk marketers to understand our recipients and speak to them with relevance and accuracy, moving the needle on the bottom line.

But does it?

Yeah, sometimes. I get emails often that use my information to justify why I should buy or subscribe to a certain offer, and a small percentage of the time they do get me to react and participate. The widespread problem seems to be content creation. Many businesses are trying to sell products and services without consulting the real-time data they get from actual shoppers using their websites.

While CRM data is very valuable, it doesn’t tell the whole story. It just reflects on past actions to predict the future. It also requires the completion of purchases to triangulate accurately what consumers ‘may’ be looking for next. Conversely, site search data is realtime actionable insights being generated by shoppers as they interact with the website whether they purchase or not. If you sell products or services, this information is pure, marketing gold.

Site search data is perfect to super-charge email campaigns

Looking into the site search data can be extremely telling and helpful when creating an email campaign. Almost every digital marketer has felt the pain of low click rates, tired lists, and marginal revenues from sends. Site search data can reduce that considerably by giving marketers the data needed to create actionable content.

Here are a few examples of how site search data gets used:

• Remove Google’s (not provided) keyword barrier by listening to your site search
  • Hear the needs directly from shoppers, learn their preferences
• Use real-time site search data to improve email content and call-to-action
  • Leverage ‘right now’ data to dial-in engaging email campaigns
• Identify trending products via site search for custom sends to product landing pages
  • Send shoppers to single and grouped product pages that are high-performing
• Correlate email metrics to site search activity, learn about your email file’s preferences
  • After sending an email campaign look at the site search data to identify shopper interest for future email optimization

Site search data is a very concise tool for gathering realtime information from shoppers. It provides actionable data that’s usable immediately for marketers and business owners. With email being a heavily data-driven channel, it’s very important to use the most relevant information available -  site search makes it possible to interact with shoppers in a whole different way than just analytics or CRM records.

This holiday season, think about site search data and how it can energize your email campaigns. If you don’t have a site search, look into it. Start getting your data right from the shoppers, they’ll thank you for it in click throughs!