Imagine you want to plan a vacation, book a business trip or find a new book to read. You start by searching the web. If you're planning a trip, you may visit 20 or more websites -- spending more time on some than others -- and piece together all of the different reviews and details that each site offers. The process is long and tedious, filled with hours of double-checking on prices and comparing user reviews.
What if, instead of having to sift through thousands of highly unorganized search results for the information that meets your unique needs, the options were dynamically structured and organized for you so the most relevant options floated easily to the surface, based on your personal preferences, your location and your previous purchases or searches?
Relevance-powered search is the future, and it's already taking hold in travel and online retail.
For individuals, the reasons for this shift are quite simple. A more relevant and personalized search experience will save time, frustration and ultimately create a smarter and easier web experience. But the implications of relevance-powered search go well beyond impacting day-to-day web searches. Rather, relevance in search has the power to completely alter the way merchants go about interacting with their customers and building long-term customer loyalty.
At the most basic level, businesses can be more targeted in their outreach by making advertisements and information more relevant to the end-user. A simple example of this is Facebook, where the platform intentionally presents different advertisements to different individuals. Facebook's ad strategy is highly targeted, and the information and offers you receive are based on who you are, what you have in your profile and advanced algorithms that determine what will be most interesting to you.
But the real power and potential of relevance is around building enduring customer engagement and loyalty. At times, businesses just want to sell more of their goods and services to anyone they can reach. But more often, they want to reach specific, target audiences. For example, the high-end restaurant considering offering a "deal" to entice new customers might prefer to target the business traveller who has just flown into town first class and is more likely to buy an expensive bottle of wine during her meal. That would help the restaurant maximize capacity and yield profits but, beyond this, it might want to build an ongoing relationship with customers who are likely to visit regularly, or to tell their friends and colleagues about their great experience.
For the diner who regularly visits on a weekend, the ability to offer an incentive to visit during the week might be highly valuable to both restaurant and consumer. Instead of spamming customers with irrelevant and unwanted emails, snail mail and sales calls, companies need to present offers unique to each of their customers. Once they learn what the customer needs and when they need it, they can deliver great value, at just the right time.
