Monthly Archives: August 2024

What is the impact of discovery on engagement?

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Discovery is a big part of engagement

Discovery is when customers find new things they are not actively searching for. It’s that “Oh wow, cool!” moment of shopping. When you look at your customers’ journey, how much time do you spend on discovery? 

Let’s dig in a bit. First, we’ll go over eight ways you can increase discovery, and then we’ll look at what any improvement does to your SEO scores and Ad costs. It’ll be a happy discovery for you, I promise.

  • Personalized Recommendations:
    There are several Shopify Apps that will make product recommendations based on customer behavior. The Achilles heel is that new customers don’t have any previous data. You could have a best-sellers collection that would probably make the same recommendations. 

  • Special Collections:
    Think about what would interest customers and create collections to pique their interest. “Sale” is always a party favorite, but “Tops under $30” might get more attention. Is there a seasonal play? Can you do something with color?

  • Curated Collections:
    Retailers create themed collections or curated lists (e.g., “Summer Essentials,” “Top Picks for You”) that highlight specific products, helping users discover items that fit within a certain context or trend is an invitation to check things out.

  • Search and Filtering Options:
    Advanced search tools and filters allow users to explore products by category, Honestly, while Google considers this a part of discovery, search tools are designed to help shoppers find what they are looking for fast. They are less about discovery and more about narrowing options They can be important, especially if you have a lot of products with purchase-relevant specifications, think appliances and tools. 

  • Social Discovery:
    Social media integration and user-generated content, such as reviews, ratings, and social shares, can guide customers to new products that are popular within their social circles or the broader online community. 

  • Content-Driven Discovery:
    Blogs, videos, and articles on the site can feature products within a story or how-to guide, introducing customers to new items in a contextual and informative way. This is not really discovery while shopping, but they are an opportunity to show products off in new ways and sell shoppers on things they may not see in the thumbnails or the first few pictures in the image carousel.

  • Interactive Tools:
    Tools like virtual try-ons, and quizzes can help users discover products that are tailored to their preferences or needs. Virtual try-ons are pretty limited at the moment and school’s out on whether quizzes have real impact on sales. They do increase dwell time (time on site), which helps tremendously with SEO engagement scores—more on that later.

  • Stylaquin:
    Discovery starts with an experience. Stylaquin uses your site’s images to create visually interesting layouts for each product. Shoppers can flip through a site like they flip through a magazine. Shopping is faster and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers view 3X more items when they shop. Stylaquin is easy to add to any Shopify site, very affordable, and comes with a free 14-day trial.
Animated gif showing a laptop that displays Stylaquin's Look Book Feature

Does Your Site Do This?

It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Learn More

Impact on Sales

Discovery plays a pivotal role in online retail by enhancing the shopping experience, increasing time spent on the platform, and driving impulse purchases. By making it easier and more enjoyable for customers to find new and relevant products, retailers can boost engagement, foster customer loyalty, and ultimately drive higher sales. 

Impact on SEO

Because AI is driving a surge in online content. (Thank you for giving a human-written post a read!) Google is altering the way it ranks sites. Remember when keywords were everything and we all worried about site tags? The sheer volume of AI-generated content is making engagement the big winner in SEO. When Google and the search engines (that could be a band name) look for the best site to send searchers they still use keywords, but the volume the site has in less important than the total events, dwell time, and repeat visits the site generates. I invented Stylaquin to make online shopping more fun for women, but it also solves the SEO problem created by AI-driven content—a happy accident. 

Impact on Ad Spend 

In case you need one more reason to focus on engagement—sites with better Google ranking pay less for ads. I’m not shining you on. Sites with higher scores get a boost in the bidding wars. Google and the search engines (Doo Wap, doo wah.) are happy to give up a few pennies to send searchers to a site they’ll be happy with. Getting a few cents off oevery ad view can save you a nice chunk depending on your ad spend.

Cancer helped me see a blindspot men have about women

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About six years ago I was given the gift of breast cancer.

I say gift because it gave me insight into many, many things. No one is more surprised than I am that one of the biggest insights I had was about men. Every morning I take a pill that blocks my estrogen. I’m a different person because of it and I now know how different it feels to have the hormones that lean more toward the typical man. I don’t feel like a man, but I GET men now in a way I didn’t when I had estrogen. I don’t have the same interest in chatter, so I just tune out. I want to get things done more than I want everyone to agree. I stopped worrying about my hair. I stopped wearing makeup. I don’t put the effort into decorating the way I used to. If I need a new shirt, I just buy a new shirt. My expectations for the new shirt have lowered. I didn’t go from Felix Unger to Oscar Madison, I just don’t care as much about how things look. In a weird way, things just aren’t as beautiful.

Animated gif showing a laptop that displays Stylaquin's Look Book Feature

Does Your Site Do This?

It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Learn More

So how does this relate to web design blindspots? Women shop differently than men. In general, women like to shop more than men. When I had an abundance of estrogen, I really enjoyed just looking at new things. Beauty and newness were delicious. Retail therapy did lovely things for my mood. Trying to explain the difference between having estrogen, and not having estrogen, is like trying to explain color to someone who has only seen black and white. The current online shopping experience was designed by men, who (gross generalization coming) don’t gronk spending free time looking at pretty things just because. Of course, the internet, which was designed by men, is geared for the way men shop. You don’t design for something you don’t think matters. Why would you? It’s like asking women who aren’t into sports to design a better system for fantasy football. Why would they? 

When online shopping first went mainstream, it was mostly men doing the shopping. A few decades, and one pandemic later, that has changed to women doing most of the online shopping. If you’re selling to women, you need to understand why women shop differently. what they get from browsing, and why it matters to them. I honestly, totally get why it is so hard to see. Thank you cancer. (There are two New York Times best sellers by Dr. Louann Brizendine you should read if you want to get into details. One is called The Female Brain. The other is called The Male Brain. Both are fascinating.)

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

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Animated gif showing a laptop displaying Stylaquin's Idea Board

I’ve had a laser focus on how women shop for my entire career as an art director and catalog designer. When you watch people shop online you can see a clear difference between shopping when they know what they want and just need to find it, and browsing. We call this item shopping. Most men are item shoppers. I am now an item shopper. Browsing is different. Browsing is about discovery, beauty, surprise, and delight. As women browse, they save all the things that interest them in separate tabs. When I point this out to men, they laugh and say “Yah, my wife/girlfriend does that.” Men don’t wonder why women open all those tabs, they just think it’s odd behavior, like spending an afternoon wandering through stores and not buying anything. Men assume that women see the world through the same lens that they do. Based on my experience, that is not true. If you’re selling to women, that’s big a blindspot.

“Shrink it and Pink it” Is a design phrase that shows the bias in product design that exists today. There is a difference between how men and women see the world. When I invented Stylaquin, I saw the world through estrogen colored glasses. I knew that my online shopping needs weren’t being met then, but I struggled to explain to my male friends and a whole bunch of male MIT professors why Stylaquin met the needs of women. They just couldn’t see it, and back then I couldn’t see why. I honestly wish there was a way to share our perspectives with each other, but alas, it’s a gift that comes at too high a price to share. The big takeaway for men is that women don’t love shopping for no reason. They aren’t engaging in odd, pointless behavior. Women love shopping more than men do because they get more from the experience than men do.

Stylaquin makes it a simple to accommodate both the item shopper and the browser on the same site. If you have a Shopify site it’s quick and easy to add Stylaquin. If you’re not on Shopify, reach out and we’ll take a look.

AI is killing the traffic X conversions equation – boom!

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What matters when it comes to web traffic?

So much of being successful online is a complex numbers game. Opening a new store on the web is like opening a store in one of the remote reaches of the planet, putting a sign on the door, and then expecting customers to show up—ain’t gonna happen. Without advertising, there is no way anyone will find you. There are some free sources of traffic, but SEO is a long game and you pay for “free” social media advertising with time. Advertising is the time-honored way to get eyeballs but it is expensive. So what matters?

Volume

Size matters. Sheer numbers work the way knocking on more doors worked a hundred years ago. Get more people to your website and you’ll get more sales. So the most simplistic form of the sales equation looks like this: Sales = Traffic X Conversion rate. If the conversion rate remains constant, then more traffic means more conversions.

Target Audience

If you want to increase the conversion rate, you need traffic that is likely to be interested in what you are selling. This is where advertising, SEO, and Social media all act as magnets to bring in the right customers. AI is changing how this all comes together. SEO is moving from keywords to content and engagement. Here’s a post on that if you want to understand why AI is going to destroy keyword search. AI determines which people will be interested in your wares, and it predicts this better than the experts can. Privacy is coming into play with AI, but we are so connected that, using AI, Google and Facebook know what you’re in the market for and what you’re going to be in the market for.

If you post that you are expecting a child on Facebook, you can also expect to see a sea of baby-related ads in your feed. Your friends can expect to see fun baby shower gifts in theirs. Grandparents will see ads for college savings programs and a new round of life insurance ads. AI, at its core, is just a predictive engine.

If humans can’t design a better campaign than AI can, we will all get the traffic we pay for. Think about it, if someone with no marketing chops can use AI to develop campaigns that beat the experts, there is no meaningful competitive advantage in audience selection. AI is the best and everyone can use AI. Done and dusted. 

Wait, what about Social Media?

It works, and it doesn’t. If you’re friends with Beyonce or Taylor Swift you’re all set. If you sell mass-market supplies or don’t love interacting with strangers, it will be a challenge. Social media gets eyeballs, but it doesn’t always convert. It can help you find and connect with your tribe. Those who are good at it are rewarded, those who aren’t good at it are frustrated. AI is probably going to impact social media soon, then it’s going to get weird. I mean what could go wrong with letting a predictive machine try to get people’s attention? (Hint: it gets racist and offensive pretty quickly.)

Customer experience

So, if we all have the same AI marketing genius design our campaigns, how are we going to impact our conversion rate so we don’t get killed by the competition?

  1. Sell products for a defined target customer that AI can identify.
  2. Create content that is interesting, relevant, and fresh.
  3. Focus on making websites that delight and engage shoppers.
  4. If you’re on Shopify, add Stylaquin to your site.

Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view more items, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Seriously, now more than ever, making your website fun to shop is a great way to increase conversions and get more repeat traffic. We see it over and over, Stylaquin shoppers are three times more likely to come back to a site. Think about what that does to the equation if 5-30% of your site traffic is three times more likely to come back. If you are on Shopify, you can add Stylaquin in about 15 minutes, test it for free, and it starts at $29/month. Book a demo to learn more.