Developing the Customer Experience -

If you’re not focusing on the customer experience, you’re potentially losing money, it’s as simple as that.

One of the simplest places to start with customer experience is to make sure your web and mobile web experiences are the best they can be.

It costs so much money to acquire traffic to your site in the first place. Every time a user bounces from your site without interacting, you’ve wasted money and you may never get another chance with that prospect, uh oh.

That’s why it’s crucial to ensure a pleasurable customer experience throughout your entire sales funnel. You need to make sure that every step of the conversion process is optimised so that once you’ve attracted a customer’s curiosity with an offer, you can immediately deliver on that promise.

We’re going to look at things you should focus on when planning to optimise your conversion rates. This is by no means an exhaustive list but all crucial in any conversion rate optimisation program.

Costly Creative

Many organisations waste money on display advertising by failing to target the right people or, when they find the right people, by failing to put the right ads in front of them.

Still more don’t segment their customer base and target those customers with relevant email content.

But an even greater number of organisations waste money by failing to make sure that their landing pages and the offers a prospect sees when they respond to a display ad or email offer are consistent with the messages that caused those prospects to react in the first place.

Time Warner Cable, one of the largest pay television companies in the world, has put this idea of creative consistency to great use. They analysed potential new customer affinity for the different products that they offer—and then promoted package offers across display media and throughout the company’s website. Additionally, the offer shown to this segment would be consistent whether the consumer was being exposed to a display media banner, coming to a landing page, or viewing the Time Warner Cable homepage. The result of this targeting and experience consistency was a 20 percent improvement in the new customer conversion rate.

The Power Of Personalisation

For example, if a user is on The Telegraph website and responds to an advert for a credit card featuring a specific offer, they should see the same creative, the same messages and the same offer when they land on the bank’s website. In fact, if they don’t see consistent messaging when they arrive on the bank’s website, then they’re very likely to leave immediately and their impression of the bank’s brand is diminished.

Taking this idea even further, the bank’s creative and messaging should not only persist throughout that session with the user – they should be remembered and recreated each time the customer returns to the site. After all, this is exactly the level of personalised experience you’d expect if you dealt with real people in the bank’s branches.

But consistent landing pages are just the beginning of landing page optimisation.

You’ve still got a lot of decisions to make in terms of layout and content: how to group sections of the page together, how to best reflect the features and functions of your products, how to represent your offer graphically, and how to structure the flow of the page as a whole.

The only way to get hard data on these things is through A/B testing – comparing different versions of a page to find out which version generates more conversions, and multivariate testing – examining which specific elements on the page actually contribute to conversions.

What options could you suggest to help someone improve their site? We will be releasing more very soon.