If you’re getting the traffic you need but seeing lots of visitors leave without doing anything then you need to reduce your bounce rate.

The official definition of bounce rate given by Google Analytics is:

A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.

‘Bounce rate’ isn’t always – as some believe – when visitors leave immediately after landing on your page. While your bounce rate will include those people, it will also include those who spend some time scrolling or reading your landing page – they just don’t click deeper into the site.

And that means that there’s an opportunity here.

In this guide, we’ll unpack the four key areas where improvements can help reduce bounce rate – and how to figure out which one applies most to your website.

Diagnozing Your Bounce Rate Problems

So what constitutes a ‘high’ bounce rate anyway? A cross-section of e-commerce businesses using Magento had an average bounce rate of 46.3% across the period of the study (although the rate fluctuated dramatically during the sample period).

Design agency Rocket Fuel has created a graph aggregating 60 of their clients’ bounce rates and also indicating what’s normal and what should be raising red flags:

If you find yourself in the higher than average range – or even if your bounce rate is around average – there’s probably a lot you can do to reduce bounce rate and recapture that lost potential revenue. But where do you start?

Before you make any changes, you need to first understand why your bounce rate is higher than it should be – and that means analysing visitor behavior. Jump into your analytics tool (whether it’s Google Analytics or something similar) and follow this methodology to get started:

1. Start by comparing your bounce rate and your exit rate (that is, the percentage of visitors for which this page was the last in their session) for key pages, such as homepage, landing pages and product pages.
2. If both the bounce and exit rates are high, this could indicate that there’s something wrong with the particular page, such as design or user experience. Your solutions will therefore come from sections  3, 4 or 5 of this book.
3. If only the bounce rate is high, it could indicate that there’s a disconnect between where the traffic is sourced from and what you’re presenting on the page.
4. If you see the problem in (3), cut your data again based on where the traffic is sourced from in order to determine whether that’s the case.  Your solution may therefore come from section 2 of this book.

Acquisition-stage Fixes to Reduce Bounce Rate

Whether or not a visitor will bounce begins long before they even land on your site – a high bounce rate can be a sign that your acquisition strategy is misaligned. Once you’ve broken down your bounce rates by traffic source, you can consider the following two options:

Are you looking for visitors in the wrong places?

Sometimes your product or brand just won’t appeal to some visitors, and that’s fine. For example, if your target audience is retirees but a large amount of your marketing spend is taking place, say, on Instagram – where only 8% of users are over the age of 65 – you may need to revisit your marketing strategy and make sure that the traffic you get is qualified and primed to buy your products.

Similarly, if you’re using display marketing or email marketing, make sure that your referral traffic is originating from lists and sites that are aligned with your product and demographic targets. It’s difficult to get demographic information about your bouncers, but it’s worth checking that your placement and messaging are appealing to the right people.

Is your landing page out of alignment?

One of the most important factors in crafting an effective landing page is ensuring that the result matches the query. In other words, when visitors enter your site, they should be getting what they’ve been promised. If your bounce rate is high, it could be because people enter your site expecting one thing and getting another – even if it’s a slight difference.

That could be that the advertisement they clicked doesn’t lead to the right product landing page. Or for example, that you’ve advertised plus-sized clothing, but the plus-sized items are out of stock. It could also be a mismatch of pricing expectations, or that your company doesn’t ship to the visitor’s location or speak their language.

If there’s a disconnect in how you’re pitching your product, being savvy and specific in how you talk about it, ensuring there’s complete continuity between acquisition marketing and on-page experience. This can help reduce your bounce rate and keep visitors away from your competitors.

User Experience Fixes to Reduce Bounce Rate

Regardless of where your visitor has landed from – whether it’s social media or from elsewhere in your site – a poor user experience is nearly guaranteed to reduce both bounce rates and exit rates. As yourself these questions to see how can you can improves yours…

Is your landing page well-designed?

This is a big one, but it’s very important. Most retailers understand the paramount importance of creating a well-designed website that’s easy to navigate. But others, well… Not so much:

An off-putting design that’s difficult to navigate, with distractions like intrusive adverts or difficult-to-read colour schemes will almost guarantee a high bounce rate. Remember: if your site makes the user work to explore your products, sign up to your mailing list or buy something, users will be unlikely to stick around to try.

Your e-commerce retail site design should feature:

• High quality product images
• Clean design that directs the viewer’s focus towards the call to action
• Consistent branding with colour and logos
• Easy-to-read fonts
• Colour-blind legibility
• A fully optimized mobile version that’s easy to navigate and make purchases on

Clear call-to-action

If someone has clicked on a paid ad to reach your site, they’ll be primed to expect a certain thing from your landing page.

They’re ready for action, so that action needs to be very clear.

Is it a pop-up offering a discount if you sign up to the mailing list? Perhaps it’s a call to browse the collection or to buy a specific item. Whatever the CTA is, it should nudge the visitor in the direction of either a micro or macro conversion. A secondary call to action – perhaps to engage with customer service – should be less conspicuous in order to avoid confusing your visitor.

For example, the landing page of watch company Linjer included a highlighted bar at the top with a small CTA to back its latest design on Kickstarter, but it doesn’t detract from the simplicity of the landing page’s main calls to action:

Having too many conflicting calls to action can be confusing and ultimately off-putting, so it’s important to select your primary call to action and make sure your entire landing page is oriented towards that.

Is it easy to sign up to your list?

If you’re capturing registrations or email addresses, it’s essential that there’s a low barrier to entry. Make sure that you’re not creating a gateway to your products or interrupting the user experience: sign-ups should be given willingly, not under duress.

This is a similar principle for the checkout process – the thing standing in the way of your conversions could in fact be you.

Are you delivering a customer-specific experience?

Personalization is an incredibly powerful marketing tool that you can use on your site from the moment people arrive – for example, you can distinguish new visitors from return visitors, and serve them different offers and content based on their level of previous interaction with the site. It’s essential here to use analytics in order to learn about individual customer journeys.

Take this example from Domino’s Pizza, who differentiated between its new and returning customers to trigger tailored incentives in order to convert them:

Content Fixes to Reduce Bounce Rate

If your user experience is clear and you’re delivering what your user expects but still seeing a high bounce rate, it may be time to look at your content.

Is your copy of a high quality?

Your landing page copy needs to be persuasive, of a high quality and legible. It needs to be clearly laid out so that it’s skimmable and easy to read, since most people won’t read everything on the page but do want to be able to pick out key points.

To achieve this, any written copy must:

• Be relevant to the customer’s needs
• Use the appropriate keywords naturally
• Have short sentences and paragraphs
• Have subheadings
• Have short, snappy sentences
• Be free from spelling and grammar errors

This is also good SEO practice, so you’ll also be improving organic traffic by sticking to these guidelines.

Tempting though it may be to use fanciful, flowery language it’s usually wise not to. If visitors are looking for something specific, a descriptive keyword that they would use to search for that item is always the best choice for product names, URLs and descriptions.

For example, your navigation bar should use clear titles to group and categorize products, and your product titles or collections should be recognizable at the reading age of a 9-year-old (the UK government’s content guidelines suggest this reading age to improve readability and accessibility).

Do people trust you?

If people are going to browse your website with the possibility of parting with their hard-earned cash in mind, they need to feel assured that this is a genuine and credible e-commerce business and that their details are safe.

There are many elements of your website and branding that must work together to establish trust, but one of the most important is to include a trust mark to show that you’re an authorized retailer, not a scam. Another way to establish trust is to incorporate user ratings and reviews – from sites like Trustpilot – to demonstrate that you have genuine, happy customers.

Technical Fixes to Reduce Bounce Rate

With every change you’ve been able to make from a content and marketing perspective, you can shoot yourself in the foot if your pages don’t perform from a technical perspective. Time is of the essence – here’s what you need to consider to make sure that your visitors stick around…

Does your page load fast enough?

A lengthy page load time is a famous traffic killer.

According to Kissmetrics, if an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

Why? Because people just aren’t willing to wait while your website loads: if they’re interested in the item, they’ll look elsewhere. The website could be amazing, but if it doesn’t load within 2 seconds or less, 47% of users will simply leave.

To test your page’s load time, use Pingdom or Web Page Test. If you’re finding that it’s taking longer than two seconds, a few of the ways you can improve your page load time include:

• Reducing image sizes by saving for web in your image processing program
• Upgrading hosting
• Minifying HTML and CSS
• Limiting the number of redirects
• Utilising GZip compression
• Minimising the number of plugins on your side

Does your page render in a timely fashion?

Page loading and page rendering may seem very similar – and they are – but rendering time refers to the amount of time your site takes to be functional. Load time refers to the time it takes to load images and code, while rendering is the time it takes to process all those elements and ready them for interaction with visitors. Time to test, test, test.

Is your site optimized for mobile?

According to Rocket Fuel, you can expect that your bounce rate on mobile will be about 10-20% higher on mobile than on desktop. However, with 34.5% of retail e-commerce now taking place on a mobile device, it’s essential that retailers pay close attention to the mobile experience and optimize pages for the increasing number of consumers browsing on mobile.

Conclusion

You’ll never eliminate bounces completely (in fact, according to Rocket Fuel, a 0-15% bounce rate indicates that something’s broken), but with smart analysis and progressive improvements you can reduce your bounce rate (and hopefully boost your conversions along the way).

As with every update to your website, the key is to do your homework first – making changes without a clear hypothesis as to why you’re doing it is a quick way to waste time and potentially do unnecessary damage. If you need help conquering bounce rates and abandonment, feel free to schedule a demo with our sales team. We’ll help get you started.

The post How to Reduce Bounce Rate appeared first on Yieldify.

Based on research conducted in August 2020 with 400 eCommerce leaders and 2,000 consumers across the US and UK, it explores the current state-of-play for marketers and consumers alike, the challenges they face, and the opportunities available to meet revenue goals this peak season.

The key findings unveiled a forthcoming peak season unlike any other before it:

More eCommerce sites than ever are opting out of 2020’s ‘peak season’ campaigns. However, consumers express the opposite intention, planning to spend more than last year – and yet more of this will be online. This raises a clear contradiction between marketers’ priorities and what consumers really want.

Of those participating in peak season, marketers have adapted their strategies post-COVID to align with the shift in consumer behavior and the new challenges presented by the pandemic.

With less competition for an increased and more engaged customer base, eCommerce leaders have a great opportunity to increase market share this peak season…if they choose to take it.

Read on to discover what lies ahead in what’s set to be an extraordinary peak season.

Introduction: When Christmas Came Early

2020 has been a landmark year for eCommerce. COVID-19 has served as a catalyst for rapid growth across many eCommerce sectors as consumers turned their attention online amid store closures and lockdown restrictions. For many eCommerce companies, ‘Christmas came early’, as ‘peak season’ levels of traffic hit in April.

In March there was a 74% growth in average transaction volumes compared with the same period last year.

This boom, while positive in the short-term, has created added complexity for eCommerce leaders this peak season. With uncertainty still at play around when the ‘new normal’ will begin, many companies are approaching this year’s peak events with caution.

The game has indeed changed, but with that change comes opportunity. Our next chapter explores the first of those.

The Peak Season Paradox

The pandemic has forced all companies to take decisive action to protect their customers, employees, brand, and revenue. The impact on peak season is shocking: More companies than ever are choosing to opt out.

The year-on-year decrease in participation across all peak season events is stark. Over 33% of eCommerce companies are choosing to opt out of peak season activities in 2020, versus only 6% last year.

This is reflected in the world of brick-and-mortar. Walmart revealed that it will close all of its stores across the US on Thanksgiving this year, ending its tradition of Black Friday deals. Other brands such as Macy’s have followed suit, looking to add focus to online deals and offer curbside pick-up as their ‘big secret weapon’.

However, there’s evidence to say that the decision to opt-out may be a mistake. This is because the consumer view indicates trends are moving in the exact opposite direction: A significant increase in peak season participation. 34% of consumers plan to increase their peak season spending year-on-year and only 18% plan to decrease it.

Even more important for eCommerce companies, this increased spending is even more likely to be online. More consumers plan to undertake their peak shopping online this year across all three peak events, with an average 8pp. growth predicted for consumers shopping either mostly online or only online.

There’s even more for eCommerce companies to consider when looking at where consumers plan to shop online. While 48% of consumers plan to shop mostly on the same websites as last year’s peak season, nearly one-third (29%) plan to shop on mostly new websites. This indicates that the discovery of new online shopping habits from COVID will ‘stick’ for peak season this year.

Looking at what consumers wanted to buy, the results differed between each peak event. For Black Friday and Cyber Monday, electronics reigned king, whereas apparel and accessories were most popular for the holiday season. So a large proportion of eCommerce leaders are opting out of peak season, while consumers are wholeheartedly opting in. So why the disconnect?

Caution vs Optimism

Choosing to pull back from the biggest period in the online sales calendar just after the industry leaps ahead would at first appear confusing. On closer examination, the reasons for doing so become clearer.

Firstly, there’s a clear atmosphere of caution amongst eCommerce leaders, who are unsure about whether COVID will dampen 2020’s peak season. While in 2019 nearly 90% of marketers expected to outdo their previous year’s results, only 45% are so positive this year. There’s even a 20pp. increase in brands expecting a year-on-year decline.

This expectation of a low financial return has likely forced eCommerce companies to interrogate the ROI of peak activities this year in a way they haven’t had to before.

eCommerce leaders revealed more concerns besides revenue, characteristic of the challenges of operating in a pandemic. The ability to meet demand was a key reason for opting-out, recalling challenges with fulfillment services and supply chain management.

However, ranking even higher was the assumption that consumer demand would be low and that competition would be fierce – both of which appear to be refuted by our consumer insights.

On the subject of consumer demand, it makes sense now to turn to consumer motivations for opting in, having looked at marketer motivations for opting out.

Of the consumers planning to increase their spend this peak season, the largest proportion were doing so because they had specific things they needed. This suggests plenty of high-intent purchases come peak season,
for which marketers should start nurturing consumers as soon as possible.

In terms of priority, this was followed by buying more gifts for friends and family. With lockdown conditions meaning fewer gifts being given in person, it makes sense that more people will be shopping online to send gifts directly to loved ones.

2020 conditions aside, the data uncovered another important area of divergence in opinion between marketers and consumers. Over the last few years, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have been viewed with more skepticism – notable brands have pulled out, and many have reshaped
their campaigns away from blitzes of discounting into more brand and value-driven campaigns.

This year has seen this opinion become even more pronounced for eCommerce leaders, with more than one in five saying that they believe consumers think it’s a ‘marketing ploy’.

However, once again, this is where marketers may have misread consumers. In truth, only 3% of global consumers think Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a marketing ploy. Instead, of the consumers spending less this year, the biggest reason was that they were trying to save money, followed by having less or unstable incomes. Neither of these reasons support marketer concerns that consumers hold a negative opinion
of Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

With such a clear disparity between corporate caution and consumer optimism, it gives brands currently on the fence about their holiday season campaigns a reason to re-think. 

Below, a few eCommerce professionals share their thoughts both ‘for’ and ‘against’ participating in peak season activities. Here is what they shared:

The pros of participating

“With Salesforce predicting that up to 30% of global retail sales will be made through digital channels this upcoming holiday season, it looks like a no brainer for retailers to engage in peak season.”

“Consumers have been supporting businesses online where they can, so the retailers feel that if they hold their prices then it won’t affect their regular sales. Even bargain hunters are stumping up the cash to pay
regular prices in support of businesses – online and in-store.”

Chans Weber / Founder & CEO / Leap Clixx 

“Simply put, crowded, closed-in spaces are not popular and won’t be for quite some time to come. While some people are eager to go back to stores and shop, particularly for the holidays, many others are planning
to remain at home and have their holiday packages delivered.”

“This is going to set up an odd dichotomy wherein retailers try to get the best of both worlds. Where Black Friday is likely to see record low turnout, Cyber Monday will likely shatter records for participation and revenue generation.”

Garrett Greller / Co-Founder / Uncle Bud’s Hemp

The cons of participating

“This year we’ve noticed that many of our retailers are not very enthusiastic about peak season activities, they require an increase in workforce and investment. The pandemic forced recession has made many retailers risk-averse, so do not want to risk investing while they’re running on losses.”

“There is also the scare of a second or third wave of pandemic hitting again and forcing another lockdown. Such a circumstance would be disastrous for all businesses, especially retailers. A retailer who’s invested too much would sink. The ideal strategy adopted by retailers is to survive this year and save up for next year.”

Ian Kelly / VP of Operations / NuLeaf Naturals

“Marketing dollars are like gold and retailers are leery of wasting money in a space that’s not helpful. The economy is still shaky, and retailers aren’t entirely sure that consumers will be buying much this year, especially since it’s unclear whether another round of stimulus checks are coming from the government.”

“To make matters worse, retailers have to worry about whether inventory will be accurate or not due to delays in the delivery process. Backordered items will be a nightmare for holiday gifts and items showing as ‘out of stock’ for too long can hurt an online business presence.”

Vinay Amin / CEO / Eu Natural

What Peak Participation Looks Like Post-COVID

For those eCommerce leaders deciding to participate in peak season, what kind of landscape can they look forward to facing? This chapter looks to answer that question.

Firstly, the indecision over participation in 2020’s peak season is reflected in the huge changes to the planning cycle. By September last year, nearly 70% of eCommerce companies had already started their peak season planning: This year, that number dwindles at less than 40%.

There are clear signs that some brands could be rolling the dice and holding off on making decisions until the very last minute – a plan which has the potential to backfire.

When looking at the types of promotions being run, there’s a clear drop in what companies are offering.

Discounts remain king, offered by 41% of participants (compared to over 70% last year), followed once again by free gifts and shipping. The overall decrease in ‘generosity’ may be a reflection of caution over the ability to fulfill offers, as well as a perceived lesser need to attract conversions.

The largest proportion of retailers plan to offer an 11-20% discount and the largest increases year-on-year were seen at the very lowest and very highest end of the scale – further underlining the “all or nothing” approach.

“One reason many eCommerce retailers may be offering less peak season discounts and offers this year is that everyone is shopping online already anyway since COVID, so many eCommerce stores are doing well enough that they don’t feel a pressure to participate in giving more discounts.”

Stacy Caprio / Marketing / AcneScar.org

There are also signs that Black Friday and Cyber Monday will last longer, a trend that has been emerging over the last few years as retailers seek to fully grasp the opportunities that peak season brings. The five and six-day time periods saw the largest increases year-on-year and the largest proportion of retailers opted for 3 days (in line with 2019).

“This unprecedented holiday season will see customers shopping on irregular schedules. An abnormal back to school season coupled with a delayed Amazon Prime Day means shoppers will likely spread out holiday spending and start buying earlier.”

Meaghan Brophy / Retail Analyst / FitSmallBusiness.com

Looking at the tactical executions planned to meet marketing goals this peak season, email marketing came out on top. This was followed by paid social and website personalization.

With inboxes set to be more crowded than ever and increased volumes of online traffic expected, personalizing on-site experiences and email marketing will be crucial to differentiate brand offerings and attract those all-important conversions from new and returning visitors alike.

For conversion-specific tactics, the most popular tactic this year was highlighting free delivery, followed by email remarketing.

These tactics work two-fold, with the former encouraging in-session conversions and the latter serving as a fallback where needed upon cart abandonment.

This means optimized lead capture forms play a crucial role for marketers in both their ability to send promotional emails to the widest audience possible and re-capture the attention of visitors that left without making a purchase.

10 Actionable Tips to Win This Peak Season

In 2020’s peak season, eCommerce consumer demand is set to be higher than ever – coupled with decreased competition thanks to other companies opting out, this creates a golden opportunity. Check out these actionable tips to win this peak season (and head over here for even more holiday eCommerce CRO tactics):

1. Against a backdrop of brands opting-out, make sure that consumers are fully aware that you will be offering holiday promotions well ahead of time. 60% of consumers who made purchases on Cyber Weekend 2019 engaged with an email from that brand prior to Q3 that same year – so start your lead capture early and nurture through Email and SMS.

2. Even your most loyal shoppers might not be aware of upcoming promotions, so connect your visitors to your holiday calendar and encourage them to create wishlists. 

3. On your website, use clear messaging to help set expectations and reduce the burden on resources such as customer service. Use these to point visitors in the direction of key information such as shipping deadlines, FAQ pages, and customer service contact information.

4. In anticipation of increased consumer demand and potential shipping delays, set clear and early shipping deadlines to ensure timely delivery. Counting down to delivery deadlines is an incredibly effective tactic to nudge procrastinating gifters into converters. 

5. Deploy an optimized lead capture form to target any new browsers that might visit your website as a result of increased demand. Track their online behaviors and preferences, then use these insights to follow-up with personalized cart abandonment emails and enroll them in email marketing campaigns.

6. Do you have items that can make a nice addition to any holiday basket? Consider an embedded cross-sell on your cart or checkout pages. This is an effective way to call attention to overlooked holiday products and increase cart size.

7. FOMO (fear of missing out) is a powerful motivator, and with holiday shoppers looking online more than ever, social proof will be an effective way to build urgency on product detail pages and drive conversions. Tried and tested ways to do this include featuring customer reviews and star ratings, showing stock levels, displaying endorsements, showing “other people bought” and highlighting best sellers.

8. Remind visitors of past shopping sessions and streamline their progression to checkout. Notifications that appear upon re-entry to your website can be effectively combined with urgency tactics like inventory warnings and discount deadlines to drive speedy conversions. 

9. If you have offers that depend on cart value, consider using a progress bar. These are a great way to help shoppers track their progress towards being eligible for offers, and encourages them to spend more to get more.

10. Prepare your post-peak season game plan. You’ll likely acquire a volume of new customers once campaigns kick-off, but how are you going to turn a one-off purchase into meaningful lifetime value? Before the new customers arrive, make sure you have a strategy in place to nurture them into multiple purchases.

In Conclusion

Whilst COVID-19 has created huge change and disruption for eCommerce leaders, there’s value in staying the course when it comes to peak season. Consumer appetite for deals is stronger than ever, and more of them are shopping online in ways we would never have expected this time last year.

While the chaos (positive and negative) that 2020 has given our industry would give any eCommerce leader good reason to be cautious and pull back from peak, the data here should give anyone reason to reconsider. The key thing is to be decisive but build in flexibility so you can adapt to any bumps in the road that Q4 might bring.

Ultimately, the eCommerce brands that win this year will be those who listen best to their consumers – good luck and have a great peak season.

Appendix/Methodology

Three online surveys were conducted with a panel of potential respondents. The recruitment periods were 8th July 2019 to 17th July 2019 and 31st July 2020 to 21st August 2020.

A total of 400 respondents completed the first two surveys. These were made up of 200 respondents residing in the UK and 200 respondents residing in the US. Only senior marketers or eCommerce directors at retailers with an eCommerce presence were eligible to take part and complete the survey. 

A total of 2,000 respondents completed the third survey. This was made up of 1000 respondents residing in the UK and 1000 respondents residing in the US. Only adults aged 18 or above were eligible to take part and complete the survey. 

All questions within the surveys were verified to be MRS compliant by a marketing research company specializing in online and mobile polling.

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Based on research conducted in July 2020 with 400 eCommerce leaders across the US and UK, it explores the current state-of-play in the sector, the challenges it faces, and where it’s heading next.

Here are some of the key findings:

The COVID-19 pandemic saw eCommerce make 10 years’ worth of growth in a 90-day period. But rather than pause their personalization efforts in the face of change, eCommerce teams have learned the lessons of ‘black swan’ events of the past and are moving ahead with ambitious plans for the next year. 

The shift in consumer behavior underlying the boom means that personalization is now being deployed more for retention, rather than acquisition or conversion, purposes. 

For eCommerce teams, scaling personalization comes with the key obstacles of lack of resource and restrictive personalization tools.

Rather than be fazed by the prospect of increasing privacy restrictions, eCommerce marketers are optimistic about how their personalization programs will benefit from them.

Read on to discover how the crisis has accelerated eCommerce marketers’ ambitions for website personalization and their plans for 2021.

A New Era of Innovation

The COVID-19 crisis has drastically changed the landscape of eCommerce. McKinsey reported the sector as having jumped forward 10 years in a 90-day period, referring to this monumental shift as ‘The Quickening’. There are stark parallels with the 2008 financial crisis, where this black swan event gave rise to the rapid growth of eCommerce companies such as Alibaba.

The eCommerce industry is left with two competing trends: the positivity of vast growth in immediate traffic, coupled with the uncertainty of bracing for a potential economic slump.

When it comes to digital innovation, challenges like this often lead to a bifurcation in the industry: those who stagnate, and those who move forward faster than ever. 

Our research found that COVID-19 is seeing very few eCommerce professionals content to stagnate when it comes to personalization. Over 74% of companies surveyed have a website personalization program in place, with adoption of advanced functionality such as dynamic segmentation expected to reach 93% by the end of next year. The overwhelming trend is that progress continues faster than ever.

This acceleration comes against a backdrop of increasing consumer demand for personalization: an Accenture report revealed that 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands offering personalized online experiences. This demand was cited as a key motivator for over 50% of respondents.

This bar-raising in website personalization is great news for the industry – but like the rest of this report details, it’s not without changes in focus and challenges in execution. 

The Current State of Personalization 

Looking at the adoption of personalization across all channels, website personalization leads the pack, ahead of channels such as SMS (42% personalization adoption) and mobile apps (56% personalization adoption).

However, there’s clear appetite for scaling efforts across new channels. Loyalty programs, SMS marketing, and conversational marketing are predicted to see the largest increases in adoption by the end of 2021. 

So if website personalization is so well-adopted, exactly what does that mean? The term covers a broad range of different approaches. The first step of unpacking this is to understand what kind of data is being used to drive website personalization. 

At present, the most popular option for driving website personalization is real-time behavioral data, used in over 75% of cases. This indicates that website personalization is largely generated in response to in-session behaviors, which bodes well for the future (see more in the chapter What Happens Next). 

Other forms of data – whether driven by cookies or ingested from CDPs and other channels – fall behind in their adoption, though each one can be expected to reach over 90% adoption by the end of next year. 

The next dimension examined was how that data is then being used to segment. When asked about segmentation methods, respondents indicated that aside from real-time decisioning, segments were more likely to be static (69%). 

By comparison, only 54% currently use AI-driven predictive segments. However, this was identified as an area of high potential growth, as 89% expected to be using it by the end of next year. 

Within this landscape of largely behaviorally-driven website personalization, the research then looked at what kind of content is being personalized.

What became clear is that personalization largely takes the form of static content (69%), but that over half of users are pushing ahead into using either dynamic creatives (60%) or user-specific content (57%). The highest appetite for growth lay with the former. 

In sum, the current state of play for website personalization indicates an industry that intends to accelerate rapidly over the course of the next year. Where adoption rates currently hover between 50% and 70% for many executions, many were forecast to reach over 90% in less than 18 months’ time. 

The Loyalty Paradigm

If the adoption of website personalization is already strong and growing fast, our next question is what eCommerce teams are trying to achieve in doing so. In 2020, retention (58%) has overtaken conversion (55%) and acquisition (45%) as the key goal. 

The reasons why become clear on examination of the impact of COVID-19 and ‘The Quickening’. 

The most obvious explanation is that acquisition and conversion have become less important on account of the vast increase in online shopping that came with the closure of brick-and-mortar stores. Simply put, it seems that conversions are easier to come by – for now.

However, the reasons for a focus on retention go beyond that. COVID-19 has provoked more fundamental changes in consumer behavior that have made them less loyal. As a result of the pandemic, two key purchase drivers reigned king: availability (due to supply chain disruptions) and price (due to economic uncertainty). 

That means that shoppers are happily ‘jumping ship’ to get what they need for a better price. With between 65 and 85% of consumers intending to continue new shopping behaviors post-pandemic, the pressure is on for eCommerce businesses to optimize the entire customer lifecycle. 

eCommerce businesses are therefore now looking to use website personalization to tap into the lucrative revenue opportunities associated with customer loyalty and keep hold of a newly-acquired customer base as a result of the temporary boom. 

Our next chapter looks at how they’re trying to do it.

How this breaks down

Stat 1: The UK is a step ahead in this game: there’s a 16pp. difference between marketers in the UK who have a website personalization strategy than their US counterparts.

Stat 2: The retention issue is more acute in the US, where eCommerce marketers were the most motivated to increase retention rates, with a 10pp. lead on their UK counterparts.

Stat 3: Sports and leisure retailers took the lead for loyalty over other sectors, with a huge 82% looking to improve retention.

Obstacles to Scale

With such big ambitions for personalization, it’s key to understand where the obstacles may lie in fulfilling them.

Global:

1. Resource: A lack of expertise 37%
2. Tools: Limited functionality 36%
3. Resource: A lack of time 35%

The biggest challenge to the eCommerce team attempting to execute website personalization is one of expertise. Even the simplest of personalization technologies demands a unique skill set in order to use them effectively – as a new area of expertise, the hires that can deliver are few and far in between.

Another pressing issue is one of time: unsurprising when considering the levels of furlough and redundancy made as a result of the pandemic. Today’s eCommerce teams are usually having to do more with less, making a lack of time a perennial issue. Even the biggest companies (1,000+ employees) were affected over 63% of the time. 

However, tools with limited functionality also proved to be a key issue across the board. This indicates that while ambitions for personalization programs are high, execution is hindered by a lack of technology solutions designed to meet the specific needs of eCommerce marketers. This is particularly true for non-enterprise businesses, given that many personalization solutions were designed for large-scale companies. 

Much lower on the scale of challenges were the strategic considerations, such as measuring ROI or getting internal buy-in. This speaks to the initial observation that eCommerce businesses have a clear understanding of the strategic necessity of personalization, and have no intention of scaling back their efforts in the face of uncertainty. 

UK: 

1. Resource: A lack of expertise 34%
2. Data: Privacy laws preventing action 32%
3. Tools: Limited functionality 29%

US:

1. Tools: Too expensive 46%
2. Tools: Limited functionality 44%
3. Resource: A lack of time 44%

Between the two markets surveyed, challenges appeared more pronounced in the US, which goes some way to explain the 15 percentage point gap between personalization adoption in the UK vs the US. 

Another key difference was that UK marketers ranked data and privacy laws as their second most obstructive challenge. eCommerce professionals in the UK having likely been affected by GDPR, this comes as little surprise. However, eCommerce companies on both sides of the Atlantic should be bracing for this concern to increase over the coming years, as we explore next. 

What Happens Next

If eCommerce teams are running headlong into a future of website personalization, what might they need to consider as they double down on their efforts? 

The short answer is ‘privacy’. Over the coming years, marketers can expect to see significant changes in how customer data can be captured and used. Some of these will be legislative, such as GDPR, and some will be driven by browsers (the so-called ‘cookiepocalypse’). 

What’s likely to emerge is that personalization solutions that depend on building detailed user profiles may be jeopardized. Not only will marketers be constrained in how they capture data, but they also may be unable to use it. 

From this, we can expect to see a growth in how eCommerce teams use real-time behavioral data instead. As we’ve seen, many are already doing so, but in the future, we can expect to see more sophistication in the use of affinities and machine learning to make this more effective. What is currently considered as ‘behavioral triggering’ is likely to become a ‘digital body language’ approach. 

There is more good news here. Over 79% of eCommerce teams expect new privacy regulations to have a positive impact on their personalization programs in the next 5 years, with over 85% of respondents feeling a level of confidence in their understanding of what’s to come. 

For eCommerce companies, it seems that privacy compliance is a high priority – this is good news not just for their future innovations, but for consumer experiences. 

How this breaks down

Stat 1: 48% of US eCommerce marketers think privacy laws will have a large positive impact versus only 20% of their UK counterparts.

Stat 2: Health and beauty retailers were most confident in their understanding of privacy regulations, with 60% citing they were very confident.

Stat 3: Large enterprises of 1,000 employees or more were most concerned about privacy laws having a large negative impact.

In Conclusion

When COVID-19 sparked a chain reaction in consumer behavior, the eCommerce industry was quick to react: its drive towards innovation in website personalization is no exception. 

The eCommerce companies that thrive in the long-term will be the ones who keep their eyes and ears open to the demands of tomorrow (not just to those of today). Successful personalization programs in two years’ time will look very different from what the market has been accustomed to, and the smartest teams will already be building towards them. 

There’s an additional important lesson here for those businesses that serve the personalization needs of eCommerce companies – tech vendors and agencies alike. The tools and resources on offer at present simply aren’t enough – the suppliers that succeed will be the ones to evolve their offerings to meet the new, accelerating needs of a ‘Quickening’ market. 

Appendix/Methodology

An online survey was conducted with a panel of potential respondents. The recruitment period was 6th July 2020 to 20th July 2020.

A total of 400 respondents completed the survey. This was made up of 200 respondents residing in the UK and 200 respondents residing in the US. 

Only senior marketers or eCommerce directors at retailers with an eCommerce presence were eligible to take part and complete the survey. 

All questions within the survey were verified to be MRS compliant by a marketing research company specializing in online and mobile polling.

The post Personalization After COVID-19 appeared first on Yieldify.

Since 2015, customer acquisition costs have surged, increasing by more than half, and the recent Internet Trends report from Mary Meeker suggests there are areas where these costs may be rising to unsustainable levels. 

In this extremely crowded market, competition for the attention of new customers and rising costs are not the only challenge marketers face. New privacy regulations, such as the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in the US, have depleted databases and changed the rules around how marketers can identify consumers via personal data. 

So how are marketers responding to these challenges with customer acquisition? We sought to find out.

At the end of 2019, we surveyed over 200 UK and US marketers working in eCommerce*, to understand how customer acquisition strategies are evolving as we start the new decade.

Inside this guide, you’ll find the new rules of customer acquisition (and e-commerce customer retention strategies), backed by data, together with an in-depth look at industry (retail and travel) and market (US and UK) trends.

*Methodology: This research was conducted by Censuswide, an independent market research consultancy, with 207 UK and US ecommerce marketers who work in retail and travel: 100 in the UK and 107 in the US. Fieldwork was carried out between 11.09.2019 – 17.09.2019. Censuswide abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society. All survey panellists are double opted in, which is in line with MRS code of conduct and ESOMAR standards.

Rule #1: It’s all about balance…

In 2018, we asked 200 marketers where they focused the majority of their efforts when it came to balancing acquisition and retention, and the results were a little surprising.

Despite the oft-cited fact that acquiring new customers is getting more expensive, and can cost up to 5x more than retaining an existing customer, marketers were still focusing 60% or more of their time and effort on attracting new customers. Revisiting the same question in 2019 revealed a notable shift in approach:

As the data reveals, marketers are shifting toward a more holistic approach, balancing their acquisition and retention efforts much more equally. In 2019, nearly half of marketers (47%) were spending equal effort on both attracting and keeping customers, compared to just 11% who said the same in 2018. 

However, it can be said that acquisition is still king, with 45% still prioritizing this, and gains to the more balanced approach largely coming from those previously weighted toward a greater focus on acquisition.

Industry and market trend spotlight

• US (53%) marketers are much more focused on acquisition than the average (45%), and their UK counterparts (36%).
• Travel marketers were slightly more focused on acquisition than their Retail counterparts, perhaps given the more one-off nature of travel purchases. 
• UK marketers are the most balanced in their customer acquisition and retention strategy – 57% are equally focused on both aspects of the customer journey.

Rule #2: Privacy requires proactivity

In May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect to protect the privacy of EU citizens, and in January 2020 a similar regulation came into effect in the US: the CCPA. The impact of the latter remains to be seen, but we do know how GDPR impacted UK marketers. 

With the average marketer losing 23% of their hard-acquired customers (i.e. email database) due to the regulation, we saw that survival in the new era of privacy requires a proactive approach to data capture. 

Businesses in retail achieved some of the best results, growing databases to 101% of their pre-GDPR size via a wide range of strategies, from loyalty programs to content optimization, as well as more traditional approaches such as competitions and incentivized newsletter sign-ups.

This shift toward a more proactive approach to acquiring customer data is also visible from the change in focus noted in the chart below:

Industry and market trend spotlight

• Interestingly the UK marketers were not as focused on acquisition as those in the US despite the advent of GDPR, suggesting many UK businesses have got their house in order when it comes to privacy and acquisition.
• Travel marketers shifted their focus less than retail, perhaps explaining the slower recovery from GDPR we saw in this sector.

Rule #3: Social media is king when it comes to channels

According to respondents, the top three acquisition channels marketers across verticals and markets are focusing on are: social media (66%), paid search (52%), and email (51%).

The high placement of social media is an interesting one, especially as social commerce finally seems to be gaining traction. In the next section, we’ll examine how these channels are perceived in terms of ROI to see if this focus is deserved.

It seems that marketers are still largely prioritizing paid channels such as paid search, display, and of course to some extent social, over strategies such as SEO. This approach remains despite rising acquisition costs, so it is worth noting that it may become unsustainable heading into the new decade – marketers will need to evaluate how they can switch up their strategies when it comes to acquisition channels.   

Industry and market trend spotlight

• The US is much more focused on paid activity than other markets, which makes sense given the greater focus on acquisition we’ve seen from this group so far. 
• After social, email was the biggest focus in the UK. Again this aligns with these segments’ greater focus on retention.
• Affiliate marketing was the channel that received the least focus. This channel was most popular with US marketers and in Retail.

Rule #4: Top focus doesn’t automatically mean ROI

Looking at the top channels for ROI, there weren’t too many changes, for example, social media still came out on top, with 52% of marketers ranking it within their best three channels for ROI. What was most interesting here was the discrepancy when comparing the focus or effort applied to particular channels, versus the ROI they were perceived as generating:

We see an interesting pattern emerge here, the top-ranked channels for focus, such as social media and paid search,  performed less well on ROI, while those who had been ranked lower, such as affiliates, actually performed better.

So should marketers switch up their strategy to focus on these ROI-driving channels? Not necessarily. What it suggests to us is that the customer journey for channels like social media and paid search needs to be improved. 

Why? It all comes down to intent. If you think about a user visiting from an organic search or an affiliate, the intent to buy is likely to be much higher, and thus these visitors are more likely to convert, boosting ROI. For channels like social media, a visitor may be in ‘discovery’ rather than ‘buy’ mode, and so needs a helping hand to move down the funnel toward conversion. In 2020 it is essential that marketers improve the customer journey from click to conversion for social media, paid search and email.

Industry and market trend spotlight

• US and Travel marketers reported much higher ROI from display than other segments, suggesting they are doing a better job of continuing the customer journey post-click.
• Travel also reported a higher ROI from affiliates than other groups, perhaps due to the higher AOV seen in this industry or because these visitors are showing a strong intent to buy.

#Rule 5: Better data collection is the foundation of success

Everything we’ve seen up to this point suggests that marketers need to evolve their approach to acquisition and retention, but how?

 The discrepancies between channel focus and ROI achieved point toward a need to improve the customer journey. The top strategies marketers plan to use to optimize the customer journey in 2020 include Marketing automation and website personalization, but neither of these are possible without a solid foundation of data.

Smart acquisition (and retention!) in 2020 will rely on:

• Effective data capture: careful targeting at the right moment in the customer journey to collect data and build a granular view of visitors
• Smart segmentation: based on available and collected data, segmenting visitors allows for scale and efficiency when it comes to both data collection and personalization, allowing you to target a new visitor and a loyal VIP differently.
• The ability to act on behavioral data: when you don’t have personal data, you need to recognize and act on intent. For example, personalizing your approach for visitors from high versus low intent channels.

The post The New Rules of Customer Acquisition appeared first on Yieldify.

Executive summary

The State of CJO is an annual report seeking to understand how e-commerce marketers are optimizing the online customer journey. Now in its second year, this edition* examines the current state of customer journey optimization (CJO) compared to 2018, and reveals marketers’ plans for 2020.

Here are some of the key findings:

• 2019 was the year marketers cracked CJO, overall demonstrating a greater level of satisfaction with their understanding and optimization of the customer journey compared to 2018. 
• The area of CJO that was ‘most improved’ was ‘optimization of customer journeys across multiple channels’, which was up over 25 percentage points, to 88%.
• These high levels of satisfaction were aligned with a much greater level of confidence (>90% confident or very confident) in defining CJO as a standalone practice in relation to more established optimization methods such as CRO and Personalization.
• The biggest challenges facing marketers have shifted away from tools and technology toward people and processes, particularly finding talent with the right skills in the UK and Retail.
• Privacy is also a growing challenge, almost doubling in importance versus 2018, particularly affecting travel and US marketers.
• Marketing automation is on the rise as a CJO tool. While personalization and customer feedback are still among the top tools and strategies, Marketing Automation saw the biggest gains, now the top used tool.

Read on to discover the state of CJO, the biggest challenges, and 2020 CJO plans, each broken down by vertical and market.

*Methodology: This research was conducted by Censuswide, an independent market research consultancy, with 207 UK and US ecommerce marketers who work in retail and travel: 100 in the UK and 107 in the US. Fieldwork was carried out between 11.09.2019 – 17.09.2019. Censuswide abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society. All survey panellists are double opted in, which is in line with MRS code of conduct and ESOMAR standards.

The State of CJO 2019

What’s the state of CJO in 2019, and how has it changed since 2018? In this first section we’ll explore how satisfied marketers are with their understanding of customer journey optimization, the tools and strategies they’re currently using, and the results to date.

The State of CJO 2019: The year marketers cracked customer journey optimization

What stood out most from this year’s results, especially when taken in comparison to 2018, was the level of satisfaction marketers now have with their understanding and optimization of the customer journey. We saw significant shifts, particularly in the optimization of customer journeys across multiple channels, which was up to 88% versus just 62% in 2018.

Other areas of improvement included conversion rate, with 85.5% of marketers now satisfied or very satisfied, suggesting that traditional conversion rate optimization (CRO) tactics have become table stakes. 

This improvement in satisfaction is perhaps linked with the fact that CJO is becoming much more of a defined practice. Marketers were much more confident defining it in relation to Personalization and CRO than last year:

We also see these advances in understanding reflecting in the tools and strategies marketers are using in 2019 to optimize the customer journey. Last year’s top tools were simpler: customer feedback and customer journey mapping, both essential for understanding the customer. In 2019, marketers have moved on to actioning the insights they’ve gathered.

The top tool in 2019 is marketing automation, followed by website personalization and multivariate testing (MVT). The latter two were ranked among the most difficult to implement in 2018’s survey, and the ‘easy’ tools and strategies that dominated last year’s survey (customer feedback, customer journey mapping and usability testing) have moved down in priority, indicating how far marketers have come in a short time when it comes to tackling CJO.

The State of CJO 2019: Travel and Retail take different approaches

As well as analyzing the overall trends, we looked at the differences between retail and travel. Both industries have different customer journeys – does this result in a different approach?

While overall satisfaction across retail and travel was pretty similar, there were a few areas where travel marketers were more likely to be ‘very satisfied’ compared to their retail counterparts. First up, conversion rate:

While retailers had a higher level of satisfaction overall, with 88% either somewhat or very satisfied, travel marketers were more likely to be very satisfied (45%).

This is backed up by the fact that travel marketers were more likely to be very satisfied with their ability to action insights:

So that leaves the tools and strategies each group are using to optimize the customer journey in 2019. Here is where we started to see some more differences emerge:

While both groups are focusing on marketing automation, travel is much more likely to be doing so. Travel’s other focuses fall in line with this trend toward automation – they are much more likely to be using AI and Machine Learning. The other area of difference is testing – travel are more likely to be running MVT and A/B testing programs. 

Where travel marketers are busy testing and automating, retail marketers are more likely to be using tools focused on understanding the customer journey (customer journey mapping, usability testing) and improving the customer experience (website personalization). 

This difference in focus when it comes to CJO i.e. executional vs. analytical, perhaps explains the levels of satisfaction we noted at the start of this section.

The State of CJO 2019: US marketers catch-up, while UK proceeds with caution

When it comes to satisfaction levels with CJO efforts, the UK and US were broadly similar. Both were largely satisfied with their conversion rate and the understanding of the customer journey. There were a few areas where US marketers expressed greater levels of satisfaction than their UK counterparts:

Compared to 2018, this represents quite a change – last year, US marketers were less satisfied than their UK counterparts. Again, multichannel is where this is particularly evident – last year over a third of US marketers were dissatisfied with their multichannel CJO efforts, compared to 16% in the UK. This year the levels of satisfaction are much higher.

Finally, can we understand the differences in satisfaction based on the tools US and UK marketers are using to implement CJO? While again, marketing automation and website personalization were among the top-rated strategies, the US put a greater focus on them:

The US was also more likely to be using AI and testing methods, while UK marketers put a greater focus on data analysis and data management – perhaps in response to the implementation of data privacy legislation such as GDPR in the EU. 

The State of CJO Challenges

What are the biggest challenges facing marketers when it comes to delivering an optimized customer journey?

The State of CJO Challenges: All change when it comes to customer journey challenges

In the last year, we’ve seen a major shift in CJO challenges from tools and processes towards skills and people. It seems that many marketers have now got their houses in order when it comes to their technology stack and established a CJO program, but this itself has presented fresh skillset challenges. 

Sourcing people with the skills required to make sense of customer journey optimization efforts and drive CJO forward is now the top challenge overall, where in 2018 this was ranked the 4th biggest challenge. Underscoring this is the fact that having the right tools, previously ranked 3rd, now drops to 5th place.

2019 has also seen a growth in internal silos as personalization and customer journey optimization increasingly touch multiple parts of the business. Nearly a third of marketers (32.3%) rated this as a challenge, rounding out the top three along with having the right skills (#1) and right data (#2).

Interestingly, despite the dawn of GDPR since the last survey, and the fact it holds on to the #2 spot,  having the right data is now challenging fewer marketers – 35.7% ranked it a challenge versus 45.8% in 2018.

The State of CJO Challenges: Retail skills shortage and privacy problems for travel

When it comes to the challenges retail and travel are facing individually, we see a few differences:

As the digital skills gap continues to widen, retailers are facing a skills shortage, and this is impacting the delivery of CJO. This is also evident in the fact retailers were more likely to see time and resource as a challenge (31%) compared to travel (19%).

In travel, the biggest issue is privacy – this aligns with research released earlier this year that found travel was the industry most struggling to recover its databases one year on from GDPR. Compared to retail, 38% of travel marketers rated this as a challenge, versus just 26% retailers, and 31% overall. 

While retailers reported strong recovery in terms of email databases post GDPR, having the right data to deliver CJO was actually rated the #2 challenge. This suggests there is a need within retail particularly to move beyond basic lead capture strategies, toward a more granular understanding of visitors, utilizing behavioral and contextual data rather than relying on private data. 

Finally, worth mentioning is the greater challenges travel marketers are having with demonstrating ROI, with 36% putting this in the #2 spot. For retailers this was less of a worry, coming in #6 overall at 28%. This is perhaps due to the complex, fragmented and lengthy nature of travel customer journeys versus retail ones, making tracking success difficult.

The State of CJO Challenges: UK and US mirror vertical CJO trends, but not as expected

Skills and privacy were again areas where the segments – this time markets – diverged. The US was unexpectedly perhaps, a lot more concerned than their UK counterparts about privacy regulations impacting CJO. This is perhaps due to the fact that the UK has already experienced GDPR, and had to get processes in place as a matter of business urgency:

As new privacy regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) come into effect from January 2020, the time has come for US marketers to ensure privacy is a foundation of their CJO strategy.

When it comes to matters of skills and people, both markets are under pressure but in different ways:

The UK is facing a major skills shortage, which will likely not be helped by geo-political issues such as Brexit. Related to the skills shortage is a real pressure on time and resources, with 30% rating this as a challenge versus 23% in the US. Where the US does have issues is in ownership of CJO, and by extension the problem this raises with working across internal silos.

Finally, like our travel marketers, the US marketers have money on their mind. There was a much bigger concern about demonstrating ROI with 35% seeing this as a top challenge, versus just 28% in the UK.

The State of CJO 2020

In this final section, we seek to understand what’s in store for CJO over the next year including the tools marketers will use and where they plan to invest budgets.

The State of CJO 2020: Marketers shift resources and evolve strategies to ensure CJO success

The biggest takeaway from our data was that CJO is now very firmly on the agenda. Now that marketers seem to have cracked their strategy, 2020 will be the year they work to refine this and ensure everything is in place for success. At the start of 2019, 15% of marketers had no plans to work on CJO – this is no longer an option, with just 1% saying the same going into 2020.

So what will marketers be doing, and how has it evolved to meet the new CJO challenges? Here are the top five:

1. The right tools for the job

As we’ve already explored, having the right tools for CJO is now seen as less of a challenge – however, it’s an area where marketers will continue to make investments heading into 2020. Planned investment in dedicated tools and solutions jumped up from 21% to 49%, demonstrating how important the right tech is to a successful CJO strategy

2 & 3. The right people to drive CJO

As we saw in section 2, skills and training will feature more heavily going into 2020 – 46% will train their existing team (up from 34%), and 40.5% will hire more specialists (up from 23%). Marketers know they need to invest, but finding the right talent will be the challenge.

4. Increasing budget dedicated to CJO

While budgets are still important, this actually fell down the rankings from last year, where it was the #2 priority. This suggests that marketers may have had more luck in securing the budgets needed, or are diverting this more purposefully toward people challenges.

5. Working with consultancies/agencies

This too has been squeezed out of the top three by internal people issues (last year it was #3), but still more than one third will choose to work with consultancies and agencies in 2020 – a wise choice perhaps given the skills shortage challenge.

So, given that marketers are planning to invest in more tools and technologies, where will this budget be spent?

As we can see, customer feedback is still the top strategy that marketers will rely on, but less so than in 2019. Marketing automation has made some huge gains, now the #2 strategy with 41% of marketers ranking it a priority for 2020. We can also see a greater focus on testing and technologies such as AI and machine learning compared to 2019 plans.

The State of CJO 2020: Travel to make external hires while retail look internally

The top priority in retail is, as expected given the data we’ve seen earlier in the report, is on training and hiring to fill the skills shortage. In travel however, this focus will be external:

The tools and strategies travel and retail will invest in next year broadly align with the overall trends, but with some notable differences. 

Travel will focus more on customer journey mapping – this was tied as the top tool or strategy for 2020, along with customer feedback and marketing automation. Again, this is likely related to the more complex and fragmented nature of the travel customer journey.

Data management and personalization are much bigger focuses for retail, rounding out the top three alongside customer feedback.

The State of CJO 2020: UK will outsource, while US hires specialists

In contrast to the vertical trends, the UK and US were quite different when it came to 2020 plans for investment. The top areas in the US for investment are tools and skills – is a little surprising  when remembering that skills were rated a bigger challenge in the UK. The UK seems to be planning to plug the skills gap by working with consultancies and agencies, with 44% planning this versus 30% of US marketers.

When it comes to the strategies for 2020, marketing automation came out top for the UK (47% plan to use it), while customer feedback remained a priority for the US (45% plan to use it). 

Other areas where the markets diverged included personalization – this is a higher priority in the US with almost 40% planning to use it in 2020 versus 35% in the UK. In preparation for personalization, US marketers were also more focused on understanding their data via tools like Google Analytics.

The State of Customer Journey Optimization: In Conclusion

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this report but here’s some final food for thought as you create your 2020 CJO strategy.

If 2019 was the year marketers began to crack CJO, reporting much higher levels of satisfaction with CJO efforts – could 2020 be the year marketers master CJO? There’s definitely room for growth:

The majority of marketers (57%) are doing more than half of what they’d like to be doing when it comes to the customer journey. Just 8% are ‘underachieving’, doing 25% or less of what they’d like to with CJO. The outlook then, is good, and if planned investments pay off we’ll likely see more CJO winners start to emerge in 2020.

The post The State of Customer Journey Optimization appeared first on Yieldify.

First there was e-commerce, then m-commerce, now s-commerce (or social commerce). As e-commerce continues to develop at a pace, new ways to sell are emerging on a regular basis. Keeping on top of the social media channels that deserve your attention can be a challenge. Though social commerce has grown pretty slowly (and faced a few challenges along the way) the coming together of social media and e-commerce is no longer a pipe-dream, seemingly have become a reality overnight.

Back in 2018, Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends reported that social commerce was finally gaining traction, particularly among 18-34 year olds. In 2019, it has truly arrived. In this ebook we are going to unpack everything you need to know about social commerce to help you decide if an s-commerce strategy is right for your brand.

What is Social Commerce?

Before we jump in, let’s first take a moment to define what we mean by social commerce, or s-commerce. The simple answer: social commerce is e-commerce as seen through the lens of social media. It’s the shopping experience framed so that the beginning of the journey – and very often the end of the journey too – takes place within a social media application.

This can manifest itself in different ways, but the end goal of social commerce is to create a streamlined user experience that makes it as simple as possible for social media users to purchase products during their regular use of social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Incorporating a social commerce strategy into your business doesn’t just allow for another means by which you can sell your product – it also offers new opportunities for reaching an audience and creating a customer journey that suits their needs.

Why use Social Commerce?

So far, so good. But if social commerce is only taking off now, do you really need to get a strategy in place? Let’s take a look at some numbers.

As of 2019, social media still only accounts for about 9% of all referrals to e-commerce sites – but this won’t be the case for long. In two years this rate has grown by 110% – faster than any other form of referral. This rate of growth has caused many to sit up and take note, with adoption among US retailers doubling between 2017 and 2018:

So, as we can see by the growth in referral traffic, consumers are certainly using social commerce to discover products they’re interested in, but what about actually buying them? In 2018, 55% of consumers reported buying something after discovering it via social media, with 44% buying immediately, and 11% purchasing the item at a later date.

These figures will continue to grow as both social media platforms and businesses better understand what audiences are looking for from their social media e-commerce. Increasingly, it looks like enabling consumers to buy natively within their favorite social media platforms is the direction we’re headed, so let’s take a look at what’s already on offer…

Where can I see Social Commerce in action?

At this point, you can find active examples of social commerce on almost every social media platform you can think of. This doesn’t mean that all platforms or equally worthy of your attention, though. Whilst e-commerce in general has experienced an upward trend year on year more or less since it first came about in the 1990s, social commerce has faltered here and there.

This is because it’s taken a while for both retailers and social media businesses alike to understand how users want to interact with their social media commerce opportunities. But whilst ecommerce business need to look at how customers’ needs are unique in their industry, social commerce also requires at least a rudimentary understanding of how customers’ needs and desires change depending on which social media platform they are using. Even the social media businesses themselves have struggled to work this out on occasion – Twitter, notably, has actually said good-buy to it’s biggest social commerce function, the ‘buy’ button.

Whilst social commerce can be found across any number of websites and apps, we’re going to take a look at the big four. These are the social media businesses that have best worked out how to utilize their platforms to become the most popular social e-commerce sites around.

Facebook

In many ways, Facebook is the original s-commerce king. Whilst other massive social networks like MySpace had come before, Facebook was the first to really look into the benefits of combining social media with e-commerce. This relatively long history in social commerce means that Facebook has perhaps the clearest understanding of the form, and is best positioned to create the tools that will best help businesses and consumers alike. It also has an unparalleled audience reach – over 2.3 billion active monthly users.

Even though its reputation as the most relevant social media business has long since slipped, Facebook’s huge user base and progressive s-commerce policies mean it’s still top of the pile for e-commerce. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken of his disinterest in the unnecessary monetization of Facebook’s social commerce, saying that an open and accessible format that doesn’t charge retailers to do business on the platform will ultimately encourage them to spend more on Facebook’s advertising services.

“We’re going to build more tools for people to buy things directly through the platform. As those products that we build help businesses convert better, [Facebook] will be more valuable to them, and therefore that will translate into higher bids on advertising.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook speaking during the company’s Q1 2019 earnings call

The tools Facebook are implementing are varied, but include the ability for customers to directly contact retailers through Facebook’s messaging app, and expanded payment methods through this same channel. The video advertising opportunities are hard to ignore too, offering businesses the chance to feature targeted ads before user-uploaded videos on one of the biggest websites on the planet.

Instagram

Instagram is another big winner in the field. This is for two reasons: firstly, it’s a visual format, which lends itself to sales. Adverts are integrated seamlessly into both the user’s image feed and the short-term ‘Stories’ feature. Those businesses that can best take advantage of the format – using eye-grabbing visuals that fit the aesthetics of the app and don’t feel overtly like ‘adverts’ stand to win big.

This is in no small part due to Instagram’s other big benefit – it is owned by Facebook, and is being given as much, if not more, social commerce attention than Facebook. This means the tools at hand to help businesses sell are amongst the best available, and that new features are frequently being released.

The ‘Shopping on Instagram‘ feature allows for products in a photo to be tagged, and this years big game-changer, Instagram Checkout, allows for the entire customer journey to be completed within the app. As this is rolled out beyond initial beta partners, Instagram will become the s-commerce platform to beat.

Pinterest

A bigger player among the social e-commerce platforms than it is perhaps amongst social media more generally, Pinterest’s importance might be a surprise. Like Instagram, though, the website is heavy on aspirational visuals. Its audience is skewed heavily towards a female user base, and will suit certain businesses more than others. Those looking to sell products that fit Pinterest’s interests (home furnishings, cookware, clothing and other beautiful things!) are able to create ‘shoppable pins’ that users can both save onto their own boards for later, or use for immediate in-app purchases.

Pinterest’s real benefit for retailers is that, more than any other social media platform, it is used specifically by people who are interested in buying things. People go to Facebook to catch up with friends, and to Instagram for aspirational holiday photos. Pinterest, though, is where people go when they want to imagine buying new products.

“Pinterest is where we see a highly engaged user who’s actively searching for inspiration to purchase from Hunter”

Alasdhair Willis, Creative Director, Hunter Boots

Features include the ability for businesses to upload their entire catalogue as ‘shoppable pins’ as well as new developments in targeted, personalized recommendations. In September 2019, Pinterest announced a ‘shop the look’ feature, which will allow pins to be tagged with up to 25 different items that can be purchased.

Snapchat

When Twitter deemed its experiment with the ‘Buy’ button a failure, and ceased its support for the feature, there were two arguments for why it hadn’t been a success. Some said that Twitter was simply a giant on its way out, and the lack of interest in social commerce on the site was due to a decreasing level of interest in the site itself. Others claimed it was evidence users weren’t as interested in social media e-commerce as hoped. Snapchat suggests both of these are wrong.

Since adopting a stronger social commerce strategy, Snapchat has actually stemmed its declining user base and improved revenues significantly. It’s the perfect example of finding what a specific social media user base wants, and catering to it.

Where Instagram and Pinterest are aspirational sellers, Snapchat has positioned itself more practically. By teaming up with Amazon, users have been able to snap photos of items they’d like, and find them for sale with the retailer. Adverts on the app have been made shoppable too – users don’t need to click through to an external page, and can buy natively without leaving the app.

E-commerce brands leveraging Social Commerce

So, now we’re more familiar with what’s on offer from the platforms, which brands are using social media to sell?

At the forefront, we have the larger brands who have the cachet and the scale to be included in the beta testing of new social commerce features, such as Instagram Checkout (currently available to less than 30 brands). While brands like Zara and Burberry have been able to try out this new feature since March 2019 – the real results won’t be known until it’s rolled out to a wider range of brands. So let’s take a look at one of the features that is more widely available – Instagram Shopping.

Instagram shopping is available pretty much globally (44 countries to be exact), and the results are rolling in. E-commerce platform BigCommerce actually followed up with those stores lucky enough to get in on the beta to understand the kind of results Instagram shopping is driving, and the outlook is positive, with brands big and small seeing sizeable increases in traffic and revenue.

Barbour is one example of a brand that has seen great results from Instagram Shopping. If you’re on mobile you can click through on the post below to see it in action!

As Laura Dover, Global Communication Director at the brand told Instagram:

“Since we started to use the feature, our sales from Instagram have increased by 42% and traffic to our website from Instagram is up 98%”

But what if you’re just starting out, or don’t have access to trials of new features? One of the easiest ways to get started with social commerce is via ads. Again, it’s important to think about the audience on each platform, and the mindset they are in! For example, Instagram ads are well suited to travel companies like Jack’s Flight Club or Easyjet, as they can take advantage of a user base who are frequently being exposed to visuals of stunning international locations. Similarly, Pinterest ads can be used to highlight homewares to users who have been looking at gorgeous kitchens and immaculately designed bedrooms.

Another approach is to take advantage of influencers and nano-influencers – people whose tastes inform those of their followers, which can number anywhere from a few thousand to tens of millions. Influencers can be offered sponsored collaborations, like the one Shackleton Whiskey offered user @arranwitheford – a travel photographer with 64,000 Instagram followers. The photos in his sponsored post start much the same as his usual entries – gorgeous landscapes that are unrelated to the sponsor. But users are drawn in through these images to the warming, cosy shots of branded whiskey.

A more organic way to create content is to get your customers to make it for you. Subscription box companies such as Mindful Chef, Loot Crate and Birchbox deliver their products to consumers in beautifully designed packages that encourage photo-sharing via social media. With every delivery, social media users fill their feeds with custom-made content that their followers will see and, hopefully, be tempted by.

How to benefit from Social Commerce?

It’s increasingly easy to combine social media and e-commerce to benefit your business. In fact, social commerce is flexible enough to offer multiple opportunities to grow and develop your business along the customer journey, through the different stages of acquisition, conversion and even customer retention.

The power of social media lies in the fact that it can play a key role across all stages of the customer journey – the catch is that it requires a considered approach. People need to hear different things from a brand depending on which stage of the customer journey they’re currently at.

Callum McCahon, Strategy Director, Born Social

Acquisition

Acquisition is the area that companies are most inclined to use social media and social commerce for currently. There’s no doubt that the large audiences offered by the likes of Facebook are a huge temptation for any company looking to expand their customer base.

We’ve already seen a couple of ways companies can introduce people to their brand above – influencers are an excellent voice for sharing new ideas on a large scale. Well-placed adverts are another way to put yourself in front of new eyes for the first time, too.

The key is to present a clear vision of who you are as a brand, and what your company does. For Callum McCahon, Strategy Director at social media agency Born Social this means creating an emotional connection:

“At the awareness stage, it’s about identifying new potential customers and introducing them to your brand. We advise going as broad as possible with your targeting – that’s how you build a brand over the long term. This is your longer term brand building work and it requires communicating on an emotional level with your audience. “

“On social, this requires distilling your message right down – you need a single minded proposition and you need to communicate that with absolute clarity. Show people something interesting. Don’t get dragged down in sales messaging or a clear call to action at this stage – it’s about making a powerful first impression and making your audience feel something.“

Though we’ve already seen how different social media platforms have different uses and audiences, it’s still important that your cross-platform presence is consistent in both voice and style. Draw your audience in with effective visuals – particularly on platforms heavy on that medium, like Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat.

If your aim is to encourage new customers to click through to your website, make sure that once they arrive at the website their customer journey is a relevant one. One way to do this is to personalize the website via referral source targeting to present specific content to users depending on where they have arrived from.

For example, Simply Cook, showed a notification to customers arriving from Facebook from a particular offer on Facebook. This allowed for a smooth customer experience, and increased the likelihood of a new customer engaging with the website. Not only that, but it helped ensure that acquisition budget was not wasted, as it asked those visitors for their email address in exchange for a discount, yet another reason to convert.

This campaign alone generated over 7,000 new leads for Simply Cook, and opens to door to delivering personalised offers to other visitor segments arriving on site from different traffic sources, for example, those arriving from vegetarian or gluten-free content on Facebook.

Conversion

Social media and social commerce also offers opportunities to raise conversions on your site, by utilising social posts to encourage customers to make a purchase via the power of social proof. Bathroom retailer soak.com encourages Instagram users to share their home bathroom decor with the hashtag ‘#mysoakstyle’, and features Instagram posts on their website alongside opportunities to ‘shop the look’.

Including other users’ experiences, as framed through social media, is an excellent way to provide social proof. By showing customers that other people are already buying these products or using these services, it’s possible to instil a sense of belief that they are worth buying. This can be done in any number of ways, including live updates that highlight trending products on social. Alternatively, the simple featuring of reviews from sites like Facebook can allow customers to develop trust for a business, seeing the success others have had in their experiences.

Your social channels themselves are a powerful extension of your website and can be used to push followers and fans who are more ready to buy further down the funnel, toward conversion. Callum McCahon, Strategy Director at social media agency Born Social explains:

“We see social as a really powerful conversion tool, giving people the nudge they need to convert. At this stage, it’s about communicating a clear, rational message. This is where you can explore personalization, making sure what you’re communicating is relevant to what the user needs to hear in order to convert.

This is the time for a clear call to action – make that desired action obvious and frictionless. Remember that most people scroll through social at lightning pace, so don’t be afraid to push the frequency here – people often need to see a piece of content 2-3 times before they take the desired action. “

Customer Retention

Once you’ve made a sale, social media offers a range of ways to both retain the customer and involve them actively in spreading the word to more potential buyers. One key way to do this is to involve your social media when promoting any loyalty program you might have.

This might involve simple promotion via your channels, as beauty eCommerce retailer Feelunique does on its Instagram feed. By sharing a tempting offer in a bright, simple image, Feelunique grabs the users attention. The full loyalty program is spelled out in a little more detail in the caption, and their bio leads to a custom page featuring all recent Instagram activity, and shoppable or relevant links for each post.

Companies can also promote special offers for loyalty scheme members enabled through a call to action that could include sharing social media tags or posts, or signing up to social media channels. Increasingly, companies are using social media platforms like Facebook to enable log-ins on their website, linking social commerce and e-commerce more closely.

Social Commerce: In Conclusion

However you plan to involve social commerce with your business, you’ll find there are huge opportunities for growth, conversion and customer retention. Remember to think about how the audiences on each social media channel differ, whilst aiming to keep a sense of consistency in your messaging regardless of where it’s being seen. With thought and relevant content, you’ll be well on your way to receiving the many benefits social commerce offers!

The post The Secrets of Social Commerce appeared first on Yieldify.

There’s a lot to think about when running an e-commerce business. At any given time, you’ll be looking at how to reach new customers and drive traffic to your site, how to increase your conversion rate, how to retain those customers who have already shopped with you, and how to raise the average order value on your site. All of these are pretty big topics in themselves – but there is one solution that can help on all four fronts: great content marketing.

Informative, practical content marketing can do wonders for your business. It can draw people in, give them a reason to return (even when they aren’t necessarily looking to make a purchase), and be a major tool for boosting your conversion rate. In fact, the Aberdeen Group found that websites using content marketing had an average conversion rate almost six times higher than those without.

Ten years ago, the phrase ‘content marketing’ generally meant an uninspiring company blog – but now there are dozens of ways it can manifest itself across your website, from magazines to videos, quizzes to think pieces. And each of these can be used to target exactly the results you want them to. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of e-commerce: a fantastic multi-use tool that can be easily adapted to meet the needs of your business at any given moment.

In this guide, we’ll take you through seven ways content marketing can boost your business to help develop or improve your e-commerce content marketing strategy.

Use Case #1: Curation

Sprawling online stores offering hundreds or even thousands of products are fantastic for consumers who know exactly what they’re looking for. But they can also harbour a wealth of missed opportunities for those who don’t. Great products can get lost amongst all the other items available.

Curation is a great way to tackle this problem. As one of the most accessible forms of content marketing it’s a resource light and easy way to create regular, fresh content for your website. But that’s not all, more importantly it performs a valuable function for potential customers in need of some extra inspiration or guidance. This dual functionality is what you should keep in mind across all your content marketing efforts:

• Does it provide value to customers?
• Is it balanced by your business’ interests.

So let’s take a look at how one brand curates content in a valuable way for its visitors. Europe’s largest beauty eCommerce retailer, Feelunique, offers curated ideas and recommendations on its website in a section called The Lounge. The goal is to help visitors discover products they might otherwise have missed, inspire them to try different looks, and highlight on-trend products from the Feelunique online catalogue.

This is particularly relevant in a industry such as beauty, where digital has driven an explosion of options – in fact a Beauty Digital Brand Report from earlier this year said that 65% of women feel overloaded with options – and this includes the impact of influencers, media and celebrities.

Feelunique tackles this issue with it’s Hot List, a monthly curated selection of new and trending products. To get the content in front of the right visitors, at the right moment the brand highlights this useful content to those visitors looking at an item on that month’s Hot List. If they’re not ready to buy, this offers them a chance to discover what else made the list that they might be interested in. If they’re in-market for the product, highlighting the fact it comes highly recommended by Feelunique’s experts is a powerful form of social proof.

Use Case #2: Education

A growing trend in e-commerce is the use of content marketing for educational purposes. A survey by The Economist Group found that 71% of consumers were put off buying from a business when the content they were engaging with came off too strongly as a sales pitch. Avoiding this trap whilst still creating content that benefits both you and the customer can be difficult. One sure fire way is to make sure the focus is on the customer first, and your product or service second.

Travel content marketing is a great opportunity for informative articles that can benefit everyone. Budget travel company Megabus have on their website a wide selection of pitch-perfect travel guides to each of the cities they serve. Each guide is thoughtfully put together, with a rundown of each city’s top tourist attractions, as well as information on local shopping and nightlife.

Megabus also think about what will be most relevant to their customer base, providing extra information on the best things to do for free in the city – meaning that the articles are not only relevant for customers on the website, but also an entry point for travellers on a budget who might then consider using the services of the company.

This sort of content can also be used to provide added value for customers – a person hesitating over whether to buy tickets to Birmingham could be directed to a city guide, demonstrating exactly what they could get up to in the city.

Use Case #3: Delivering a Personalized Experience

As well as content that is relevant to your website, there are plenty of ways to present specific and targeted content that is personalized for each customer. There are two popular ways to do this…

The first is by creating content like quizzes that allow the customer to make several different choices. Each decision tells you more about who your customer is, and what they want from you. At the end of the quiz, a product or recommendation can be made that is specific to all the answers given. In this case, most of the user’s time reading the marketing is spent personalizing, and only at the very end are they presented with a hyper relevant opportunity.

The second approach is to provide a quick and simple personalisation option up front, that allows for the customer to be taken directly to the most relevant content for them. This is particularly useful for businesses selling to broad but defined categories.

As an example, when curly hair product specialist Ouidad redesigned their site in 2017, the brand organized everything by Curl Type to personalize the experience for women with Loose, Classic, Tight, or Kinky curls. Each curl type has unique characteristics and needs so Ouidad ensured that all products, site content, and UGC are organized in this way.

In order to personalize the customer journey for visitors who discover Ouidad via its educational blog the brand created a diagonsitc tool ‘What’s my curl type’. Presenting this to someone already seeking educational content, helps further refine the customer journey and present them with relevant product options. This campaign drove an 11% uplift in conversion rate, demonstrating the power of a personalized approach.

Use Case #4: Boosting Customer Acquisition with Content Marketing

Content marketing is a great way to attract new customers as you have the chance to disseminate your content across a wide variety of channels, in a variety of formats.

One content format that’s rising in importance for e-commerce brands is video – and YouTube offers the perfect platform through which to attract new customers. YouTube visitors watch almost 5 billion videos every day making it a great vehicle for promoting brand awareness and building a loyal following.

It’s important when creating content for this channel to understand consumer behavior. An analysis of consumer behavior from Nielsen found that 81% of video viewing sessions capture people’s attention. On YouTube, viewing sessions aren’t passive. Viewers are actively engaged with an influencer, or something they want to learn, discover, or share. YouTube recently released an analysis of over 1 billion videos and found that Product reviews and ‘how to’ videos are the most popular content types – a perfect opportunity for e-commerce content marketers.

Video tutorials or ‘how to’ videos, offer an excellent way to use content marketing to bring new customers to your website. Increasingly, when people need to learn how to do something – from learning an instrument to changing a tyre – they turn to the internet for answers.

Bathroom retailer Soak.com recognized this need to learn, and found that it fit well with their offering. Specialist bathroom and plumbing knowledge is often rare (and expensive) to come by so the brand put together a selection of how-to tutorials that people can use for free.

The videos themselves are short, simple and don’t push new products – but on both the website and externally on Youtube, the description below the video prompts the viewer to wonder if they might be in the market to buy. It’s a simple way to turn people searching ‘how to change a shower head’ or ‘how to bleed a radiator’ into potential customers.

There are plenty of approaches businesses can take to create quality video content. Retailers might benefit most from how-to tutorials (be that bathroom repairs, cooking tips and recipes, or outfit planning videos), but travel companies can also consider using them to create brief city guides. Video testimonials are another powerful way to build trust with new customers, or share company values.

Just remember to keep it useful, entertaining and snappy, or visitors will lose interest  – and you might lose their business. The ideal length is generally no more than a minute or so in length. Soak.com’s tutorials are an excellent example of how to achieve your goals and maintain a snappy pace.

Use Case #5: Improving SEO with Content Marketing

Everything we’ve covered so far in this guide has the additional benefit of improving SEO. Well written blog articles, video and other content types are all key to a well rounded SEO strategy, especially in e-commerce where product descriptions and short blurbs don’t always lend themselves particularly well to seamlessly integrating vital keywords.

If we take a look back at haircare brand Ouidad, we can see how a smart keyword strategy on their blog paid off when it came to improving SEO and driving traffic to their site:

But keywords aren’t all that content marketing has to offer when it comes to SEO. Google now accounts for over 200 factors when it comes to determining a SERP’s order, so it can be really difficult to optimize for them all. So where should you focus your efforts? One of the most important factors to optimize for that will have a big impact on your rankings is domain authority.

For Google, your domain authority is your reputation as a thought leader for a particular topic or area. The benefits of content marketing for e-commerce when it comes to building a ‘good’ domain authority are twofold. Firstly, Google ranks content off a variety of engagement metrics, so creating quality content that is compelling for your visitors will have a positive impact. If your content is good enough, in comes the second benefit – earning high quality inbound links from other websites in your industry. By creating content that puts the customer’s needs ahead of the immediate desire to advertise and sell, your company’s website is more likely to be shared via other sites. This has the obvious benefit of providing potential customers with more ways to discover your brand, but it also helps boost your SEO.

Use Case #6: Customer Retention

A strong content marketing strategy is also an excellent way of making sure existing customers keep returning to your site.

Canadian sustainable fashion brand Frank And Oak does a great job of this with its online blog The Handbook. The brand is able to go much deeper into the stories behind its products, materials and eco-conscious processes to really let visitors build an up close and personal relationship with the brand and its values.

The blog focuses on lifestyle and cultural content, rather than solely on products, seeking to provide readers with ‘stories and advice on living good and green’. For many users the site becomes not only somewhere to buy clothing and accessories, but a destination for advice on something they care about – sustainability and being a conscious consumer. The content is then utilized by Frank And Oak to nurture both new and existing customers, enticing them to learn more be it via email, social or on the site itself.

Some brands have taken this concept of editorial content to whole new levels, building their e-commerce offering around it. Semaine is one such example, as an ‘online magazine meets concept shop’ it offers a curated selection from a new tastemaker each week, resulting in an ever changing selection that keeps visitors coming back for more. Everything about a tastemakers lifestyle, from the music they listen to, to the food they eat is showcased in a heady blend of content and commerce.

Use Case #7: Increasing AOV with Content

When you’re running an e-commerce business, it can be all too easy to spend all your time worrying about how many customers you have. Sometimes another important factor is left behind: how much is each customer spending?

Increasing your Average Order Value (AOV) is a powerful method of improving overall sales, and there are plenty of ways to go about it. Unsurprisingly, content marketing again makes an appearance.

Online butchers Farmison & Co have an extensive collection of e-commerce content on their site. They have blog posts detailing the importance of animal welfare, informative pieces that educate customers on different cuts of meat and, perhaps most importantly, a lot of recipes.

Farmison’s recipe section is aspirational. It’s filled with gorgeous looking photos of delicious dishes created by renowned chefs. Each dish uses a cut of meat available from the Farmison website and many feature more than one purchasable ingredient. The recipe section means that customers buying meat on the website have a resource to fall back on when deciding what to cook – and that Farmison have another location to push some of the more niche ingredients that customers might otherwise shy away from, unsure of how to use them. As an added bonus, Farmison have made it easy for customers to share the dishes with others, raising the potential for new customers to discover the brand.

Making content marketing work for you

As we’ve seen, there are so many different uses for content marketing on your e-commerce site. The question is how best to create a strategy that works for you. This should be shaped by a number of factors, including who your target audience is, and what products you sell. But the beauty of content marketing is the many different ways it can be used, allowing for you to create an e-commerce content strategy that meets your specific objectives.

The best strategies often utilize several of the tools listed above, to provide different targeted approaches for new customers, existing customers, seasonal offerings and more. The question isn’t if content marketing work for you – it’s simply which of the many tools available will work best.

The post Content Marketing for E-commerce appeared first on Yieldify.

Many marketers are still relying on a ‘one size fits all approach’ that doesn’t quite meet the rapidly rising consumer expectations around website personalization and privacy. In this guide, we take a look at new ways brands can approach email capture and lead generation to ensure a better customer experience in a newly privacy-conscious world.

Email Capture: The Current Landscape

A successful email capture strategy is about appealing to the right people, and making sure the leads that you generate are real and valuable opportunities. Sounds pretty simple, but having created thousands of email capture campaigns for our clients, we’ve found that appearances can be deceptive.

So what are the key challenges facing marketers when it comes to email capture?

One of the biggest challenges facing marketers is the rise in consumer awareness of and expectations around privacy when it comes to their data. In Europe, the implementation of GDPR legislation in May 2018 saw the average marketer lose 23% of their database, and more than one-third lost over 30%.

The good news? Marketers have been forced to focus on engagement during the email capture process, leading to better quality, more engaged leads.

Already we’ve seen unexpectedly strong recovery from those affected by GDPR, with retail marketers reporting a recovery to 101% of their pre-GDPR levels.

Other industries have struggled more though, with travel marketing databases still only at 74% of their previous levels. It’s also worth noting that larger businesses, whilst harder hit by the legislation, have recovered at a higher rate than smaller ones.

Though this recovery is generally better than many had expected, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. For the last year, email capture strategies have been focused primarily on recovering numbers whilst maintaining compliance with GDPR. Now, as marketing database levels begin to return to normal, there’s an opportunity to re-evaluate what successful lead generation looks like.

Aside from the wider challenge of privacy, and laws like GDPR, there are a few challenges closer to home that marketers also need to consider:

1. Email capture campaigns can be too obtrusive, displaying at inopportune moments is more of an annoyance than a benefit to your visitors.
2. At the other end of the scale, many strategies aren’t obtrusive enough (think about newsletter sign-up forms hidden in website footers!).
3. In today’s content-heavy world, the offer needs to be compelling – do your visitors really want another newsletter in their inbox?
4. But at the same time, discounts, while compelling can create all sorts of problems with customer expectations, as well as impacting your margin.
5. Today’s approach to email capture does what it says on the tin – captures emails. Is this really enough data to create a personalized experience for your visitors?

Consider this ebook your guide to a new era of email capture. By taking a smarter, more thoughtful approach to the process, utilizing website personalization, and offering customers opportunities at the right moment, and in the right way, you can bring in genuinely useful leads from customers who are excited to hear from you!

The best way to achieve this? Follow the four ‘P’s of excellent email capture…

1. Presentation

Where and how you ask for a user’s information, and which information you ask for, is the core foundation upon which successful customer database growth is built. Regardless of your other efforts to improve engagement and sign-up rates, if the customer doesn’t have the opportunity to share their data with you, you aren’t going to get it.

Making sure that your email capture opportunity is presented in a way that is accessible and appealing is your first priority, then. As such, the presentation includes a number of things.

First, there’s the seemingly simple question of what information you ask for. The best email capture strategies can assist you in gathering a wealth of information from prospective clients, and allows you to better target your messaging in the future.

Name, age, gender, income – all of these can be incredibly useful information for a marketer. They also require a lot of different fields that the customer needs to fill in, and this sort of commitment is frequently more than they are willing to give.

A better approach is to gather as much data as possible elsewhere and keep your form focused on as few details as possible.

Most lead capture forms will have one simple box – email. After all, email is the only piece of data you need to guarantee a second chance to engage your customers. But you could be making your lead generation forms work harder with a few simple tweaks.

The key to gathering extra data is by making the sharing process as easy, and as standardized as possible. Yieldify has recently added the ability to include dropdown menus in lead capture forms. This offers an added layer of insight for marketers in a way that makes things easier for both parties – less typing for the customer, and simple, easily actionable data for the marketer.

Once you’ve decided what will be on your form, you need to decide how to present it. Many companies feature a simple lead capture form in the footer of their website – an easy and simple positioning that ensures visibility on every page within their site.

The downside of this is that, as we’ve mentioned, it isn’t a particularly active form of email capture. It relies on the customer scrolling down, seeing a static box in the corner of their screen, and choosing to engage with it.

At the other end of the scale, there’s the overlay option or ‘pop up’. Poorly implemented overlays can be jarring for users and have the potential to compromise your brand, so it’s important to be really careful with how you present these to your visitors.

But how? Enter behavioral segmentation.

Understanding the right moment to present an overlay to visitors is vital – examining your data will help you identify a few likely ‘moments of truth’ along the customer journey where it makes the most sense to target your visitors.

Then once you understand more about your visitor behavior you can build an engaging email capture campaign based on this, for example, the number sessions your visitor has had, or if they’re showing exit intent. And that brings us nicely along to our next ‘P’…

2. Picking your moment

One of the most common trends in lead capture notifications is for pop-ups that open immediately upon entering the site. This is a great example of an aggressive campaign that can often do more damage than good. Potential customers, who are perhaps visiting the website for the first time, are faced with an intrusive notification that blocks their ability to navigate the site before they’ve even had a chance to decide if they’d like to explore further.

Rather than leap at the first opportunity to sign your customers up, consider the customer journey, and how each customer’s intent varies from page to page throughout your site.

On your homepage, a viewer could have any number of goals – many will be first-time visitors looking to see what you have on offer – hiding this behind a pop-up can be off-putting. Once they’ve selected an item or product to look at in more detail, there’s a clearer idea of their intent. If they click to put an item in their basket, there’s more understanding and opportunity still.

The further down the customer journey you place your call to action, the more committed and thus valuable a customer you have. You’ve also picked up a lot of data about that customer which you wouldn’t have had if you asked for their email on their arrival. Clothes size, preferred holiday destination, even a sense of income – all these can be gathered from the customer journey.

Travel brand Thomas Cook Airlines considered customer intent when placing an email capture strategy on their website. With Yieldify’s help, the brand implemented a notification that displayed when the customer showed intent to leave.

By offering customers a chance to save the flight they’d shown interest in, Thomas Cook Airlines both offered a useful service and provided a clear opt-in to receive remarketing for said flight, or other products like it, at a later point – a win-win for both customer and business.

Occasionally asking a visitor for data upfront can work – particularly for businesses where a personalized approach is the main USP. Firstleaf Wine Club want to ensure its visitors are able to discover the best wines for their tastes, and it uses a smart strategy to do this – a quiz!

Covering preferred color, countries of origin, and more visitors get access to the full personalized recommendations in exchange for their email address.

By taking a fun, engaging, and above all useful approach to data capture Firstleaf are able to gather more insight than a single box for an email address could provide, meaning more data that the business could use to personalize future experiences. And this, really, is the stage that will mark the new era of lead generation out…

3. Personalization

Now more than ever we have the opportunity to personalize our marketing approaches. This obviously includes using the data we have to make sure that emails and newsletters are catered to the individual’s needs and interests – but it extends also to the initial moves we make to secure that data.

Personalization offers us the ability to capture leads in a way that makes the customer confident they’ve made the right decision in sharing their data.

A simple version of this is acknowledging whether the customer is new to the site, or a returning visitor. When Marks & Spencer upgraded its website it ensured that new customers could be greeted appropriately whilst returning visitors were recognized and offered an opportunity to re-engage with the new website:

Personalization prior to sign-up can take place just by acknowledging the smallest of things, like the type of device being used to access the website. An email capture notification that is catered to customers using their mobile device to browse the site will be easier to use and thus more likely to yield results than a one-size-fits-all notification.

A great format to use for mobile devices is the floating button as it accounts for the lack of real estate available on smaller screens, and it’s also going to garner interest from those with intent since visitors need to click to interact. Learn more about floating buttons in this blog post.

4. Provocation

When customers are hesitant to share their data with you, offering a small incentive is often the final touch that can provoke action. In fact, offers, deals, and news of sales are frequently the provocation that helps bring in new leads by the droves.

A DMA report suggests that these represent the reasons for 60% of newsletter sign-ups. Our own data shows that post-GDPR while offering an incentive was one of the top tactics used by marketers seeking to rebuild their customer database, it was slightly edged out by sign-ups without incentives.

This is important to recognize, as it means you won’t always need to offer discounts or immediate incentives in order to achieve your email capture goals. In fact, in many cases, teasing promises of exclusive news and future offers will be enough to draw customers in – particularly those already interested in your brand.

When you do need to offer a more immediate incentive for email capture, be aware of the options available to you. A content tease is often a good way to bring in completely new customers. Think of Firstleaf’s quiz, the results of which were only revealed after an email address had been offered up. Or if you are going to offer an incentive you can again leverage behavioral segmentation, or triggering based on basket value to ensure you’re only targeting the visitors with the highest potential and value.

Gaming site Bethard drew in new customers with a subtle notification that alerted new customers to a deal that would give them free credit to start their betting with.

The campaign encouraged customers to make a deposit, which would give them an extra €10 credit for free. By drawing customers in first with a deal, that then committed them to engage directly with the site, the campaign provided an uplift in deposits of 23% and, in doing so, generated plenty of leads as well.

There are plenty of other ways to use incentives to provoke engagement from customers. New customers can often be signed up with immediate money-off deals, or promises of free shipping for members. Existing users can be brought into the lead generation fold with notifications alerting them to referral systems, through which they can earn rewards for introducing friends as new customers.

Smart Email Capture: In Conclusion

Utilizing the four ‘P’s is key to a savvy, flexible email capture campaign. Clear, simple, and unobtrusive presentation, picking the perfect moment to engage, personalizing the approach, and provoking the customers to action with the right incentives.

These are the ways you can separate yourself from your competitors and ensure every customer visiting your business’s website is excited to sign up for whatever you are offering.

And if you’re ready to start giving some of these strategies a try, why not speak with one of our experts? Click here to book your appointment!

The post Smart Email Capture Strategies appeared first on Yieldify.

Just like no two vacations are the same, no two customer journeys are the same.

With continued evolution in digital booking, the opportunity to book how, when and where you want grows by the day. Where the travel booking journey was once fairly linear, there’s now a never-ending multiplicity of customer journeys, each of which are complex are in their own right.

Knowing this, you’d be forgiven for wondering where to start as a travel marketer. At Yieldify, we work with hundreds of travel websites around the world – from monoliths such as Megabus to smaller package holiday sites. We’ve seen that amongst the complexity, there are clear trends to be found if you know which segments to look at. So that’s what we’ve done here.

Surveying over 1000 UK and US consumers who have researched or purchased travel products online in the past year, we asked them about how, where and why they book their travel. In addition, we interviewed key thought leaders in travel marketing to add color to the data.

The resulting report is a fascinating picture of booking behavior and how much it differs by five key segments: generation, gender, vacation type, market and product. Each of the following chapters not only illuminates current customer behavior and expectations, but reveals numerous opportunities for brands to improve the customer journey through personalizing to a segment’s specific needs.

Read on to find out ‘how we book now’…

The Contributors

This report is the result of quantitative research and interviews with the following audiences and individuals:

• 1005 UK and US travel consumers*
• Eilidh Whyte, Group Airline Display and Affiliate Manager, Thomas Cook Airlines
• Wai Lin Yip, Corporate Director E-Commerce, Arlo Hotels
• Sarah Hawkins, Senior Digital Optimization Executive, Virgin Trains
• Marie Tracy, Group Marketing Manager, TravelUp
• Sophie Herbert, Marketing Director, Beds and Bars
• Mark Murray, Head of Travel, Yieldify

*This research was conducted by Censuswide, an independent market research consultancy, with 1005 Respondents who have researched and purchased travel related products online in the last 12 months: 503 in the UK and 502 in the US. Fieldwork was carried out between 09.05.2019 – 14.05.2019. Censuswide abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society. All survey panellists are double opted in, which is in line with MRS code of conduct and ESOMAR standards.

Executive Summary

Over the last decade, technology has transformed how consumers book their travel, but not how you might expect…

One of the biggest changes technology has brought to travel is the ability for consumers to plan and book every bit of their holiday without the need for a third party such as a travel agent. But while innovation has made this possible, it hasn’t necessarily made the experience more efficient: consumers are now spending more time planning and booking trips.

Below, we break down the stages of the travel customer journey, highlighting the key findings from our research.

Planning a trip

The average customer now starts to research where to go on their next trip 4.19 months before departure, with 41.7% spending more time on research and booking than they did five years ago.

In 2013, research from Expedia found that customers browse upwards of 38 sites before purchase — our research shows that customers are now likely to be visiting many more across the 4+ months they spend researching and booking.

The question is – why?

The increasing complexity of the customer journey is part of the answer. Now that consumers act as their own travel agents – many of them booking each part of their vacation separately – there are multiple purchase journeys to each trip. More than four in ten (42%) of consumers agree the process of researching or purchasing travel goods online is fragmented and complex:

‘Analysis paralysis’ also lies behind the lengthiness of booking: as the number of travel websites has exploded, the research stage of the customer journey now has no limits. This means a longer booking funnel, with more work for consumers, and more chances to lose them.

Making a booking

What drives consumers to book varies across demographic, market and type of travel product, and this report will deep-dive into each. But what’s clear is that convenience is king – nine out of ten respondents (90%) say that the convenience of the booking process is important to them.

As ever, there are contradictions – despite their love of convenience, almost eight in ten (78%) travelers say that they always visit multiple sites when deciding where to go on holiday — although 75% would be happy to book all aspects of their holiday on one site.

When it comes to deciding which sites to visit, travelers still cite price as the top motivator, but this only just edges previous experience (48.6% vs 45.7%), indicating the importance of cultivating loyalty as a travel marketer.

Reviews (41.3%), an easy booking process (39.4%) and comparison websites (33.5%) also play a key role in consumers choosing to visit travel sites, highlighting how the metasearch experience has become the norm in the eyes of the consumer.

Personalizing the customer journey

In seeking to deliver on consumer need for trust and convenience, travel brands have turned to personalization. But what do consumers make of these efforts?

Consumer attitudes towards personalization are somewhat contradictory. Despite privacy concerns, travelers are broadly in favor of a personalized experience when booking a holiday. This is not surprising, given that many applications of personalization make the customer journey smoother – recommendations, real-time availability and saved preferences were all rated positively.

For consumers, ‘good’ personalization is all about the value exchange – consumers are willing to share data if they’re getting something in return. According to our research, over a third (35%) say that they’re not comfortable with brands collecting and sharing their data. They are, however, willing to share their data if they get something in return, such as cheaper rates (42%) or improved service (38%).

Personalization is the key to delivering a more seamless customer journey, but many travel brands struggle to get this right. “In terms of personalization, travel is a little behind the retail sector, but it’s catching up fast,” explains Mark Murray, Head of Travel at Yieldify.

“Data is getting bigger and bigger each day, but harnessing it effectively to serve the right experience to users with the right content is becoming key.”

Mark Murray, Head of Travel, Yieldify

It’s become a priority for brands seeking to stand out from the crowd, as Sarah Hawkins from Virgin Trains explains: “In terms of what I’m excited about when it comes to trends within travel, personalization is a big one. People expect it now – they want to be spoken to directly, they want content that’s relevant to them and they want to book quickly and easily.”

Booking Behavior by Generation

The first of our spotlights is on generational cohorts. With much of the shift in the travel customer journey being driven by digital innovation, we sought to find out whether this has had selective impact on different age groups.

Planning and booking

As a general rule, advance research and booking behavior increases with age: 16-24 year olds spend the least time, starting 3.82 months in advance, while 55+ start the earliest (4.54 months in advance).

These older age groups, despite tending less towards digital channels, are still visiting more websites than they used to. More than one in five (22%) of those aged 55+ are visiting a lot more than they did 10 years ago.

When it comes to the fragmentation of the online travel journey, it’s actually 16-24-year-olds who find it most complex (52%). But it’s 25-34 (37%) year olds who report the biggest increase in the amount of time they’re now spending on planning a trip – presumably as a cohort rising in disposable income their options expand and with it, the time they spend choosing between them.

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to the factors influencing visitors to make the booking, it’s those aged 16-24 who are most influenced by social media (43%). In addition, 20% of those aged 16-24 and 18% of those aged 25-34 are inspired by influencers when deciding where to go on holiday.

Personalizing the customer journey

Personalization depends on the availability of data, and willingness to share this decreases with age. Younger consumers were happy to share data in exchange for something of value – 47% of 25-34-year-olds are willing to share data in exchange for cheaper rates, which fell to 34% for those over 55. Younger consumers were also more receptive to sharing data in exchange for an improved service.

Where it gets really interesting is the different types of personalization preferred by different age groups. People aged 25-34 are most likely to ‘love’ real-time availability information (20%), reviews (15%) and personalized offers (11%), and one in five cost-conscious 16-24-year-olds ‘love’ personalized rewards or loyalty schemes.

Tailored advertising is the least popular type of personalization: 39% of respondents overall dislike this, with 15% saying that they ‘hate’ it. Those aged 55+ are most likely to feel this way (19% ‘hate’ it). Real-time information on what other people are looking at – a much-used tactic by many booking engines – was also unpopular: 31% of respondents dislike it and 11% ‘hate’ it. Those aged 55+ were the least impressed (17% ‘hate’ it).

What it means for travel marketers

When it comes to creating a better customer journey for younger consumers, it pays to focus on reviews and have an active social media presence. Many travel brands now work closely with carefully-selected influencers. Wai Lin Yip, Corporate Director E-Commerce, Arlo Hotels explains:

“We work with a lot of influencers from all around the world. Once a couple of them stay, and tag us, they all find us. We pick a select few and host them for their stay.”

Wai Lin Yip, Corporate Director E-commerce, Arlo Hotels

She continues: “Guests these days are very savvy. They go online, they look at reviews, they look at images, they see what we’re doing, what kind of events we have. We are very active on social media. Even before they arrive guests are asking us questions on Facebook, on Instagram, and we answer them over DM. Consumer expectations mean that they want answers fast.”

For older consumers, building trust is key given their unwillingness to share data. Previous experience is the most important factor for over half of those aged 55+ (52%), so here is where travel marketers would do well to look at their customer retention strategy, especially considering that 1 in 5 of this age-group are shopping around more than they used to.

In focus: The March of Metasearch

More than one in five customers (22%) say that they are influenced by comparison websites when booking flights, and more than one in three (32%) are driven by these when booking hotels.

Metasearch sites like TravelSupermarket, Trivago, Skyscanner and KAYAK are most popular with younger people: a quarter (25%) of 25-34 year-olds use them when booking flights, and more than a third (37%) of 16-24 year-olds use them when booking accommodation.

As you might expect, it’s those booking non-package holidays who use these to get the best deal: 22% use them when booking flights, and 35% use them when booking accommodation.

Eilidh Whyte, Group Airline Display and Affiliate Manager, Thomas Cook Airlines says: “I know that Thomas Cook is a trusted brand name, but comparison websites like Skyscanner and KAYAK are actually becoming trusted brands themselves. People trust that they are showing the cheapest price to their customers.”

Booking Behavior by Gender

Our second set of personas revolves around gender – and we found many more differences than expected in how men and women plan and book their travel.

Planning and booking

When it comes to researching and planning a trip, women begin this process earlier than men (4.43 months, compared to 3.83 months) and they dedicate more time to it. This trend is increasing: nearly one-third of women spend more time planning than they did 10 years ago, compared to 23% of men.

When it comes to motivation, women are most influenced by online reviews when it comes to deciding where to go on vacation (44%, compared to 38% of men). Women are also the most cost-conscious: 41% of women, compared to 37% of men, base their decision on the lowest price. In contrast, previous experience is a bigger driver for men (49%, compared to 44% of women) as it was for our older generation (see previous chapter).

Convenience is high on the list of priorities for women during the booking process, with more than half (52%) rating it as important, compared to 48% of men. Both men and women were equally likely to start their booking journey on a comparison site, traditionally associated with travelers searching for the best price – a third each stated that these drive them toward the websites they will look on.

Personalizing the customer journey

Women are less likely than men to be comfortable sharing data with travel brands – 37% would never share data, compared to 32% of men. Men are also more likely to share data in return for an improved service (45% vs. 33% women), while women are still more price-motivated, more likely to share data in exchange for cheaper rates (42.4% vs 41.6% for men).

However, this attitude towards personalization vs privacy was not without its contradictions (as is often the case). Despite expressing less willingness to share data, women viewed websites saving their preferences more positively (54.8%) than men (52%). Women were also more likely to find product recommendations based on previously viewed or purchased products useful (50.7% vs. 47.4%).

For both, relevant reviews were the most liked form of personalization (69% of women and 63% of men rated positively), followed by personalized loyalty schemes (66.9% of women and 66% of men).

What it means for travel marketers

As this section revealed, an additional complication toward delivering personalization is the struggle to access the data necessary. This is especially true when customers research and book their holidays via aggregate sites.

“All of my goals are aligned towards getting our guests to book directly on our booking engine, and not so much via OTAs. When they do that we don’t own the guests as much, they don’t give us their email addresses,” explains Wai Lin Yip. “So how do we make sure our website is offering people value as well as a unique value that they can’t get on Expedia? Perhaps we can offer them that upgrade, or special perks and free drink vouchers when they check in.”

For women especially, ensuring that this unique value is clear is paramount given the fact they are more inclined to be driven by price. Combining this goal with preferred forms of personalization, such as highlighting value via reviews, or incorporating offers into your loyalty scheme could be a way to secure the booking across both visitor groups.

In Focus: Convenience Matters

Nine out of ten respondents (90%) say that the convenience of the booking process is important to them when booking a holiday, with 11% saying that it’s the most important thing to them. Those aged 35-44 are most likely to prioritize convenience (15% say it’s the most important thing) and those booking package holidays (with a travel agent or online) share their view (both 15%).

37% of customers say that convenience and ease of use are more important to them than cost when booking a trip, with 18% of those who use a travel agent strongly agreeing that this is the case.

But be warned against taking this at face value. Although 75% would be happy to book all aspects of their vacation on one site, almost eight in ten (78%) travelers say that they always visit multiple sites when deciding where to go. This implies that the inclination to explore choice can still overpower convenience alone.

Eilidh Whyte believes that the appetite for convenience will increase as it merges with choice: “I think people will want to book more and more on aggregate sites, and that’s something we really have to consider. We need to think about how we deal with these people. If a customer is already logged-in to a website, and they have stored their card details, it might just be easier for them to book everything in one place.”

Booking Behavior by Trip Type

Next up, we’re exploring how these travel customer journeys and preferences differ by the type of travel that the consumer is looking for. We explored six key types of vacation: beach, adventure, city break, cruise, wellness and special interest.

Planning and booking

The key outlier in all of these groups was wellness holidays. It’s here that the biggest shifts have taken place (56% are looking at more sites than a year ago, compared to a 44% average). Our wellness travelers are also the most frustrated, with over 70% of them complaining of a complex and fragmented booking process compared to an average of less than 50%.

Consumers here are also the most likely to be influenced by social media (39%) and of all our holidays types were the most impacted by influencers (21%) and traditional media (21%). Convenience is at its most critical with these holidaymakers, who are the most likely to say that it matters over cost (65%). However, the data implies that all this might come from the fact that these trips are booked at relatively short notice – planned only 3 months ahead compared to an average of 4 months.

Our adventure travelers are comparatively more relaxed – they only start planning 3.7 months ahead of time. While for the vast majority (64%) this timeline hasn’t changed much in the last year – they’re still visiting more sites (43%) than a year ago. When deciding which sites to visit, it’s less about convenience and more about experience for these travelers – 50% are driven by previous experience, 52% by online reviews and 31% by word of mouth. These travelers also rank high for influencers and social media. Unsurprisingly, this group are the least likely to want to bundle their booking together (10% would actively stay away from booking their trip on a single site).

City breaks are where we find the opportunists. The research period is close to average, but this group is the least likely to have branched out in terms of the sites that they visit (37%) – this aligns with the fact that they’re the most likely to base their website choices on previous experience (50%). However, this is also comparison shopping territory – 35% have choices driven by them.

Our other price-driven group are those going on beach vacations. Planning is long here across every element of the vacation, taking 4.3 months in total. Their choices of website are driven strongly by price (52%), closely followed by previous experience (47%) – influencers won’t help you too much here. Convenience in booking is also key – 91% rated it as important in influencing their decision.

The booking preferences of those going on cruises align generally with the trends we saw in the older demographics. Convenience and user experience is paramount here, with 83% more inclined to book vacations on websites that are easier to use – this group were also the most likely to rate convenience as important (91%). Previous experience is key here and the planning period is the longest of all our groups, at over 4.5 months.

Finally, our wild cards – the special interest vacations (i.e. historic sites or religious sites). While this group spend an average amount of time researching where to go on vacation, their digital horizons seem to be the slowest to expand – only 40% are looking at more sites than a year ago, which is the lowest of our report. Like beach vacationers, their choice of website is driven by price (53%) then experience (47%).

Personalizing the customer journey

When it comes to sharing data, beachgoers and special interest vacationers are the most likely to rule this out entirely (36% and 38% respectively compared to a 34% average). By contrast, those going on city breaks, cruises or wellness holidays are the most willing to exchange data for better service or pricing.

Personalization preferences also vary. For the context-conscious adventure traveler, reviews are key – as they also are for the beachgoer who spends a long time planning. For city breaks, special interest and cruises where previous experience is a key driver in website choice, personalized rewards and loyalty schemes come out on top. Finally, our wellness outliers – the only group to rate product recommendations highest (69%).

What it means for travel marketers

“Technology has made it so much easier to plan, book and travel,” says Sarah Hawkins, Senior Digital Optimization Executive, Virgin Trains. The sheer diversity in how this plays out for different types of vacationer show how carefully the marketer needs to adapt the experience.

“People are now a lot more independent,” says Marie Tracy, Group Marketing Manager at TravelUp. “If they’re looking for a package holiday, they just want a good deal and they want a simple booking process. Sometimes they want more than just your standard package, or they want better search options. If they get stuck, they can call us and we’ll do it for them. Or if they want something specific, then we can build it for them.”
Marie Tracy, Group Marketing Manager at TravelUp.

A big part of the lesson here is never to overlook loyalty – for many of these groups, experience is key and perks need to be driven by previous experience. Sam Willan, General Manager UK, StudentUniverse, believes that marketers are missing a trick. He explains: “A repeat booker costs half as much to acquire and returns 2.5 times in income.”

Booking Behavior by Market

Do travelers from the US approach their booking journey differently to their counterparts in the UK? We cut the data once again to see whether approaches need to differ by market.

Planning and booking

American travelers are more likely to find the booking journey complex than their British counterparts (45% vs 38%). In general, they spend less time researching (3.8 months vs 4.5 months) but this is growing at a faster rate, with 29% spending more time on it than a year ago. This could be down to the growing diversity of sites being visited in the US – 47% of Americans cite visiting more sites on their booking journey than last year, compared to 40% of Brits.

How our travelers get to these websites varies, with US travelers appearing more price-conscious. While nearly the same proportion cite price as a key driver in choosing sites (49% US and 48% UK), US consumers make bigger use of comparison websites (36% vs 31%). They’re also more driven by online reviews and social media, where UK consumers rate previous experience more important (51%).

Personalizing the customer journey

Almost without exception, UK travelers were more likely to dislike personalization than American consumers – real-time availability information on what other people are viewing came under the biggest fire, with 35% of Brits expressing their dislike for it.

On the other side of the coin, US consumers were much more likely to actively like personalization – in each of our 9 categories of personalization a greater proportion of Americans than Brits expressed approval. Reviews came out on top, with over 70% of Americans liking – or even loving – these.

However, that’s not the whole story. As we know, consumer attitudes to personalization often come in stark contrast to their openness to sharing data, and this plays out here. Despite being more open to personalization, over 40% of Americans said that they would never be comfortable with travel companies collecting their data. This is a significantly larger proportion than the UK, where 29% would never share their data.

What it means for travel marketers

The conclusions here are particularly interesting because of the apparent contradictions raised. When it comes to personalization, there’s a clear lack of understanding especially among US consumers about the connection between collecting data and delivering personalization. Solving this from a marketer’s perspective has to start with greater transparency.

Elsewhere, while the differences here are perhaps more subtle than what we’ve seen elsewhere in the report, it pays to be aware of the more intense nature of the US customer journey – more sites, less time and more comparison.

Booking Behavior by Product

Our final cross-section of research was driven by the understanding that more and more consumers are booking different elements of their travel separately. We therefore analyzed the booking processes for these different products: flights, accommodation, activities, airport travel and parking.

Planning and booking

The booking journey starts, of course, with researching where to go – around 4.1 months ahead of departure. Flights come almost exactly a month later, at 3.1 months before the vacation. From there, the leap to booking accommodation is quick – this is booked 2.96 months in advance. It’s also at this point that our travelers will be looking for inspiration on activities (2.71 months). Travel to and from the airport comes much later, along with airport parking (1.7 and 1.6 months respectively).

But do the influencing factors change as consumers go through their booking journeys? It turns out that they do. For booking flights, it’s all about price (50%), followed by previous experience, convenience and safety. However, when consumers switch their attention to accommodation this changes – online reviews here are the most important factor (47%), followed by previous experience and then price.

It’s only when consumers start thinking about holiday activities that social proof really comes into play. Online reviews (44%) and word of mouth (38%) rank highest here, and social media also makes the top five (24%) – the only category where it does.

What it means for travel marketers

Depending on where your brand sits in the customer journey, it’s important to time your approaches carefully. Effective retargeting and email nurture campaigns can be pivotal in ensuring that you’re front of mind when your place in the booking funnel comes around.

This is particularly important if you’re looking for the all-important ancillary upsells. Eilidh Whyte believes that customers are most likely to be sensitive to price when they’re booking short-haul trips. She explains: “Customers on short-haul flights are often more considered in their purchase of ancillaries such as meals and baggage. We must work as a brand to sell our products post booking and offer things like buy duty-free ahead of time for a decreased price or champagne for onboard bought ahead of time so there’s no need to worry about cash on the flight.”

Recognising when to target customers is a challenge, but one that can be tackled with behavioral segmentation. Virgin Trains takes this approach with a variety of personas:

“Our customers range from people who’ve never even boarded a train before to people who commute with us every day. We’ve got every type of customer covered that we can think of. From that, we understand the behaviors that each persona may exhibit when boarding, when booking, and post journey as well.

“We use this to target visitors online with our personalization program offering them more information if they need it, or learning to sit back and let them get on with it when they want as well.”

Conclusions

The findings in this report could have filled several volumes – the proliferation of the types of customer journey that we’ve seen in recent years means that there are limitless paths of enquiry to follow.

However, what we hope is that we’ve managed to paint tangible – and as importantly, actionable – pictures of consumer booking behavior.

While there are overarching trends to be aware of – longer planning periods, more sites being visited along the way and a universal focus on convenience – the diversity of opinion beyond that means that success lies in personalizing the customer journey transparently and usefully. As the report indicates, a quid pro quo approach to personalization is more likely to improve the customer experience, boost loyalty and give brands the valuable data they need to secure future bookings.

One of the biggest challenges for any travel brand is encouraging customers to book directly so that they can capture data and use it to build customer loyalty and ensure repeat business — after all, previous experience drives almost half of our respondents’ travel decisions. This is an industry where the pace of consumer behavioral change is fast, and historically where brands have struggled to keep pace – but this is changing.

“There’s so much appetite in the industry for a solution that can help companies adapt to the challenges of a complex customer journey,” says Mark Murray. “I think we’ll see more trailblazers in 2019.”

We hope you’ll be one of them.

The post How We Book Now appeared first on Yieldify.

That’s the difficult question that every company must ask itself sooner or later. There are, of course, well-established answers.

The first one most people think of is this: ‘I will grow my company by widening my customer base’. It seems like a simple enough solution, but in practice, it can be much harder to achieve than most would like it to be. The other option, however, is often a much easier path to tread – even though too many people overlook it as a strategy for growth. This strategy is e-commerce customer retention.

Why should I be interested in customer retention?

E-commerce customer retention strategies look to ease the pressure of finding new customers to make purchases by increasing the potential for return visits and repeat purchases from your existing customer base.

There are all sorts of benefits to a strong customer retention strategy. It can cost five times as much to invest in attracting a new customer as it can to retain an existing one. And having that customer onside can prove incredibly profitable. After all, if a customer decides to buy from you twice, they’re likely to be open to buying from you for a third, fourth and fifth time too – especially if you’ve got an effective customer retention strategy to keep tempting them back.

According to research by Bain & Company, an increase in customer retention of just 5% can increase profits by as much as 95%.

When should I be focussing on customer retention?

It’s important that customer retention strategies work alongside your acquisition strategies, and aren’t seen as a replacement. Without new customers, even a business with plenty of active returning customers will stagnate eventually, and struggle to grow beyond a certain point.

The smartest approach is to build your online customer retention plans as you build your business up. When a company is first starting out, it won’t have made any sales. As such, there won’t be any need to look at how to retain customers. But as the business develops, and the e-commerce site begins to make a few sales each week, opportunities will arise to reach out to those who have already made purchases and the business will want to look at how to increase customer loyalty.

At this point, though, the main focus should still be one bringing new customers in – you can put more time into retaining customers once you’ve actually got them.

The more you utilize the full potential of a lead capture software and grow your user base, the more you’ll be looking to balance new customer acquisition with reaching out to those who have made purchases before and encouraging them to do so again. Eventually, you should be looking to be focussing at least as much on customer retention as you are on acquisition.

When Yieldify asked marketers how they chose to split their time between acquisition and retention of customers, the results were clear – most marketers keep their efforts very balanced, with 21% opting for a 60:40 ratio in favor of acquisition, and 18% favoring the same ratio in favor of retention. Overall, 50% of marketers were giving at least 40% of their time over to focusing on how to retain customers and increase loyalty to their brand.

What can I do to measure customer retention rates?

There are four major metrics you’ll want to consider to best understand your customer retention rates:

• Repeat Customer Rate
• Average Order Value (AOV)
• Customer Retention Rate
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The repeat customer rate gives you a quick, basic overview of where you stand with customer retention. Who is buying from you, and how many are coming back to buy again? It is the simplest of the metrics to calculate and gives you a basic overview of what percentage of your customers are repeat buyers.

To work out your repeat customer rate, simply divide the sum total of all customers who have purchased from your site more than once by the total number of paying customers – every individual who has made a purchase, whether it was just once, or on multiple occasions. Both figures should be available via your analytics provider.

Average Order Value (AOV) allows you to have an idea of how much each customer is spending on your website. This is an important number to acknowledge, as increasing AOV is a fast and efficient way to grow your company. To find it, divide total revenue by the number of orders made. Yieldify has plenty of suggestions for the best ways to increase your average order value.

Your customer retention rate is an excellent metric for understanding how you were doing in a given period. Google’s excellent cohort analysis feature is a handy tool that helps separate visitors into groups for just this sort of insight. Working out the customer retention rate itself is a matter of identifying three figures – total customers at the end of your chosen period, new customers acquired during that period, and the number of customers at the beginning of that period:

Finally, consider the customer lifetime value figures, which offers you an idea of the long-term value your average customer might offer the business. This metric, often abbreviated to CLV, is a great way to see how practical different acquisition strategies might be in the long-term – allowing you to look at the costs of such strategies alongside the potential benefits of undertaking them.

Unfortunately, it can be the hardest to calculate – you need to know your average customer value, which involves multiplying your AOV by your purchase frequency figure (that’s the number of orders made in a one year period divided by the number unique customers in that period). This customer value is then multiplied by the average lifespan for customers on your website – that is the amount of time the average person is an active customer before they drop off and become dormant. This can be hard to calculate, so you might opt to take a rough estimation of three years (a figure suggested by analytics guru Avinash Kaushik).

How do I improve customer retention?

We’ve seen why customer retention is so important, and have some idea of how to track it – but the key takeaway has to be about how you might implement customer retention strategies. There are multiple ways that you can do this, but the overall aim is to work on your customer journey optimization by engaging each individual through various approaches.

Encouraging Further Purchases

It might sound counter-intuitive, but very often the best strategy to ensure repeat purchases from a customer is one that is implemented before they’ve even made their first.

A customer that is signed up to an account, or even simply to a mailing list, is a customer that can be easily reached and given an incentive to make future purchases. Here at Yieldify, we’ve seen the link between a micro-conversion, like lead capture, and customer retention borne out in our data from over 200,000 customer journeys. More than one-third (36%) of users return to the website after submitting their details via a lead capture campaign.

Micro conversions, such as an email address submission or account creation, are an incredibly important part of nurturing both new and returning visitors and customers. This is why it’s so key to personalize your ‘ask’ depending on the stage the visitor is at in their journey. A great example comes from British retailer Marks & Spencer, which created targeted campaigns to support the launch of its new website following a site migration.

The brand knew that the key to retaining its existing customer base, as well as driving conversions, was to ensure that both new and returning visitors shared their details and logged in. To achieve this the brand tailored a free express delivery message to each group of visitors. This was responsible for driving over one-fifth of all registrations on the relaunched website, and helped drive a conversion rate uplift of 5.4% with new visitors.

Offering a perk in exchange for an email address is a simple but effective tactic that most consumers will see as an obvious (if welcome) attempt to get them to make an initial purchase from the store. But few will think about all the future purchasing opportunities they’ll be exposed to once they’re on the mailing list.

Depending on which industry you’re working in, lead capture might not be the right micro-conversion to target. Online gaming company Bethard realized that the key to customer retention in their industry was ensuring users deposited money into their online account.

To this end, they worked with Yieldify to remove barriers for customers and encourage online deposits. A notification encouraged customers to easily make deposits directly from their bank accounts, which made them much more likely to engage going forward as well.

Building Trust

Trust can play a vital part in customer acquisition, with companies often going out of their way to prove to potential buyers that they are in safe hands. But it also plays a big part in maintaining customer relationships. We’ve all had a bad experience with a company and decided not to buy from them again as a result. Providing great customer service the first time around is the best way to ensure customers will be open to buying from you again.

It’s possible to go further, though, and utilize trust in a way that simultaneously works for both customer acquisition and customer retention.

81% of people trust the advice of their friends and family over that of a business, which is why innovative brands and industry disruptors use the tactic to build an engaged customer base. It’s important to make it easy for the consumer, such as in the example below from IT Cosmetics where visitors can make a referral across Facebook, WhatsApp and more at the click of a button:

The trust-building works two ways: it provides potential new customers with a voice they trust and respect – that of a friend or family member. Simultaneously, existing customers are encouraged to show commitment to the brand. This calls on the psychological concept of commitment – by making a public commitment to the company in the form of a recommendation, customers are more likely to stick with the business going forward.

Reward Loyalty

Loyalty schemes are another excellent way to encourage return visits to your site. Exclusive offers that are only shared via the mailing list are a popular way of bringing potential dormant customers back into the fold. But what if you could get smarter with loyalty?

Recognizing the challenges associated with building loyalty in the competitive beauty industry haircare brand Ouidad makes sure to give customers a reason to keep coming back. Looking at metrics such as repeat purchase rate, and average purchase frequency, the brand has created a personalized loyalty program.

This includes on-site messages tailored based on visitor behavior e.g offering money off for VIP customers, or making this dependant on a certain spend threshold, and giving different offers to loyalty program members vs. repeat customers:

The strategy has worked well for the brand, generating a high level of engagement with the loyalty program. Its loyalty members have a 83% higher repurchase rate compared to non-members and a higher than average annual purchase frequency.

Personalize the Experience

The more you get to know you customers throughout their lifecycle, the greater the opportunity to personalize their experience. Personalization offers endless opportunities to create a relevant customer journey that encourages further purchases from your website. The more personalized the offering, the better for the customer.

This example is of Melbourne-based design house, Aura Home, which creates contemporary bedlinen & homewares. They use flexible targeting to recommend a complementary product to visitors purchasing cotton quilt covers. The suggestion, which allows users to feel personally catered to, helps to create an uplift in conversion rate and boost order values.

Another easy approach to personalization is to offer a cart saving functionality, whereby customers are able to save their cart for a set period of time.

This enables the customer to make more informed purchases, but also allows for email remarketing to remind the customer of their saved cart and perhaps encourage further additions to it at the same time – or simply to make a purchase they might otherwise have forgotten about.

Travel brand Thomas Cook Airlines used this strategy to build its database after GDPR. By incorporating explicit opt-in into its Save My Booking functionality it was able to mitigate against booking abandonment. Users exiting the site were given the option to save their booking for later by entering their email address and explicitly opting-in to re-engagement:

Customer retention: don’t leave it to chance

However you choose to approach customer retention, the important thing is that you do approach it. Customer retention strategies are an excellent way to grow your business without the heavy costs of new customer acquisition, and there are so many opportunities afforded to e-commerce businesses in this field.

Remember to encourage further purchases that will increase both your customer’s lifetime value to your store but also the average order value on each visit. Build trust and look at how you can increase customer loyalty for your business. Finally, look at how you might be able to personalize the customer journey and offer relevant and helpful ideas that will encourage your customers to return to you time and time again.

The post Customer Retention in eCommerce appeared first on Yieldify.

The Yieldify CJO Atlas is an e-commerce marketer’s guide to navigating, optimizing and personalizing the world of customer journeys.

Inside you’ll find:

The world of CJO

• Defining CJO
• Why CJO

Customer journeys made personal

• Retail
• Travel
• Gaming

Defining CJO

This atlas is your guide to all things CJO – that’s customer journey optimization.

The dictionary definition might look at little something like this:

NOUN [U] | ABBREVIATION CJO | UK USUALLY customer journey optimisation
1. ‘Using a data-driven approach to improving the whole customer journey to get more conversions’

But this isn’t a dictionary, so let’s go beyond that, and explore a little further. Here’s a few points to remember when trying to define CJO:

• Customer journey optimization is an evolution of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
• It incorporates personalization, but applies it to the customer journey as a whole
• This means customers get the experience they want, and Marketers get the results they need.

Why CJO?

The customer journey is broken. But don’t just take our word for it. We surveyed 1000+ US and UK consumers to understand what they think. Here’s what they told us:

• 62% of consumers expect brands to have information on their preferences and how they prefer to interact with them.
• This is across all channels – in-store, online, social media etc.
• This jumps to 74% for millennial consumers – the highest of any generation.

However, despite these high expectations around personalized experiences tailored to their preferences, consumers don’t make it easy.

• Only 50% of consumers are willing to trade their data for more personalization
• 59% of consumers are not comfortable with websites tracking their behaviour
• This is further complicated by privacy in a post-GDPR world – 82% of consumers say they’ve become more aware of their online privacy in recent months.

And what about marketers? Our State of CJO report revealed that marketers are:

• Still relying heavily on methods such as customer feedback, to optimize the customer journey.
• While 40% have mapped out the customer journey, optimizing this presents more of a challenge.
• For 2019 personalization is high on the agenda, but this was also rated among the most difficult tools and strategies to implement and execute.

What’s clear is that optimizing the customer journey is a big challenge. Consumers want, and even expect it, but marketers need to tread carefully when it comes to navigating how they execute more personalized experiences.

This atlas is your guide to the customer journeys we’ve tried and tested, to drive results without compromising the customer experience.

Retail Customer Journeys

Key challenges:

• Increase conversion rates
• Personalize the customer journey
• Reduce abandonment on PDP pages
• Increase cross-sell activity
• Capture high quality leads

As Hitesh Kapadia, Retail Industry Lead, put’s it:

‘Today’s consumers don’t want a one size fits all experience, but 1-to-1 personalization is a huge challenge, both technically and from an organizational perspective.

We work with our retail clients to identify the groups of visitors that represent the biggest opportunity for your business. Then we develop smart strategies to not only improve conversion rates but create loyalty and lifetime value by improving the customer experience’

Here’s a simplified version of the different journeys a visitors to a retail site might take.

Now let’s take a look at how these journeys could be improved…

CJO for a first time visitor

Challenge

A first-time visitor arriving from search directly to a PDP page. This group of visitors is likely to represent around ¼ of your shoppers, and are 72% more likely to bounce than the average.

Solutions

• Improve discoverability to help users navigate back to the PLP or category page
• Before they go, get their email address or other useful information

Why it works

“PDP pages are not optimized landing pages, and bounce rates are increasing due to changes in behaviour driven by mobile. Visitors are leaving because they aren’t finding what they’re looking for.

An optimized journey helps the visitor discover more products, so they can find something they like and captures visitor data so you can remarket and give them a better experience next time they visit.”

Théo Devred, Senior Consultant, Yieldify

CJO for a returning visitor

Challenge

A returning visitor arriving from Google Shopping, a channel that has seen huge increases in ad spend over the last few years. How do you ensure they convert, ensuring ROI on your paid spend?

Solution

They’re looking for something specific – and they’ve found it on your website via Google Shopping. At this early stage of the customer journey use social proof to secure the conversion.

Why it works

“Even before they get to your site, social proof is impacting the visitor. It’s been proven that higher star ratings on Google Shopping pages mean a higher number of orders – so it makes sense to carry this message on to the website. Campaigns using Dynamic Social Proof can drive conversion rate uplifts from +6.6%, up to as high as +48.3% depending on the targeting criteria.”

Théo Devred, Senior Consultant, Yieldify

CJO for a cart abandoner

Challenge

97% of visitors don’t convert, but all is not lost – especially if they’ve shown intent to buy by adding items to their cart.

Solution

Showing high intent visitors the right message at the right moment can keep them on the path to purchase. Even better, our data shows that showing this type of message multiple times throughout the customer journey to nurture visitors toward purchase increases conversion even further.

Why it works

“Our research shows that the top reason for abandoning cart is that shipping charges that are too high. Highlighting a shipping offer, or even simply highlighting your shipping USPs, removes this barrier to purchase.”

Théo Devred, Senior Consultant, Yieldify

CJO for a returning customer

Challenge

Once you’ve secured a conversion, how do you increase average order value next time from a returning customer?

Solution

When a customer returns ensure you’re creating a relevant and personalized experience that offers value based on behaviour:

Why it works

“Our research shows that 63% of consumers expect brands to remember their preferences and information, and this is even higher for millennials (74%). Yet marketers struggle with personalization, ranking it one of the top 3 most difficult strategies to implement. Using in-session information is an easy way to deliver a personalized experience.”

Théo Devred, Senior Consultant, Yieldify

CJO for retail: a case study

“The winning combination of Yieldify’s technology and team forms a valuable part of our digital strategy for L’Oreal brands here in Spain. The Kiehl’s results demonstrate the positive ROI we have achieved through this partnership, by driving an increase in conversion rates and average order values. We’re excited to continue optimising our customer journey together.”

Pilar Ruiz de Temiño
Senior Digital Project Manager, L’Oreal Luxe

Global beauty brand Kiehl’s drove a 33.3% uplift in conversion with Customer Journey Optimization. To learn more read the full case study here.

Travel Customer Journeys

Key challenges:

• Long booking funnel
• Complex products
• Ancillaries
• Perishable inventory
• Metasearch

Travel customer journeys are complex due to the considered nature of the purchase. Brands have to contend with visitors who are comparing across multiple visits and providers, and may even go on to convert offline. There’s so much choice, the funnel is long, metasearch has changed booking behavior, inventory is perishable and it goes on.

These are just a handful of the challenges travel brands must contend with to get the booking. We work with brands like Megabus and Flight Centre to identify the areas for improvement, and create journeys tailored to the needs of their visitors.

Here’s a simplified version of the different journeys a visitor to a travel booking site might take.

And here are the strategies we can use to optimize each…

CJO for a first time visitor

Challenge

Travel products are complex, with multiple touchpoints across the customer journey. How do you cater to a first time visitor to combat choice paralysis and help them find their perfect holiday?

Solution

Target messages based on what users are searching for to give them the most relevant experience as it’s this, not price, that drives early travel plans. Then recognise if they’re struggling, and put them in touch with an advisor via click to call, straight from their mobile.

Why it works

“Over 90% of consumers know what they want to do on holiday, but they don’t know where to do it. You can help – 80% of travellers say that informative content from travel brands can influence their decision-making process. “

Mark Murray, Head of Travel, Yieldify

CJO for a booking abandoner

Challenge

Travel has one of the highest abandonment rates of any industry at around 81%. Part of this is due to lengthy booking funnels. How can you keep bookers on track to buy?

Solution

Different parts of the booking funnel require different messages and tactics such as highlighting USPs or utilizing social proof. Combine messages as the customer moves through the booking journey to ensure the maximum conversion rate is achieved.

Why it works

“Our work with Stansted Express and Megabus highlights the right message at the right moment in the customer journey, demonstrating the value of multiple messages throughout the funnel. There is more than one opportunity to re-engage abandoning bookers, so don’t miss a single one!”

Mark Murray, Head of Travel, Yieldify

CJO for a deal hunter

Challenge

Metasearch has changed the way visitors book. For example, 90% of millennials search for deals before booking and 49% of Generation X use search engines to compare. This means price-driven traffic, and lower average order values.

Solution

With the visitor in a comparison mindset help them decide by differentiating your offering and once you have them, encourage repeat purchases with a tailored incentive.

CJO for a last-minute booker

Challenge

Consumers are travelling more, holidaying on average 3.5 times per year, but booking later. This rise of the last-minute booker presents a problem when it comes to managing ultra-perishable inventory like flights and rooms. How can you convince a last-minute traveler to convert?

Solution

Utilize urgency to turn last-minute bookers into buyers, time is very much on your side for this tactic. Then tailor an offer based on how they’ve arrived on-site to drive average order values higher.

Why it works

“Perishable inventory is perfectly suited to urgency and our data shows this –  it can drive a conversion rate uplift of between +3% and +7%. Combining this with a relevant ancillary upsell offers an additional route to increasing average order values.”

Mark Murray, Head of Travel, Yieldify

CJO for travel: a case study

Through Yieldify’s combination of expert strategy and technology, Stansted Express has been able to continuously optimize the online customer journey. By testing, learning and iterating on our campaigns, Yieldify has more than delivered on increasing our conversion rate and driving incremental revenue.”

Chris Ford
Marketing and Digital Manager, Stansted Express

Customer Journey Optimization saw Stansted Express achieve a +120% uplift for four campaigns versus just one. To learn more, read the full case study here.

Gaming Customer Journeys

Key challenges

• First deposit conversion
• Deposit/bet conversion
• Retention and active bettor base
• Deposit/bet frequency and value
• Cross-gaming activity

As a highly competitive industry focused on digital products, the big challenge within gaming is to create a differentiated betting experience that keeps customers coming back for more.

The ultimate goal is to create high-value repeat customers so that we can increase key performance metrics such as Net Gaming Revenue (NGR), AverageRevenue per user (ARPU) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Here’s a simplified version of the different journeys gaming visitors might take:

And here’s how we go about optimizing those journeys…

CJO for new visitor registration

Challenge

Competition within gaming is fierce and customer acquisition comes at a premium, with gambling related keywords dominating the costliest list. So once you’ve overcome this to get them on-site, why should visitors register with you?

Solution

Remind new users why they should join and serve a welcome offer to secure the conversion.

Why it works

“As a digital product, the difference is in the experience you offer your visitors. Making this clear at the outset gives them a reason to register, while a welcome offer recaptures visitor attention by reminding them of why they came in the first place”

Bruno Diogo, Consultant, Yieldify

CJO for registered visitors

Challenge

So you’ve registered a visitor, but now the challenge is to get them to deposit and lessen the time it takes for them to do that. First time deposit rates can be as low as 1%, again driving up those acquisition costs.

Solution

Showcase a first deposit incentive to non-deposited, first-time registrants to drive conversion and deposit values.

Why it works

“Offering the incentive via a timed notification automatically applies the incentive to the menu for relevant users, avoiding any barrier to entry by making it easy for users to interact with the offer.”

Bruno Diogo, Consultant, Yieldify

CJO for deposited customers

Challenge

Visitors often play on one market, or one type of game. How can you encourage them to try something new?

Solution

Serve a notification to users who have previously shown interest in other offerings e.g. visited the casino or bingo pages.

Why it works

“Encouraging visitors to explore and play on more than one type of market or game creates stickiness and increases lifetime value.”

Bruno Diogo, Consultant, Yieldify

CJO for VIP players

Challenge

Encouraging visitors to spend more on a regular basis is difficult when customers are so fickle – they’re always one click away from moving to a competitor gaming site.

Solution

Make them feel special with exclusive loyalty offers that are relevant to them, served at the perfect moment.

Why it works

“Consumers expect brands to know their preferences – and this is especially true when it comes to high rollers. Loyalty programs such as Frequent Player Points can encourage higher, more frequent bets.”

Bruno Diogo, Consultant, Yieldify

CJO for gaming: a case study

“As a partner, Yieldify delivers a rare combination: speed and smarts. Their team not only analysed our customer journey to tap the perfect solution but even negotiated with third parties to make it happen – and the tech moves so quickly that you can test, learn and see the impact fast.”

Robin Olsson,
Partner, Bethard

With CJO Bethard were able to increase deposits by 23%. To learn more, read the full case study.

Ready to get started with CJO? Book a free consultation below to learn more about how we’ve helped the leading retail, travel and gaming brands personalize the customer journey.

The post The CJO Atlas appeared first on Yieldify.

When it comes to e-commerce design, the expectations of today’s consumers are high. A browsing experience that is smooth, clean, easy to use and pleasant to look at is now a basic standard for the average internet user. Nowadays we seek out (sometimes subconsciously) the most intuitive and user-friendly experiences we can, so it’s vital that e-commerce websites keep up with this consumer behavior.

As online spending continues to rise and the wealth of options for consumers diversifies, consumers will buy (and come back to) those that can provide the most seamless customer journeys. Central to this is the customer experience, and e-commerce design of your online store. Put simply:

“People buy with their eyes. If something doesn’t look good, users won’t be interested in it – end of story. There’s a furious competition online for everything, so good design is the key to a successful user journey.”

Lana Kropyvna, Head of Design, Yieldify

UX and UI design: what’s the difference?

When it comes to website design and creating this successful user journey, there are two disciplines to consider. Website design is split, broadly speaking, into these areas of focus: UX and UI. Their functions are distinct, but they could never really be described as fully separate from one another – truly great website design relies on the UX and UI working in harmony to provide the consumer with everything they need.

UX stands for User Experience. In the simplest of terms, this is the functioning core of the website – if your online store was a human body, UX works like the muscles to keep things moving as they should. To this end, it’s obviously vitally important to have great UX across your website – with poor UX your customers’ journeys will be fractured and frustrating, and may drive them away to better functioning websites.

UI stands for User Interface. This includes much of the more visible elements of design on your website. Again, if your store was a human body, UI would be its face. The way your website looks, and the ways your customers can interact directly with it (or be interacted with) is determined by your UI design.

Tied together, great UX and UI design will help to perfect the customer journey – but if one of the two factors isn’t up to scratch, it will always be immediately noticeable to your customers. No matter how great a website looks, poor UX design will make it difficult to use. Alternately, your website might run like a dream, but with poor UI design your customers won’t know where to look or where to click to find the information they need.

Creating an intuitive website through UX and UI design is imperative, then. A study by Magnetic North found that one in three people will abandon a purchase because they can’t find the information they’re looking for on the website. Similarly, 75% of consumers admit they judge a websites credibility on its design, and 42% simply won’t purchase from a poorly designed website. What’s clear is that consumers can be pretty ruthless when it comes to e-commerce website design.

This guide will show you how to ensure your site avoids the pitfalls of bad e-commerce design, by demonstrating best practice for how your website should look and function at every stage of the customer journey. We’ll show you the do’s and don’ts of UX and UI design considerations to help you face down the challenges marketers face in creating intuitive, functional e-commerce sites.

Arrival: homepage design

For many of your online visitors, the homepage will be their first impression of both your website and your company as a whole. Here is where you need to demonstrate not only that your e-commerce site has exactly what the visitor is looking for, but also that they aren’t going to have to battle against bad design to get it. Demonstrating all this just through the impact of your homepage is no small feat, but there are plenty of ways to do it.

Part of making a strong first impression is highlighting why visitors should buy from you. Effectively communicating this information on your homepage is the first step toward luring in potential customers. Let’s take a look at an example:

This is the homepage of bathroom retailer soak.com. If you think about a bathroom, it’s a relatively big ticket item to buy online, so right up front soak.com uses a number of tactics to assure visitors that finding and buying their perfect bathroom won’t be as difficult as they think. The brand highlights a mix of USPs, such as free delivery and interest-free credit, alongside seasonal special offers.

Hero images are a useful way of alerting people to the core messages you want them to take away – in this case, the last few hours of a special offer. One way that Soak.com takes full advantage of its hero image is to include a countdown timer, letting visitors know how much longer they have to take advantage of the deal. Using animation subtly, such as in a countdown timer, is an excellent way of providing a user-friendly experience i.e. adding value, by communicating important information, whilst also driving urgency.

Perhaps most important though is the use of a hero image at the very center of the landing page. Hero images are large images that are generally the central focus point on a website – the first big visual element that consumers see and are drawn to.

Soak.com also makes great use of its branding from other channels on the homepage, such as Tully the elephant (the star of its TV ads!) so even visitors arriving from offline advertising will be sure to know they’re in the right place.

E-commerce design can be tricky when it comes to homepages, do you introduce your USPs, show off your flagship product or focus on seasonal promotions as in the example above? This is where you might want to consider how website personalization can help. Personalizing the homepage for different visitor segments doesn’t have to involve a lot of heavy lifting, it could be as simple as utilizing a notification or overlay to differentiate between new and returning visitors, and provide them with relevant information.

For example, train operator Stansted Express utilized a corner notification on its homepage to highlight the USP of being the fastest route to central London. This was targeted at visitors who had not yet entered the booking funnel, and worked to drive an 11.08% uplift in conversion versus the control. Testing out messaging like this via an overlay is a great way to understand what works best from both a design and commercial perspective, before you commit IT resource to add this to your site on a more permanent basis.

The key to your arrival page is to provide clear messaging – as well as directing customers to focal points that the brand wants them to see, both of the above examples have easy and recognizable navigation features on their homepages. Each shows a selection of categories that can be clicked on to narrow down the products available to precisely what the customer is looking for and a very easy to find search function.

Homepage e-commerce design essentials:

• Above all, be clear!
• Make use of eye-catching, on-brand imagery
• Highlight your USPs (and test to see what works best)
• Personalize based on visitor segment

Discovery: navigation and category page design

The search functionality of your website is a key part of your UX design. The Baymard Institute found that search support is designed poorly with such frequency that when they asked survey participants to complete product finding tasks using e-commerce search functions, 31% of attempts ended in failure.

In fact, the same study found that of the top 60 e-commerce sites 70% were unable to return searches that used synonyms that didn’t match their own chosen descriptors, and 34% failed to return results when product numbers or search queries were typed in with a single error. While on-site search is not only a problem for design to solve, there are plenty of ways it can help.

First up, make your search function obvious if that’s how your customers prefer to find products (and 50% probably do!) In the previous examples we’ve covered soak.com pre-populates its search box with a question ‘what are you looking for’ to encourage users to interact, and Stansted Express provides a drop-down of all possible routes, alongside a CTA that makes it clear what the results of the search will be (prices and the ability to book).

Another way to help visitors in finding what they’re looking for, aside from search, is to include a thorough filtering system. Fashion retailer Monki changes its filtering options depending on what you’re searching for – a search for sneakers allows you to filter the results until you see only those shoes that fit the color, size and price that you’re seeking:

Thread, whose entire concept is built around being an online store that makes recommendations based on your established tastes, takes this idea even further. Thread’s search filters allow customers to highlight specific categories within their search, as well as other factors like brands and sustainability – allowing vegan customers to avoid products featuring leather or silk.

More impressive still, customers can mark whether they like or dislike each search result. A ‘liked’ result will be remembered and featured near the top of relevant user searches. A ‘disliked’ result will allow the customer to choose exactly which features they don’t like and have other products with similar features pushed down future search results.

Aside from getting smart with filters, another way to assist your visitors when it comes to navigation is by understanding their behavior. For example, maybe they’re dwelling on a particular page, and can’t find what they’re looking for, or maybe, based on their behavior, you know they’re looking for gifts. A corner notification, triggered on scroll or timer, asking users how they want to shop is a great way to take visitors to curated or high performing sections of your site. In the example below, Swedish retailer Fyndiq combined this with a seasonal Valentine’s campaign to direct users toward gifts for him, her or friends:

Navigation and category e-commerce design essentials:

• Get smart with filtering, make it easy and logical for the user
• Consider a sticky navigation bar to keep the filter options at hand
• Recognize where visitors are getting stuck, and offer assistance

Selection: product page design

Once your customer has discovered an item of interest to them, they’ll find themselves on a product page. As ever, it’s important that the design is well thought out and enables them to find all the information they need with the minimum amount of effort. Remember that customers who have arrived at your website through advertisements or in-article links will frequently arrive directly at the product page, so maintaining accessible navigation tools is still very important!

Information should be at the forefront of any product page’s design. The customer has come so far as to show intent – now they want to focus on the specific details that will help them decide whether or not to purchase.

Activewear retailer Sweaty Betty offers a clear and concise set up on their product pages that nonetheless hits all the right notes:

There are a number of high-quality images of the item that can be clicked on, or scrolled through easily. Many products include a video so visitors can see how the clothing looks and moves in action. Information about the product is presented clearly, and the average rating given by previous purchasers is a great way to instill confidence through social proof. The site also makes product choice an easy process, offering a selection of colors and sizes, and fading those that are not currently available. These are the basics of good UI design, ensuring an entirely intuitive experience for consumers.

Further down the page Sweaty Betty utilizes the space below the product details to provide further value to the visitor – a selection of items that complement this particular product, and a ‘recently viewed’ tab that shows other items the customer has looked at, allowing for easy comparison and consideration (and the ability to add each item to their basket without leaving the page).

The ability to include personalization in-page is very often what raises good e-commerce design to great e-commerce design. By tailoring the page to each customer you are able to present a more relevant and more useful experience that can make all the difference. Here’s an example:

Not sure which bit we’re talking about? That’s exactly the idea. The In-Page Personalization element here is the ‘120 people…’ social proof flag in blue – it has been added in a matter of minutes and will only appear on the site’s most popular products, even then only materializing after the user has dwelled for a few seconds. To the user, it all looks seamlessly like part of your site, for the marketer it ensures the small screen real estate on mobile is used in the most effective way to drive conversions.

Here’s another example from NEST Fragrances. A similar concept has been used to showcase ‘bestsellers’, which is also part of NEST’s filtering categories onsite, by utilizing a free area of white space on the product page. Mirroring the message the user has seen throughout their journey is a great way to build confidence that they’ve chosen the right product – this example led to a 30% uplift in conversion rate!

Product page e-commerce design essentials:

• Use high-quality imagery (or video!)
• Communicate important information like shipping deadlines or cost
• Cross-sell and up-sell with relevant recommendations

Conversion: cart and checkout design

There’s no more frustrating a loss for an e-commerce business than that of a customer who has made it all the way through to the checkout, only to abandon their purchase at the last moment! But this happens all too often. There are plenty of reasons for this – sometimes the process is too long and muddled (a UX issue), too busy and complicated to look at (a UI issue), and sometimes the customer just doesn’t have faith in the safety of their card details or the credibility of the site they are dealing with. There are fixes for all of these problems.

Travel is an industry that suffers particularly from the issue of cart abandonment, due in part to the often lengthy booking funnel, as well as the fact holidays are often high value, high consideration purchases. A visitor who enters into the booking funnel, however, is showing high intent, so how can you encourage them to complete this process via great design?

Great design is all about great communication, and this is especially true when it comes to e-commerce design. So one way to solve the issue of abandonment within travel is to set visitor expectations at the appropriate point in the user journey. Tour company Leger Holidays sought to do this at different points along the booking funnel utilizing In-Page Personalization:

As users complete the form, they are made aware of how long is left to go in the process, encouraging them to continue on their journey. What’s good about this example is that the information is presented in context – anchored to the relevant section of the form, but without interrupting the visitor journey. To date, the results have been impressive, with conversion rates up by +15.7% versus the control group.

An interesting recent development when it comes to this stage of the customer journey is Instagram’s new checkout feature, which allows customers to buy products on the social media platform without having to leave the app itself. The ease that this affords customers is obvious and echoed by the app’s clean checkout process as seen below, and there are a few things that e-commerce brands would do well to add to their own site, particularly when it comes to mobile.

The selling points as Instagram tell it are: simplicity, convenience and security. Users don’t need to log in and enter their details multiple times (often a barrier to conversion, particularly on mobile), and the payment options available, such as PayPal, are well known and mobile-friendly.

One crucial area where Instagram might fall down is trust, given ongoing issues with how its parent company, Facebook, handles consumer data. A lack of trust can be a hugely disruptive factor in the checkout process and with consumers more aware of online security than ever before, highlighting your brand’s reputation and security is one of the best ways to counter these fears.

Cart and checkout e-commerce design essentials:

• Use trust symbols and well-known payment providers
• Keep it simple, especially on mobile
• Communicate clearly around form completion

Post-Purchase: customer experience e-commerce design

Of course, once your sale is completed that shouldn’t be the end of your customer’s journey with you. In many cases, the delivery is still to be made, and of course, you’ll always want to encourage the customer to return for another purchase in the future. There are a few ways to make sure the ongoing customer experience is catered for in via your e-commerce design.

Pop-up notifications when arriving on a website are a common way to encourage account or mailing list sign-ups, but can feel like a frustrating obstacle to users who already have accounts – that’s why it’s important to personalize your lead generation efforts, and think about what information you want to ask for, or give to, returning users . It might be to encourage them to sign-up for your loyalty program, with a post-purchase notificaiton:

Or it might be giving them a special offer the next time they visit, based on purchase frequency, as shown below from beauty brand Ouidad. The brand created campaigns to re-engage lapsing users and reward top customers, driving a high level of engagement and boosting loyalty and lifetime value. Last year, Ouidad loyalty members had an average repeat purchase rate of 54.4% (vs. 29.8% for non-members) and a higher annual purchase frequency.

Or it might be, for those awaiting delivery, a tracking process. This can be utilized whether the item is likely to take a few days to arrive, like clothing, books or other goods, or likely to arrive in half an hour so, like takeaway pizza.

Domino’s pizza tracker that kicks off the moment you order your pizza and gives an estimate about where in the process of getting to you the pizza currently is. It’s a useful tool that helps the customer feel as though they’re being cared for and looked after even though the purchase itself has now been made.

Post-purchase e-commerce design essentials:

• Showcase your loyalty program to drive memberships
• If you don’t have a loyalty program, you can still tailor offers based on behavior
• Think about how you can best communicate delivery tracking information

Conclusion

Your website should be built and designed so that it is always considering the customer journey. From the moment visitors arrive until well after their purchase has been made, there are opportunities to make a smooth and intuitive experience that ensures visit after visit. Above all, seek to provide a clean and easily navigable experience, incorporating personalization to help create a customized experience for every visitor. Get it right and you will not only secure the conversion, but have the opportunity to increase average order values and build long-term loyalty.

The post E-commerce design & the customer journey appeared first on Yieldify.

While audience segmentation is an established marketing practice – most marketers will no doubt be segmenting their email lists and creating demographics-driven personas in their marketing activities – behavioral segmentation for website visitors is an evolution that has happened in-line with changing technology.

Marketers can now understand much more about visitors to their eCommerce sites, opening exciting new avenues to better reach customers at the right point in the customer journey.

One of those avenues is the ability to segment your web traffic by behavior – meaning you don’t have to acquire their details in order to effectively market to them, but rather, you can automate this process while visitors are browsing your website.

This guide will help you get a handle on segmentation and how it can be used effectively in your onsite marketing strategy.

We’ll explain the difference between segmentation and personalization, provide examples of what kinds of visitor or customer segments you might market to, and show how segmentation has been used as a tool to personalize the customer journey in real-life examples.

Why audience segmentation?

E-commerce personalization depends on the data sources you can access and personalize against. Segmentation allows you to start doing this, without asking your visitors for additional data. 

Behavioral segmentation in particular is an easy win for marketers: by recognizing patterns within your web traffic, you can cater to large groups among your users before drilling down to create a detailed personalization strategy within those audience segments.

This means you can cater to these large groups easily with small tweaks to your onsite marketing strategy. Combining behavioral segmentation with demographic, geographic, and psychographic segmentation is a powerful way to understand more about your audience, and from this deliver more personalized experiences on your website.

Audience segmentation vs. Personalization: What’s the difference?

Though both are driven by data, segmentation is about breaking customers into broadly identifiable groups; personalization is about individual behavior.

Return visitors who haven’t yet purchased are a customer segment, and after identifying them, marketers can set up messaging that will address them appropriately.

Personalization tactics can then reach those at the right point in their individual customer journey – for example, if they add an item to their shopping cart and then show intent to abandon their basket.

There are of course challenges with both: segmentation is by definition broad and can be generic; meanwhile, personalization requires a large amount of data in order for marketers to make the right play. However, both are highly effective tools that can increase conversion rates and average order value.

Segmentation can be a stepping stone to delivering personalization, especially when combined with real-time behavioral segmentation.

8 ways to segment your audience

When practicing website optimization, leveraging audience segmentation helps provide a framework for creating your customer journey map. Experimenting with the data you gather from specific audience segments interacting with your site will help you to provide a more personalized experience. But with hundreds of data points available, creating segments worth focusing on can be a challenge.

Given that we regularly analyze over 30 billion data points to benchmark customer journeys across eCommerce, we can shed some light on the audience segments you might want to consider focusing on.

Depending on your product, market, and marketing strategy, however, there could be dozens of other ways that work for you to form the foundation of a segmentation and personalization strategy.

1. New visitor segmentation

New visitors are an important segment to personalize for, but at this point in the customer journey, you don’t know too much about them – so understanding their behavior is key.

According to Yieldify data, new visitors make up a hefty majority of website traffic for both retail and travel, at around 55%. They also drive the most revenue: 40% and 44% for retail and travel sites respectively, so they need to be carefully nurtured, and led either to the checkout or to a micro-conversion, like signing up for an email newsletter.

It’s also likely you’re acquiring new visitors from paid sources such as PPC, so consider adding traffic source here, as visitors arriving from different channels might demonstrate different (but more on that later!).

Generally, for new visitors you want to:

• Ensure they know what you’re all about, as soon as possible.
• Keep them on the site as long as possible (so they can do the above).
• Learn more about them through their on-site behavior.
• Get an email address or other useful data before they go (if they’re really not ready to convert).

A simple welcome offer, such as the one below from Skyn ICELAND, served at the perfect moment can make the customer feel cared for and creates a strong reason to either make a purchase then and there. This could be given to them then and there or in exchange for a valuable email address! The important thing is to test what works best.

For example, A/B testing whether you need to actually offer a discount is a smart way to understand more about this segment (and preserve your margins!) In this case Skyn ICELAND found that highlighting its brand USPs was actually more successful for driving conversions with new visitors, as it helped educate those leaving the website about the brand and products.

2. Returning visitor segmentation

So, maybe you’ve done a great job with your new visitors, and lots of them are coming back to your website. The returning visitor segment, as you might have guessed, is made up of people who haven’t purchased before but who have visited your website before. They are a truly key segment as they have the highest average order value across both retail and travel – so keeping them happy should be a priority.

One key expectation that consumers today have is that you remember a little bit about them, 63% of consumers expect you remember their preferences and data across all channels, and this rises to 74% when we look at millennials. When it comes to behavioral segmentation this means treating them differently than the last time they visited, especially if they shared data with you!

It doesn’t have to be complicated, a simple ‘welcome back’ message, evolved from when they were a new visitor shows they’re not just another number – creating the same feeling you get when a shop assistant recognizes you. This is also another opportunity to secure their email address if you didn’t get it the first time around, as in the below example from online grocer Heartier:

While this approach can work well for retailers, especially in grocery where there is a lack of loyalty you might want to approach longer, higher-value, purchases, such as travel, slightly differently – especially considering the high Average Order Value (AOV) returning visitors represent.

Thomas Cook Airlines and Condor designed a campaign to mitigate against booking abandonment by offering the user the option to save their booking for later and opt-in explicitly. This circumvented the need to send cart abandonment emails without explicit opt-in – a strategy that would no longer have been valid under GDPR.

The new campaign that incorporated opt-in was first trialed on Condor before being rolled out across Thomas Cook Airlines. It triggered an exit to offer the user the opportunity to save their booking by entering their email address and explicitly opting-in to re-engagement.

This campaign succeeded in engaging customers who were at high risk of being lost from the booking funnel, putting them on a journey towards conversion when they would otherwise have been lost. The GDPR-friendly approach also surfaced key learnings: whilst send volumes were smaller, the open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates were significantly higher.

Considering the likelihood of a high order value from returning visitors, there’s an opportunity to personalize based on basket value.

For example, skincare brand Kiehl’s gave customers with order values within certain ranges incentives to increase the value of their basket: visitors showing intent to exit with a basket value below €60 were shown the exact amount they needed to spend to qualify for free shipping via Yieldify’s Dynamic Promotions feature. In addition, those with a cart valued between €75 and €89 were targeted with a corner notification offering a range of samples and sachets for orders over €90.

3. Returning customer segmentation

Returning customers – that is, those who have already made a purchase with you but aren’t yet loyal customers – are another segment that needs tailored attention as they are guided towards becoming a loyal customer. For both retail and travel, returning customers typically have a higher average order than loyal customers.

However, according to Bain & Company, “60-80% of customers who describe themselves as satisfied do not go back to do more business with the company that initially satisfied them.” This means that marketers have to work hard to woo these customers into returning again and again.

To guide this customer segment towards becoming high-value customers, VIP messaging and perks like gifts with purchase are another way to engage them and grow the relationship. Skincare brand 100% Pure uses a tiered loyalty program with clearly communicated benefits, and according to Shopify, 92-100% of customers go on to buy five more times following their fourth purchase.

Gifts with Purchase can be an effective strategy for a variety of segments, but ensure the messaging is tailored to your returning customers. Haircare brand Ouidad works hard to give this group of customers a reason to come back, creating campaigns to re-engage lapsing users and reward top customers.

This is strategy is further supported by the brand’s loyalty program, with loyalty members demonstrating an average repeat purchase rate of 54.4 (vs. 29.8% for non-members).

4. Loyal customer segmentation

Customers who have returned time and again, purchasing multiple times and/or who have a high lifetime value are a small but hugely important segment. Our stats show that they have a 31.3% (retail) or 33.8% (travel) chance of converting, the highest of any segment: a loyal retail customer has an 8.5x higher chance of converting than a new visitor.

“Loyal customers have the highest chance of converting verusus the segments we’ve discussed so far – 31.3% for retail and 33.8% for travel!”

Yieldify

With this segment, you can really start to focus on personalization, since you’ll have plenty of data from the customer’s previous purchases. For example, a fashion shopper’s previous purchase data could be used to recommend an extra item to increase order value.

This can be highly-personalized, ‘in the moment’ by recommending complementary products to go with what they’ve already got in their cart, as they reach the checkout page – similar to the way in-store checkouts are merchandised with additional products. Sports nutrition brand Science in Sport, saw a 155.5% uplift in conversions from using this tactic:

Another way to personalize for this segment is to offer highly tailored discounts based on preferences shown in the past, for example, if they have a preference for a particular brand or product, showing special promotions for those brands.

These are also the kinds of customers who may act as promoters on your behalf, so another way of extracting value from them is to suggest social sharing or to offer referral codes. For example, clothing retailer UNTUCKit offers a clear referral incentive for those who join their VIP program:

Finally, you might also want to ask those happy customers for a review! We’ve found that this works best when it is well-timed after a recent purchase. For example, using Yieldify’s historical targeting feature we were able to encourage returning customers who had made a purchase between a particular time frame to review their recent purchases for one of our beauty eCommerce clients:

5. Time-based segmentation

Leading on from the above, time is of the essence! Time of day, day of the week and seasonal traffic are key segments that can be overlooked. Depending on the product and the target market, different times can be more or less profitable.

For example, soak.com, an online bathroom retailer, found that social proof personalization tactics weren’t working as effectively as expected on their visitors. The process of analyzing the customer journey and creating a customer journey map revealed that it did work well with those visitors browsing at lunchtime – i.e. people with more time to read, think, and consider this big purchase.

After zeroing in on this time of day with the campaign, they saw an 11.2% conversion rate uplift among those targeted.

6. Location and Language segmentation

Depending on your product, breaking users down by their geographic location could be a highly effective tool to cater to customers’ needs. With this information, you can create highly targeted offers.

Geographic segmentation can also be used to serve specific messaging based on topical information like weather or local events. See for example the comparison between this topical vs generic display advertising:

With this kind of targeting, you can highlight specific products (like fans during a heatwave or gifts and decorations for holidays celebrated in particular countries and regions).

Although global eCommerce brands will likely run different sites in the language of the region they operate in, SMEs or new entrants to markets who may not have the capacity for multiple sites can still target these market segments by offering targeted messages to those with different language browser settings.

Another use case for language-based segments is when a significant number of visitors who are accessing a site in a particular country but who speak in a different language from the dominant one in that country.

Lancome found that many of their customers browsing the Canadian site were Chinese speakers, who are a huge driving force in global luxury e-commerce. This segment was then targeted with a lead gen message in their browser language:

7. Traffic source segmentation

Part of creating a seamless customer journey is in guiding browsers from the first point of contact (like an email, Instagram post, or Facebook advert) to your site and into the sales funnel. Traffic driven from specific sources might be attracted for particular reasons, so ensure that you’re serving them the content or offer they’ve clicked on.

Remind this audience segment of the initial reason they clicked. Subscription service SimplyCook’s targeted Facebook-driven traffic; by prompting them to sign up with a £1 trial offer, they were able to drive 7k leads that otherwise would have been lost.

Building on the success of this campaign, the brand is now working with Yieldify to deliver personalized offers to other audience segments arriving on site from different traffic sources targeting, for example, those arriving from vegetarian or gluten-free content on Facebook.

8. Device segmentation

The proportion of purchases made via mobile is expected to reach 53.9% by 2021, and research shows that up to 65% of all online purchases involve multi-device journeys, so segmenting by device should be a no-brainer. But knowing what works best on desktop, versus mobile and tablet can be a big challenge.

The path to conversion on mobile looks different from the desktop journey: it could mean a customer searching for store locations, making a call directly, using the mobile site while visiting in person (tying in with location segmentation), downloading an app, or engaging in browsing that starts on mobile but transfers to a desktop for the purchase. These kinds of journeys should be reflected in your customer journey map, and based on data from your users.

To target abandoning mobile visitors, menswear retailer M.J.Bale highlighted its click-and-collect service, and in-store returns, perfect for mobile users on the go.

Conclusion

Identifying and catering to your audience segments is one of the first steps to a strong personalization strategy, and these eight examples are just a simple starting point!

By catering to the circumstances and expectations of your traffic, you can begin to optimize ROI with messaging that reflects the stage of customer journey the visitor is at, whether they’re a brand new visitor or a loyal customer.

Your segments will constantly evolve as you gather more data on your visitors, and may interact with each other: For example, location may interact with device use, and language form an important part of your returning customer strategy.

Ultimately, the greater the granularity available in the data, the more you’ll be able to personalize for these segments as they emerge.

The post Audience Segmentation for eCommerce appeared first on Yieldify.

A further 34% are planning to invest in it this year, so there’s no time like the present to get your head around what customer journey mapping is all about.

Whether you’ve already tried your hand at mapping your customer journeys, or you simply want some ideas on how to refresh your existing customer journey maps, this guide will cover it all.

We will examine the following points:

• Why it’s so important to map the customer journey;
• When’s the best time to create a customer journey map;
• Who to involve in the process;
• And how to actually do it – all in 10 simple steps!

Along the way, we’ll include plenty of examples, and then some real-life applications from brands including Virgin Trains, soak.com, and more.

What is customer journey mapping?

Creating a customer journey map is the practice of creating a visual representation of the journey a user makes from being unaware of a brand to becoming a customer.

It’s a simple but powerful idea that’s based on qualitative and quantitative data that helps you understand more about customer touchpoints. That is, how they discover your brand and how they get from one touchpoint to the next to move down your sales funnel toward becoming a customer.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Customers have never had higher expectations of brands: over 50% are prepared to go to another brand if the one they’re using doesn’t personalize the user experience. But in order to personalize the experience, you need to first understand what that experience looks like – enter customer journey mapping.

Creating a view of your customer journey can seem daunting, especially as the number of digital touchpoints continues to grow. But, it’s highly worthwhile for marketers, salespeople, developers, and eCommerce executives to get on the same page about how visitors are experiencing the brand, across different channels, moving toward making the first purchase – and then hopefully many more.

By understanding this customer journey via a data-first approach, marketers can capitalize on the most effective customer touchpoints and improve the points in the journey where people drop out. It’s a highly effective tool for improving conversions and ROI, so indispensable for marketing teams.

When to carry out customer journey mapping (and who to involve)

Creating your customer journey map should be a task that’s completed as soon as possible, but is particularly useful if you’re undergoing a stage of growth, adding new marketing and communications channels (such as new social accounts, chatbots, etc), or replatforming your e-commerce site.

Ideally, customer journey mapping should be an ongoing project, since e-commerce audiences evolve and shift rapidly. A year-old map may not give you the same information and guidance as an up-to-date one, especially considering that digital touchpoints are growing by 20% each year, according to McKinsey.

Creating your customer journey map is a complex task that requires input from stakeholders across the business. It’s not just for marketing to worry about!

For example, you might need help from your IT team to provide data from your digital channels, your sales team for front-line feedback from customers, your fulfillment or delivery partners, and the list goes on. If your journey map is going to help you truly understand your customers, having a cross-functional team that interacts with different aspects of the customer journey is vital.

So that’s the what, who, when, and why of customer journey mapping. But we did say we’d be helping out with the how. 

So although every business is different, and there is no single right way to create a customer journey map, the examples and frameworks illustrated here should give you a good head-start at better understanding the journey that your customers travel through as they engage with your company, brand, products, partners, and people.

How to create a customer journey map

If just a little over 40% of marketers use a customer journey map as a part of their strategy, that means there’s almost 60% who aren’t using this incredibly useful tool at all.

Here are the 10 steps you need to follow to create your first map (or improve your existing one!):

1) Get clear on your objectives

A customer journey map might fill many purposes (and the more people you involve in the process will complicate this further). Here are a few examples of goals for a customer journey map:

• Understanding the user journey;
• Improving the current user journey;
• Visualizing a multi-channel marketing approach;
• Creating a starting point for a new marketing strategy;
• Understanding and finding new market segments;
• Engaging or re-engaging a market segment;
• Zeroing in on where to conduct testing;
• Acquiring or converting more customers.

And these are just a few ideas. So at the outset, consider what you want to get out of the customer journey mapping project, so you can define its scope (and stick to it!)

2) Assemble the A-Team

Given that your customers interact with many different parts of your organization, it makes sense that your customer journey mapping team should reflect this. Build a cross-functional project group with stakeholders from across the business, including:

• Marketing and communications;
• Sales and product development;
• Software engineers and front-end developers;
• Fulfillment, order management, and shipping partners;
• Customer service;
• Executive stakeholders.

It may be that your customer journey map requires several iterations, with one team creating the first draft and then input from other teams being incorporated to add detail and sophistication.

3) Forget complicated templates

Type ‘customer journey map template’ into Google (or your search engine of choice) and you’ll find hundreds of results showing different ways companies have created customer journey maps.

However, every business is unique, and that goes for the customer journey too. Your customer journey may not fit neatly into one of these structures (and nor do you have to have a beautifully designed one for it to be functional).

While we’ll share some examples throughout this report – don’t despair – take them as inspiration if you like, but simply start with pen and paper, sticky notes, or mind maps before formalizing your ‘finished’ map with your graphic design team if preferred.

Here are a few useful layouts you might start with that can be created with post-it notes or a whitebord:

4) Start with your customer personas

Another feature of the user journey is that it may be different for each of your user personas. A customer journey map shouldn’t be retro-fitted from the perspective of the brand, but rather a quantitative reflection of your customers’ genuine experience of it.

Put yourself in your personas’ shoes, and start there, rather than starting at the point of sale and working backwards. Doing this for each of your key personas is vital to personalizing and improving the user experience. And given that 55% of consumers are willing to pay extra for a guaranteed good experience, there’s a lot of incentive to get the personalization right. Orienting your customer journey strategy around your customers is an important step in customer satisfaction.

Here’s a great example from LEGO’s customer experience team. In this customer journey map we see the approach for a business traveler flying to New York – the persona, who has specific needs and preferences, is at the center of the map:

5) Gather your data

Now, we’ve used the word ‘quantitative’ a few times, and that’s no accident: the best customer journeys are data-driven. Even the best marketers’ instincts about how people interact with your brand need to be backed up by data. You may want to collect statistics around:

• Macro and micro-conversion rates;
• Traffic driven from different channels;
• How people navigate through your site: where they begin, where they go next and how they end;
• Bounce rates, basket abandonment, and exit rates;
• Peak times of day, days of the week and busy seasons.

You can find most of this data in your analytics tool, but sometimes it can be a challenge to bring it to life visually, and tie it together into a coherent journey (especially if you’re short on time, or lack advanced analytics skills).

Not only that, but with so much data now available you could end up spending a lot of time looking at something that isn’t going to have a real impact.

Here at Yieldify, we help our clients overcome data fatigue with smart visualizations that offer an easy to understand, yet data-rich analysis of how customers move through your website: From acquisition, through to the end of the funnel or their exit.

Here’s an example, showing the various customer journeys that happen as visitors arrive on site:

6) Start mapping your touchpoints

You’ve probably got more customer touchpoints than you’re even aware of.

A touchpoint is any situation where the customer interacts with your brand, so it could be on social channels, email, chatbots, call centers, voice search, and many more.

First, make a list of all your touchpoints, then once you have an idea of the key ones for your business, you can start to plot how they interact along the customer journey.

In the simple example below, for a returning customer choosing a new mobile phone, the touchpoints are listed in blue, and the stages of the customer journey in yellow. Key decision points or ‘moments of truth’ are shown in red.

7) Include the internal actions

The last example showed the journey from the customer perspective, but don’t forget what’s going on behind the scenes. For example, when a complaint is raised on Facebook, where does the ticket get routed to and how does it get resolved?

A lot of these internal actions are invisible, but by creating a coherent document you can capture the internal processes – this is also useful for codifying the company’s workflow and making it more efficient.

To help get a clear vision of how this interplays with the customer journey, you may choose to color-code for internal actions that are triggered by the customer’s journey. In this example for a pizza restaurant, the backstage and support processes are listed out alongside the customer actions and touchpoints:

8) Add timelines to the customer journey map

How long does it take from a customer to move from one touchpoint to the next? How long does it take them to get from first becoming aware of the brand to making a purchase, or from buying for the first time and the second, or from asking a question on the chatbot to adding a product to their basket?

Each of these intervals will give you a significant amount of data to work with, and it will particularly show you where the efficiencies or opportunities lie.

Another important metric is time of day – when dealing with large volumes of customers, peak times for certain customer requirements will become more apparent, and lead to greater insights and easing of pain points.

See for example this telecommunication provider customer journey map, which indicates at what time of day the most demand is for certain services, helping with internal resourcing, such as customer service or order fulfilment:

9) Pay attention to customer emotions

Consumer behavior is driven largely by emotion and psychology. If you understand their emotional state at every point in the user journey, you can cater to it.

For example, if they’re curious in the beginning, serve informative content to pique their interest further. If they’re uncertain, create triggers that will inspire more urgency to buy. If they’re frustrated, fix the part of the journey that’s causing the frustration.

Capturing customers’ feelings on paper can be as simple as choosing the right emoji to reflect the situation. In this example, all the possible crisis situations are illustrated with how the customer might be feeling, and potential solutions below.

Here’s another example related to completing an application for a new bank account online. The emotional experience has been mapped against the journey phases, revealing exactly where it can be improved: security, simplicity, and ease of registration.

10) Note your evaluation criteria and metrics

As part of your map, benchmark your metrics next to each touchpoint so you can track the impact of any adjustments you make.

For example, if targeting idle browsers to inspire them to check out, make a note of the conversion rate so when you next run tests you can have an easy reference for what tactics are more or less successful.

This will also tell you which touchpoints aren’t pulling their weight and need to be improved. Some metrics you might want to include are:

• Bounce rate;
• Average time on page;
• Average order value (AOV);
• New vs return customer order values.

It can be extremely difficult to know how you’re comparing with competitors and industry standards here, so it’s useful to take advantage of external data and benchmarking services, so you can understand where you stand in relation to the rest of your industry.

Using your customer journey map

Now, your map isn’t an end goal in itself. It’s an evolving tool you can now use to optimize the customer journey, closely analyzing the different stages of the journey and fixing the touchpoints that have been flagged up in your analysis as causing problem journeys.

The map is also a tool to identify opportunities for improvement, capitalizing on big opportunities to improve ROI, such as re-engaging visitors arriving from paid channels who have fallen idle or who are showing exit intent.

Bathroom retailer soak.com utilized its understanding of the customer journey, gained through strategy workshops and customer journey mapping with Yieldify, to target PPC traffic to understand more about this touchpoint, and visitor segment. The campaign provided insights into visitor behavior, as well as re-engaging visitors who would have otherwise come to the end of their journey.

Virgin Trains offers another example of fine-tuning touchpoints based on user experience mapping. A big challenge within travel is the booking process, by analyzing this stage of the customer journey in detail it found room for improvement.

To combat customers dropping out of the booking funnel, a proximity to purchase message was added to show customers how close they were to completion, along with messaging that reassured users of no hidden fees and the best price guarantee. This approach resulted in a 16.6% uplift in conversions from abandoning customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Customer journey mapping is not only useful in preventing abandonment, or understanding your visitors more clearly, but can also help identify opportunities to increase average order value.

From their in-depth understanding of the customer journey, beauty eCommerce brand Skyn ICELAND knows that the key to cross-selling successfully is to suggest value-added products that focus on the skincare needs of its visitors.

The brand created a campaign that targeted visitors purchasing Hydro Cool Firming Eye Gels. Using flexible targeting they were shown an overlay that recommended a complementary product, the Brightening Eye Serum.

The campaign took the form of a notification that appeared at the bottom-right of the screen immediately when the user added Hydro Cool Firming Eye Gels to cart. Providing more education on why this product would help visitors achieve their skincare goals resulted in a +23.1% uplift in conversion rate and boosted order value by 14.94%.

Conclusion and next steps

Although customer journey mapping can seem like a big task, it’s a powerful tool for marketers who can ensure that their customer journeys are sophisticated and robust, able to be personalized to the individual customer’s expectations, needs and preferences. It’s your roadmap to successful touchpoint interactions and conversion rate optimization.

After you’ve created a thorough working customer journey model, you can and should return to it again and again to base marketing strategy decisions, or when adding new marketing channels or touchpoints.

Using this as your launchpad, you also have a framework for drilling into customer behavior, uncovering more and more information about your customer base, and feeding this back into how you create your customer engagement and marketing strategy.

Ultimately, customer journey mapping allows marketers to embed the customer experience at the heart of all marketing activities and campaigns, what better reason to get started?

The post How to Create a Customer Journey Map appeared first on Yieldify.

Every year since 2006 has been hailed as the ‘year of mobile’. But in reality mobile, and within that m-commerce, is no longer an upcoming trend, or ‘the next big thing’. M-commerce is well and truly here (in fact, some claim it reached the tipping point way back in 2016!)

So, you may ask, why are we publishing an ebook on m-commerce?

Well the fact you’re here for a start, indicates that things aren’t done with when it comes to m-commerce. Mobile commerce is continuing to evolve at a rapid pace, meaning what we knew yesterday, isn’t necessarily true today. Consider the increase in digital media usage in the below chart from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trend Report:

What’s evident is the huge growth mobile is driving when it comes to time spent online. Yet despite this huge growth, there’s been much made of a ‘mobile commerce gap’, with a 2017 comScore study reporting that mobile accounts for 69% of traffic, but only 20% of conversions.

But is this still true today? If we look at the data, we can see that m-commerce in the US, actually seems to hold a pretty healthy share of the pie when it comes to sales. And this is just one of the myths we’ll seek to bust, or confirm, in this report.

The impact of mobile access to e-commerce is wide-reaching, and requires companies to consider every aspect of online shopping, and how they might better serve the growing customer base experiencing their sites through mobile devices.

There are a lot of different factors to think about:

• How visible relevant deals and offers are when presented on a smaller screen
• How to take advantage of social shopping, instigated by traffic from social media.
• How to handle payments when consumers are on-the-go
• The impact of multi-device journeys on customer experience

With so much to consider, it’s easy to see why confusion arises around what m-commerce actually means for e-commerce businesses, and how strategies need to adapt in order to improve the customer journey.

This ebook is here to solve those problems by dissecting some of the myths surrounding the ever-changing world of m-commerce. We’re going to debunk common misconceptions, and show you how to make the most out of mobile!

M-commerce myth #1: Consumers stick to their preferred devices when buying online

It’s easy to think of your m-commerce strategy as a standalone thing. A new strategy to add alongside those you already have in place for more traditional e-commerce. This comes from the idea that a customer who ends up buying a product using their phone is likely to have carried out the entire customer journey through the same screen.

Increasingly, consumers are beginning their online shopping on one device, and completing the purchase on another.  We watch one episode of our favourite show on a Smart TV, the next streamed onto our phone, and the one after that on our desktop PC. Our shopping habits often take similar journeys – studies show that up to 65% of all online purchases involve multi-device journeys.

Even within mobile, 46% of users are switching between mobile sites, and mobile apps, and actually this helps in debunking our first myth. The reality is that consumers will go with whatever device, or indeed app, that serves them best in that moment – it’s all about a smooth customer journey.

Consumers might start browsing on a PC, before ultimately completing their purchase through their phone during their commute into work. For purchases that require lengthy consideration (expensive purchases, or those that may involve research to ensure the right deal), it’s even more likely that the consumer will engage across multiple devices during their journey.

Your challenge, then, is to make sure each consumer has a consistent experience with your site, regardless of which channel or device they might be viewing it from. If a potential customer has been looking at jackets on their PC, it’s a good idea to direct them to jackets next time they log into the site on their phone.

A smart way to do this is to map out the customer journey your site offers, and try and identify all the touchpoints along the way that offer you opportunities to connect with your customers browsing on their phones.

Online bathroom specialists soak.com worked with Yieldify to identify these mobile opportunities. As a high-consideration purchase, an important consideration for the customer journey was which devices consumers were likely to be accessing the site through at specific points during the day.

Utilizing Yieldify’s time of day targeting feature the brand was able to test the impact of social proof at different times, across different devices. The results showed that mobile users browsing the website during lunch break hours who were shown Dynamic Social Proof were more likely to convert, with conversion rate among the target group increasing by +11.2%. It also showed the importance of having a customer journey map in place.

This worked because the campaign looked at not just how, but when consumers would be browsing the website. Bathroom fixtures are the sort of product that requires a lot of planning and consideration before purchase – targeting browsers who were using their mobiles to check out products at lunchtime made sense, and this hypothesis was backed up by the data.

What to learn from this myth

For mobile websites, think about how you can help visitors make their decision by adding context, without disrupting the customer journey. Base this on analysis of your customer behaviour, as we saw in the soak.com example.

Delivering messages anchored to a particular page element is a quick way to do this, and takes into account the limitations of screen real-estate on mobile. Then you can easily test different messaging and targeting to understand what works when it comes to influencing your customer journey, without the need for extensive IT set-up.

M-commerce Myth #2: Mobile users don’t convert

We’ll be honest: we can see where this myth has come from (we even referenced it at the start of this guide). It’s certainly true that whilst traffic continues to increase across mobile devices, conversions aren’t keeping pace. But here’s the important thing: mobile conversion rates are increasing, and will only continue to do so as the way we shop develops further.

Already, more than 57% of search traffic online comes from mobile devices. This makes sense when you consider what Google calls the ‘mobile moment‘ mindset. Unlike in the past with desktop where we might have ‘gone online’ to check something, we now live online. Consumers can use their mobile device to search, discover and buy the moment something pops into their head, wherever they are. It’s a huge cultural shift that means we’re in the midst of a major change in consumer behaviour that will impact your m-commerce strategy.

The question then, is about how you utilize this shift, and optimize your site for customer journeys on mobile devices. A big part of this is understanding what the new behaviours look like. The instant access and ever-present nature of mobile devices mean they’re being used at every small ‘vacant’ moment in our day. The bus ride from the station, the doctor’s waiting room, are now opportunities to browse the internet on our phones.

Increasingly we aren’t using these moments to play games or read listicles, but to meet needs we have in the moment, be it ordering food, discovering the next pair of sneakers we’ll buy, or purchasing travel insurance on the way to the airport. In fact, research shows that 75% of us think our mobile phones are helping us to be more productive.

Once again, understanding the customer journey is central to your ability to cater to these mobile moments. With mobile responsible for more than half of Google searches, this means optimizing the journey for users arriving from paid search. Google Shopping dominates paid search on mobile, and is becoming increasingly competitive, so getting the journey right is also a case of ensuring return on investment.

A key insight into Google Shopping traffic is that 75% of searches arriving via this source land directly on product pages, despite being broader category searches. There’s no guarantee that the product Google has directed your customer to is the right one for them – and if the search was ‘jewellery’, and you’re an online jewellery store, the chances are that you have a lot more products that might be of interest to your customer.

What to learn from this myth

If you’re sending your search traffic to PDPs, you need to find a way to give consumers the opportunity to discover other relevant items. Notifications that use Dynamic Social Proof to demonstrate what others are buying are one way to highlight the options available. Remember that many people use their moments of downtime to browse casually in discovery mode, as opposed to those who are actively looking to fulfil a need. Notifications like the below will help you recognize which are which, but will also help to nudge some casual browsers over into more purposeful shopping territory:

M-commerce Myth #3: Mobile-first indexing means everything needs to change

July 2018 saw the launch of Google’s mobile-first index, which gives preference to websites that are optimized towards mobile access. It’s an important change, and one that’s been coming ever since mobile devices became responsible for over 50% of search queries on the site. It represents a fundamental reversal of how Google is thinking about your website from a ranking and content perspective – the mobile version of your site is now considered the primary version of your site.

But, while there are a few new realities to adjust to when it comes to mobile, it doesn’t mean the death of desktop or throwing out your old mobile strategy completely. In fact, if the desktop and mobile versions of your site are identical, you may have not had to do much to maintain your rankings.

So what do you need to consider if you want to ensure your site continues to perform well in Google’s new mobile reality?

Perhaps the biggest change to date is Google’s mobile page speed update, which now includes page speed as a ranking factor for mobile. It makes sense – people want to be able to find answers to their questions as quickly as possible. This used to only be a consideration on desktop, but studies show it’s just as, if not more important on mobile:

According to Kissmetrics, if an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year. Fortunately, Google has some great resources to help you understand if page speed is an issue on your mobile site. Even if it’s not (lucky you!) mobile bounce rates are typically 10-20% higher than on desktop – so what else can you do to beat the bounce?

What to learn from this myth

The rules are broadly the same as for desktop. Start off by analyzing your customer journey map to understand where you’re losing visitors. A high bounce rate is indicative of entrance pages that aren’t relevant – so ensure you’re mirroring your marketing messages throughout the customer journey.

For example, if traffic is arriving from an offer advertised on social media, utilize this fact to re-engage them once they hit the site. This type of personalization is especially important on mobile, where paid search and social traffic represent a higher share of visitors than on desktop:

Recipe subscription service SimplyCook does a great job of reducing abandonment by reminding users why they visited in the first place. In the below example it tailored the campaign by referral source (Facebook – a key channel driving mobile sales), generating over 7k leads that would have been otherwise lost.

M-commerce Myth #4: Autocomplete will solve all your payment problems

Oh boy, do we wish this was always correct. Conversion rates remain lower on mobile than desktop, and no small part of this is just how complicated payment systems can appear when you’re navigating them on a six-inch screen.

There are few things more daunting to a mobile shopper than reaching the payment screen and seeing a lot of boxes, each half the width of their index finger, and knowing that each and every one of them requires information to be tapped in.

Then there’s the three-hand task of holding a credit card, holding a mobile device, and typing the long number into a two-inch keyboard. For many, it just seems easier to put off the task until they get to a desktop computer – and that’s the first step to putting off the purchase altogether.

A report by comScore highlighted the five biggest reasons mobile conversion rates remain lower than desktop. Two of the reasons – the difficulty of inputting details and concerns about the website’s security – directly relate to the checkout experience. That means that a well thought-out and easy to use checkout system could counter 40% of consumers’ concerns about shopping on your site!

There are two clear ways to counter these concerns. Firstly, ensuring that the customer feels safe buying from your site. The base level to work from is having an SSL certificate – but there are plenty of other ways to highlight your trustworthiness, including sharing scores from consumer reviews websites like Trustpilot, and using recognizable companies for your payment software.

Making sure your payment process is simple and accessible is the other big element that allows you to win more conversions from your mobile users. In recent years the options available to make your mobile payments as easy as possible have grown exponentially – phones will often offer to autocomplete payments details for consumers, to save them putting the information in manually.

What to learn from this myth

Don’t rely on autocomplete functionality, while this makes the experience smoother it wont alleviate consumer concerns around trust and security.- Consider combining easy payments with trustworthy brands to knock out 40% of those conversion concerns in one go. Iconic payment and digital wallet systems like Paypal, Google Pay and Apple Pay allow consumers to engage in one-click payments that they already know and trust with their money, and can boost mobile cart conversions by 3x according to BigCommerce.

If you don’t have a digital wallet option available, offering reassurance messaging around completion can be another way to combat abandonment, especially on longer forms such as travel booking or insurance applications. Showing a message alongside the relevant form field can aid completion, as Leger Holidays found, driving a +15.7% increase in conversions.

Alternatively, try reducing abandonment with a message triggered on-exit. In the example below menswear brand M.J. Bale highlighted USPs, such as click and collect. This can be even more effective on mobile as you can target by location, securing conversions from those near your stores!

M-commerce Myth #5: Once you’ve built your mobile site, the conversions will roll on in

It would be fantastic if the building of an effective mobile website was the whole story with m-commerce. You build the site, make it fast-loading, user-friendly, integrate it with its desktop equivalent, sit back and watch your conversions spike.

But m-commerce remains a fast-moving and ever-changing game. Central to any ongoing success will be your ability to analyze all the data available to you, while paying special attention to the customer journey map, and adjust your site accordingly. If you can do this, there are plenty of benefits that will allow you to improve conversions further and maintain a website that is always ready to offer the consumer exactly what they need!

A firm understanding of data can drive marketing decisions and improve your ability to provide personalization across your site, and improve the overall customer journey. Encouraging new users to sign up or log in using notifications will give your data even greater depth and, ultimately, allow you to connect with each customer in a much more meaningful way.

Making the customer journey your focus is always the best way to ensure you are making the most out of your mobile site. Only once you’ve mapped out what your website experiences might look like from first contact (including the source of that contact) right through to a completed sale, can you fully understand and recognize all the different ways that you can improve what you offer.

What to learn from this myth

In order to continually learn from your efforts to improve the customer journey, you need a testing strategy in place. What works on desktop, won’t necessarily drive results on mobile, so it’s important to separate out your tests by device. For example, we’ve seen that mobile gets a higher share of returning visitors than desktop, so make sure at the very least you have seperate strategies in place for new versus returning users.

Bus travel operator Megabus applied this ‘test and learn’ approach to its whole booking funnel, and from this was able to discover how to best boost conversions on both desktop and mobile.

For example, testing USPs at the top of the booking funnel revealed which formats and messages were most successful, and drove a +3.2% increase in conversion on mobile.

Conclusion

As users continue to favour their mobile devices as a means to access the internet and online shopping, the revenue earned from sales on those devices will continue to skyrocket. Now is the time to make sure your website is in the best position to sell to those who are accessing it on mobile devices – whether responsible for all or part of the customer journey.

Consider how the mode of access changes user habits, and target well-placed and relevant campaigns thoughtfully. Make sure your site is optimized for mobile use, so that you can make the most of Google’s mobile-first indexing, and don’t forget to include your payment screens in those considerations!

Nothing will help your conversions more than a system that enables them to happen easily. And finally, continue to look at the data you collect and analyze it to make sure you are consistently offering the best customer journey that you can. Do all of this, and you will have a forward-thinking m-commerce strategy that’s ready to make a real impact for your business.

The post M-commerce Myths appeared first on Yieldify.

When it comes to creating a successful eCommerce marketing strategy we need to talk about touchpoints – customer touchpoints to be exact.

A customer touchpoint is any time a customer or potential customer encounters your brand, especially when it involves interacting with it.

These interactions occur before, during, and after a consumer becomes a customer, perhaps starting via a Facebook ad they’re seeing for the first time, right down to the transactional email they receive after purchasing.

Customer touchpoints are the building blocks of your customer journey, so understanding them, and the right ones to focus on, is the starting point for any eCommerce marketer seeking to improve the visitor experience.

Not only that, but keeping up with (and adapting to) the evolution of customer touchpoints, and how your visitors are interacting with them, is now a non-negotiable part of creating a strong end-to-end customer journey.

Understanding the nuances of customer touchpoints is essential when you begin mapping out the customer journey and your eCommerce marketing strategy. However, it can be hard to know where to start as you try to get to grips with the increasing number of touchpoints available. Yet, it’s imperative brands work to do this, in order to deliver on consumer expectations:

“More than 60% of customers interact through multiple channels and irrespective of time, place, device, or medium, they expect consistency.”

Source: Deloitte

As technology develops, and consumer behavior evolves, growth of touchpoints has exploded, as brands seek to ensure the experience they’re offering is keeping pace with consumers’ adoption of new technologies.

Online is often the first customer touchpoint in the overall journey, with 65% of consumers researching products online before purchasing – whether online or in-store. Having multiple digital touchpoints integrated into your eCommerce marketing and user experience strategy is a must.

How to identify your customer touchpoints

In order to identify customer touchpoints, you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Get familiar with the steps they will take as they discover and purchase your product. Then, classify them in a way that makes sense for your business.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, but one simple way you could to look at classification is by pre, during and post-purchase, for example, for an eCommerce store:

E-commerce marketing customer touchpoints pre-purchase:

• Word of mouth
• Social media
• Email marketing

E-commerce marketing customer touchpoints during purchase:

• Product pages
• Customer service contact
• Shopping cart or checkout page

E-commerce marketing customer touchpoints post-purchase:

• Email follow-up, tracking, and delivery confirmation

Then put it all together, to get something like this:

When starting out with Customer Journey Optimization (CJO), identifying these key touchpoints, then mapping how your customer interacts with them across the journey will give you a good idea of what you should prioritize, and where the quick wins are.

This will depend on your audience’s needs, habits, and preferences, so your eCommerce marketing strategy should start with research. Read on to learn more about the key customer touchpoints to consider, and brands that are using them effectively.

8 key customer touchpoints (and best-in-class brand examples)

So, where do we start when there are so many potential touchpoints? Let’s discover the major of the foundational customer touchpoints, how they’ve evolved, and what you need to know if they’re part of your customer journey.

Email

With so many ways to reach your customers, is email still a relevant touchpoint? Short answer: Yes! The humble email is still one of the most effective eCommerce marketing tools in your arsenal.

The Data & Marketing Association found that 99% of consumers check their personal email every day and check their inbox about 20 times a day.

A message is five times more likely to be seen in an email than via Facebook. Customers are fans of email too: 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.

It makes sense then that DMA and Salesforce report a high ROI for email (and this has actually grown over the last few years, with Campaign Monitor reporting a $44 return on every $1 spent.) 

With the implementation of new privacy laws such as GDPR, it’s more important than ever to have a solid email strategy in place. Consumers tend to guard email access closely: they generally have 2-3 email accounts, with 44% sending marketing emails to a specific email address. The opportunity to unsubscribe from a mailing list is always available, so the relationship between customer and brand at this touchpoint needs to be nurtured.

In a world where customers are receiving many messages per day, online retailers need to break through the noise. Beauty subscription brands like Birchbox have mastered fostering great relationships with customers via email. Emails are centred around ‘value’, whether that be the brand’s values or the customer experience. Value is also literally provided in emails with a regular offer of free gifts, making it harder for the customer to ever want to unsubscribe.

Chatbots

Chatbots are a touchpoint that has exploded in popularity over recent years as artificial intelligence has advanced. They can help customers with whatever they’ve been programmed to manage, whether that be online support, suggesting products, or assisting at check out.

The important thing is to define the purpose of the chatbot carefully. Experts at Forrester suggest success with a chatbot strategy comes from a narrow field of uses, rather than trying to tackle a broad range of customer inquiries.

With consumers now expecting instant customer service, chatbots are an investment in personalized customer journeys and engagement. Telecommunications brand Vodafone is an example of a business leveraging this technology with their chatbot TOBi.

This digital assistant has accelerated conversion rates online by making the purchasing process two to three times faster. This addressed the significant basket abandonment issue the company was experiencing in customers browsing SIM only contracts.

Vodafone was able to address the specific concerns of this particular subset of customers, utilizing the best practice for chatbots by maintaining a narrow field of use.

Nurturing the customer-brand relationship has also been important here in the way TOBi has been designed to provide additional messages. For example, customers can ask TOBi about their plan options when traveling abroad and TOBi can even tell them a joke if they ask for one – all of which serves to increase customer engagement with the brand.

Social media

As a touchpoint, there’s no real getting used to social media – the landscape changes every few months. Right when you think you’re set, algorithm updates, new features, or even new platforms will inevitably upend your carefully crafted strategy, and change user behavior and buyer habits. But with 94% of online adults now using a social media account on at least one platform, it’s a customer touchpoint that can’t be ignored.

So what’s the state of play when it comes to social media and the eCommerce customer journey? Well, 75% of customers use social media as part of the buying process, and a further 55% go on to make a purchase after discovering a product via social media.

This behavior and social commerce are only set to rise as platforms look to bridge the gap between content and commerce, and remove friction from the purchase process with Instagram shoppable posts a huge hit with brands and consumers alike in 2018. So what do brands need to know?

When designing a strategy for this customer touchpoint, it’s important to go back to the customer behavior – brands need to think about the new kind of customer journey these social formats are creating. Given the important role social plays in product discovery – personalization is key.

The goal for any visitor arriving from these channels is to get as much information as possible about the item they’ve discovered, so consider creating specific landing pages, or using tailored messages based on referral source to help guide them toward purchase.

Getting it right can see significant uplifts in traffic and sales, for example, luxury shoe brand Dear Frances saw a 4.6x increase in sales and an 8.6x return on shoppable ads shown to already engaged users over the key Black Friday trading period.

Website

Websites have evolved as a touchpoint, from something that was an afterthought for many brands selling via bricks and mortar shops, to now being the central focus and face of a brand and its identity. Within the website itself, there are many touchpoints to consider, so it’s one of the most important areas to get right.

The visual and functional capability of an eCommerce website needs constant reviewing to keep up with demand for seamless customer experiences. Forbes predicts that by 2021, mobile eCommerce will account for 54% of all online sales, so a mobile-first website strategy is key.

For websites to act as effective touchpoints, they must quickly connect with visitors and then retain that connection, given that you have around 6-8 seconds before they leave. To do this effectively it’s important to consider their journey up to that point, for example, via which channel did they arrive on your site?

Bathroom retailer soak.com recognized the importance of personalizing its website for different visitors. Working with Yieldify, the brand targeted valuable PPC traffic that was exiting its site. An overlay asked users for more information on the reason for their visit, with three calls-to-action: shop by style, by room, or by color.

On the one hand, it helped ensure that traffic acquired at a high cost would not be easily lost. In this respect, the campaign continues to help drive conversion rate increase. On the other, it also helped the team at soak.com improve their understanding of their user experience and gauge the success of their PPC campaigns in driving users of high intent

Online influencers

Online influencers are valuable customer touchpoints, as they establish trust with customers as a credible source for a specific industry. Via a YouTube channel or Instagram page influencers have access to a large audience of potential customers.

Influencers don’t have to be celebrities now, with micro-influencers becoming increasingly used for marketing as they can engage and relate with more consumers in a targeted market segment.

Rather than spending an influencer budget on one celebrity post with 500k followers, you can tailor the message to more specific groups via 10-20 micro-influencers for the same price and higher engagement.

Nike is a market-leading user of influencer marketing. When promoting their new Air Vapormax series, they teamed up with father and son YouTube team, Dan and Lincoln Markham, for their series “What’s Inside?” where they cut open everyday objects.

Nike and the Markhams created seven sponsored videos filming a trip to Nike’s headquarters and dissecting Nike’s newest shoe, the Air Vapormax. This last video alone has been watched over 5.5 million times and received over 40,000 likes so far, reaching a large, but more importantly, a highly engaged audience to promote their new campaign.

Text message marketing (SMS)

Using Text Messages (SMS) as part of your eCommerce marketing strategy is a customer touchpoint that is growting in popularity with brands. It’s simple to create an affordable bulk SMS marketing campaign, generating a high reach and response rate. SMS marketing brand SlickText outlines why this touchpoint is so effective today:

• Texts have a 98% open rate within 5 seconds of being received.
• People take an average of 90 minutes to respond to email, but only 90 seconds to respond to am SMS.
• More than 75% of consumers would like to have offers sent to them via SMS. 
• Around 35% of consumers who receive a text message from a bulk SMS marketing campaign click on the link that they receive, and 47% go on to make a purchase.
• 64% of consumers are likely to think positively about companies that offer text communications.

Sandwich chain Subway has used SMS marketing successfully since 2015. They now have over 5 million subscribers with an 85% retention rate. Their average return from SMS customers is impressive:

“On average, 26% return more often, 13% spend more when they do, and 15% make more purchases than before being in the SMS program. Not only are these customers more engaged, but they have a clear impact on the success of Subway and their bottom line.”

Source: Motivity and Subway presentation at Mobile World Congress 2018

Voice assistants

Voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are part of a rapidly developing customer touchpoint that offers brands the opportunity to engage directly with consumers, especially in their own home.

Adobe’s statistics reveal voice assistants’ primary activities include acting as a search engine to ask about the weather or utilizing a particular purchase such as subscription music brand Spotify to stream music.

However, voice assistants are starting to emerge as a marketing and customer experience tool, with a small (but expected to grow) proportion of users engaging with voice assistants for online shopping and food delivery.

Amazon has been quickest off the mark, partnering with brands like Domino’s, Johnnie Walker and Tide to offer services and products to customers:

Although voice commerce is not currently the primary activity of voice assistants, RBC Capital Markets predicts that voice shopping on Amazon’s Alexa alone could generate more than $5 billion per year in revenue by 2020, so early adopters in this space will likely see the benefits.

Customer support

Whether via online chat assistants or call centers, effective customer support touchpoints are vital for smooth CJO. PwC reports that businesses seeking to offer a great experience for customers see a 16% price premium on products and services.

However, a McKinsey survey demonstrated 57% of customer service managers in call centers focus on reducing customer inquiries. This intention is understandable cost-wise, as call center interaction is more expensive and customer support touchpoints are having to rely more on online self-service platforms instead.

Forbes Technology Council member Puru Govind theorizes that a combination of customer support touchpoints could help balance this particular touchpoint to make it more effective

“I believe the key is to adopt a holistic customer service approach. When it comes to call centers and self-service, it is not a question of embracing either-or. Rather, I think you should seek to reap the benefits of both.”

Puru Govind, Forbes Technology Council

Camera manufacturer Canon did just this developing a self-service web portal. Customers can order consumables, perform self-diagnosis, and raise track and trace service requests wherever and whenever they want. Consumers and businesses are able to share knowledge with Canon, so the company is better equipped to tackle future queries.

The portal is designed to resolve a vast number of queries as the first point of contact, re-routing inquiries away from the call-center. This in turn frees up call center staff to respond more efficiently to customers who need support over the phone.

Whether offering customer service via chat or call, brands should seek to integrate this tightly with the website touchpoint. Recognizing customer behavior, such as dwelling on a particular page, offers brands the opportunity to offer assistance proactively via a chat message or click-to-call notification.

Conclusion

As we’ve touched on (excuse the pun) there are a huge range of customer touchpoints available to consumers and brands, and they are constantly evolving. However, as we found, it’s also important not to dismiss more established channels such as email and call centres.

Hopefully this guide has provided some food for though when it comes to identifying and prioritising the most important touchpoints for your business.

Once you’ve identified these key touchpoints for your brand, the next steps are to start mapping how they interact with each other along the customer journey, benchmark how they’re performing, and, from this, develop your CJO strategy.

Need a hand identifying and prioritizing your customer touchpoints? Get in touch to book your free consultation with our customer journey experts.

The post Keeping Up With Customer Touchpoints appeared first on Yieldify.

But unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Yieldify’s recent State of CJO report revealed that marketers still consider personalization among the top 3 the most difficult tools or strategies to implement, behind only artificial intelligence (AI). This is further emphasized by the fact that less than one-third (27%) are currently using a website personalization tool to optimize the customer journey.

Despite this, e-commerce personalization is still very much on the agenda for marketers, with 37% planning to implement it in 2019. This means, that in addition to those who have already kicked off with personalization, 2019 will see almost two-thirds of brands seeking to provide customers with personalized customer journeys.

It seems like the year of personalization might finally be here, so in this guide, we’ll explore how marketers can overcome the challenges associated with e-commerce personalization, and take a look at personalization in-action across industries such as retail, travel and financial services.

Defining E-Commerce Personalization

Before we jump right in, first it’s key to define what we mean by e-commerce personalization.

In the past that, it’s been assumed that e-commerce personalization is little more than a few smart touches that make a website visitor feel more personally involved with the brand, such as an email that greets them by name, or an offer tailored to their birthday.

But today, website personalization goes far beyond these small touches – though they, too, can be vital additions to an experience that ultimately leads the customer to convert.

We take personalization for granted across many services that we use every day as consumers – a Netflix show ‘recommended for you’, or a Spotify discover weekly playlist are both examples of personalization in action. 

The key in both these examples is the value delivered to the end user – a new show to enjoy or a favourite song. The problem e-commerce personalization has faced is that it hasn’t always been focused on this value exchange.

Product recommendations, for example, are only as good as they are relevant. If I was buying a gift the last time I shopped with you then how much do you really know about my taste and preferences?

Personalization for personalization’s sake is not the goal for e-commerce brands today – so what is?

Personalization is about delivering relevant messaging, at the right moment in the customer journey, to drive the desired action.

Personalization, like more traditional conversion rate optimization (CRO) tactics that came before, is an important tool within the wider practice of Customer Journey Optimization, but it’s not a stand-alone tactic or a goal in and of itself. The goals for marketers remain the same – acquire more customers, drive more conversions, build customer loyalty.

This guide will look at examples of how e-commerce brands are already achieving these goals by delivering more personalized customer journeys.

E-commerce Personalization – Why Now?

Consumers have made themselves clear – they want more personalized experiences from brands, and not just on e-commerce sites. Yieldify’s recent survey of over 1000 UK and US consumers revealed that 63% expect brands to have up to date information on their preferences across all channels. This number rises significantly within younger generations, too – 74% of millennials agreed, with that rising to 82% of millennials in the US.

The percentage of consumers that expect brands to have up-to-date information on their preferences across channels:

And, as we’ve already briefly covered, marketers want personalization too. With benefits such as reducing acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, lifting revenues by 5 to 15 percent, and increasing the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30 percent, the race is on to master personalization.

With our own clients, Yieldify has seen a 10% increase in how many personalized campaigns we delivered between 2017 to 2018, up to 56% from 46%.

And with 37% of marketers planning to join the 27% already using personalization in 2019, it’s crunch time – get personal, or get left behind.

Overcoming the Personalization Paradox

Consumers want it, marketers want it – so what’s the hold-up with e-commerce personalization?

There are a variety of reasons that more than two-thirds of marketers are not yet delivering personalized customer journeys, but central is the data that fuels personalization. Typically marketers have viewed this as an operational obstacle – lack of the right data, siloed data sources, and inability to action this data. But 2018 has brought a bigger question to light – that of privacy.

Half of consumers are unwilling to trade their data for more personalized experiences. This paradox – that consumers want both personalization and privacy – is central to concerns around delivering an online experience that matches with expectations.

With the implementation of GDPR regulations coming into effect across Europe, and numerous high-profile data breaches from companies that thrive on our most personal data, it’s fair to say that 2018 has been the year in which the public’s eyes have truly been opened to the many ways companies gather and use personal data – our survey backs this up, revealing that 82% of consumers have become more aware of protecting their online privacy in the last year.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%. But more than ever, businesses are aware of the potential real-world implications for marketers trying to deliver personalization based on customer data, and it can feel like the ‘holy grail’ of 1:1 personalization is slipping out of reach.

So what’s the answer?

Well, far from derailing e-commerce personalization, taking privacy seriously provides a clear way forward for marketers – a spectrum of personalization.

At one end you have those highly engaged consumers, opted-in to your marketing, and willing to share their behavioural, contextual and CRM data. In the middle, with limited information, you can still personalize, based on contextual data such as location, or weather. And at the very other side, you have no personal data – but you can still create relevancy in-the-moment by utilizing real-time data.

Here’s a glimpse at the most popular types of personalization marketers are already using to personalize the customer journey:

E-commerce Personalization Examples

Let’s take a look now at how e-commerce personalization works in practice for a few different types of sites.

Personalization for Retail

There are endless opportunities for e-commerce personalization in online retail. Even a first-time visitor provides a perfect opportunity to create engagement and start that process of getting to know them better so that in future you can create ever more personalized experiences.

Wine retailer First Leaf pitches itself as ‘the only wine club tailored to you’. With its core values relying on a personalized approach, it was vital that they be able to quickly gather data on potential customers to show just how great their personalized wine service could be. To this end, they targeted first-time visitors with a fun quiz to help quickly narrow down their tastes. This simple, but effective approach provides both the consumer and brand with valuable insights into their relevant tastes.

As a visitor interacts with your site more, personalization can rely on behavioral data, for example, the products they’ve browsed, or items added to cart. A visitor looking at specific types of clothing on a fashion retailer’s website can prompt recommended items in similar ranges – rather than simply suggesting other items that the retailer has selected to promote, Dynamic Promotions allow for customer-specific examples instead – increasing the possibility that the customer will be interested in adding other items to the basket for purchase.

Entertainment retailer HMV wanted to recognise customers showing interest in buying albums on vinyl, but were hesitant to complete the purchase. Those demonstrating intent to leave the site after viewing records were shown a notification that highlighted the safety of HMV’s vinyl delivery. This preempted any concerns about the notoriously fragile medium getting damaged in the post and reassured the visitors that their purchase would arrive safely, and at no extra cost.

Another important type of data for e-commerce personalization is contextual, for example, geo-location data. This type of data can be used in a broader range of situations and can be used to generate relevant messages, even when personal data is missing.  

Fashion retailer Burberry was one of the first to pioneer location-based marketing on the offline world way back in 2012 with a billboard that reacted to the weather. Creating this on the online can be even more effective, as it’s a chance to capture those consumers driven to action by the weather at that moment of intent to buy.

Rain? Promote those umbrellas. Sunny? Showcase your best selling sunglasses. Even better – target referral traffic from social or ads focused on the weather, and mirror that message on-site. Just make sure you’re providing value to the consumer, like stationery retailer Scribbler. The brand made sure to give their customers a heads-up when the UK experienced some delivery delays due to the snow.

Though personalized approaches offer a quick way to speak to new visitors, it’s important too to consider how they can build loyalty with returning customers. Online supermarket Ocado sends out emails to customers who haven’t shopped with them for a while, enticing them back with a personal offer. The touch of familiarity starts in the email’s subject line, where the customer’s name is included alongside the words ‘we miss you’ – and a limited time only offer is made for a discount off of their next Ocado purchase.

Recognizing a returning customer offers benefits to both parties. Dominos Pizza remembers customers’ previous orders to enable speedy reordering. Many people have their own favourite toppings for pizzas, so the ability to easily click through and order the same items again – be they a simple Margherita or a complicated custom-made selection – presents an opportunity for customers to avoid decision making and commit to purchasing.

Personalization for Travel

Where once travel agents were the only way to easily access all the information one needed to book a trip, the internet allowed consumers to build their perfect trip from the comfort of their home. The only part of the experience that has been lacking is the sense of curation that agencies offered – something that looks set to return to the industry due to the opportunities personalization affords.Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings says:

“I always give the analogy of that old-time human travel agent, who knew everything about you because they knew the things you’ve done in the past. And they knew your income, they knew what you liked. They know what kind of trip you should have, what kind of restaurants you should go to, what kind of attractions you should go to, what kind of experiences you should have. … That’s what [artificial intelligence] needs to recreate so that when people come to us, we are able to provide them what really is the perfect trip and make their lives easier.”

The key, now, is to realise this potential. A recent survey by Skift found that only 40% of consumers who had received personalized messages from online travel companies felt that those messages had been relevant. Travel brands have to do better at getting closer, and one way to do this is by inferring intent based on behaviour.  Filip Filipov, vice president of product management at travel price-comparison service Skyscanner talks about the need to utilize ‘contextual clues’ :

“A lot of personalization can be generated based on high-level details like your location or the time of day you’re searching and other contextual clues like your browsing behavior, rather than specifically about ‘I am this person,’”

Airbnb has a simple personalized touch on its homepage that makes all the difference – returning visitors see the search already populated with whatever they last searched for. With potential holidaymakers likely already set on at least the basic idea of when and where they would like to travel, it’s a small move that allows for a much smoother customer journey. 

This behavior-led personalization can easily be extended as customers return, with the ability to retain information on preferred airlines, frequent destinations and whether or not a customer has shown an active interest in direct flights over cheaper routes involving stopovers. Websites like that of flight and holiday comparison company Kayak take this data and use it to present the options that are likely to be most relevant to each individual user.

With limited inventory, travel brands are also perfectly placed to use real-time data to create a personalized experience for all visitors. Train operator Stansted Express combined this idea of real-time data, via Dynamic Social Proof, with other messages to create a fully optimized customer journey within the booking funnel.

Personalization for Financial Services

As one of the most privacy-sensitive sectors, personalization has been a huge challenge within the financial services industry – with 94% of banks unable to deliver on ‘personalization promise’. As the industry is disrupted by new entrants such as Monzo though it’s becoming an imperative.

Over the past few years, personal finance apps and bots have surged in popularity, offering customers the ability to track their spending, receive detailed breakdowns of their money habits and get customized budgets. In October of 2018 Metro Bank became the first UK bank to implement AI-powered money management tools in its app. Offering personalized insights, based on data the bank already has access to, customers get tips and recommendations on managing their money, a clear value adds and better customer experience than a PDF statement download.

But what about personalizing the journey for visitors who are not yet customers? There are plenty of opportunities to introduce personalization when it comes to product discovery, especially during the research phase. For those browsing mortgages, for example, showing relevant marketing through modal notifications can direct visitors towards products that could be right for them.

And once a visitor has started completing an application or quote process, there’s plenty to test and learn from when it comes to personalization.

Argos Pet Insurance was looking to learn how personalization at the start of the quote funnel would impact conversions later on, and also test how value propositions would move the visitor through the funnel.  Through testing, Yieldify and Argos identified that each step of the quote funnel required a different action to improve engagement and encouragement to the next step. The learnings gathered could then be utilised across the rest of the RSA group to help drive more personalised experiences and reduce funnel abandonment.

Conclusion

With the race on to master e-commerce personalization hopefully, this guide has provided some food for thought. As we’ve seen, the most effective approaches are those that aren’t perceived as invasive or ‘creepy’ – campaigns that instead work with the customer’s behaviour, contextual and real-time data to provide relevant messaging that improves the customer journey.

Consider the ways that personalization can make your customers’ online experiences easier – whether that is directing them to the products they’ve previously been looking for, or using the data your website has collected to offer them new and appropriate ideas that anticipate their needs and, ultimately, benefit everyone involved. And if you’re in need of further inspiration, why not book a consultation below! We’d be happy to share our insights into creating personalized customer journeys.

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In the history of marketing, there’s never been a better time than now to learn what makes your customers tick. Surveys and focus groups used to be the only way to get to the heart of what your customers were thinking – and then you’d put your advertisement on TV or on a billboard and hope that it made enough of an impression that people would buy.

In the digital age, e-commerce marketers have an unfair advantage – a superpower, even. It’s been shown to improve the bottom line and allows you to iterate until you create the perfect call to action, subject line or sign-up offer. But here’s the thing: 84% of marketers are not using it.

We’re referring, of course, to testing. Yes, in e-commerce A/B testing can be tricky. Yes, it can be time-consuming. But with huge rewards to be gained, why not accelerate your conversions instead of stabbing in the dark? In this guide, we’re taking you through the why, when, where, and how of testing.

Why is Testing Important

Given that more than one-quarter of marketers are not satisfied with their conversion rates, there’s a clear need to improve. Yet when we asked marketers about the tools and strategies they’re using to accomplish this and optimize the customer journey, only 16% selected A/B testing (sometimes called split testing), and even less (5.9%) are running multivariate tests (MVT).

Continuous improvement and analysis is a cornerstone of a successful e-commerce marketing program – allowing you to make decisions based on scientific data, learning constantly about what makes your customers click, sign-up or buy. It allows you to zero in on elements of the customer journey and optimize the key touchpoints, conversions and micro conversions by showing the right message to the right person at the right moment, all of which is knowable with good data.

Before we go any further, it’s important to note the variations between different kinds of testing. A/B testing is one version of an element against another, while MVT (multivariate testing) tests multiple subtle changes on a single web page, to see how different elements interact with one another.

A/B testing is perhaps the better known and easier to manage, especially if you’re new to testing (since you’re only comparing one version against another), and also requires less traffic. Because multivariate tests have (surprise) more variables, the technique is best used on highly trafficked sites in order to get meaningful results. In this guide, we’ll focus more on A/B testing since it’s easier to get started with.

What Are The Challenges With E-Commerce A/B Testing?

Now, the reason why the majority of e-commerce marketers aren’t testing is, frankly, that it’s difficult. Setting up the test conditions, getting the right tech in place, measuring and analyzing results can take a back seat to the more pressing concerns of ‘business as usual’ marketing. Here are a few of the questions and concerns marketers have:

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: STARTING WITH THE RIGHT HYPOTHESIS

Just like any other scientific experiment, testing should start with a hypothesis. For example, “I think our customers will prefer a discount to VIP access”. Start with an educated guess based on your customers’ behavior and then test how accurate it is. However, starting with the wrong hypothesis – one that’s not based on how your customers are currently behaving – could lead you down the wrong path and give you results that aren’t worthwhile.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: HOW LONG TO TEST

According to Neil Patel, the master of testing, you should run a test for at least several days in order to get significant results. According to him, “As a rule, you should test for a minimum of seven days, make sure you’ve reached statistical significance, and then test for another seven days if you haven’t.”

While a lot of e-commerce marketing is based on quick turnarounds, it’s worth planning ahead to allow your test to gain good traction.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: THE RIGHT TECH

One of the things stopping a lot of marketers from running detailed and useful tests is that many of the touchpoints available for testing are hard-coded into the website. This means that running a test on whether the CTA button is orange or purple requires not only marketing, but also design and development to get involved, and it’s at this point that many marketers file it away as ‘too difficult’.

However, some technologies are built to facilitate easy and fast testing, so if you’re considering onboarding a new marketing tool, make sure that this is one of your assessment criteria.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: WHERE TO TEST

So you’ve decided to run some tests. Great! But when you can literally test everything on your website, email marketing, social advertising and checkout process, how do you even decide where to start? Before you get overwhelmed with the choice available, it’s time to go back to your customer journey map (or, if you haven’t got one, create one and then go back to it).

What you’re looking for is the key touchpoints and conversion points to identify your priorities. For example, you might see a point in the journey where users are dropping off – say, your checkout funnel. Something needs to be fixed here, so don’t just go with your gut and change it, take a systematic approach and test your hypotheses.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: AUDIENCE SIZE

If you’re testing smaller audiences, your results will be unreliable and won’t be worthwhile, so make sure you’re testing on a larger audience to get statistically significant information (see our tips section below for more about statistical significance).

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: WHEN TO TEST

While optimization through testing is ideally an ongoing process, peak season can also be an ideal time to run a series of tests. While it’s tempting to leave things as they are during important trading periods, busy times will give you more information, more quickly, meaning you get your results faster and get valuable learnings for the following year.

Consider running a test if…

• Your website has at least moderate traffic volumes (over 50,000 monthly visitors)
• Your targeting is broad

Don’t run a test if…

• Your website has low traffic volumes (fewer than 20,000 monthly visitors)
• or your targeting is very narrow

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: WHAT TO MEASURE  

Just as there are a range of things you could be testing, there are also many things you could be measuring: micro and macro conversion rates, clicks, sign-ups and average order value. Anywhere that users aren’t acting as you’d like them to is a good place to start – or look at where you’ll likely see the biggest impact, such as preventing cart abandonment.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: HOW TO MEASURE

Ensure your data capture is set up so it’s easy to compare results – and implement the findings or iterate on them for the next round of testing. Here’s an example from the Yieldify Conversion Platform of how you might record your A/B test results so that you can make informed decisions based on the results:

What Should You Test?

Like we said earlier, testing is a secret superpower that most marketers are ignoring. By running a systematic and well-planned series of tests – and, crucially, by implementing the results you find – you can improve ROI on marketing spend, reduce customer acquisition costs and ramp up your conversion rates. Here are some examples of elements of your marketing that you can easily test:

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: DIFFERENT MESSAGES

Different calls to action will generate different results from your audience. If you need to get to know your audience to find out what their priorities are, this is a perfect opportunity. For example, they might be the kind of people who will happily increase their basket order in exchange for free shipping but may not be as tempted by a VIP club.

Travel company Megabus wanted to target booking abandonment at the top of the sales funnel. At this crucial point in the customer journey, they ran an A/B test against a control to see whether highlighting USPs would work to decrease the abandonment rate, with some users being served a ‘Free Wi-Fi’ message, and others seeing ‘at-seat power’. With both of those messages decreasing abandonment and increasing conversion rates, further testing uncovered the more effective messaging, leading to a 3.2% uplift in conversion rate.

It’s worth taking your time and calculating the cost-benefit of running different kinds of messaging. Perhaps people will happily take a 10% discount over a mailing list ask, but are only really interested in discounted purchases – meaning that money is walking out the door without the customer longevity. But if the mailing list sign-up CTA is still quite effective, perhaps that discount doesn’t need to be offered, saving you money and growing a great list of warm leads instead.

For example, Skyn Iceland found that a message targeting the USP of the brand was more effective than one offering $5 off, with the USP-driven messaging creating a 28.87% uplift in conversion rate.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: DIFFERENT COPY

Perhaps you’ve determined that your customers are happy to join the VIP list – so how exactly should you word the call to action? Are your customers more motivated by savings or exclusivity? By “Buy now” or “offer ends soon”? There are a million different versions you could try, so start with your best hunch, or employ some tried and tested psychology.

Software company Friendbuy realized its call to action wasn’t working as well as it should, hypothesizing that the copy was complicated and indirect:

So they did a split test against the control group:

It was found that Variant 2 had a 211% improvement over the control group, compared with Variant 1, which only had a 71% improvement. They concluded that Variation 2 was well defined, clear, and was what people were expecting.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: DESIGN

There can be a lot of focus on testing copy, but don’t forget the visuals! This is particularly important if you sell design-focused or aspirational products, like fashion, beauty or travel destinations. Again, given that testing should ideally be an ongoing activity, testing out different images and different copy will give you huge insight that you can apply to future campaigns.

Other design elements you can and should test are color, font, static vs. video image, font size, composition and button placement.

Activewear brand Hylete tested out video content versus static imagery in a campaign designed to reduce cart abandonment. With the knowledge that 53% of consumers want more video content from marketers, the brand developed the hypothesis that their audience would react better to video content. Testing proved this correct – video drove a 42.2% uplift in conversions.

E-commerce A/B Testing Tips

One of the reasons people avoid testing is that there are a few common pitfalls. Here are some of the ways you can avoid getting caught out.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE

If you’re running a test, that’s a great start. But, as MarketingSherpa found, 40% of marketers don’t calculate statistical significance when running experiments. It’s essential that you reach 95% statistical significance in your testing activity, otherwise, your data won’t be worth making decisions on. Hubspot offers a statistical significance calculator along with other resources that will tell you whether you’ve got reliable data or not, and Analytics Toolkit offers an in-depth guide to interpreting your data accurately.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: USE A CONTROL GROUP

A/B testing might be a slight misnomer, as you will usually be testing two alternatives against a control or baseline group – so there are actually three versions of a page in play. The control group is a population which is not being exposed to something new: they’re the group that sees your website as-is, while your A/B testing group is seeing two new variations. The control is essential for proving your hypothesis.

E-COMMERCE A/B TESTING: ALWAYS REMEMBER THE PURPOSE

Put a goal in place before launching your test: improve lead generation, decrease cart abandonment, get more conversions at a specific touchpoint. That way, you can measure your success against how well you’ve reached your goals, and then move on.

Conclusion

Testing is a core practice of digital marketing, no matter the channel, in order to get the most out of your marketing campaigns. While there are a few challenges as we’ve discussed, regular testing becomes much easier if you’ve got the right technical and strategic support in place.

With data from over 200,000 Yieldify campaigns the services team at Yieldify use these benchmarks, combined with in-depth analysis of the customer journey on our clients’ websites to develop testing hypotheses and roadmaps.  This is then carried out via the A/B testing capability of the Yieldify Conversion Platform, to ascertain what resonates most with visitors at different points in their journey.

Book your free consultation with the team by clicking below!

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To understand psychology in e-commerce, and how to best use it, we need to first understand consumer behaviour, and go back to the offline world. 

Research shows that 95% of all purchasing decisions are made subconsciously – the brick and mortar retail stores we shop in have long reflected this finding. From the layout of the aisles, to the way prices are displayed on shelf – savvy retailers have plotted and planned out every detail when it comes to the in-store customer experience, allowing them to push consumers toward purchase with psychological triggers and cues.

But when it comes to online shopping, the field has often been overlooked by e-commerce brands. Jez Groom, founder of behavioral economics specialists Cowry Consulting, recognises the problem:

“All too often, we see lessons learnt in the physical environment fundamentally lost and forgotten in the digital one. We know, for example, that top selling products are often the most easy to reach on shelves. So why, in the digital environment do we make everything so hard to choose?”

This guide will look at how brands can use psychology in e-commerce, bringing the online experience in line with in-store when it comes to understanding consumer behaviour.

We’ll draw on the seven principles of persuasion that behavioural scientist and ‘godfather’ of persuasion, Robert Cialdini identified, to share how brands can use psychology in e-commerce to target the right customer at the best point in their journey to drive more conversions.

Getting started with understanding consumer behaviour

Before we jump into the principles of persuasion, and how they apply to psychology in e-commerce, a word on understanding customer behaviour.

The foundation of any successful e-commerce strategy lies in understanding the customer. And when it comes to psychology in e-commerce, this means uncovering the reasons why customers behave as they do.

The 7 principles will help us with this, but with so much data out there it can be difficult to know where to begin. In fact only 6% of executives believe they know their customers’ needs very well, so it’s not so surprising that conversion rates are averaging between 2 and 3% for retail, and around 5% for travel.

Here are a few practical tips on where to start:

1. Map the customer journey
2. Test how consumers respond to the tactics outlined in this guide – we recommend A/B testing to optimise performance and ensure you get results that count.
3. Ask! Gathering customer feedback gives you a direct line into the motivations of your visitors.

Once you’ve accomplished #1 from the list above, you should have a clearer view of your customer journey, which leaves the way open for some experimentation with the 7 principles of persuasion, so now let’s look at these in more detail!

The 7 principles of persuasion: reciprocity

The idea behind reciprocity is that humans don’t like to feel indebted to others in any way. By offering an item or service to potential customers for free, we can encourage them to consider ways in which they might balance out what they have received.

Obviously, no consumer is indebted to buy something because they were given a separate item free, nevertheless, that original gift can often induce a desire within the consumer to ‘return the favour’. It can be drawn as much from a sense of gratitude as it can from a sense of being indebted, but in either form, it’s a powerful motivator.

We see this utilised all the time in real-world consumer experiences – it’s a technique that is particularly popular with high street food chains selling relatively luxurious items. Both Krispy Kreme doughnuts and ice-cream makers Ben & Jerry’s set aside a specific day each year in which anyone can enter their store and a free doughnut or scoop of ice cream.In both cases the food given away would cost consumers a relatively small amount if purchased normally, but by giving away such treats en masse the companies manage to create a combination of goodwill and gratitude amongst their customers.

Reciprocity is a powerful tactic when it comes to psychology in e-commerce, too. In fact, food delivery service Uber Eats managed a very similar promotion in the past – using their fleet of drivers to deliver free ice cream upon request. The big difference is that their promotion required users to download their app – a smart way to engage consumers’ sense of reciprocity as well as actively signing them up to their service at the same time.

Reciprocity doesn’t always have to involve giving away free products – loyalty programs are another way of persuading customers to connect in a more lasting way. Vegan and cruelty-free beauty brand Skyn ICELAND sought to drive both new and existing customers to make return visits and more purchases in the future with the relaunch of its loyalty program. According to a study by Experian, the biggest challenge with loyalty programs is registrations, recognising this skyn ICELAND tailored on-site messaging to the visitors, informing them of the benefits depending on whether the customer was new or returning.

The 7 principles of persuasion: Scarcity

Consumers are more inclined to make decisions in favour of purchase if they know the product or service they’re interested in is not going to be available for long.

Scarcity is the psychological idea that captures this way of thinking. If a potential customer is concerned that not purchasing a product now will mean not being able to buy it later either, they’ll be incentivized to buy.

Streetwear brand Supreme is an extreme example of scarcity in real life. Every Thursday each season the clothing store releases a fresh batch of new limited edition items that are available to purchase from their brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. A combination of savvy marketing, brand reputation and the knowledge that once the items are sold out they’ll only be available at heightened prices from websites like eBay mean that a long queue forms outside the store every Wednesday night.

Where in-demand products like iPhones used to create such demand on an annual basis, Supreme succeeds every single week. Groom sums up neatly why Supreme’s tactics work so well:

“The scarcity principle means that people value things more that are in short supply, and so customers feel more compelled to buy products or services which are only available for a select group of people.”

Inventory that is naturally limited or perishable, like tickets for travel or concerts, is a perfect fit for this use of psychology in e-commerce.  SeatWave, a ticket reseller saw a +155.6% uplift in conversion by using scarcity messaging that highlighted the limited timeline and quantity available for visitors who had added tickets to the cart, but were exiting the site. 

Even if stocks are plentiful there are ways of demonstrating scarcity to your customers. Speedy delivery is increasingly becoming an important motivator for consumers, with 49% of shoppers saying same-day delivery makes them more likely to shop online. If your company can deliver today or tomorrow, highlighting cut off points for such a service can create an idea of scarcity too. A customer hesitating over an order will purchase, rather than not have the product as soon as possible. Learn more about leveraging psychology in e-commerce via the scarcity principle in our online masterclass here.

The 7 principles of persuasion: Authority

People have an inherent tendency to trust sources of authority, and this can make these sources persuasive factors in encouraging consumers to make decisions.

Groom tells us:

“We tend to place more weight on the opinions of authority figures, which is known as authority bias. Interestingly, we helped one of the oldest and established brands in one of the newest and freshest grocery categories – food box deliveries (like HelloFresh and Gousto) – significantly increase responses, and decrease acquisition cost, by highlighting that they had been delivering boxes of organic food ingredients to peoples’ doors for 27 ¾ years.”

The idea of a trusted figure is central to a great deal of marketing, and the same applies for psychology in e-commerce. Who (or what) that figure is can vary greatly depending on the product or service being sold. Today you’ll see dentists recommending toothpaste brands and authors like Stephen King recommending the latest horror books. A Whiskas pet food advert in the 1980s even used cats as an authority figure, declaring 8 out of 10 cats preferred their brand.

More contemporary authority figures come in the form of social media influencers, who can often reach audiences of millions through their blogs and YouTube channels. Specialist hair product brand Ouidad teamed up with beauty bloggers who had authority amongst the brands target market – people with curly hair.

By building a relationship with bloggers, Ouidad is able to share information about its products more widely, and gains a respected third party to act as an audience ambassador. On the Ouidad blog, this informational content is then linked to a diagnostic quiz, pushing users toward products that are suited to their curl type. Watch the masterclass featuring Ouidad’s Director of E-commerce, Katrina Seitz, to learn more about how the brand bridges content and commerce!

Not all authority sources need to be external to the company itself, though. Sometimes authority can be demonstrated through qualities regarding the products or services themselves. Food retailers will point customers to the fact that their product is organic or Fairtrade because these are qualities that will guarantee certain things about what they’re purchasing. In Japan, Kobe beef can draw remarkable prices because the rigorously monitored production guarantees an unmatched quality.

Jennifer Hey, Head of Digital and Customer Experience at online butcher Farmison & Co shares how the brand applies this idea of having a trusted reputation when it comes to psychology in e-commerce:

“Something that works really well for us is displaying our rewards for all to see – we’ve won Online Butcher of the Year 2 years in a row, we’re really proud of this, so it’s a really key message we want our customers to see as a trust signal.

We have this on our marketing emails, in our PPC copy and more places onsite, but where Yieldify has helped is to get it in front of users wherever they land on our site and in a more noticeable way, without interrupting the customer journey.”

Luxury pen and watchmaker Montblanc similarly highlight the exclusive services offered to customers via notifications showcasing free engraving or personalization. The artisan reputation of the employees themselves creates a reason for consumers to take advantage of the offer by buying a product that they can have engraved by finely skilled hands.

The 7 principles of persuasion: Commitment and Consistency

On a deeper psychological level, Cialdini suggests that humans have an inbuilt need to be seen as consistent individuals. This carries through into everyday life in a more practically observable way – if someone makes a commitment, they are much more likely to follow through on it.

There’s more to the test-drive offered by a car salesperson than just the opportunity to get a feel by your potential purchase. By committing to a test-drive, and taking the salesperson’s time, there’s a psychological debt that makes you more likely to follow through and purchase the car.

The recent boom in direct to consumer mattress retailers is interesting considering the various factors they are up against – not least asking consumers to buy one of the most important household items without seeing it in person. So they are an interesting example to consider when it comes to psychology in e-commerce. For instance, they might want to partner with multiple review sites like Sleep Advisor and get featured. This way, the customers can make a knowledgeable purchase decision.

For one retailer, Simba, the answer has been to provide 100 day free trials of the products. Potential customers are informed that once they purchase their mattress they have over three months to try it out safe in the knowledge that if it doesn’t meet their standards they can return it free of charge.

This idea commits customers to buying the product but also gives them peace of mind. In fact, the offer itself plays into the psychology of authority, too. Consumers will see that Simba have enough confidence in their product to make such an offer and think that the product must be worthy of that confidence.

Using guarantees along these lines to encourage commitment can work across other industries too – online gaming distribution platform Steam allows consumers to buy and download computer games, but there myriad reasons for people to be wary of purchasing their games online. Perhaps their computer won’t have the correct specifications to run the game. Perhaps they simply won’t like it. Steam counter these fears by offering a two-hour return policy. Customers can purchase and download a game, and then can play it for two hours to make sure it lives up to their expectations (or simply that they aren’t terrible at it)! If they decide they don’t want the game they can return it in that time for a full refund.

Online gaming sites are increasingly using guarantees to get initial commitments from users, too. Bethard frequently feature offers on major sporting events, such as the World Cup, where users are guaranteed their money back in the form of other bets should they lose on their first one. This gives customers a reason to commit knowing that the worst case scenario is another chance to bet.

The 7 principles of persuasion: Liking

Sometimes psychological ideas are incredibly simple: the more consumers like a brand, the more they’ll be likely to make a purchase.

Brand loyalty is no new idea, and that’s because it stems from a deeply held psychological instinct to stick with what we know and like. And so, for brands looking to bring new customers in, there should always be a focus on what the customer is looking for – what they’ll like about your brand.

High street stores like Lush and The Body Shop will often make a point of highlighting the good causes they support in their shop windows – they understand that these are factors their customers consider when buying their goods. UK based independent ‘supermarket rebels’ HISBE doesn’t have the instant brand recognition, so their shopfront is used as a giant advert for the all the reasons potential customers might like what they’re doing:

Skyn ICELAND learned how powerful the concept of liking was as part of their psychology in e-commerce strategy with a simple A/B test. Yieldify targeted visitors who had items in their baskets but were showing intent to leave with two different messages: $5 off their purchase and brand USPs: natural ingredients and products that would help fight stress.

Ultimately both messages were effective at raising conversion rates, but the clear winner was the USP message providing users simple but effective reasons to like the brand and get onboard with their values.

The 7 principles of persuasion: Social Proof

There’s safety in numbers – at least, that’s the idea behind the psychological benefits of consensus, where people are more likely to do what they can observe others doing.

This is why brands like Supreme and Apple enjoy putting their long winding queues out on the street, so passing consumers can pass by and consider joining themselves. It’s also why social proof is such a powerful tool when it comes to psychology in e-commerce.

Groom has seen the results of this:

“When we’re unsure how to behave in a situation, we tend to follow the behaviour of others, which behavioural economists have called social proof. We employed social proof in our work for a major multiple when we redesigned their emails promoting an online grocery service. By simply stating the average amount saved by each customer, we decreased the cost per acquisition by over 10%.”

Social proof allows us to show potential customers what other users are doing. This might take the form of a gallery on each product page showing what others are also purchasing when they buy that product, or simply how many others are browsing a particular product.

Based on Yieldify’s benchmark data from over 155k campaigns, websites that use Dynamic Social Proof can drive conversion rate uplifts from +6.6%, up to as high as +48.3% depending on the targeting criteria, with the average falling around +8.5%. Brands who have seen success with this include Kicker’s, Megabus and M.J. Bale. Megabus even combined scarcity with social proof to ensure visitors moved down the booking funnel, driving a 7.5% uplift in conversion rate.

Social proof can also provide a sense of authority for consumers. Websites such as TripAdvisor collate experiences from people who have already visited a hotel or restaurant to give potential future visitors authoritative voices on which place they should book themselves.

One industry where this idea of trust is especially important is healthcare. Yieldify worked with online doctor and pharmacy MedExpress to highlight the company’s Trustpilot score across their website, driving a 12.2% uplift in conversions. In such a sensitive industry positive customer experiences become the most important authority of all.

The 7 principles of persuasion: Unity

Thirty years after his initial six persuasion principles, Cialdini identified a seventh psychological factor – unity. This relates to the idea that people will make decisions they think will help them feel a sense of belonging.

Playing into this innate need to feel a part of something is a powerful way to market a company. We’ve seen it throughout this guide to psychology in e-commerce already. The crowds of people queuing every Thursday to be part of Supreme’s distinct streetwear culture. The bringing together of curly-haired women to champion Ouidad’s shampoos. Even supermarket HISBE’s marketing highlighted the local produce sold there, allowing customers to feel like a contributing member of the local community.

There are plenty of ways to utilise this 7th principle when it comes to psychology in e-commerce. Music festivals are a great example of brands that manage to create a sense of unity around their product by making their customers feel part of a unique club – those who were there, sharing the experience for that one weekend. Loyalty programmes are an established way to bring about that sense of unity too. Exclusive deals sent out each week to a small ‘loyalty club’ will heighten the idea that your customers belong, and that your business is an important part of that.

More recently, crowdsourcing has been adopted by savvy online-only brands seeking to get their customers more invested in products. Cult online beauty brand Glossier crowdsourced a face cleanser, and it’s now one of the brands bestsellers!

Conclusion

Succeeding with applying psychology in e-commerce means understanding customer behaviour. The same subconscious drivers shoppers experience offline play heavily into online shopping habits too. The seven principles of persuasion are a great starting point for incorporating psychology in e-commerce into your ongoing site optimization efforts. Remember the following the next time you’re launching a campaign and test what works for your visitors:

Reciprocity: instil a sense of indebted gratitude in your customers.

Scarcity: make customers aware of how they might miss out.

Authority: encourage customers through trusted voices.

Commitment & consistency: lead customers to big purchases through smaller commitments.

Liking: make customers feel good about buying from you.

Social proof: let the wisdom of the crowd lead your customer’s decision-making

Unity: help your customers build a sense of belonging

Combine two or more of these factors, and you’ll be well on your way to improving conversions for your business. If you’d like help understanding your customer journeys and applying these pscyhology in e-commerce examples, you can book a free consultation below.

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The post How To Use Psychology in E-Commerce appeared first on Yieldify.

It’s the most wonderful ecommerce marketing time of the year: Q4 is make or break for most e-commerce retail brands, as shoppers take to the internet, credit cards at the ready, prepared to snap up bargains. But in an ever-changing e-commerce landscape, it’s important to stay agile and approach it flexibly.

This guide will examine the data behind all the key dates in the Q4 shopping calendar so you can know what to expect and how to engage shoppers across the holiday season:

• Singles’ Day: top ecommerce marketing tips for the growing shopping holiday
• Black Friday & Cyber Week: your ecommerce marketing game plan for before, during and after
• Holiday season: the can’t miss ecommerce marketing opportunities to take you into the New Year on a high

Singles’ Day

Many western consumers and retailers are still in the dark about this Chinese holiday celebrating singledom, but 11/11 (the date was chosen because of all the lonely ones) has now become e-commerce’s day of days, thanks to a lot of promotion from Alibaba. Last year, Chinese consumers spent $25bn – four times the amount spent on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. 

Much like Black Friday beginning in the US and then jumping the pond to Europe, Singles’ Day is now reaching far beyond China, and is extending to other countries in Asia. For example, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has used Singles’ Day as leverage into other markets, using non-Chinese social networks to promote their offer in countries like Malaysia:

And it’s not just Chinese brands selling beyond China. Non-Chinese consumers are getting in on the action and purchasing in the sales, and non-Chinese brands are investing in the Chinese market (health and nutrition brands like Swisse and Bio Island and baby brands like Aptamil and Moony are among the top foreign brands being purchased on Singles’ Day).

Additionally, there are reports that Chinese consumers aren’t simply looking for discounts on Singles’ Day, but are also looking for high quality imported goods. This means that retailers don’t have to offer deep discounts to benefit from the day, but instead need to create smart ecommerce marketing campaigns to position their products as desirable.

Top ecommerce marketing tips from Singles Day

Whether Singles’ day is something you’ll participate in or not, its rapid rise leaves some lesson to be learned. Here’s what you can take and apply to peaks throughout the year:

• Be mobile first: 90% of Alibaba’s sales came via mobile last year, meaning that the mobile customer journey must be seamless
• Understand your audience: Singles’ Day consumers are mostly digitally savvy millennials using WeChat and Weibo to shop. The top ecommerce marketing tactics make a play for this audience with gamification, celebrity endorsement on social networks, events and live streaming
• Make payment easy: for example, if serving the Chinese market, ensure top payment platforms like Alipay, TenPay and others are integrated into your checkout
• Use data and machine learning to predict a shopper’s next move, serving shoppers the right messaging at the right time in order to increase conversion rates
• Use peer-to-peer recommendations such as social proof
• Create a sense of urgency using countdown timers

Black Friday and Cyber week

While Singles’ Day remains primarily an Asian phenomenon (although we’ve got no doubt the rest of the world will catch on in the years to come), the biggest event on the e-commerce calendar for most western brands is Black Friday (followed by Cyber Monday and beyond).

And if the trends we’re seeing continue, then Black Friday 2018 could be the biggest yet in terms of conversions. Between 2016 and 2017 conversion rate jumped from 3.9% up to 4.8%, driven by increasingly savvy consumers who know exactly what they’re looking for, as well as the fact retailers are getting better at optimizing for conversion.

To succeed on Black Friday, it’s important to realize that this event isn’t just about the day itself, but the lead-up and aftermath as well. Check out the traffic peaks as consumers start doing their research in the days before Black Friday. Note that it remains high, right through until the Tuesday following:

Before Black Friday

What this tells us is that for the biggest e-commerce day of the year, preparations should be starting now. So what should your ecommerce marketing focus on?

Get mobile ready

With two fifths of last year’s Black Friday revenue originating via mobile (not to mention the browsing – 54.3% of site visits were via mobile), there are no excuses for a poor mobile customer journey. But it seems this is still a challenge for many, with conversion rates on this channel still lagging behind, generally half that of desktop and tablet:

But if this is where the traffic’s going, there’s a real urgency to make sure that the conversion experience follows suit. In the lead-up to Cyber Week, here’s what you need to do to ensure a mobile-best experience:

Test and optimize page speed and server capacity

Mobile shoppers routinely abandon pages that crash or load slowly. With overloaded traffic numbers, sites that crash will face dropping revenues – which is not just lost potential but also sunk cost spent on traffic acquisition.

Ensure the mobile user journey is perfect

Your site navigation and checkout process must be flawless – remember that everyone who faces a complicated sign-up process or clunky user journey could easily abandon to find another retailer.

Expect a bigger leap in traffic than last year

In 2016, mobile traffic was 24% higher than the previous year, and in 2017, mobile traffic was 49.5% higher, according to Yieldify data. 2018 could well see that figure jump again!

Start awareness campaigns early

Black Friday works best when there has been an ongoing conversation with consumers, so it’s essential to start creating buzz early – according to the National Retail Federation, 40% of holiday shoppers start buying before Halloween. Starting this conversation days and even weeks before the event itself across multiple different channels is key here.

By doing this, you can avoid having to rely on the highly competitive paid advertising during the month of November itself – rather, you’ll have warmed up the market so that they will think of you as they enter the research and intent phase.

Additionally, our data shows that the ‘Black Friday Effect’ starts five days before the actual date, so smart marketers will capitalize on the early bird traffic.

Create a multichannel customer journey

Meet your customers where they are. With a detailed and data-driven customer profile or avatar, you’ll be able to target your ideal customer in their preferred manner. This means investing in the campaigns that nudge the customer along the journey to Black Friday conversions in a way that’s informative and seamless.

As the author, motivational speaker and salesperson Zig Ziglar once said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you just help other people get what they want.” In this case, you’re helping your customers find the products that they want via the channels they already use.

Targeted onsite messaging

Use onsite behavior to serve targeted messaging to users. For example, if they’ve browsed a few items but haven’t added anything to the basket – i.e. in research mode – serve a teaser message to let them know that Black Friday sales are coming up, and capture emails in a special Black Friday email list that you can use later to keep people notified of offers, flash sales and discount codes when the time comes.

Communicate with your existing audiences

Retailers typically get the most value from their existing audience and people who have already converted than from a cold lead. That means you can make great use of your email and social networks to reward loyalty. For example, Sephora let Instagram and Snapchat followers in on a sneak peek that they also shared via email:

Create FOMO

Urgency is a hugely valuable ecommerce marketing tactic. Using countdown timers to not only raise awareness that sales are coming up, but also to create that all-important fear of missing out on great deals. Swedish homewares retailer Rum 21 enjoyed a +19% average order rate and a +35.9% conversion rate uplift over the Cyber Week period by serving customers this countdown timer:

During the Black Friday peak

This is when there needs to be all hands on deck. Agility, segmentation and variety are your friends here, keeping users engaged and interested

Leverage the marketing opportunity

Some US and most UK retailers now believe that Black Friday is unprofitable. So why engage? Remember that Black Friday is also a marketing opportunity. Consider opportunities for creating a strong brand connection, such as offering a free gift with purchase, or viewing the discounts as a way to get traffic onto your site while planning for long-term retention and engagement.

Some brands use Black Friday as an ecommerce marketing opportunity without actually engaging in sales at all: for example, US outdoor retailer REI launched its #OptOutside campaign to encourage people to spend the day outdoors, and paid all its employees to take the day off in a publicity stunt:

Work to increase order value

Increasing average order value will massively reduce cost per acquisition. Offer your customers incentives to increase their order, like onsite messaging to let them know about free delivery offers for orders above $X, or helping them discover other items they might like.

Sephora killed two birds with one stone and created an incentive to increase order value offered samples in 2015 to encourage people to increase their order value above $25 (while also creating goodwill and brand rapport by giving an inexpensive gift):

Even better, create a more personalized experience by surfacing offers like this at the relevant moment. Kiehl’s did just that using a Notification based on basket value to highlight the free samples visitors would get if they purchased items worth more than €90.

Deploy email to make the most of peak traffic 

Want to know when the most traffic and conversions happen on Black Friday? It’s between 7-8pm. So, if you’ve sent out an early morning email, make sure you’re retargeting your campaign as that peak time ramps up to catch people just before and as they browse during this magic hour.

After Black Friday

Traffic tends to dip over the weekend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there’s still some after-glow, with visitors returning at the start of the next working week for Cyber Monday and Tuesday. Cyber Monday shows desktop traffic revives after the weekend, meaning there’s a huge opportunity to continue to engage customers.

Differentiate to re-engage

Make use of the continued high traffic by offering new reasons to come back. For example,  featuring different products, creating hourly offers and launching competitions or flash sales.

Extend your sale beyond the day itself

If your competitors are stopping their sales on Friday itself, push yours a little longer to scoop up shoppers with nowhere to go. In its customer email, ASOS used copy (calling it the Black Friday ‘weekender’) and clearly showed that their sale pushed through to Tuesday morning to communicate that their sales last:

The holiday season

As you can see from the earlier graph, December fares less well for online traffic than the previous month. There are some potential missed opportunities here, so make sure your ecommerce marketing is working hard for you right up until the Christmas break.

Pre-Christmas period

Beware the ‘conversion cliff’

Yieldify stats show that around the middle of December (17th or 18th), there tends to be a drop-off in e-commerce conversions – mainly because customers assume that they’ve missed the boat to get their deliveries before Christmas, and instead return to the high street.

To combat this decline, e-commerce retailers can create messaging campaigns around delivery cut-off dates, for example, by serving overlays directly targeting Christmas shoppers with clear and prominent information about last shipping dates:

And as we’ve already covered, countdown clocks are another effective way to not only communicate shipping cut off dates, but drive urgency to purchase

Christmas Day and Boxing Day

People are increasingly looking to plan out their boxing day bargains on Christmas day itself. UK statistics found in 2017 that early risers were using PCs between 6am-7am (having just put the turkey in the oven, perhaps?), switching to mobile from 8am till 11am (looking to use the gift cards they’ve just received) and with sales peaking during the Queen’s speech at 3pm (no shade to her Majesty). Our own data backs this up:

This is a new trend which didn’t really happen in 2016, so we expect another increase to happen for this Christmas. The bottom line? Marketers need to be prepared to launch Boxing Day-specific campaigns as soon as the Christmas promotions end.

Seed Boxing Day sales early

Just like Black Friday, it pays to start the conversation early so that users are already planning their sales activity. Amazon, for example, advertises a whole week of Boxing Day deals, starting from Christmas Day itself:

Boxing Day sales are now a misnomer. The new phenomenon of people browsing on Christmas Day itself is likely to take off, and brands that are prepared to launch sales on Boxing Day will benefit from this uptick.

Re-engage your Black Friday customers

Use smart segmentation campaigns to engage your new customers. This might be in custom overlays based on user data, in email campaigns or in special promotions. Remember that the probability of selling again to existing customers is 60-70% – considerably more than selling to new customers (5-20%). This is the perfect opportunity to start turning newly acquired Black Friday buyers into loyal customers.

Clear inventory

Boxing Day sales are a good opportunity to clear your inventory before the start of the new year. Use scarcity tactics to inspire action in customers, such as showing stock levels and highlighting interest from other browsers.

And in the New Year…

Once you’ve had a moment to catch your breath, it’s time to gather and analyze all the data you’ve accumulated – make sure this insight doesn’t go to waste, as you’ll only benefit from it next time around. The e-commerce brands that survive and thrive in an ever-changing landscape are the ones that review and make decisions based on data. Some key metrics to consider are:

• Cost per acquisition – can you bring it down next year? How can you use loyalty tactics to improve customer retention?
• Returns – were customers returning the items they purchased? At what cost? How can this be reduced next time?
• Conversion rate – was the customer journey effective? What campaigns and tactics saw the best rates? Can these figures be optimized for next year?

As you can see, what were once individual shopping days are now merging into one two-month long shopping holiday – so consider all these individual campaigns as part of a much bigger push to acquire, convert and retain customers. Don’t forget to download your holiday e-commerce checklist, for a bite-size version of this report, and stay tuned for more festive content, data and insights as we approach Q4.

The post Jingle Sells: Holiday Ecommerce Marketing appeared first on Yieldify.