Emma shares how to cater to user behavior shifts during times of economic turbulence using thorough research and user journey mapping.

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Hello, and welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. I'm Emma Russell. I'm the founder of Oxford Comma Digital. Today, we're going to be talking about catering to user behavior shifts through times of economic turbulence, and we're going to be primarily looking at e-commerce sites.

So the first thing that we want to be talking about is user behavior, and then we're going to be moving on to look at how you can implement a few things in your strategy to make sure that you're catering to these shifts in user behavior as it changes through times of economic turbulence.

Get your own data

So, the best thing to do is to get your own data. So this is yours. It's about your audience. It's how they currently behave. It's how they're going to be intending to behave in the future. And because it's your own audience, it means that it's not more generic information from studies.

So this is the best way to go about it, and you can get current user behavior data from Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. You can get it from heat mapping tools, like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity, and also do event tagging through things like Google Tag Manager.

Get qualitative data

The next thing that is good to do for getting data for your own audience is to get qualitative data, so getting an understanding of how they intend to behave in the future and that's difficult to do with current click data, right? You're not going to be able to do it.

So, you're going to have to talk to your audience or do something like an internet pop-up on your website where it's through Hotjar, and you can ask them questions. That's a nice example of how you can do it without actually talking to them in real life. An email campaign is another way to get nice qualitative data. So, that is the best way to go about getting information from your audience about how they're going to be behaving in the future.

However, it's good to mention now that, despite best intentions, people don't always behave in the way that they say they're going to behave. So that's just worth bearing in mind.

Use behavior studies

Now, another good source of data is to use behavioral studies. So, this includes research papers or research from groups, for example, Boston Consulting Group, pay for analytics, or classic McKinsey, or papers from things like ResearchGate, so academic papers.

Another really good example is actually the Wayfair Tech Blog. If you think about it, they've got millions of products, so they have a long history of figuring out how to best cater to user behavior and help with purchasing decisions. So that's another good way to look at data.

We're going to be pulling out a few key points from some of this data that we've looked at.

So, one study from the Boston Consulting Group is called "Recessionary Behavior." It's a great article. It will be linked below. They found that 19% of people intend to shop more in online marketplaces, in contrast to 7% of people intending to shop less on actual brand sites. Also, 13% of people are intending to shop more on secondhand sites. They also found that 70% of people are looking to get the best deal for them. So they will do a lot of shopping around to find that best deal, and that's a big percentage.

So, another study found that 68% of people are looking for free delivery, even if it takes longer to arrive, and actually, 42% of people won't make that purchase if they don't have their preferred delivery option, which is a huge percentage.

So actually, when we look at it, all the way from choosing where people are going to be shopping to how they shop and then the delivery method, it's all factored into the actual purchase. And taking this a step further, this study also found also found that people would shop online more and in store less to save money on petrol. So that's really important.

All the way through the journey, people are making conscious decisions on how they shop to make the best use of their money. However, this isn't everybody. As I said, it depends on your own audience. So, this study also factored in affluence. So, they looked at high-income earners and actually found that they intend to spend more on discretionary spending. So, for example, cruises, hotels, casinos, wine, cosmetics, and luxury fashion. That's really important to highlight. This isn't across the board, and so that's why you should absolutely look at your own audience.

Key learnings

So, there are two things that we've learned. People are still spending. They just want the most for their money. Also, the consideration phase is much more complex and longer.

So, if we look at this, it's a somewhat simplified map of how people can go about the purchasing journey. You have research, compare, and buy across online, social, and then in-store.

Of course, ideally, preferably through organic search, somebody would come to your site online and they would do all of the research they need to do, all the comparisons they need to do, and then make that final purchase. But, of course, that doesn't happen.

So, somebody might actually go online first of all. They might then go in the store, try a garment on if they're shopping for clothes, and then buy it again online. Or they might go to social. TikTok Shop is growing hugely. So there are all of these new ways and new technologies in which to purchase, and people are making good use of this. So it's much more complex now.

Ensure your content is indexed

If we think about organic traffic and SEO and how we can cater to this search behavior, dresses have a really high search volume. Then you've got blue dresses, which have about 18,000 searches a month, and blue work dresses, which have 210 searches a month. So, there is still a good amount of search volume.

When these are all built up together, so blue work dresses, black work dresses, and then you've got designs, patterns, this is actually a lot a search volume. But many e-commerce sites don't actually index that deep into their site. In fact, sometimes people will just index dresses and then rely on filter parameters to get to blue dresses and blue work dresses.

Some sites, and if you Google "blue work dresses," you'll see nice examples of this, so Marks & Spencer's and John Lewis have nice indexing strategies. Not perfect. Sorry for anybody watching if you're from there. They're not perfect, but they are good, and they're working because you rank. So those are good examples to look at if you want an example of an indexing strategy.

So, they've indexed dresses, blue dresses, and blue work dresses. So, going back to this, if you haven't indexed blue work dresses, you're taking yourself out. So when somebody goes online, and they're looking for what you have to offer, let's say they've gone for dresses, then go in store, and they've found one they want, but they can't remember what it was.

Let's say they just type in "blue work dresses." You won't come up if that isn't indexed. This is really important and a really nice strategy for catering to how user behavior is changing during times of economic turbulence. That's the main tactic that we're going to talk about today. There are two more that I want to mention.

Implement reviews

So the first one, reviews. Reviews, reviews, reviews, they're so important. If you're not implementing reviews on your site now, get on it. Of course, if you're a startup, you want to do this at the right time. So you don't want to be going to market maybe a little bit too earlier than you thought, or you're wanting to get more user feedback, but you've got it live on the site, so if somebody wants to buy it, then they can.

If it's a little bit too early and you're getting some bad reviews or you think you'll get some bad reviews, then maybe talk to somebody who works in growth or your product manager to understand when to implement reviews. But they are very, very useful and absolutely worth doing during times of economic turbulence.

Product listing page ordering

The last thing that I want to talk about is product listing page ordering. So again, Wayfair have done this. They've smashed it out of the park, and they have a really nice article on this topic. They use AI. They used to use something called Top Shelf, which again is really interesting.

Things you want to be doing, you want to be prioritizing, of course, your in-stock items, and sometimes, if there's a store near them, prioritizing in-stock items in a store near them. You also want to be prioritizing items that have a high search volume or are trending or your best sellers, and that way, your product listing pages will be highlighting the most important products that you have, so the best sellers, and also what people are looking for, so what has search demand behind it.

Those are just three ways that you can cater to user behavior in times of economic turbulence. Thank you for watching. Goodbye.

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