As a B2B (or B2C) retailer, directing potential customers to the products they could buy on your eCommerce site is excruciatingly hard. How do you ensure customers find the right products? What steps do you take to make your products more “findable”? What keywords do you use to improve search ranking? Given the number of businesses in the market today and the number of products being offered by each one, accurate, consistent, and updated product content is crucial from the start of the buyer journey and then all the way through it too. Since customers can't buy products if they can't find them and won't buy them if they don't trust them, it is extremely critical for organizations to provide the right information and use the right tactics at every touchpoint of the buying journey.
Why SKUs get neglected in the first place
To meet the specific needs of specific customers, every day, millions of new products (and their variants) are launched across brick-and-mortar stores and eCommerce sites, leaving modern customers spoiled for choice. It is natural for businesses to want to offer a product to meet the unique needs of customers across different markets, age groups, genders, and demographics. You could create a product for a very particular market segment or create many different versions of a product to fit different market segments or modify an existing product to make it more appealing. All this choice can get too overwhelming for the end customer.
Although every product that is brought into the market, is, usually, introduced as a result of thorough market research to overcome a specific challenge or meet a specific need, enabling the customers with those needs to find their way to these products is often a Herculean task. In most cases, only popular or fast-moving products end up being found (and bought), with the specific-purpose, not-so-popular or slow-moving products often lying untouched in the warehouse. These neglected SKUs are not only difficult to manage; they also add to the inventory cost.
5 ways you can revamp neglected SKUs
If businesses can drive efforts in revamping these neglected SKUs, the end result will be better product searchability, improved customer satisfaction, enhanced profits, as well as optimized inventory.
Listed below are 5 ways you can revamp neglected SKUs and bring them back to life:
- Update product content: If you want to improve product discovery across search engines, build customer trust, and empower customers to make the right purchasing decisions, you need to constantly update your product content. Make sure to contextualize the product and focus on building creative and innovative product titles and descriptions. Deliver cross-selling and up-selling opportunities at every step of the sales cycle and provide sufficient reasons for them to buy the product. Updated product content can not only help deliver consistent shopping experiences; it can also help you maintain brand consistency – which in the long run can lead to improved trust and loyalty.
- Revisit keywords: As industries and markets grow and technologies and processes undergo a constant overhaul, the approach to product content must also evolve. Driving continued efforts in revisiting and refreshing keywords is also a great way to get neglected SKUs the attention they deserve. Since keywords are the link between online searches and products, it makes sense to only use high-ranking and relevant keywords on product pages and meta descriptions. Periodic keyword optimization based on feature updates and/or latest trends can enable customers to easily find your products.
- Improve product taxonomy: Given the massive number of products available in the market today, improving your product taxonomy can help organize the available products in a way that makes it easy for customers to find what they want – in just a few clicks. A well-built taxonomy will enable you to display all product categories and sub-categories in a standardized manner. So, if a particular product is not available, customers can easily find a related product – thus helping you drive conversion. Use behavioral data to optimize taxonomy and provide customers with the products they often seek; at the same time, remember to optimize your taxonomies for SEO, so your products are easy to search and find.
- Enhance product schema: Enhancing your product schema can also help in overhauling your neglected products. Displaying your product information in a more structured way can improve customer experience. It can also help search engines understand your website’s content better. A good product schema means you can provide critical product information to your customers as well as provide a strong boost to your brand presence. Make sure to highlight the essential elements of your products via schemas such as price and availability; if possible, also include product reviews, visuals, special offers to increase the visibility of your products as well as improve click-through rates – which means better searchability and thus more revenue.
- Enable faceted search: With AI-driven automation and personalization becoming increasingly popular, another way to improve product searchability is by using faceted search. Although AI solutions might seem costly to purchase and time-consuming to implement, they can offer great value. By understanding how customers filter through your pages and allowing them to customize the search based on what they are looking for, you can refine the results they get – thus improving the customer experience as well as your conversion.
When customers search for a product online, they are more likely to buy what appears in their eye line if they think it “more or less” fits the bill even though, there might be better products available, that perfectly meet their specific needs. Due to poor product attributes, they don’t get reflected in the search results. Driving efforts towards revamping these neglected products can contribute greatly to their searchability and sale. So, make sure to constantly update product content, revisit keywords, improve product taxonomy, enhance product schema, and enable faceted search to give your neglected products the attention they need and deserve.