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Video Transcript
0:06 – Welcome back to our holiday partner series, everyone. I am here with Search Spring today. I’m Christina Carrdellio, our partner manager here at Yottaa and Searchspring is one of our great partners.
0:21 – They specialize in, as you can imagine, search, but also personalization and product merchandising as well as many other things.
0:32 – I want to kick this over to Neil Lofgren over at Searchspring to help talk about this topic and really what matters this holiday season with customers.
0:42 – Neil, I’d love for you to introduce yourself and your position over at Searchspring.
0:48 – Hi, yes, Neil Lofgren, I’m a Senior Director of engineering Searchspring and I’ve been involved in product discovery, personalization, free commerce for the last 15 years or so.
1:02 – So Searchspring, you know, we’re, we’re always, of course every year we start very early focusing on the Black Friday period and getting things ready. So excited to talk about that some more with you today.
1:17 – So we know that there’s a lot that goes in this holiday season and there’s a lot of things that our customers are talking about and search thing really, you know likes to focus on the shopper experience as does Yottaa.
1:30 – Obviously we like to focus on the front end shopper experience being lightning fast on websites. But you guys all have a very unique perspective and unique offerings on the shopper experience in terms of, you know, personalization and the data behind things and search and really what the shoppers doing and interacting with on the site.
1:51 – Can you talk a little bit more about that and what you’re seeing is how that relates to importance this holiday season and how that makes merchandisers and customers stick out.
2:03 – Sure. And yeah, of course, site speed is really critical. That’s something that Yottaa can help a lot with on the search spring side.
2:11 – We help to try and also, you know, minimize our, our load times and API speed so that we can, we can help with that as well as far as just not in not hurting at least right.
2:27 – So our focus though, I think for for the holiday season, there’s two areas that stand out for me. One of them is stability. You want to make sure that your entire tech stack is very stable.
2:39 – You have partners that are focused on that, that have scalability, reliability, failover in place and the staff on hand. And that’s something that we always focus on every year.
2:55 – Searchspring, we start our Black Friday preparation sometime end of July, making sure that everything is buttoned up and ready. We code freeze use the end of October and then and make sure that we have redundancy scale up of all of our infrastructure.
3:11 – We have multiple regions so that we if there’s a problem with cloud providers in one region, we can fail over to another and that we can scale out based on traffic.
3:22 – So the the main things you’re going to have there is increased traffic load, lot more shoppers on the site. You want to make sure you can handle that, that load and that nothing’s going to fall over and, and ’cause that inability to, to provide your website to your customers.
3:38 – Yeah, there’s nothing worse than there’s no worse nightmare to a customer than having their customers have a core website experience and losing all those new, new unique visitors that they can have.
3:52 – They’re spending so much money on marketing and promoting the holidays and probably all of these sales that they’re running. Obviously, you know, looking at that volume, that’s huge for them, yes.
4:03 – And so another aspect of that volume is that a lot of those shoppers are going to be new to your site. So with the increased volume comes new, new eyes that maybe aren’t familiar with your product line.
4:15 – Maybe they just arrived directly from a Google search and they can easily hit the back button and look at the next entry in the results. So you really want to try and capture that audience when they arrive, keep them engaged, keep them on your site.
4:29 – And that’s where product discovery and personalization can really help. For example, having a recommendation profile of of similar products high on the page, preferably above the fold, so that if they land from that search and that product they land on isn’t exactly what they want, they see something else that catches their eye and they continue browsing.
4:55 – We found that personalized recommendations will greatly improve both your reduce your bounce rate, improve your time on site pages viewed and most importantly conversion rate.
5:08 – So that’s what you want to do is, is capture as much conversion as you can from that increased traffic coming to the site.
5:16 – Yeah, definitely.
5:17 – I mean, I think that’s something that really makes brands stand out is, is that personalization aspect.
5:24 – We all want to feel unique when we come to a brand site and exactly what you just described.
5:31 – I want a brand to know me and to know what I’m looking at. And you know, if that’s not the product, recommend something else or based on my browsing history on their site, recommend things that you think I’m also going to like.
5:43 – And like you said, that matters for all of the customers that we’re working with because that’s an increase in conversions, Get me hooked and show me more things that I want to buy.
5:54 – So that’s great. I, I love that that’s something that you guys do.
5:58 – That’s something that’s huge in the industry that we’re seeing. And like Neil mentioned, Searchspring isn’t something that weighs the sites down too. So those customers are going to have a great experience once they’re on there.
6:10 – Anything else you want to recommend this holiday season, Neil?
6:14 – Well, just just keep that in mind that you want to have, you want to have the right partners in place that can help keep your customers engaged, keep them finding what they’re looking for. That’s something we really focus on that searchspring is both on the search results and on the, the personalization recommendations. But there’s, there’s also personalization of the search results, right?
6:38 – So we’re applying that same shopper context. We’re kind of tracking the shopper as they land on your site, what we know about that shopper.
6:46 – And then as they browse through your site, what can we tell about their intent and use that to help personalize that experience, both in the order of the search results and in the order of the recommendations.
6:57 – And then we also provide our merchandisers with the ability to add their own rules and merchandising on top of that so that they can be guiding the personalization and the AI to reproduce the results they think are best.
7:12 – And then let the AI, you know, add nuance to that on top of it. So there’s, there’s both levels of control where you might want to go in and add some extra merchandising.
7:22 – Knowing that shoppers are going to be coming to your site for the first time and looking for specific items that you want to help highlight and present to them.
7:31 – You can, you can add merchandising rules and boost factors to bring those up to the top of the results.
7:38 – And then also let that personalization help guide them and, and highlight those items that are most relevant to their current experience. Makes a ton of sense.
7:49 – And there’s that buzzword again that we’re all hearing AI this holiday season. We appreciate you taking the time today, Neil.
7:56 – We appreciate Searchspring as such a great partner.
8:00 – And there you have it, thanks everyone.
