Conversion Optimization News & Resource Community

Developing loyal customers isn’t always expensive or difficult for businesses with small marketing budgets. It may sound cliché, but when it comes to boosting customer loyalty, it’s the little things that count the most.

Small yet thoughtful actions can have a big impact on how customers perceive your brand and store.

During my time as an ecommerce operator, I found these 11 easy and inexpensive gestures effective in establishing a personal connection with my customers.

Personalize your Follow-ups

It’s always wise for merchants to follow-up after a purchase to gauge a customer’s satisfaction. But why not take that follow-up a step further by making it much more personal?

For instance, if you know that a customer bought your produ…

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In 2012, the idea of “big data” was number one on almost every marketers mind. Everyone wanted to know how much data they needed, where they could get it, and where they could put it. For this year, (and even beyond), ion is proposing a new idea, “big testing.”

Data is phenomenally useful to marketers, but only if they know what to do with it and how to truly learn from it- turning mere hypothesis into marketing gold. This is what testing allows for, proving out your hypothesis into actionable marketing insights. And what’s the payoff? Big experiences. These are experiences that not only wow, but also convert, leading to higher revenues increased ROI and the perfect user experience.

At this year’s SiriusDecisions conference, Tom Berger, Director of Internet Marketing, at Iron Mountain co-presented with us the success that his team has seen through fueling big testing with big data. It’s a pretty impressive case study and one that we are especially proud to be a part of. 

Enjoy!

Iron Mountain: Fueling Big Testing with Big Data from ion interactive

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What percentage of market share does IE7 have?

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Last month, SiteTuners held a webinar with Tony Brinton and Julia Sloan of Motivate Design, where they talked about the importance of emotions in user experience. We reached out to Tony and Julia, and they answered the most asked questions that day. This is the second of two entries that directly tackle audience questions. Read the first one here. 

Q: How do you reconcile the concept of simple in an ecommerce world where you have over 100 products? If you have an emotional home page with a single image and one button, where do the visitors go?

A: You can have 1,000,000 products…it doesn’t matter. There is still a simple, clean, and engaging way to showcase them. A homepage can be “emotional” and not have a single image and button – those were just some key examples. Your homepage should serve as your entry point for all customer impressions and interactions. You want to make a good impression, tell them your story, show them who you are and what you believe in – not bombard them with products, badges, copy, links, etc.

Q: Other than general principles like simplicity, do you have a specific set of suggestions to make ecommerce sites fresh and delightful?

A: We feel that too many eCommerce sites are missing opportunities for emotional design on Category Landing Pages. This could be better achieved through rich lead message modules promoting the spirit of brands and categories, and more interesting promotion of featured products/services.

Think about adding content and offers to your eCommerce site that can help you capture leads, which you can then nurture through your sales funnel. Most people don’t buy on the first visit, but they may download your shopping guide, how-to paper, etc. Most eCommerce sites don’t think about lead generation / nurturing because they are preoccupied with closing sales. Big opportunities are missed as a result.

Nice interaction design that is relevant to your products and enhances people’s understanding of them, can be delightful and lead to increased conversions. The way Warby Parker let’s you experience their eyewear online is terrific: On models, or by themselves. From different angles. Rollovers to reveal dimensions. A virtual try-on function. All understated features, relevant to the product category, with elegant interaction design applied, resulting in a delightful experience.

Q: Are the principles you talk about more apt for business to consumer? Are people expecting the same web experiences when they shop for personal items as when they are working on a project for work?

A: They may not expect it, but it doesn’t mean they don’t value it or that it wouldn’t help them work better, faster, and happier.

Q: With so little wording, how do you compensate for SEO ratings?

A: Blog postings, linked pages, white papers, etc.

Q: With shopping cart buttons, what changes have you seen with the influence of skeuomorphism- in their design?

A: We see a general trend away from skeuomorphism in the most current, sophisticated UI design. As a result, buttons, such as shopping cart-related buttons (add to cart, view cart, etc.) are becoming flatter, simpler and more elegant. Again, the + Add to Cart” button on Warby Parker’s product detail pages is a well-executed example of this trend. 

Watch the FREE webinar with Tony and Julia here. 

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The discussion was prompted by Stefan Tornquist when he asked, “What are the internal, organizational challenges to Integrated Marketing?”  

Here’s a wrap-up of our collective response:

Too many large organizations are using incentive structures that foster (dis)integrated digital marketing by issuing bonuses to individual teams based on the performance of the marketing channels they are responsible for.  

Because each team (search, social, email, display, etc.) must prove their own channel’s performance for compensation, they’re thrust into internal competition and left to seek metrics and attribution models favorable to their particular channel. This creates both operational and data silos.

As Tom Cunniff put it,  ”each data plume creates more smoke to hide behind”.  

He cautioned marketers to “beware of glowing reports, because everyone has incentive to make it look great” and joked that you’ll find “everything’s working, but sales are down!”.  

While the joke brought laughs, it highlighted a serious organizational flaw that introduces a channel bias that often turns attribution into politics.     

It’s no wonder that Econsultancy found that 61% of organizations spending more than $5m on marketing a year said “internal cross-team politics” was holding them back in a recent survey.  

So what needs to be changed?

In order for organizations to execute effective integrated marketing, their marketing teams need to be integrated internally.  

Jim Sterne was quick to point out that there has to be a culture change and adjustment of incentive structures to ensure teams are functioning in synergy towards a common goal, rather than to satisfy individual objectives.

Sterne suggests incentive structures be based on group profitability.  If all teams are given bonuses according to aggregate success, each is incentivized to operate and spend in a way that drives overall marketing performance.   

With a singular goal, teams would be more willing to cut back spending and shift to areas where traffic is more profitable and better integrate on multichannel campaigns. 

According to Cunniff, this change would “break down silos and demand programs that are harder to attribute individually,” leading to better integrated marketing and creating the need for integrated attribution.  

The best marketing is so well integrated that you can’t tear it apart to see which thing worked the best, so you have to attribute channel performance by how well it syncs with your entire marketing mix to drive sales.

Without the pressure to use reports provided by vendors with an equally-vested interest to prove their singular channel’s performance, an integrated marketer incentivized by group profitability can (and should) assess their channel’s performance using independent attribution tools and unbiased models. 

Organizations focused on successful integrated marketing don’t want their marketers asking “how does my channel drive sales?”  They want them asking “how does my channel interact with others to drive sales?”  

Will a change in incentive structure breed a more integrated marketer?  We think so.   

See the full discussion on Econsultancy’s Youtube page.

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Excesses are dangerous. If a financial organisation is excessively insular it looks out of touch, whereas by going to the other extreme, and jumping on every social media trend available, banks risk being seen like the deeply embarrassing parent dancing to the latest youth anthem.  

Rob Cottingham captures this phenomenon well in the attached comic strip.

In the most recent Mapa Credit Card Dashboard update we recorded the demise of First Direct’s Little Black Book.

This was the first UK bank online community site retained exclusively for customers to share reviews of both banking and non-banking experiences when it was launched way back in 2008.

The bank’s stated reason for closure was customer feedback which identified that “numerous review sites online…have become a lot bigger than the Little Black Book”. No doubt the usual suspects of social media like Facebook, Twitter etc. are ‘bigger’ – but size is only one factor when considering online communities, and not necessarily the most important.

Online communities can be used to develop customer relationships but they come into their own when considered as sources of information for targeted sales.

The most successful way to exploit this opportunity for sales is to develop a number of groups and or sub-groups within the main online community. These groups are defined by customer interests and service requirements.

By increasing the number of groups the online community benefits and the community provider, in this case banks, profits from the opportunity to identify additional customer segments. At a certain point when enough information has been generated within the communities it becomes possible to segment further into highly personalised micro-segments.

Micro-segmentation is a hotly debated topic often mentioned in the same breath as big data. In the context of online communities these micro-segments provide more targeted insight, making sales and marketing strategies more effective, whilst providing a highly personalised and predictive approach to the sales process.

The online community sales and market segmentation opportunity

By interrogating the data provided from communities, for example considering communication streams and topics of conversation, upsell and cross-sell opportunities can be increased. 

Targeted use

Social media, like any communication platform, needs to be used in a targeted fashion: its use should imitate a scalpel not a meat cleaver. 

Good online communities should follow a set of simply guidelines: 

1. Relevance. Communities must make sense in relation to the customer or segment in question. For example who is it targeting and for what reason? Is it to increase spending or to keep the customer from churning?
2. Logic. It must make sense for the service, product or information to be delivered through the social platform in question. There is nothing worse than a random product insertion and it has the potential to alienate the community members.  
3. Integration. Any service offering should appear to seamlessly link into the community ethos, its pertinence and relevance being unquestionable. 

Successful targeted online financial communities

Whilst monitoring the digital strategies of banks we have come across a number of innovative uses of online communities. An area within which banks have been particularly active is the enterprise sector with SMEs.

Many of the communities developed for this segment have been highly successful and widely utilised. One of the most original is Commonwealth Bank’s “Women in Focus”, a forum dedicated to connecting business women in Australia through the provision of events, workshops and partnerships.

The community even has an area where business owners can promote their products and services. Although the services provided are not within the remit of the bank’s core products, this site does fulfil the criteria of a good online community by providing pertinent and useful services to its members.

A leading example in the US is American Express with its OPEN Forum, which provides video, articles, blogs, podcasts and expert advice for business owners.

The Community has a “Highlights” section which features blogs and articles on topics such as branding and employee morale. In its second year OPEN increased unique visitors by 525% from 160,000 to over a million.

AMEX’s proposition demonstrates a number of online community best practice features including pertinence, relevance and service integration through the incorporation of the OPEN Forum within the wider proposition, which includes a dedicated selection of credit card products for SMEs.

Financial communities are both relevant and useful for SMEs, as business owners are limited in their choices, yet have a close working relation with their financial advisors.

This provides the opportunity for banks to provide SME communities with core banking products through integration into the communities themselves.

In this way the community serves as a cross-selling and value added service opportunity. In contrast The Little Black Book did not promote cross sales and First Direct made minimal effort explaining how these features were relevant to the bank or its customers.

Perhaps the most important factor for banks to maintain a successful community is the integration of products and services.

The Little Black Book may have had more success had it integrated information and services surrounding loyalty and other schemes usually associated with credit cards such as frequent flyer programmes.

But let us not denigrate First Direct. It was the first to approach communities indirectly by providing a non-core banking offering. It remains an innovator in this space and has simply been overtaken by developments elsewhere on the web.

It should also be commended for recognising this and reacting to customer input to remove the service, and thereby proving that they actually listen to those very online community members. 

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Making conscious choices improves your ability to build and communicate value. When these choices are made unconsciously you confuse both employees and customers.

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With this in mind, I thought I’d give the toolset a whirl and see how it could be useful to content teams, and I was impressed!

I’ve often wondered why people would start making the leap from one network to another, and I seldom use Google+, but these improved features certainly give it a major advantage in photo uploading.

It’s not the tipping point, but it’s certainly a victory in a war that will go on for some time yet. 

Integration of Snapseed

Ever since coming across Tim Ferris’ brilliant blog post: Food Photography Made Easy – Simple Tricks and Pro Tips from The 4 Hours Chef I’ve been interested in Snapseed.

It’s a brilliant photo app, but getting editorial teams to use it proved difficult since Google had discontinued the desktop version of it. The iPad version is brilliant – far superior to Instagram in terms of editing functionality – but it’s difficult to get into a content workflow.

However, yesterday I was pleased to see that Google had basically integrated the entire functionality of the app into Google+, and the results are fantastic!

Five features used in five steps

Let’s take the standard photo of me that I use for all most of my online avatars (indeed, for my Twitter profile, I previously used Snapseed for filtering). 

Now there’s quite a bit wrong with this. It’s lopsided, there’s blue lighting (from a TV), my face is shiny, stubbly and there’s a couple of blemishes. Time for a clean-up. 

Step one: basic edits

1. First of all we can crop out the unnecessary space using the standard crop function and then rotate the photo to straighten it.  
2. Cropped and moved 2.39 degrees to the right, then resized to 600px height – basics done. 

Step two: touch up

1. A small blemish on my fore head can be lost using Effects > Touch Up > Blemish Fix. I just clicked over the area a couple of times and it was history.
2. Then I used the Shine-be-Gone brush to mute shine on my forehead and nose. 
3. I then used the airbrush to mute the beginnings of a beard!
4. I also gave myself a bit of a tan. 

Step three: effects

I just started messing about. On the left is soften, on the right is a duo tone filter. 

Step four: decorate

I used Focal Pixelate on the bottom left and top right, and put in one of the speech marks overlays. I love that you can do this – you can quickly put quotes onto images. 

Step five: text

The number of fonts is impressive… However, at this stage watch out for pressing enter when you’re type, because you could lose everything!

Verdict: Possibly not the greatest example in the world, but it does show off the capability. There’s clearly quite a lot you can do with it! If you create your own images, give it a try – you’ll have the added bonus of an instant syndication point. 

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This week’s infographic is courtesy of MintTwist, looking at the web usage habits of Europeans.

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• Europeans make up 12% of the global population, and 21% of the online population Tweet this

• Iceland and Scandanavia have the highest Internet penetration in Europe Tweet this

• Only 59% of Europeans shop online Tweet this

• Romanians, Bulgarians and Italians are least likely Europeans to shop online Tweet this

• 92% of Europeans prefer Google as a search engine Tweet this

• 49% of Europeans use social networks daily, 1/3 of them are Russians Tweet this

• There are 131.5 million smartphones in Europe (46% Android, 39% Apple)
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• It’s predicted that there’ll be 35 million tablets in Europe by 2014 Tweet this

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