Too many times, I’ve seen eTailers take the wrong approach at trying to match products with shoppers. At the extreme, is the “show them everything” approach. You can recognize this approach right away when you see an overly crowded home page with dozens of products, promotions and offers that scroll down several pages. eTailers throw everything but the kitchen sink at a visitor in hopes that something sticks. Another approach is to use click behavior to drive business rules that target content based on placing the shopper into a dynamic segment, i.e. a segment that is determined real time based on what the shopper has been doing on the site. Once their segment is determined you can start to filter out content that is irrelevant and make recommendations that make more sense. This can be very effective but takes a sophisticated personalization engine to pull off. 

Yet another approach that is gaining in popularity is what I often refer to as “guided selling.” It’s brilliant in its simplicity. Rather than guess at a customer’s intent or needs, simply ask them. For example, check out Road Runner Sports. They’ve got a huge selection of shoes available, but to help you save time, they ask you a few simple questions to fine tune your search (e.g. what is your arch type,  what surface do you run on, etc.) A few basic answers let them personalize the experience without guesswork. Another site to look at is Personal Shopper. They go to the extreme of allowing you to fill out a preference profile. Completing this form establishes your interests and preferences enabling their recommendation engine to make more intelligent suggestions. A simple version of guided selling - sometimes called “faceted search” or “guided navigation” - also lets you fine tune search results. You see this on sites like Best Buy’s that let you select brands, price range and features on the left navigation to fine tune your search and return personalized search results. 

 

Interestingly, even Google is starting to personalize search results. Although out of the gate, they are trying to “guess” at better results based on your search history, over time I’m sure they’ll move toward more explicit “guided search.”  (See my comment on the Read/Write Web post…) Google is already encouraging users to set up a profile… it’s only a matter of time before this information is leveraged to produce more intelligent search results. Bottom line, consumers are willing to share information with you in exchange for value (saving them time and money). 

So if you’re not sure what the online consumer is trying to find, think about simply asking them.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,