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Brief
Until 2008, Onlinegolf.co.uk had been using Celebros but had begun to realise that this solution was not particularly user-friendly, particularly from an administrative perspective, which limited the company’s ability to react to customer requirements.
“It was increasingly clear that our on-site search system’s poor integration was limiting us, both in terms of adding new functionality and information about customer search habits on the site,” explained Lee Brown, managing director at Onlinegolf.co.uk.
Strategy
As the name suggests, online sales are crucial to Onlinegolf.co.uk. Since it was founded in 1999 its strategy has been extremely customer-focused and from day one that meant striving to understand how those customers shop and reacting with improved customer service and careful stock management.
As part of this strategy, Onlinegolf.co.uk permanently keeps its massive warehouse stocked with more than 7,000 products. This, coupled with the close management of vendor partner relationships, helps ensure that customers are not disappointed by lack of product availability or slow delivery times.
Equally crucial as efficient fulfilment, however, is providing the right online experience for customers, and central to this is its search functionality.
Execution
The company began exploring its options and eventually implemented Learning Search, a hosted site search solution from SLI Systems.
“Although filling a similar role to our previous solution, the ease of integration of Learning Search meant we were able to quickly add more functionality to the site, for example, displaying customer ‘top-rated’ items, plus the team at SLI have suggested extra ideas such as video links which help the sales process,” said Brown.
Results
“We have been particularly impressed by the effect of video on both site traffic and conversion rates,” continued Brown. “Not only do video links embedded in the search results double the amount of video content viewed on the site, but customers who click on videos while searching are significantly more likely to buy the product than those who don’t”.
As well as increased functionality and simple implementation, SLI’s solution also offered search capabilities that learn from user behaviour by tracking the search terms they use on the site and the resulting items they click on to deliver search results based on popularity, providing the ability to track customer journeys in greater detail.
“Prior to implementing Learning Search we calculated that 10 per cent of our sales came via search,” explains Brown. “Since we changed to SLI Systems that figure has risen to 14 per cent, which, although may not sound like a dramatic increase, is actually worth several hundred thousand pounds a year in terms of revenue.”
The company currently reports revenues that have grown 30 per cent this year alone. Part of the reason for this sales increase is the new-found flexibility that Learning Search allows. Because Onlinegolf.co.uk can now see patterns in what customers are searching for, it is far easier for the team to make small adjustments to the results those searches return, therefore increasing the likelihood of the customer finding what they are looking for or, if not, being presented with a viable alternative.
“This level of responsiveness allows us to tailor our sales based on our understanding of how customers shop. This means, for example, we can promote special offers on certain items, particularly around Christmas or other key times of the year for retailers,” said Brown.
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