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Monday, 20 April 2015
Friday, 3 April 2015
Monday, 30 March 2015
4 ways to improve customer experience with data
4 ways to improve customer experience with data
In marketing, data is power. Surveys of marketers across industries
suggest that brands of all shapes and sizes have hopped on the big data
bandwagon. The Direct Marketing Association found that 84 percent of
respondents plan to increase spending in data-driven marketing for 2015.
Just the same, an InfoGroup survey found that brands rely on a number of different sources to collect and analyze this data. All of these activities are done in the name of improving customer experience with the type of marketing content and information that compels conversions and appeals to new customers.
Data is important, but it’s not just having all of this information that makes data-driven marketing successful. There are several important steps marketers must take to ensure they reach the outcomes they want within their budgets. Here are four steps any marketer can take to turn data into actionable insights that directly improve customer experience.
Quantitative data is great to determine which strategies work and where a brand needs to see improvement. However, no statistic can explain why a campaign succeeded better than the customer who made the decision to convert, whether that meant a purchase or a simple request for more information. Reaching out to customers and asking them what drove them to act will provide context to quantitative metrics.
It’s important to conduct a few interviews from each customer segment using your product, too. What worked for one customer may not have been as effective for another. Understanding data and trends mean collecting information from a sizable sample of your target audience.
When conducting interviews, the goal is to get to know the different user groups. By looking at usage and behavior data in a third-party analytics tool, such as Preact, you can identify specific user groups and analyze the product features used most. If the goal is to improve the overall product, you need information from different categories. Alternately, if the goal is specifically to optimize a certain feature, you can subset user categories.
In both cases, you can send out either a survey via Survey Monkey or Tech Validate, or an email asking if recipients are interested in having a conversation. You’d be surprised how many people want to talk to you, and they often have great feedback and advice about what’s working and what needs improvement.
Segmentation and personalization are all the rage in Web marketing. Big data helps companies understand different portions of their target audience and identify the best content for that group based on what made similar customers convert. This process can always improve, though. What attracts a young millennial to your product may be different from what attracts a Gen-Xer or Baby Boomer.
Consider who you are trying to attract. Are all of these groups satisfied with their experiences? Are they similarly engaged with your product? The ways different website visitors interacted with certain content and how it moved them through the conversion funnel will highlight what is working and what can improve.
Preact can also track event data, such as how know many times a customer has clicked on a certain button or viewed a page. It collects contact and professional information, which helps to determine customer segments. You can also keep track of formal customer complaints with tools such as Zendesk, which can help uncover bugs quickly via Zendesk tickets.
Sometimes a strategy doesn’t yield the expected ROI, or it doesn’t keep customers coming back to a brand. When someone converts once or twice but then doesn’t return, there may be an opportunity to capture that customer again with a better understanding of the conversion paths he took.
Again, look at your quantitative data to hypothesize what could be happening, conduct experiments and hold interviews. Once there’s a clear pattern for why these customers aren’t returning, solve the problem in your product, and then reach out to past customers with new information to get them back onboard.
To conduct experiments, consider using Optimizely, a tool that allows you to change the wording, placement of buttons, text and more, essentially creating multiple versions of the same Web page. Wording can have a big impact on a prospect’s decision, so it helps to write a couple versions of your Web page and compare. Optimizely will expose randomly selected customers to each page and keep track of how each performs.
The introduction to the conversion funnel is the type of information some brands can end up neglecting. There’s so much content coming out of a marketing team, marketers might forget to think about what’s working and what isn’t.
The first point of exposure a customer has to a company can be the most important, so it’s always a good idea to determine which channels are really working to attract new or repeat customers. The results may come as a bit of a surprise, and it’s a great way to redirect time and effort to more effective channels.
Analytics tools, such as KISSmetrics, track acquisition channels and allow you to see how many customers are coming from places like Google or paid advertisements, and if they’re converting. If you continue to track customers from various channels over time, you can see which channels are performing best.
Google Analytics is a good, free alternative to track these measurements. Most bloggers and smaller companies start with Google Analytics and then subscribe to a more robust third-party tool once they have some cash in the bank.
The more data a marketer has to make decisions for a brand, the better. It can’t just be about the raw quantitative analysis, though. There are insights that must come from that information to ensure it brings tangible benefits to a company.
Sometimes, finding those answers will take a bit of digging. Investigate the true meaning behind every piece of information, and you’ll see all that data really start to prove its value.
Just the same, an InfoGroup survey found that brands rely on a number of different sources to collect and analyze this data. All of these activities are done in the name of improving customer experience with the type of marketing content and information that compels conversions and appeals to new customers.
Data is important, but it’s not just having all of this information that makes data-driven marketing successful. There are several important steps marketers must take to ensure they reach the outcomes they want within their budgets. Here are four steps any marketer can take to turn data into actionable insights that directly improve customer experience.
Conduct interviews to fill in the gaps
Quantitative data is great to determine which strategies work and where a brand needs to see improvement. However, no statistic can explain why a campaign succeeded better than the customer who made the decision to convert, whether that meant a purchase or a simple request for more information. Reaching out to customers and asking them what drove them to act will provide context to quantitative metrics.
It’s important to conduct a few interviews from each customer segment using your product, too. What worked for one customer may not have been as effective for another. Understanding data and trends mean collecting information from a sizable sample of your target audience.
When conducting interviews, the goal is to get to know the different user groups. By looking at usage and behavior data in a third-party analytics tool, such as Preact, you can identify specific user groups and analyze the product features used most. If the goal is to improve the overall product, you need information from different categories. Alternately, if the goal is specifically to optimize a certain feature, you can subset user categories.
In both cases, you can send out either a survey via Survey Monkey or Tech Validate, or an email asking if recipients are interested in having a conversation. You’d be surprised how many people want to talk to you, and they often have great feedback and advice about what’s working and what needs improvement.
Examine usage data to assess customer experience
Segmentation and personalization are all the rage in Web marketing. Big data helps companies understand different portions of their target audience and identify the best content for that group based on what made similar customers convert. This process can always improve, though. What attracts a young millennial to your product may be different from what attracts a Gen-Xer or Baby Boomer.
Consider who you are trying to attract. Are all of these groups satisfied with their experiences? Are they similarly engaged with your product? The ways different website visitors interacted with certain content and how it moved them through the conversion funnel will highlight what is working and what can improve.
Preact can also track event data, such as how know many times a customer has clicked on a certain button or viewed a page. It collects contact and professional information, which helps to determine customer segments. You can also keep track of formal customer complaints with tools such as Zendesk, which can help uncover bugs quickly via Zendesk tickets.
Identify stagnant customers to bring them back
Sometimes a strategy doesn’t yield the expected ROI, or it doesn’t keep customers coming back to a brand. When someone converts once or twice but then doesn’t return, there may be an opportunity to capture that customer again with a better understanding of the conversion paths he took.
Again, look at your quantitative data to hypothesize what could be happening, conduct experiments and hold interviews. Once there’s a clear pattern for why these customers aren’t returning, solve the problem in your product, and then reach out to past customers with new information to get them back onboard.
To conduct experiments, consider using Optimizely, a tool that allows you to change the wording, placement of buttons, text and more, essentially creating multiple versions of the same Web page. Wording can have a big impact on a prospect’s decision, so it helps to write a couple versions of your Web page and compare. Optimizely will expose randomly selected customers to each page and keep track of how each performs.
Analyze acquisition data to assess progress
The introduction to the conversion funnel is the type of information some brands can end up neglecting. There’s so much content coming out of a marketing team, marketers might forget to think about what’s working and what isn’t.
The first point of exposure a customer has to a company can be the most important, so it’s always a good idea to determine which channels are really working to attract new or repeat customers. The results may come as a bit of a surprise, and it’s a great way to redirect time and effort to more effective channels.
Analytics tools, such as KISSmetrics, track acquisition channels and allow you to see how many customers are coming from places like Google or paid advertisements, and if they’re converting. If you continue to track customers from various channels over time, you can see which channels are performing best.
Google Analytics is a good, free alternative to track these measurements. Most bloggers and smaller companies start with Google Analytics and then subscribe to a more robust third-party tool once they have some cash in the bank.
The more data a marketer has to make decisions for a brand, the better. It can’t just be about the raw quantitative analysis, though. There are insights that must come from that information to ensure it brings tangible benefits to a company.
Sometimes, finding those answers will take a bit of digging. Investigate the true meaning behind every piece of information, and you’ll see all that data really start to prove its value.
Monday, 23 March 2015
Wednesday, 18 March 2015
Marketers three core testing categories
“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”
― Marshall McLuhan
So many times in the haste of developing our marketing strategy and materials, we use the ol’ seasoned judgment of ‘I think’:
“I think this is the best creative” – it follows brand standards.
“I think this is the best day of the week to mail or post” – the latest industry best practices say this is the best day.
“I think this call to action will be the most responsive” – our rates have been pretty good so far.
Despite knowing that we really shouldn’t make assumptions when it comes to truly knowing our customers, sometimes assumptions still make their way into our marketing plans. After all, we’ve already spent the time building out our customers’ personas and have segmented our data but do we really know how our audiences will respond?
So how do we get from, ‘I think’ to ‘I know’?
A great place to start, no matter what level of marketer you are, is to
run a relatively easy A/B test. Why is this necessary? Well, our
customers’ preferences are changing all the time. Testing allows us to
stay on top of these changes and adapt our marketing strategies to
ensure our efforts are relevant. Variations in campaign elements can
increase engagement and conversion.
Here are the three core testing categories to consider that will have a significant impact on response:
1. Creative: style of graphics, layout, copy length2. Content: subject line, call to action, promotional or editorial copy
3. Timing and frequency: send time, send day, send or share frequency
Okay, but are marketers really still running A/B tests?
Steps to Developing an A/B Testing Strategy
Steps to Developing an A/B Testing Strategy:
Over half of all marketers use some form of testing but up to 75% of the more mature strategic marketers use A/B testing routinely as part of a formal marketing strategy to learn about customer behavior.
Pretty impressive, right?
So, let's get started! Follow the six steps below to help you develop a successful A/B testing strategy. Remember, we should consider testing a continuous process, so when one test is completed, another is started. And this all begins with thoughtful planning.
“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”
― David Ogilvy
Steps to Developing an A/B Testing Strategy:
Pretty impressive, right?
So, let's get started! Follow the six steps below to help you develop a successful A/B testing strategy. Remember, we should consider testing a continuous process, so when one test is completed, another is started. And this all begins with thoughtful planning.
“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”
― David Ogilvy
Steps to Developing an A/B Testing Strategy:
- Develop a Plan - this will be pivotal in garnering the best results!
- What are my company’s top business goals?
- What are the measurable results we want to achieve?
- Which of the three categories will I start testing (creative, content, timing and frequency)?
Remember to only test one element at a time.
- Find an executive sponsor. This shouldn’t be too challenging since most executives love to have metrics to validate programs.
- Assign people to support each step in the testing process. For instance, determine who will create and build the testing program in the system.
- Ensure someone is reporting and benchmarking metrics in the system.
- It’s essential to review results during the test time to optimize the final version. If you can assign an analyst to the team, they can often validate the statistical significance beyond the basic metrics.
- Don’t forget to document the full process along the way, including the steps taken and the results achieved. This will help the team review what was successful and where to focus next.
- What did you discover during your testing?
- Communicate findings and recommendations to management.
Assess Your Content Marketing Maturity Level
Assess Your Content Marketing Maturity Level
Marketers today know that they need relevant and interesting content in order to attract and continue to engage with their customers across channels, as well as to stay relevant in a competitive landscape. Marketers have access to technology and tools that help organize and distribute this content, but identifying, developing and planning the most appropriate assets intended for customer consumption can be daunting if there is no solid content marketing strategy in place.All too often we see marketers focusing on creating new content for individual campaigns or channels rather than developing a content strategy that addresses all stages of the buyers’ life cycles.
The Marketing Team develops custom content strategies for marketers so they can use the technology to publish and send the right content, at the right times, to the right people. When customers receive content they value and appreciate, they are more likely to convert.
Take a look at our latest infographic, “Content Marketing: What Level Are You?” to assess your organization’s content marketing maturity level. Question your competencies and sophistication around areas such as creating buyer personas, editorial calendars, audits and analysis, and theme and content ideation and creation. Then discover solutions that will help you plan the content that will most resonate with your customer base and achieve your business objectives.
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