10 Tips To Help Customers Find Your Products — in Any Channel

Have you mapped your customer journey lately? Chances are it’s a bit of a roller coaster. But the wild ride almost always starts the same: a customer finds your product or brand. 

As consumers, we all understand the drive to find products that meet our needs. We want seamless ways to buy and get the products. And we naturally give our business to companies we trust. Pivotree views this process as the frictionless commerce customer journey.

To dig deeper into this journey, we created an article series on each phase: Trust, Find, Buy, and Get. 

Hopefully, you saw our first article, 8 Ways to Build Trust in the Customer Journey. (If you haven’t had a chance, we recommend going back to read it.)

Now, let’s dive into the “Find” phase, including ten ways to make it frictionless.  

How Important is a Frictionless “Find” Experience?

The importance of the “Find” experience might seem obvious. After all, you can’t buy what you can’t find. Yet when you peel back the layers, you see a deeper value.

A recent article from Wired.com found that while many businesses lost ground during the pandemic, some commerce companies grew. These organizations understood their customers’ greatest currency—time and trust—and created a frictionless experience to meet those needs.  

The secret to their success boils down to this: 

When you help your customers easily find what they need, you save them time. When you present them with personalized recommendations, they learn to trust.  

In that way, a frictionless “Find” experience goes beyond the basics of search and discover. It involves a relationship with your customer and the ability to offer relevant products before your customer even thinks to ask. 

What does this look like in practice? The list below includes ten tactics to check off your list. 

Finally, behind every “Find” tactic is an essential layer of accuracy and trust. If something goes wrong at any step, it creates friction that could prevent your customer from finding the right product.

Filtering out unwanted search results. Providing accurate product information. Ensuring items are available and providing alternatives if not. Keeping glitches out of the online experience. All these elements aid the “Find” process and instill trust at each step. 

Perhaps the best way to improve product discovery is to keep your product content optimized and up to date.

For example, do you have the correct technical attributes and specs? Have you showcased your product with images and videos? Are the latest customer reviews posted? Do your product titles and descriptions support your SEO goals?

With so much ground to cover, Data-as-a-service (DaaS) is a turnkey option for companies that want to ensure their product content stays optimized, even when their team is busy with other initiatives.  

#1: Amp Up Your Marketing

One of the first ways anyone finds a product or brand is through marketing. In the case of search engine marketing (SEM), you promote your product’s visibility via paid search and contextual advertising. Display marketing casts a wider net, yet still gets your products in front of your customer’s eye. 

SEM and displays can ignite the process of selecting, buying, and getting a product. But certain elements must happen behind the scenes — like product content optimized for each channel and inventory visibility to ensure you don’t promote a product that’s actually out of stock. Connecting your marketing to the bigger picture helps you get the right product in front of the right customer at the right time to convert. 

#2: Continuously Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Every time Google updates its algorithm—which happens thousands of times each year—people start scrambling to ensure they optimize their data.

While SEM involves paid advertising (pay per click), SEO focuses entirely on improving organic rankings. Data plays a significant role in helping you match your product details to a customer’s query. 

Since keywords are the link between online searches and products, it makes sense to use high-ranking and relevant keywords on product pages and meta descriptions. Periodic keyword optimization based on feature updates and trends also helps customers easily find your products.

#3: Consider Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce is also on the rise, where shoppers engage with companies via messages, live chat, text, voice (Hey, Siri), and virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa.

One survey found that 47% of online shoppers used a virtual assistant to purchase with a voice command. Respondents cited convenience and time savings as the biggest pros. 

Conversational commerce is most beneficial at the consideration stage. Your customer is interested, but hasn’t found exactly what they need. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce relevant products and help guide their search. Sometimes, a conversation can save a sale by providing helpful suggestions or alternatives to consider. 

#4: Provide Different Types of Assisted Selling

Assisted selling—particularly in the digital realm—takes conversational commerce one step further. It spans areas like in-store interaction, customer support, and virtual associate tools integrated with your commerce platform. 

For example, fashion and beauty companies can use live video calls with consultants to recommend products and answer questions. This approach can boost order size, capture new customer data, increase loyalty registrations, and build stronger customer relationships. 

#5: Make Social Channels a Priority

If you’ve ever purchased from a Facebook or Instagram ad, you know how one piece of marketing can spark interest. It seems like they know you better than you know yourself. 

External channels—including social media, mobile apps, and influencer posts—are now a leading source for finding products, whether by search or inspiration. Marketplaces are also a favorite channel for product search. 

To keep pace, consider your marketplace and channel strategy. Your ability to quickly onboard channels—and deliver content in the context of each channel—helps you engage with customers when, where, and how they choose.

#6: Optimize Product Recommendations

Your customers expect highly personalized recommendations, plus a sense that you genuinely care about their experience. To get to this level, online retailers should look beyond rules-based engines. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning deliver far better results.

For example, intelligent search platforms use Natural Language Processing to uncover customer intent and deliver the most relevant recommendations. Customers can find the products they want faster, while retailers benefit from cross-selling and upselling for higher order values.

#7: Make Filtering and Finding Products Easy

Like recommendations, the ability to filter search results will ease the “Find” process. Shoppers want to explore their options without the frustration of navigating dozens of pages.

When it comes to filters, it’s important to strike a balance between presenting the most relevant products versus products you’ve prioritized for sale. For example, you may have neglected SKUs that you need to move out of inventory. 

AI-driven automation and faceted search can help solve these challenges. By understanding how customers filter through your pages and allowing them to customize their search, you can improve the experience as well as your conversions.

#8: Offer Categories in a Click

Categorization is another way to make the “Find” process more manageable. With tons of products on the market today, improving your product taxonomy is a must. Taxonomy helps you organize your products so that it’s easier for customers to find what they want in a few clicks.  

A well-built taxonomy and schema help you display all product categories and sub-categories in a standardized manner. Customers can easily view their options and see how similar products stack up based on price, style, options, and availability. 

#9: Make Your Products Irresistible 

Perhaps the best way to improve product discovery is to keep your product content optimized and up to date.

For example, do you have the correct technical attributes and specs? Have you showcased your product with images and videos? Are the latest customer reviews posted? Do your product titles and descriptions support your SEO goals?

With so much ground to cover, Data-as-a-service (DaaS) is a turnkey option for companies that want to ensure their product content stays optimized, even when their team is busy with other initiatives.  

#10: Always Ensure Accuracy and Trust

Finally, behind every “Find” tactic is an essential layer of accuracy and trust. If something goes wrong at any step, it creates friction that could prevent your customer from finding the right product.

Filtering out unwanted search results. Providing accurate product information. Ensuring items are available and providing alternatives if not. Keeping glitches out of the online experience. All these elements aid the “Find” process and instill trust at each step. 

Are You Missing Pieces of the Puzzle? 

Delivering a frictionless “Find” experience requires approaching the journey from all angles —including aligning your customers’ needs with your technology platforms and business practices. 

It’s important to consider:

• How you manage your data and product content,
• The capabilities of your commerce platform and tools,
• Complete visibility into your supply chain and inventory, and
• The stability and reliability of your e-commerce sites.

Pivotree brings this process to life with our Experience Strategy group. Our experts look at the big picture. Then we design, build, and manage full transformations that deliver immediate and ongoing results.

We recently shared how our client CAE achieved a successful transformation, including launching multiple storefronts in record time. How did they do it? Read their success story to find out. 

To learn more about Pivotree’s vision and approach, visit our frictionless commerce resource page. Plus, stay tuned for the rest of our Customer Journey series, exploring the Buy and Get stages.

FAQs