Is a Party!E X P E R I E N C E

O P T I M I Z A T I O N

Is a Party!

Conversion optimization is becoming table stakes for any lead gen or e-commerce

site these days. Brands are getting more sophisticated tools, processes and teams

focused on A/B testing and conversion optimization. The evolution of the Customer

Experience perspective has helped brands expand their definition of optimization

beyond the Marketing team, and beyond SEO and A/B Testing. Through this lens,

experiences can be optimized through better collaboration with designers, developers,

usability experts, content authors, brand owners, and senior management. A more

holistic perspective of optimization now appears over the horizon and everyone across

the organization is invited to participate. It’s going to be a party.

The 2013 E-Consultancy Conversion Rate Optimization Report shows that 59% of

brands and 41% of agencies consider conversion optimization to be a critical part of

their business. The same report also shows that companies are primarily focusing on

Sales, Revenue and Lead Volume when they talk about the success of their on-site

optimization program.

Any savvy digital marketer knows that these are ultimately the key performance

indicators that they are accountable to stakeholders for, but what about the brand’s

accountability to their customers? Where does customer experience come into play?

According to Watermark Consulting’s analysis of Forrester Research’s annual Customer

Experience Index, brands that are leading in customer experience are also leading in

improving incremental returns.

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

-10%

-20%

-30%

-40%

CXi Leaders

43.0%

S&P 500 Index

14.5%

CXi laggards

-33.9%

Customer experience leaders outperform the market (2007-2012)Six-year stock performance of Forrester’s Customer Experience index leaders versus laggards cersus S&P 500

source: Watermark Consulting

A great party takes a lot of planning, coordination and rigor, but rallying your team

around the idea of having the best party ever gives everyone a common perspective

of the goal. Like a party, providing the best experience for your customers requires

that disciplines and business lines team up around the common goal of optimizing the

overall level of delight your customers receive from your brand. The following examples

are areas where experience optimization can be applied to your current processes,

teams, and digital ecosystem to help you prepare the CX party of the century!

Party PlanningParty Planning

ROLES AND GOVERNANCE

For this party of the century, we will need an event coordinator to oversee the DJ, the

caterers, the decorators, etc. This role is vital to our goal that the guests (customers)

have the best experience possible. Similarly, there needs to be executive sponsorship of

optimization and clear roles inside of the organization that are assuring that customer

experience is at the core of all that you do.

THEMES

Theme parties are the best, but you have to make sure the theme is appropriate for the

people you are inviting and the timing. It is also pretty difficult to pull off more than one

theme at the same event. Have you ever been to a costume pool party in the winter?

Focus your optimization efforts around a specific theme and audience segments and

change themes on regular basis. Examples of this could mobile experience one month,

and personalized emails the next month. It is too confusing for the customer if there

is too much change at once, and not having focused themes makes it much more

difficult to determine which efforts are working the best.

Deciding Who to InviteDeciding Who to Invite

CUSTOMER INSIGHTS & MARKET RESEARCH

Know who should be coming to your digital properties and why they are there.

• What are they coming to accomplish?

• What types of content have the most value to them?

• When they engage?

• What devices do they use to engage different tasks and content?

CREATE SEGMENTS

Without customer segmentation, great insights are commonly lost because aggregate

data doesn’t show the patterns that are most actionable. Segment customers in

ways that will help you deliver more relevant and targeted experiences based on

their individual needs. Segments can be developed from behavioral web analytics

(implicit) and attributes that the customer gives you or that you retrieve from your

CRM customer database or a tool like Demandbase (explicit). There are various ways

that segments can be created: market segments, personas and visitor history are a few

good starting points.

Implicit

Classic

Explicit

Implicit Personalization

Anonymous Browsing

Positively Identified

Logged in User

Detected without user’s input

User identified & remembered

User provides info through navigation paths or choices

Information tailored to user

Self Identification Self Identification

2014

MAP CUSTOMER JOURNEYS & MAKE PERSONAS

In order to optimize the customer experience, you must first understand the

customer’s experience. Remember that customers have multiple touch points, and

that their experiences should be consistent across all touch points online and offline.

Make sure that the calls to action and offers that your brand content is based around

aligns to the customers journey and what their needs are, not just what the business

wants them to accomplish. Alignment of offers and calls to action around customer

expectation is a great place to start doing user focused A/B testing. It is important to

do primary customer research through interviews, surveys, data analysis and industry

analysis to help round out a thorough perspective of your customer’s journey. You are

likely to determine multiple journeys exist for different types of customers. Turning this

research into a robust persona helps you connect to your customers more personally.

Like remembering that you have seven vegetarian friends when crafting your party

menu, you can make design decisions based on what you know about your customers.

Sending Invitations & Generating Buzz

Sending Invitations & Generating Buzz

IN-BOUND MARKETING

Be nice to your customers and don’t bombard them with communications that hurt

your brand more than help. Measure the response to marketing by segment and

use carefully designed remarketing and automation plans that help nurture interest

without overstepping. This will enable more delightful marketing campaigns that can

be more dynamically aligned instead of monotonous ads.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Know where you audience hangs out so that you can focus your efforts in the areas

that are the most effective for your brand goals. Not all social media channels are the

right place for your brand marketing, but you can be part of the conversation and be

a more relevant source of information to your customers in their space. Customer

research and journey mapping combined with segmented web analytics focused on

social engagement can help uncover the channels where you can reach the right

party guests.

ORGANIC SEARCH

SEO is no longer about gaming the system and learning the algorithms for Google.

We know that search engines are in the business of getting the most relevant search

results in front of their users with as little friction as possible and this means that your

“homepage” is more commonly not actually the most common landing page for your

site. Connect customers to content by creating a more robust content strategy that is

consistent, concise, manageable, and measureable. Focus content strategy around

the goal of getting more people to your site that are engaging, not just increasing new

traffic for the sake of having more.

Looking Over Your RSVP List

Looking Over Your RSVP List

CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE

It is much easier to start an engaging conversation with your guests if you know a

little bit about them first. It is really hard to know everything about your customers,

but having some attributes to use can help you deliver more personal content and

engage with them more naturally. Customer intelligence platforms help combine data

that you already own with third party resources. These platforms can fill in gaps about

customers to give you a more complete picture. Using customer intelligence in real-

time moves up the capability of personalization from assumptions (implicit) to facts

(explicit). Third party tools like Lytics and Demandbase can also help fill in the gaps for

non-authenticated traffic, and help make the introduction for you by providing some

of these customer attributes.

WEB ANALYTICS

Web analytics are usually aligned around high level and aggregated business goals,

but optimization starts at low level micro interactions in many cases. Look at your

analytics implementation for areas where you can add tracking around engagement

and develop more segments. Start tracking things like form errors and form

abandonment, downloads, videos, and specific content category engagement. Now

slice and dice your data to be more closely related to your audience segments.

This will let you see more clearly how different customers are trying to accomplish

different things and see where there is opportunity for enhancing the content or

design to eliminate points of friction.

Preparing the RoomPreparing the Room

DESIGN

Test elements of the design that are personal and relevant to the tasks and segments.

Testing assumptions about the way customers want to interact with your site will

enable the design team to spend more time working on refining the customer

navigation and information architecture rather than doing a redesign every other year

based solely on re-branding.

USABILITY

Use voice-of-customer data from surveys and user research to identify the most

common point of frustration with usability and develop a plan to prioritize, plan,

design, and test solutions to the usability issues that have the biggest impact on

customer experience and business performance.

ACCESSIBILITY

Design for everyone. Setting the stage for the most delightful digital experience

means that it is time to do a deep dive into nuances in accessibility.

Party Playlist

Party Playlist

WEB CONTENT

Use web analytics to review what your top content is and how it is being engaged.

Make sure that there is content that speaks to all of the customer needs that you

identified in your customer journey mapping. Remember though, less is more;

content that does not support the user needs is a distraction. You wouldn’t have two

stereos playing at your party at the same time right? Run tests around simplifying the

amount of copy and sheer amount of content that you have available through your

main navigation.

Greeting People at the DoorGreeting People at the Door

LANDING PAGES

You want your guests to feel welcome at your party no matter which door they use,

right? SEO’s focus on content freshness and relevance has shifted the idea of the

landing page away from the homepage and now any page can really be an entry

point. Look at your top landing pages and groups of similar landing pages like product

description pages as one experience. Now look at the analytics for these pages.

Imagine this is the first page you have ever seen for your website. Prioritize conversion

rate optimization testing around the top landing pages with the lowest conversions,

and content optimization around the lower search engine ranked landing pages with

the higher conversion rates. Sometime you may find that there are redundancies

in your landing pages that are introducing too many options in search results, and

can be confusing for customers. Thinking about your organic landing page strategy

though your overall content strategy will help customers find the best entry pages

through their searches.

ON-SITE PERSONALIZATION

If you know something meaningful about your website visitors, why not use that

as part of the conversation? Personalization of the experience with locally relevant

content, or welcoming messages can be just the right amount of personal touch

needed to make a customer feel welcome. Be careful not to make broad assumptions

about visitors when using personalized content; you wouldn’t want to get in the

awkward, “Oh, you didn’t hear, we broke up two months ago...” scenario.

MinglingMingling

COMMUNITY CONTENT & SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Bring more people into the conversation by involving the community of loyal

customers to be the advocates for your brand. Social media and branded forums can

allow the brand to still drive the direction of the conversion, but open it up to feel

more genuine.

VOICE OF CUSTOMER

Don’t just talk to your visitors, listen to them. The website experience can feel much

more personal if it is obvious that the brand listens to their customers and responds.

Tools like ForeSee Results can gather and aggregate customer feedback that can

be overlapped with User Experience tools like CrazyEgg and Tealeaf. Combining

customer feedback with analytics will direct you to the frustration customers are

having, and also show you exactly what they were trying to do. Conversely, Voice of

Customer (VoC) can teach you more about what you are doing right, where analytics

is more traditionally used to see where you are going wrong.

Making IntroductionsMaking Introductions

ONLINE MERCHANDISING AND PERSONALIZED OFFERS

Help introduce customers to the product or offer that is relevant to them. Use what

you know about your customers to play matchmaker between them and the content

that is the most meaningful and useful to them in their phase of the customer journey.

ON-SITE SEARCH

Make sure that your on-site search is optimized to help visitors find what they are

looking for easily, and measure how well it is working. Use on-site search to learn

about what customers are looking for that is not easily findable through the site’s

navigation and understand expectations of what your site is built to solve. This can be

done by spending more time with your on-site search analytics. Review the keywords

that are being searched, group keywords into logical themes, determine how your

content structure is accommodating those searches, and optimize your content to

align with what customers are having difficulty finding.

Saying Good NightSaying Good NightSaying Good Night

POST-TRANSACTION COMMUNICATION

Don’t forget that you have customers out there who have engaged with your brand

and enjoyed your products. They are your advocates and you have the opportunity

to keep in touch with them. Thank-you pages should always invite customers to

take a deeper step into engaging, like a newsletter or social media. Use testing to get

customers involved with communications through automated emails, promotions and

special offers. Making every customer feel like they are getting a personal touch that is

actually useful will keep your brand top of mind.

Keeping the Buzz GoingKeeping the Buzz Going

MARKETING AUTOMATION

It’s within party planning etiquette to reach out to follow up with your attendees. Make

sure to have feedback channels that can keep your customers engaged with relevant

and timely information based on things they have told you through their behavior

on the site and information they have provided in your CRM. Marketing automation

systems like Marketo, ActOn, and Eloqua can be integrated into outbound campaigns

like email, and then continues to engage the recipients (or your invitees) about your

really great party. If people reply to the invitation, these tools maintain engagement

until they convert, or ever afterward to make sure there is a continued presence of the

brand throughout the nurturing process. Keep a careful watch on the analytics from

these communications, though; lean toward information that is useful and persuasive,

not creepy and annoying.

CUSTOMER ADVOCATES

Don’t expect that putting social media icons on everything is going to be a productive

customer advocacy program. Instead be strategic with how you ask customers to

share their stories on your site or in social media with customer story campaigns and

give them something worth sharing. This will make your customers feel like they are

the success story for your brand and put them at the center.