Who Are Your Most Valuable ecommerce Customers?

ecommerce retailers would often notice that not all their customers are created equal; some provide more revenue as compared to others. Identifying these customers is critical for any business, in order to optimize customer acquisition costs & maximize profits. At Unbxd, we’ve recently come across a startling site search trend – that nearly 50% of the 20 million daily search queries we serve come from repeat visitors. Not only are these ‘qualified leads’ for ecommerce sites but might actually convert with little or zero acquisition costs. Basically, these users are the most important to business. And valuable. Does your site search reward or penalize your loyal customers?

The above statistic is a result of the trend that we’ve seen on most of our customers’ sites and this ispossibly a trend on your ecommerce site too. If yes, do you know if it is easy or difficult for your loyal customers to search on your site?

How can you find out?

Though your site search data gives information about your search performance, it says almost nothing about customer behavior & how usable they find your site search. Try looking a little deeper and consider asking yourself some basic questions to analyze if your customers are able to find what they are looking for. For example,

Is 23.89% search exit rate good or bad for business? If bad, is it the relevance that needs improvement or the page layout of the search results page? Nobody knows. You could find out with an A/B test – but what do you do an A/B on? Usability, Relevance?

Here is my take on analyzing your customer behavior using your existing site search data:

1. Site Search without insights is a sending emails without knowing the open and click rate.

2. Every metric you measure needs an insight on 4 levels –

• Is it Usability Problem?

• Is it Relevance Problem?

• Is it a Data Problem?

• Is it a Merchandising Problem?

So, the bigger question is –

“How do you increase the percentage of the most profitable visitors to your eCommerce site?”

Answer: Take every metric and ask the above 4 questions all the time.

Keep these pointers in mind to identify your most valuable customers and understand how they search on your site.

I’d love to hear what you think about this post. What measures do you take to make searching effortless for your valuable customers? Do let me know in the comments below.