The digital conversion toolkit

Following up on my two recent posts on the cusotmer aquisition path, including the digital PR toolkit and the digital marketing toolkit, I thought I would complete the series with this one on online conversion.

Note:
My prompt to complete this posting was ceated by my arrival of the new O'Reilly book 'Conversion Optimization' which I have to review ASAP.

Digital conversion tools are those methods you would use to turn viewers into customers, browsers into buyers, lookers into bookers... and the customer acquisition cycle would not be complete without them.

Here's a breakdown of the tools you can use off-site

User Journey Optimisation:
From creating a usable way for customers to put products into their shopping basket, through to a seamless checkout/payment experience, the efficiency of the interface is key. I guess this is a pretty big subject in itself and just a footnote in this posting does not do it justice. However, suffice to say, if you're not optimizing your user journey to increase conversions on your website... then you probably need to take a good hard look at why you're doing this in the first place!

A/B & Multivariate Tools
Using tools that allow you to use and compare two or more different set of content, imagery or layout are now common practice on large eCommerce websites. Its a way to check what wording or template is leading to better sales very quickly and enables site to find what's working better, quicker. And furthermore.... do you want a way for your website to automatically improve your purchase ratio without actually doing any further fancy technical coding? Then consider using Google Optimiser, which is a dynamic multi-variate testing website tool that plugs into Google's Pay-Per-Click and Analytics functionality.

Feedback
Yes, I know its old-hat compared to what I've just described, but asking customers for their views on your website (e.g. the layout, etc.) is a basic but assured way of getting ideas on what aspects of your site aren't optimal.

Search & Social Marketing
Why have I put this lots into a posting about conversion when search and social marketing aim to get customers into your website and not through it? Simple!
If there are specific keywords that visitors type into search engines that means they then far more likely to go on  and spend money on your site, are those ones worth focusing on rather than the ones that just get loads of traffic that lands, takes a look and then disappears to the next site? And if there are images in your Facebook adverts that do the same thing.... shouldn't you be looking more closely at these ones?
Note: Affiliate marketing campaigns tend to convert the highest out of all. But I'll leave this subject for another day

eCRM
Now this means a lot of different things to different people and again deserves more than a few lines here. But online CRM or eCRM as its know (usually centred around email marketing and its integration with the target website) is a powerful tool to ensure that you identify, communicate with and convert customers as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Note: I'm sure I'll follow this posting up with more eCRM stuff in the future

Email
Do you know that targeted emails can produce a far higher conversion rate that organic or pay-per-click visitors? Yes, simple old email is still one of the most effective means of securing a sale online, assuming you don't bombard your recipients with messages and your email can get users to the site in the first place.

On-site:

Content
Unless your products are available everywhere (in which case they are probably highly commoditised and therefore you're probably aware of all that I'm describing and more) then you should take every chance to communicate to your customers what your products are all about. Aside from the SEO benefits of great content, customers do tend to need  encouragement and you also need to clearly explain things such as your delivery options, returns policy and trading terms & conditions.

Analytics
Sure.... analytics won't give you instant conversion improvement, but acting on what you find and analyse really can do. If you're still not using analytics to understand customer behaviour and map that all-important transaction funnel... then I recommend you do so immediately.

Personalisation
Delivering personalised content on new sites is one thing, but providing recommendations based on what a user has previously looked at or bought is a very sensible way to encourage them to purchase. Obviously the more you can then provide relevant suggestions (perhaps even based on what friends have bought), the better your eCommerce operation could be working.

In short.... make sure everything on your site is working as hard as it can to turn visitors into customers.

More on the single view

After reading an eMarketer article [Brands Adjust to Media Fragmentation - now only availble if you subscribe], it brought back my thoughts from a recent posting on the Single View of customers and companies.

The fragmentation of old and even new media channels these days makes it difficult for companies to communicate effectivey. And following the further fragmented dialogue caused by these messages is an issue of exponential difficulty beyond that!

So how to you ensure a customer has a complete view of your own company?

In my opinion you can't fully right now, because as soon as you use different channels for customer communication you loose a certain rigour. As for controlling which channel customers use.... "forgeddaboutit". As I said yesterday, its all about channel relevancy.

Lets be frank, customers don't care if your call-centre/website/branch is out-sourced or have different staff training processes now...

...To them it is all the same company, regardless of channel!

But you can help yourself:

1. Interlink your activity wherever possible:
How often do you see a press release with no URL to additonal information of supporting data?
(Answer: still too much!). Online date should link to each other, it joins a users thinking with your efforts and was the purpose of the WWW in the first place. Don't forget that links between your different online submissions can help in your Search Engine Optimisation efforts as well.

2. Be consistent across all channels:
As any Marketing or PR manual will tell you, you must make sure you give the same message as often as possible. Channel mis-match confuses people and this is even more important digitally (where inconsistencies can turn up in the same Google search). Consider a quality process for all your externally-bound content. Have a corporate-wide terminology database, especially if you translate content (and make sure ALL translation companies have access to this source). Give call-centre/customer service staff the same information you give everyone else and be prepared to manage the exceptions / issues carefully, noting what those exceptions are (product, brand, circumstance, etc.).
Note:
There's far more information from Mr Bob Liodice on the subject than I could ever provide.

3. Track your messaging
Monitor what gets said across the web and who says it. Social Media monitoring solutions are increasing in their ability to detect sentiment and can be inexpensive to implement quickly.

A single view

I've been speaking with a few clients recently about managing customer data and have found myself saying those wonderful words "what we need is a single view of the customer".

By this I mean that companies must try to identify the customer once and not try to create different records of them just because they chose to use several different channels of communication or purchase.

This is widely acceped as a goal of CRM, to save on more expensive aquisitional costs of re-marketing to try to repeatedly obtain the same

customer and use retentional techniques to keep them happy and purchasing instead. Simple eh?Well, yes its easy enough to state, but hard to implement as:

1. Customers are not able to be tracked across all channels all the time (and still then we can't and shouldn't track them down when they are carrying out 'anonymous' or secure tasks)

2. They use different methods for interaction acording to the channel they use.


However, is this view-point not being a little arrogant? Shouldn't the customer be able to communicate with companies in the different ways they want and when they want to?

Surely what's required is not so much for companies to have a single view of their customer, but for customers to have a single view of a company?