As an e-commerce business, you always need to think about which products to show to which visitors to maintain your brand and keep growing. Modern personalization engines can often help with this, but they also often make it hard for you to influence their results without fully overriding the automation. This is a problem when you have specific marketing goals, but still want to work smartly with personalization. So stay tuned to find out how to get this right with Klerk.io's merchandising. In this video, I will talk about the main problems with trying to merchandise results in modern e-commerce businesses.
You will learn how Klerk.io's merchandising tool lets you align your marketing strategy with just a few clicks, while keeping the intelligence of our AI intact. And lastly, I will share four great ways of using merchandising for boosting your business. E-commerce merchandising is an old concept.
Yes, in the internet age, a few years is basically a lifetime. After all, you can't sell a product you don't show. The problem is that it often requires a lot of strategic planning for streamlining the webshop's front page, categories, basket and other pages with your email marketing and ad campaigns.
Not to mention the sheer amount of time it can take to actually place those products on the right pages. To make it easier, Many automation tools on the market do allow you to influence the results they show, but they usually have the same problem. They often only let you fully take over the results, like only showing these three Nike shoes when customers search for Nike, or always showing this Canon camera as the first result in an email. Yeah, this got very meta all of a sudden.
Even the tools that do it best often ask you to define the algorithm they use for showing products. This can include things like way name higher than description in search results or have Nokia phones show up first in any phone-related category and so on. When the only option is to redefine the algorithm, it defeats the purpose of automation, as you are suddenly left with the task of identifying trends, rather than letting the system do it for you. It's basically like paying a sales consultant to give you advice on how to sell your smartphones, but then disregard their knowledge entirely and force them to only show Nokia phones when people ask for the best phones.
Not really sure if this is a good example as the Nokia 3310 is probably one of the best phones that is also completely indestructible. A better solution is to give the sales assistant a set of rules to navigate in, letting you combine your business goals with the assistant's knowledge of what to show in which situation. This is exactly what Klerk.io's merchandising tool lets you do.
Merchandising lets you create simple and complex rules that have a powerful impact on your whole business from one single interface. Whether you want to promote your own brand in recommendations, add variety to your emails or push high margin items to the top of search results, merchandising lets you do it in just a few seconds. Let me show you how. Merchandising lets you adapt our AI to match your business goals. The word adapt is key here as you'll be able to influence the results being shown while keeping the intelligence of Klerk.io's AI behind the exact products that are shown.
Each campaign consists of a timing option and a number of triggers and rules that let you decide when you want your campaign to run, where to run it, and what it should do. Apart from adding your campaigns to all Klerk.io elements at once, you can choose to only impact searches, specific recommendations, or banner placements in your webshop, particular groups of emails and anything else in between. As long as it's shown by Klerk.io, it can be merchandised. With rules, you can control everything down to one particular product to show in one particular case, with always pinned to top. Or go broader by choosing products based on filters or searches.
Selecting the products for a campaign is both easy and flexible. Using product list lets you search for and handpick the exact products you want to pin, boost or remove. With search, you only need to write a few words, just as if you were searching on your webshop.
And all the matching products will be part of your campaign. Lastly, using filter, you can define a set of products based on their attributes. Like all products that are on sale, every product with a margin over 40% or every Stephen King book you have. Once a campaign is activated, it will take effect instantly so you can start realizing your business goals.
Let's talk about four fantastic ways of using merchandising to boost your business to give you some inspiration. The first example is boosting your high margin items everywhere. Most webshops stock large quantities of different products and as such there will be some categories that generate higher margins compared to others.
To implement this start by making sure Klerk.io receives an indication of each product's margin. This can be a percentage or a number between one to five or anything else that tells the AI what the margin is relative to other products. Then choose the anywhere trigger to have it apply. Buy across your search, recommendations and emails. Finally, set up a rule that gives a significant boost to any product with a margin over, say, 40%.
These products will now be presented much more often everywhere. The second example is using merchandising to promote your own white label brand and nudge customers to buy them. This is important as you often earn much more from the products you produce yourself.
Let's use Cables Cables as an example for this. Catchy, right? The best way to get the most out of your brand is to use Cables Cables. The best way to get the most out of your brand is to use Cables Cables. The best way to get the most out of your brand is to use Cables Cables.
The best way to get the most out of your brand is to use Cables Cables. The best way to get the most out of your brand is to use Cables Cables. The best way to get the most out of your brand is to use Cables Cables. The best way to get the most out of your brand is to use Cables Cables. to do it is to boost your brand in alternatives when customers browse any cables that are not from Cables Cables.
To do this, start by adding a rule that uses a filter to apply the campaign when customers browse cables of a brand that is not Cables Cables. Make sure it's only displayed for your alternative products on the product page, then set up a rule that gives a significant boost to the brand Cables Cables in this case. The third example is agreeing to have one of your suppliers own a search for a set period of time.
Let's say that you agree with Papa's Personal Protein to get a 15% discount on the next shipment of their protein bars. In return, you make sure that their products are always shown in the top results whenever anyone searches for protein or protein bars for a full month. Klögeio cannot help with the negotiation itself, unfortunately, but once the deal is made, you simply have to create a rule for the two specific searches, protein and protein bars.
Afterwards, Add a rule that always pins to top any protein bars from Papa's personal protein. Klerk will still rank the products based on what will be most likely to sell from within the brand. Lastly, choose a time range in which the campaign should run. In this example, it should be 30 days to run for a full month. After that period, Klerk.io will deactivate the campaign automatically, returning to letting the AI choose the best matches for these searches.
The last example is using merchandising to manage your out-of-stock products. It's no secret that showing out-of-stock products in recommendations is pretty bad, as consumers, including myself, don't like seeing products we can't buy right now. Talk about being impatient.
However, it can be strategically important to show them that you do stock these products, even if they're not available right now. Due to this, it's often necessary to remove them from recommendations, but include them in the bottom of search results. To do this, you just need two simple campaigns. The first one should run on all recommendations and the matching rules should remove any product where you filter on anything with zero stock. The second campaign should run on all searches and the matching rules should use very below others with the same filter on stock zero.
Recommendations will now only show the most relevant items that can be bought, but customers can still see that you do sell Harry Potter LEGO. when they search for it, highly increasing the chance of them placing a back order or coming back later. As the icing on the cake, a merchandising campaign can be run on one, multiple or even all of your stores at the same time.
At Klerk.io, we always build features that save you time and increase your revenue. Merchandising comes bundled with any Klerk.io product you buy at no additional cost. We do highly recommend signing up for the whole platform of our four products Search, Recommendations, Email and Audience to allow you to align your marketing across your entire webshop and email campaigns.
This is Klerk.io's merchandising tool. To summarize, you can't sell a product that you don't show. That's why it's important to make sure that you show the right products at the right time, but also make it easy for yourself to influence your product listings to match your business goals. By using Klerk.io's full suite of products, You can use merchandising as a one-stop interface to align your business goals through searches, recommendations and email campaigns in just a few clicks.
Best of all, even when you influence results, you still keep the intelligence behind Klerk.io's AI. You simply define a set of rules it should navigate within. Ultimately, if you want to grow your business by working smarter, not harder, you need Klerk.io in your tech stack. It's the best way to attract, convert and retain your customers. So, What are you waiting for?