Upselling and cross-selling can be a challenge to implement in any industry. A poorly-time distraction can frustrate users, or worse, cause them to leave your site. At the same, cross-selling, when done right, can prove to be an effective way to increase revenue and sales. In fact, product recommendations drive 10-30% of eCommerce site revenue, according to Forrester research analyst Sucharita Kodali. But, you can’t push just any product at any point in the buyer’s journey. In order to really drive value for your customers, you need to be mindful about what you suggest and about your upsell UX.

There’s no doubt that companies should take advantage of upsell and cross-sell opportunities to surface relevant, popular products to customers and drive sales. After all, pushing a product at the right time can help increase the average order value at checkout. The tricky part, however, is executing these recommendations in a seamless, unobtrusive way.

To help you perfect your eCommerce upsell UX and cross-sell strategy, we’ve put together some best-in-class examples that show how you can incorporate upsells and cross-sells within your existing site design.

1. Present recommendations in the cart preview or add-to-bag confirmation modal

Placing product recommendations within the cart or add to bag confirmation allows users to make quick decisions about adding products they may have missed during their browsing session, while catching their attention before the end of their purchase journey 

Recommendations should stand out from the cart in their own container and design. This helps users quickly distinguish between areas of the cart page, while still capturing their attention.

Once a user adds an item to their bag on home goods company Wayfair’s site, they receive recommendations within the same modal for relevant warranties and accessories. Users can choose to add items, continue to the cart, or exit out of the modal to return to their browsing experience.

2. Surface recommendations to the shopping cart

Adding cross-sell recommendations directly to the cart without having to navigate away from the browsing experience allows for a hassle-free experience. Make sure to have just enough key details to empower your users to make an informed decision, such as the product title, an image thumbnail (if applicable), and the price. Have the cart update seamlessly and automatically if a user decides to add one or more of these items to their cart, and check for long page reloads when users use this feature to minimize frustration.

When creating your upsell UX, consider providing a tooltip or a quickview for users that require more information about the product before adding.

On luggage and travel accessories company Away’s site, add-ons are displayed on the right-hand side of a users cart using a panel with a different background color to help set it apart from the rest of the cart. Users can click on the plus icon to add these items directly to their cart.

On furniture retailer Joybird’s site, the company’s upsell UX offers users optional add-ons for eligible products wIthin the cart preview. From this view, users can directly add these warranties and protection plans to their cart.

3. Personalize your recommendations

Your recommendations should be straightforward and fairly intuitive to your users. You don’t want to surface a product that seems completely unrelated to their interests or needs. Items should be of lower cart value, or at least a necessary addition to the item that was added. That way, your users can quickly perceive the value of these additional items, decide whether the item is right for, and seamlessly add it to their cart.

Any item you recommend should fit into one of these three categories:

1. It’s directly related to the product
2. It’s complementary to the product
3. It’s personalized for the user

So, how can you ensure the value and convenience of these items are communicated clearly to your customers? The secret lies in optimizing both your user interface (UI) and using easy-to-understand copy. Here’s how to improve your upsell UX using these two factors: 

Recommendations should make sense to the user based on their relation to other items in the cart. For example, are they normally bought together out of necessity? Or, are you surfacing this recommendation because most users bought these items together?  Indenting cross-sell recommendations within the same listing and using the right language can be a subtle, but effective way to indicate direct relation to the cart item. 

Apple’s upsell UX recommends add-ons and protection plans in the same container as the cart item. Users can use a simple ‘Add’ link to automatically add the coverage to their cart within the cart page, so they never have to leave the page and their checkout flow is not disrupted. 

Another way to suggest related products to customers is on a product display page. Shoe company Vans offers its popular Water & Stain Shield product on the PDP for its shoes. Customers who are buying a new pair of Vans will probably want them to stay in good condition for as long as possible. So, they can easily add the spray to their cart and help protect their new shoes from stains and moisture. 

Despite the difficulty of incorporating recommendations without being intrusive, cross-sell and upsell product recommendations can ultimately be very beneficial for users. It’s a great way to surface relevant products that a customer may have missed during their browsing journey. For you, it’s an opportunity to drive more sales, but also to increase the discoverability of your products and help your customers find what they need more easily and efficiently. 

It can be an effective way to maximize their experience without the difficulty and time-consuming activity of looking for specific items that pair well together with the product they already plan on purchasing. At the end of the day, cross-sells should be considered as a seamless part of the experience rather than an afterthought to the design.

Although conversions are the desired outcome of a good customer experience, they are not the end-all be-all for brands. A happy customer may make a one-time purchase, but more importantly, a happy customer will return to do business with your company time and time again.

But, how exactly do you define something as elusive as customer happiness? How do you understand the nuances of customer frustration and pinpoint what exactly fosters engagement? And, how do you turn all of this data and intelligence into an effective retention strategy that drives greater customer lifetime value (CLV)? 

There are plenty of systems designed to measure user experience; these primarily deal with the pages users visit on your site, conversions, and the oft-cited biggest UX failure: bounces. 

But, unfortunately, basic user experience metrics won’t give you enough insight into the nuances of users’ digital happiness. Sure, studying on-page experience, bounce rate, time on page, and other CX metrics are important, but they only give you a one-dimensional view of your customer experience. They fail to give you rich insights into customer sentiment. Fortunately, there is a metric that does exactly that: the Digital Happiness Index. 

Calculated from several other behavioral metrics and consolidated into one mega metric, the Digital Happiness Index (DHI) is a unique measure of visitor satisfaction, providing an objective view of whether or not your overall experience is hitting the right notes.

In this article we’ll look at:

1. What Is Digital Happiness And How Can You Achieve It?
2. What is The Current State of Digital Happiness?
3. Calculating the DHI: the 5 Dimensions of Digital Experience
4. Making Sense of the Digital Happiness Index

What Is Digital Happiness And How Can You Achieve It?

Before we delve directly into the DHI, let’s start by focusing on digital happiness. A rather simple concept, it denotes the convenience, satisfaction, and even the pleasure of interacting with a website or online interface, such as a search engine results page (SERP). 

As a feeling, it is incidentally difficult to pin down, even in the digital realm. But by using Contentsquare’s DHI metric, you can determine how happy your site visitors are, based on their experience with your site or app. 

The first of its kind, the DHI combines KPIs from 5 key pillars that contribute to overall customer satisfaction: 

1. Flawless: Are customers enjoying a smooth experience free of technical performance issues?
2. Engaged: Are customers engaging with and satisfied with the content?
3. Sticky: Are visitors loyal, returning to the site frequently?
4. Intuitive: Does the navigation make it easy for visitors to enjoy a complete experience?
5. Empowered: How easy is it for customers to find the products and services right for them?

Is your site’s navigation seamless and friction-free? Is your content proving effective in helping visitors reach their goals? Are visitors coming back to your site? Are they exiting early or completing their journeys? And finally, are they finding what they’re looking for — be that information or products?

By quantifying these various strands of experience, and combining metrics into one score, the DHI provides brands with an objective grasp of whether or not visitors are enjoying a positive experience.

What is The Current State of Digital Happiness?

To better understand the current state of digital happiness in the world, we recently surveyed over 500 marketers and 4,000 shoppers from around the globe in our new Digital Happiness Pulse survey. Here are some of the shocking findings the survey revealed:

1. Most Marketers Can’t Measure Digital Happiness

• 77% of marketers say their brands don’t think about customer happiness as a key concern
• 84% of marketers can’t currently track the moods and mindsets of digital customers
• 76% of marketers can’t accurately measure whether digital customers are happy

If brands are going to understand and improve the happiness of their digital customers, they need to focus on using the right metrics, getting access to the right customer data, and the right technology to make the first two possible.

2. Why Today’s Customers Are Unhappy Online

• 49% of online shoppers feel unhappy when a site uses pop-ups and adverts
• 42% of online shoppers feel unhappy when they can’t find what they’re looking for
• 48% of online shoppers feel unhappy when a site or app crashes during checkout

When asked if they feel happy when shopping online, only 15% of consumers said yes. Considering that a quarter (25%) of customers feel nervous about shopping in-store since COVID-19, now is the time for brands to get serious about making online experiences just as good as — or better than — those in-store.

Every brand’s goal should be to create digital experiences that ensure customers leave your app, site, or online store happier than when they arrived. This doesn’t mean losing focus on retention, market share or brand awareness, but rather thinking about those objectives in the context of satisfying customers and building experiences they’ll love.

Calculating The DHI: The 5 Dimensions of Digital Experience 

Using behavioral data from our tool, the DHI separates the data into 5 dimensions to filter the numbers into intelligible concepts behind visitors’ digital happiness. Our clients get a comparison to industry standards, and every score represents an aggregate of every session on the website.

As we mentioned earlier, the DHI has 5 components or 5 dimensions that make up its final score, a number out of 100. To calculate a site’s DHI, we take the average of the 5 scores of each dimension. To come up with this rating, we consider the following five dimensions: flawless, engaged, sticky, intuitive, and empowered. 

Each of these 5 individual scores is determined by its own calculations, based on metrics like time spent on site, time spent engaging with pages/elements, bounce rates, and more. 

It also takes into account if users have reached their destinations and the way they’ve done so. It captures whether users ran into UX issues like non-intuitive navigation — clicks on non-clickable content, misleading clicks, etc.

Making Sense of the Digital Happiness Index

Innovations in SaaS and marketing have led to more avant-garde methods of measuring digital customer experience and benchmarking customer satisfaction. 

Although the complex, 5-tier system of our mega metric is supplemental, it is very much in line with our granular approach to behavioral analytics. 

The fact that the 5 dimensions deal with different occurrences in the UX means the DHI is casting as wide a net as possible to capture your customer’s mindset. Based on this score, you can shine light on areas of friction and other obstacles in the customer decision journey. 

Customers today will not hesitate to review a poor UX or give one star for a session that doesn’t meet their expectations. But they are also giving you continuous feedback on your site or app through their interactions — with every tap, click, scroll or hover, they are voicing their feelings about your CX. 

Here at Contentsquare, we give brands the tools to capture this on-page feedback so you can hear and understand what your customers feel and want. 

Happiness of any kind is difficult to pin down to a numerical format. But, by combining the 5 pillars of the UX, you will come as close as possible to determining how digitally happy your visitors are with your content.

Conversions rarely occur on a whim; usually, there is a layered process behind eCommerce purchases. Known as the conversion funnel — or the sales funnel — this model shows the conduit between the least aware prospects to those who are most aware of your company’s products and services. Those with the most knowledge of your offerings are usually the most interested and motivated to convert.  

Brands have to be both wary and strategic in the ways they set up conversions, and that is where the concept of the conversion funnel comes in handy. While no one can truly “set up” conversions, you can set the scene and command all the workings that bring visitors closer to converting thanks to conversion funnel optimization. 

As UX-perts, we like to blare the horns on the importance of UX, so it should come as no surprise that a good user experience plays an important role in conversion rate optimization. Let’s take a look at how you can optimize your conversion rate by way of working in a good UX to the different stages of conversion funnel optimization. Here are some of the topics we will discuss: 

• What is a conversion funnel?
• What is conversion funnel optimization in marketing?
• What does good conversion funnel optimization look like?
• The different stages of the conversion funnel
• How to optimize these stages to drive consumers down the funnel

What is a conversion funnel?

Before we jump into how to optimize your conversion funnel, we need to briefly review what a conversion funnel is.

The conversion funnel denotes a process in which brands work to turn potential customers into converting customers.

It is comprised of several stages, with each one indicating your customers’ level of brand awareness, interest, and willingness to buy — along with the gradual steps and undertakings you can take to lead users further down. Here’s a quick breakdown of the different stages and what they mean: 

1. Attention/Awareness: At this stage, your users become aware they have a problem and first discover your brand. This might be through word of mouth, a google search, a blog post, a display ad, an email – you name it!
2. Interest: Now, your users are more interested in what you have to say. Share how can your brand help them solve their problem?.
3. Desire: This is where you need to turn on the charm and sell your visitors the benefits of your products and services. You want to drive home how your company is different (and better) than your competitors, pushing your users further down the funnel.
4. Action: Your users have all the information they need and are ready to pull the trigger, whether they’re checking out to buy a shirt in their cart, applying for a loan, signing a contract, or taking whatever action your company defines as a conversion.

Source: HubSpot

What is Conversion Funnel Optimization in Marketing?

While the stages in each conversion funnel may differ from brand to brand, each shares the ultimate goal of “pushing” site users down to the very last step, which, evidently, represents conversions.

Through this structure, brands can group their potential customers into easy-to-understand categories, thereby dictating several efforts they can maneuver to encourage prospects further down the funnel.

There are various marketing tactics to drive customers down the conversion funnel; they can be deployed through more than one stage. Let’s dig deeper.

What is Good UX in Conversion Funnel Optimization?

Now that you know what a conversion funnel is, the next thing to cover is how to apply good UX practices that relate to each stage in the conversion funnel. The following spells out the ways brands can enhance their UX per each stage of the conversion funnel to optimize it and garner greater conversions.

Stage 1: Awareness

Sitting atop the conversion funnel as the entry point, the awareness stage is the stage with the least… awareness of your brand or offering(s). It’s also the stage with mounting awareness, as potential clients become cognizant of your business and click onto your website, the act which carries with it the possibility to spawn possible interest. 

But that requires capturing new customers. You should approach your awareness stage with the mentality of casting a wide net. You want to attract as many people as you can, so you have a higher chance of moving people further down the funnel. 

We’re not saying adopt a “spray and pray” method, you still need to be strategic and methodical so you can securely create a heightened awareness of what your brand does – and attract the right kind of customers. Getting tons of traffic on your site or clicks on your ads can be exciting at first, but if these are unqualified visits, they won’t do you much good.

Here are a few ways to educating potential customers on your brand and make it easier for new users to find you:

• PPC ads
• Social media campaigns
• SEO 

Take e.l.f Cosmetics, for example. To educate potential customers, e.l.f. Cosmetics allows anyone to take their skincare quiz which not only provides awareness to what types of skincare products they offer but also how their products can help alleviate a consumer’s pain points. Whether a potential customer wants to treat acne, dry skin, or improve fine lines, e.l.f. has products that cater to their every need.

Source: e.l.f. Cosmetics website

You have to keep your target audience in mind and create your campaigns accordingly. But once you’ve brought new people onto your site, the UX must be optimized, or at least suitable to pique interest within visitors (lead them to step 2), or — even better — make them convert on the spot.

UX Best Practices at The Awareness Phase

There is a slew of general ways to improve upon the user experience. But often in the awareness stage, users usually arrive at your site via a landing page. 

The UX has to be top tier on this page. Keep the copy and imagery relevant to the conversion goal, while making it clear what your brand does. The latter is more important since you’re introducing new prospects to your company. The copy and other contents on landing pages should be to the point, so steer clear of wasting users’ time. In short, don’t overload it.

Most importantly, construct the landing page so that it is relevant to the message that led visitors to click on it in the first place. 

Stage 2: Interest

Next, we reach the stage of interest. Now that prospective customers know your company exists, they have to frequent your website; simply knowing about your offering(s) does not ensure they’ll return to your site or engage with your content.

Content is key in this step, as it can foster relationships and maintain interest within your prospects. There’s a twofold approach for conversion funnel optimization: the first is the nature of the content and the second concerns the UX, or the feelings and attitudes users develop over their experience. 

The first element deals with the core of the content — the content type, its subject matter, how it can help with your prospects’ problems, its visual identity, etc. You would need to establish a blog with relevant posts to your industry or niche. Take Slack for example, since the pandemic Slack has upped its content production, providing guides, interviews, etc to teach business leaders and employees alike how to adapt to the “new normal” with Slack. 

Source: Slack

Other useful content for stimulating user interest are:

• Guides
• Videos
• Interviews
• A resources page to keep everything together in one place
• And more! The sky is the limit – get creative and see what content works for your audience.  

You would have to make sure these align with the needs/interests of your vertical as well as making your content stand out and offer something different. Videos and other content, for example, should not focus on the product alone, but offer something of value — whether that’s inspirational content, news related to your niche or something else. 

UX Best Practices for The Interest Phase

As for the attitudes toward the content, i.e. the UX, consider the amount of content on your page; is it slowing down your site? If so, reduce it so that you never have issues with loading speeds. 

Make sure everything can be easily seen and accessed. This will encourage further browsing. For example, if you have an in-page element that requires scrolling, the width of it, at the very least, needs to be wide enough so all the content can be easily read. 

You should limit scrollable in-page content to one type of scrolling function (either by length or width, never both.) This is generally length, as this is easier to look through. Use carousels, in-page recommendations, and links to other pages to incite browsing.

In fact, when it comes to the UX in general, be sure to keep it continually optimized so that all content elements are easy to understand and seamless. The best way to gauge customer understanding and frustration is of course to measure interactions with each element.

Stage 3: Desire

Once you’ve developed some level of interest, you need to propel prospects towards the lower half of the conversion funnel, which starts with desire. Representing a heightened interest, desire attracts users to your actual offering aside from your content alone. 

At this stage, you should make your product or service, as the stage suggests, desirable. It’s also where you have to distinguish your offering from that of your competitors, specifically, by positioning your company as the better option. 

This can be done by:

• Employing more targeted social ads that lead to pages with CTAs
• Highlighting how your product can alleviate specific problems
• Offering sales/promotions

For example, Superdry entices their customers through a series of emails providing special discounts, promotions, etc. to showcase the value of their products.

Source: Superdry

The users with the highest level of interest will sign up for a newsletter or other form of email communication. This is vital, as it enables you to see exactly who your most interested prospects are and market to them directly. 

UX Best Practices at The Desire Phase

For the Desire stage, your best bet is to arrange a drip campaign, or an automated email campaign, which can be set off by different triggers and sent at strategic periods. For example, when someone signs up or makes a purchase, you can then sent prewritten emails during key periods, such as sales, new blog posts, company news, etc.

Also, although they’re prewritten content, assure that emails are personalized with the prospects’ names or their company names. Emails that appear auto-generated, or lack a human touch, yield a poor UX.

As you may have gathered, content is as weighty a component at this stage as in others. You need to eliminate any traces of a poor UX, such as an image that appears clickable, but doesn’t actually take users to a landing page, enlarging the image instead, a common UX problem. Nothing spoils a customer journey like obstacles in the digital experience — another reason to measure user behavior.

Stage 4: Action

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve reached the final stage: action. This is the most targeted stage of the conversion funnel for obvious reasons. After pumping out UX-optimized content and building a relationship with potential customers, only a small portion of them will make it to this stage. 

Most will hang in the balance of desire and action, toggling between the two until they make the decision to either buy or bounce. This is where your UX can make or break you.

UX Best Practices at The Action Phase

First, you need to ensure that the navigation of your product pages are neatly organized so that products are easy to find. Don’t succumb to the UX sin of overstuffing your navigation. Finding your product/service should be a seamless experience.

As for the product pages, each must have selection tools that make it easier for customers to filter out products by way of their particular needs. (Think of common product organization types like size, color, price, etc.)

Additionally, all aspects of this experience must promote purchases, from the ability to zoom in, to quick load times of the actual product pages (when clicked on from a multi-product page), to the product image quality.

Any element can be off-putting at this stage, including non-design bits like pricing, so make sure your UX is superb and built around actual customer intelligence.

UX Insights Throughout the Conversion Funnel Optimization Process

Measuring the success of your marketing efforts does not end while you embark on optimizing the conversion funnel. In fact, you should not approach the conversion funnel as a standalone marketing tactic to reel in more conversions. 

This is because not all user experience exists in such a linear way. As such, it may ring true for some users but not all. Particularly, the customer decision journey can be seen as a contrast to the funnel. This can be observed by viewing user paths and segmenting your users to narrow behavior-based categories. 

By tackling a specific segment, you can customize the UX to that segment, to assure an optimized journey that reduces exists and bounces. For example, pure player brands understand that their content will not be consumed by a general audience. Only specific segments will visit their sites and social channels. As such, they create content that aligns with the interests of their segmented users.

Seems like just yesterday we were pouring over lists of predictions for 2020, and considering all the ways in which the digital experience wars would heat up. But that was a whole year (and lifetime!) ago, and heat up they did…

Little did we know what lay ahead, and the extent to which the best-laid digital plans would need to be rethought. While customer journey analysis was already the key brand differentiator in 2019, the pandemic context and lockdown shift to digital, drastically raised the bar on CX-cellence, and forced many companies to fast-track digital improvements to stay relevant.

Maintaining business continuity as the world around us shut down became a key focus of brands everywhere, and beyond its status as the ‘convenient’ option, digital emerged as the only ‘always-reliable’ option. 

Overnight, we all became acutely aware of how much we relied on digital — to stay informed, order necessities, keep working, socialize, etc. With our offline lives restricted, being online was suddenly a much more emotional affair. 

It certainly has been a challenging year. The speed of digital acceleration has been fierce, but it has also put brands in a much better position to write the future of customer experience. And one thing’s for sure: businesses today are a whole lot closer to their customers than they were this time last year. Now using DXP software is the next step towards dominating the eCommerce world.

Instead of offering predictions in these anything-but-predictable times, here are four 2021 customer experience trends to look out for this year:

1. Customer centricity as the “means”, not the objective

Customer-centric isn’t a badge of honor, it’s a verb. What do I mean by that? That the only way to ensure your experience is aligned with your customers’ wants and needs is to make sure your CX strategy is driven by the people who use your services or shop your platform. After all, consumers are continuously communicating their likes and dislikes with every tap, scroll, hover and swipe — collecting this feedback and understanding their digital language is key to building the experiences your visitors want and deserve.

In fact, you could say that 2020 revived the lost art of listening. The pandemic affected customer behaviors in ways we could never have predicted, forcing businesses to listen more closely than ever before to consumer priorities. Supermarkets piloted virtual lines to help shoppers avoid crowds, resort group ClubMed refocused its offering on at-home activities, and many others were able to rethink the way they do things and even reinvent themselves.  

Hopefully, 2021 will not throw quite so many challenges our way, but one thing is certain: customer-centricity needs to be baked into your experience strategy. The good news is, if your methods and technology are customer-driven, and if your innovation is spurred by customer insight, you’ll be able to cut through the noise and excel in your CX. By using funnel optimization tools, mobile app heatmapping, and sessions replay you will blow the competition out of the water.

2. Keep the digital momentum going

The pace of digital transformation these past twelve months has been dizzying, it’s true. But now’s not the time to slow down! 2020 has been described as a ‘before and after’ year, and where digital is concerned, there is certainly no going back. Consumer behaviors have changed a lot this year: people who never shopped online now have standing orders on online grocery sites, we meet our doctors virtually, even our children have Zoom accounts. And brands have had to think on their feet to enhance and expand the digital CX: from launching new eComm platforms to adopting AR technology overnight, bridging the gap between offline and online has tested many a company’s agility this year.

The silver lining is that this type of crisis management has helped brands improve their ability to roll out successful digital initiatives at scale and speed. And if there’s one thing we know about customer behaviors, it’s that they are anything but static. Equipping your team with the ability (and tools!) to respond quickly and efficiently to the unpredictable is the best way to ensuring ongoing agility and digital success.

3. Digital happiness & the emotional side of analytics

We’ve all experienced emotionally-charged situations online this year. From setting an alarm clock to refresh the delivery slot page in the middle of the night to failing to set up your child’s remote learning account — our increased reliance on digital has come with its fair share of frustrations. It’s no surprise then that Forrester is predicting “CI leaders will shift 10% of their insights budget to emotion analytics” this year. Indeed, tracking clicks and conversions is not going to tell you all that much about how visitors feel about the CX. However, The use of tools like page heatmapping, visual merchandising analytics, and AI analytics will do just that.

New behaviors require new metrics. The ability to understand what frustrates visitors and what delights them is key to creating human digital experiences and personalization that actually matters. Retention, conversion, market share and brand awareness will continue to be key focuses of marketers everywhere, but if you can say your customers leave your app, site or online store happier than when they arrived, you’re doing something very right.

4. Who needs predictions when you have predictive analytics?

But how on earth do you make sure your customers are digitally satisfied? Well, there is an antidote to guesswork. Customer behaviors change fast and furiously but if you’re able to monitor digital interactions and surface opportunities for improvement in real-time, you’ll be able to keep pace with your customers. This type of agility is not only helpful to navigate a time of crisis, but will also be hugely beneficial around high-impact events like Black Friday. Think about it: if you can be alerted to any CX obstacles as they occur and fix them instantly, you won’t have to save your insight-gleaning for the post-mortem. 

When it comes to digital, you can’t predict the future but you can prepare your business for it. In order to have the competitive edge in 2021, brands will need to continuously improve the performance of their digital assets while creating value through innovation. Businesses that can combine a problem-solving mindset with a creative approach to experience building will be poised for success this year and going forward.

This time last year, the entire Contentsquare team had just come back from our annual company-wide Kickoff event, two hours north of Paris. We had just spent three days together — all 580 of us — looking back at the year gone by, and firming up our vision for 2020. We had big plans. 

Six weeks later, like businesses all over the world, we had to rethink those big plans, and adapt overnight to a situation no one could have predicted. 

And twelve months later, we’ve just wrapped up another Kickoff, except this time there are 740 of us, not 580, and we gathered over Zoom instead of the French countryside. And the team isn’t the only thing that’s grown — this year we welcomed 200 new clients, opened 3 new offices, released 3 new products, acquired 2 companies, and raised $190M in Series D funding. 

A record-breaking year for Contentsquare

It’s been a year of exciting growth for the company, because it’s been a year of huge value creation — value created for our customers that went digital-only or digital-mostly overnight. For the brands that had to rethink their customer experience (CX), services and even products to meet new consumer priorities with funnel optimization tools, heatmap analytics, and AI insights. 

I’m especially proud that we managed to close our best quarter ever during such a turbulent year; it rewards our focus on innovation and excellence, of course, but it’s also a reminder that customer experience really is the big differentiator today, and that customer insight is key to digital success.

The other amazing thing about the last twelve months is that we’ve never partnered with such a wide range of brands, across all industries — proving customer experience is no longer just a priority for retailers, but for anyone connecting with others digitally. From biotech to manufacturing, airlines to auto makers — it’s exciting to see that we share our vision for a brighter digital future with leaders in all fields. 

We’re thrilled to welcome inspiring new brands to our client community, including BMW, Diesel, FedEx, Accor, and many others. We’re honored to be in such incredible company, and we look forward to raising the bar for CX together.

Innovation to improve customer experiences

A recent survey we conducted showed that only 23% of consumers in the US feel happy shopping online. And ultimately, what all brands have in common is making their customers happy. So when 76% of marketers say they can’t accurately measure customer happiness, we know we have a role to play. 

If 2020 was the year of adapting, then 2021 is the year of listening to customers. As consumers, we noticed how brands addressed our concerns last year — how they went over and above to make us feel safe, understood, connected, valued. 

Helping brands improve the experience for their customers is what drives our innovation roadmap, here at Contentsquare. This year, we enhanced our solution by acquiring Dareboost, and adding their performance monitoring technology to our brand new Find & Fix feature. 

And because our mission is to empower brands to create better digital experiences not just for some people, but for all, we also made the decision to acquire an inspiring accessibility software company called AdaptMyWeb. We also created the Contentsquare Foundation to increase the availability of accessibility technology across the industry, including for universities, schools, and healthcare organizations.

Over the next twelve months, we’ll be working closely with our clients and the 100+ partners in our new Experience Partner Ecosystem on developing even more business-driven innovations, and constantly enriching our solution so our customers stay ahead of the curve.

One team, one (customer experience) dream

So how did we get here — to our biggest quarter, our biggest year, and to this incredible global community of customers and partners? Well, this year’s success has everything to do with the creativity and dedication of our amazing team. 

We said last year we would put our customers and innovation first, and we did. In 2020, we collected 200 billion pageviews, released 52 new projects from our product roadmap, and completed 75 technology integrations.

From helping our clients make digital adjustments overnight to supporting them through a uniquely important holiday season, the team has gone out of its way to show their commitment to our clients’ success during this difficult year. It’s why we hear time and time again that clients love our product, yes, but they also love our team. 

During our 2020 kickoff, I asked the team what I ask them every year — to think big and go beyond themselves. And they really did.

I’m so proud of what we accomplished together last year, and of how far we’ve come since I founded Contentsquare in 2012. And while I’d rather be celebrating this new company milestone in person with the whole team, and with our clients and partners, I know we will be able to soon.

It’s been a big year, but 2021 is going to be even bigger.

“Creativity has the power to bend reality,” is the advice Burger King’s Global CMO, Fernando Machado, left with attendees of Contentsquare’s annual conference, CX Circle. Machado is an extremely decorated marketer with a proven track record of pushing creative boundaries and driving business growth, so it’s no surprise his keynote speech, “The King Just Wants to Have Fun,” shared how brands can build bold, courageous, and innovative experiences that engage customers and stand out from the crowd. 

Burger King’s secret sauce for success? According to Machado, it’s a combination of the brand’s self-deprecating personality, outside of the box thinking, and culture that doesn’t shy away from failure. “Our main goal is to bring smiles to people,” said Machado.

Like many other companies this year, Burger King has increased its investment in digital customer experience. With restaurants closed at the beginning of the pandemic, the home of the Whopper depended heavily on delivery and mobile app sales and pivoted to connect with consumers through social media and invest more heavily in perfecting their digital experience. 

That said, perfecting the digital customer journey has always been a top priority for Burger King and Machado. In his keynote address at CX Circle, Machado highlighted a few of his favorite campaigns and shared how brands can use creativity to connect with their audiences in new ways. Here’s what he had to share: 

1. Creativity Has The Power to Bend Reality

“When I see people from tech or digital backgrounds speak, I rarely hear them use the word ‘creativity,’” remarked Machado. “But I think that creativity is so centric to the work that we do and how successful we can be. I truly believe that creativity has the power to bend reality.” 

In one recent creative campaign, the BK team bent the reality of the physical and online world. They called it The Stevenage Challenge. 

The Stevenage Challenge was first born out of the realization that many BK customers love gaming. Additionally, because many games are live, gamers can’t pause them to go cook a meal, making delivery an enticing option for many players. 

Here’s where creativity comes into play. The Stevenage Football Club is a fourth-tier soccer team in England. Even though they’re a low-ranking team, they still appear in FIFA, a football simulation video game and one of the largest Playstation franchises. Burger King decided to sponsor Stevenage, thus prominently featuring their logo on the team’s jerseys and requiring FIFA to do the same!

Players from around the world could select Stevenage as their team and for every goal they shared on Twitter, Burger King sent them rewards. Over the course of the campaign, more than 24,000 goals were shared, Stevenage became the most used team in career mode, and the team’s shirts sold out for the first time in history. 

“It was an awesome example of how creativity can bridge the real world and the digital one,” exclaimed Machado.

2. If It Looks, Sounds, & Smells Like an Ad, It Isn’t a Good Ad

“There’s more to advertising than just rubbing your brand’s logo in your customer’s face,” urged Machado. Marketing campaigns are more than just advertising, reminds Machado. Great ads need to do more than just push your product or service, they must engage and connect with your consumers through their digital experience.

There’s more to advertising than just rubbing your brand’s logo in your customer’s face.

That was the idea behind the 2019 Whopper Detour campaign, which had the highest ROI for the brand of any digital campaign that year. While many other fast-food chains had mobile apps that let customers order and pay, Burger King wanted to give people a reason to talk about their app and boost app engagement. 

Chick-Fil-A, Wendy’s, and other fast-food chains all do the same thing to encourage customers to download and use their mobile app: they offer a free sandwich, drink, or nuggets to every customer who downloads their app. “The engagement levels are not high when you do that,” noted Machado. “We tested it out for ourselves. That’s why we had to come up with something different.” 

So how did Burger King use creativity as a source of competitive advantage? They asked customers to download the BK app, drive to their main competitor (McDonald’s) to order a $0.01 Whopper from the app, and then drive back to Burger King to pick it up.

“When I first heard that idea presented, my head exploded,” exclaimed Machado. “I thought the headline ‘You can now order a Whopper for a penny at McDonald’s’ would get a lot of people to talk about the idea, which was exactly what we were trying to achieve. The thing is, this idea breaks all the rules in terms of customer friction. It asks customers to drive to a McDonald’s and then drive to Burger King to pick up their sandwich, but we know our fans. They expect us to come up with stuff that’s a bit crazy and out there and then they engage.” And that’s just what happened.  

We know our fans. They expect us to come up with stuff that’s a bit crazy and out there and then they engage.

3. No Money, No Problem

Of course, a little cash doesn’t hurt, but remember that you don’t have to run with expensive, elaborate ideas to make waves. Instead of pouring all of your marketing and advertising budget into expensive TV ads, consider investing more in your digital brand experience and marketing strategies. With digital, you can segment and micro-target your audiences more, allowing you to create a movement and spark a conversation with your target audience, for a fraction of the cost of TV ads. Plus, having a smaller budget inspires you to get creative and scrappy with your ideas and execution. 

4. Stretch and Learn 

Many digital marketers kill a great idea when they don’t know how to execute it or think it’s too much effort. “But those are often the ideas that we are most passionate about because we will learn a lot from them,” declared Machado. The lessons and skills you learn from these stretch assignments can be applied to future campaigns and better prepare you for future challenges in creating your digital customer journey. “This mindset of stretching and learning, embracing uncertainty, and solving for something you didn’t know how to at first allows you to grow as a marketer and grow your brand,” said Machado.

This mindset of stretching and learning, embracing uncertainty, and solving for something you didn’t know how to at first allows you to grow as a marketer and grow your brand.

Machado’s recent “stretch and learn” project? The Traffic Jam Whopper. The Burger King team realized that Mexico City had lower delivery performance than over regions due to the fact that traffic in the city is so bad – sometimes traffic jams last up to 5 hours! When people get stuck in traffic, they get home so late that the restaurant is already closed or they’re too hungry to wait for delivery so they just grab something from the fridge. 

The Burger King team wanted to find a way to make delivery more accessible to their customers, even if they were stuck in traffic. That’s when the idea for the Traffic Jam Whopper was born. The team wanted to deliver to cars stuck in traffic. 

“At first, we asked a lot of questions. ‘How would we even do that?’ ‘How would we be able to find a customer?’, ‘What if after a customer orders the traffic jam breaks up?’ said Machado. “There were a lot of “what ifs,” but we thought we should at least try.”

So, how’d they do it? The team used a combination of dynamic physical-digital ads and the Waze app to promote the service to consumers in high congestion zones and leveraged GPS data and vehicle speed to pinpoint where to make the delivery. The campaign increased delivery orders by 63% and daily app download rate by 44 times, making the Burger King app the most downloaded fast food app in the country.

5. First or Nothing

Being the first to do something automatically helps your brand experience stand out. That said, being the leader also comes with its own set of challenges. We have to embrace uncertainty and overcome fear, but if you can do that, you can benefit immensely.

To help illustrate this idea, Machado shared the story of the artist Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain sculpture. The sculpture is a normal urinal, just placed on its back, but the artwork caused quite a controversy at the time of its debut and today is renowned as one of Duchamp’s most famous works and an icon of twentieth-century art. 

“If you are the first one to bring an upside-down urinal to a museum, you are an artist. If you are the second to do that, you are probably just a plumber,” explained Machado. “If I had to choose between being an artist or a plumber, I would pick being an artist.”

This article is an excerpt from Fernando Machado’s keynote address at CX Circle | Digital Happiness: The Return on Experience. To watch the session on-demand and relive the magic of the only event that explored how to build a digital customer journey that makes your consumers smile, click here. 

The world of customer experience is ever-changing – as consumer preferences and the technologies that aim to serve them continue to evolve at a dizzying pace. New technology disruptors and sophisticated strategies are introduced almost daily. It can be tricky to keep track of all these innovative CX strategies and trends. Luckily, something as easy as following customer experience thought leaders on social media can ensure you stay up-to-date on the latest industry topics.

As we know, organizations are continually on the lookout for more effective means for understanding customer intent and for anticipating and meeting their needs. This is the key to increasing and securing long-term loyalty. In fact, customer experience is often highlighted as the main driver for pushing the digital transformations that so many businesses all over the world are undergoing today.

A great place to start is really understanding what consumers consider a great customer experience. Identify what makes for mutually rewarding engagements and what they are looking for from their digital experiences. Without a bit of inspiration from others in the industry, it can be difficult to keep up.

We’ve put together a list of some of the brightest minds in the world of customer experience. These customer experience leaders are analysts to influencers to marketing executives, these customer experience thought leaders share unique insights and advice on all things CX. Shoot them a follow to never miss out on the latest trends, campaigns, and customer experience news.

Analyst Thought Leaders

1. Alan D. Duncan

Alan D Duncan is the Vice President for Data & Analytics Strategy and Chief Data Officer (CDO) for leading research company, Gartner. His main interests include data, data science, and digital strategies. 

Twitter | LinkedIn

2. Augie Ray

Augie Ray is Gartner’s Vice President, Analyst and Fellow Covering Customer Experience whose team develops research plans and thought leadership to drive Gartner’s clients’ business. His topic areas include the CX strategy and measurement, persona development, voice of customer (VoC), customer journey mapping, customer loyalty, and more. 

Twitter  | LinkedIn

3. Kate Leggett

Kate Leggett is a VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, focusing on CRM and customer service – market trends, research, opinions, best practices, and technologies.

Twitter | LinkedIn 

4. Brian Solis

Brian Solis is a Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce and best-selling author of “X: The Experience When Business Meets Design.” Brian’s research explores digital transformation, customer experience and the future of industries, trends, and customer behavior. 

Twitter | LinkedIn

Customer Experience, Where It is Now, and Where It Will Go Next https://t.co/o75BW3WSlN #CX #UX #Disney

— Brian Solis (@briansolis) May 21, 2018

5. Jane-Anne Mennella

Jane-Anne Mennella is a Vice President, CX, UX and Customer Research/Insights Analyst at Gartner. Advising executives and writing and Research Director at Gartner, advising executives on customer experience, user experience, user research and optimization. 

Twitter | LinkedIn 

6. Mila D’Antonio

Mila D’Antonio is a Principal Analyst at technology research and consulting firm, Omidia. Her specialties include social media, conversational AI, omnichannel expansion, and customer experience.

Twitter | LinkedIn 

7. Lizzy Foo Kune

Lizzy Foo Kune is a Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, specializing in marketing analytics, advertising, and search. Her research interests include digital marketing analytics, cross-device identification, and customer journey analytics, among others.

Twitter | LinkedIn

Subject Matter Experts & Influencers

8. Blake Morgan

Blake Morgan is a “customer experience futurist,” speaker, and author of “More is More: How The Best Companies Work Harder And Go Farther To Create Knock Your Socks Off Customer Experiences.” She is also the host of the leading CX podcast, “The Modern Customer.”

Twitter | LinkedIn

9. Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson is the founder of CustomerThink, a global online community of customer-centric business leaders, the author of Hooked on Customers, and a global evangelist for the customer-centric business.

Twitter | LinkedIn

10. Bruce Temkin

Bruce Temkin is the Head of XM Institute at Qualtrics and the Co-Founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, a global non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of customer experience management practices. Bruce, a CX transformist, helps large organizations dramatically improve business results by changing how they deal with customers. 

Twitter | LinkedIn

Are your #CustomerExperience efforts focused enough on real #people? @TemkinGroup‘s 6 components of #HumanBeings helps you better understand what drives #customers & #employees, so you can better serve them. #cx #custexp #EmployeeEngagement #hr #hrm https://t.co/KJkmlnXO9j pic.twitter.com/rI907VAl4s

— Bruce Temkin (@btemkin) May 13, 2018

11. Ann Handley

Ann Handley is a marketing content guru, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs, a company offering marketing training, courses, events, and free resources, and author of the WSJ bestseller, “Everybody Writes.” She has been cited by Forbes as the most influential woman in Social Media and recognized by ForbesWoman as one of the top 20 women bloggers.

Twitter | LinkedIn

C-Suite Executives

12. Alan See

Alan See was featured on Forbes’s “50 Most Influential Chief Marketing Officers on Social Media” list. He was also named “Marketer of the Year” by the American Marketing Association – an award he won for both Content Marketing (2015) and Social Media Marketing (2016).

Twitter | LinkedIn

13. Kirsten Knipp

Kirsten Knipp is VP/CMO at Convey Inc. She delivers advice and modern marketing research to CMOs and marketing leaders, specializing in inbound and commerce marketing.

Twitter | LinkedIn  

14. Mark Johnson

Mark Johnson is the CEO and CMO of Loyalty360, the association for customer loyalty. As expected, Mark focuses mainly on customer and brand loyalty, but regularly shares how leading brands are creating exceptional customer experiences.

Twitter | LinkedIn 

15. Jonathan Levitt

Jonathan Levitt is a speaker and writer with a unique slant on customer experience and digital marketing. He currently holds the role of Chief Marketing Officer at Voxco Survey Software. His work has regularly been featured in Forbes, Fortune, eMarketing & Commerce, Chief Marketer, and more. 

Twitter | LinkedIn

There you have it! Our list of the top customer experience thought leaders in the business for you to follow on social media. Improving your customer experience and marketing knowledge is just a “follow” away.

For the last five weeks, we’ve been welcoming digital leaders from top brands like Tile, Walmart, Columbia Care, and e.l.f. Cosmetics to discuss all things customer experience as part of our Summer Camp series (mosquitos not included).  Our digital experts shared what they think the future of digital holds for eCommerce, how their companies and teams are adapting in uncertain times, and tips on how to digitally transform your business. 

Whether you’ve been following Contentsquare Summer Camp since day one or are just joining the adventure now, here’s a recap of what we learned along the way:

1. Understanding Customer Needs and Expectations

with Head of Category Management Paloma Garcia de Letona Ysita and Head of eCommerce Trade Marketing Olivia Urriolagoitia of Walmart

The team at Sam’s Club Mexico relied heavily on data to inform their strategy during the pandemic. While grocery delivery had always been on the company’s roadmap, the team worked to speed up the service rollout to help customers get necessities from the comfort of their homes. Based on the early success of the program, Sam’s Club expanded the service to serve 117 stores, instead of the original 60. 

So how did the team achieve such a swift and seamless rollout?

When it comes to building an exceptional customer experience, the trick is understanding customer needs and expectations. “We put ourselves in the place of the customer to address their pain points,” Paloma and Olivia explained. “Thinking about how people were actually using the site helped us improve the user flow.”

Paloma and Olivia said the speed and success of the project wouldn’t have been possible without support and buy-in from teams across the organization. “Everyone is involved in decisions. It gives us the ability to shift and adapt,” said Paloma. “We approach decisions as a business, not just as an eCommerce business.” 

A consistent brand experience, team alignment, and reliable customer intelligence are some of the ingredients that go into Sam’s Club formula for digital agility, and that have helped the business meet their customers’ needs over the past few months. 

2. Using Data to Inform and Evolve Your CX Strategy

with Kathy Ando, Head of Growth Marketing, Direct-to-Consumer and CRM at Tile

Covid-19 has made it more apparent than ever than brands need to be able to pivot and react to changing customer behaviors and needs at the drop of a hat. For Tile, the creator of Bluetooth trackers that help you keep track of your belongings, digital agility is second nature. Their secret? Data. 

In her session, Kathy urged businesses to invest in tools that give teams constant access to reliable data. Only then, can teams make informed decisions and fix issues in real-time. “Coming in with an assumption never plays out — decisions need to be made based on data,” said Kathy. 

“Coming in with an assumption never plays out — decisions need to be made based on data.” — Kathy Ando

For her last tip on how to digitally transform your business, Kathy urged campers to embrace new metrics. “A lot of brands look only at sales results but the secret is understanding the middle part of the journey — the friction points, the frustration, the hesitation,” said Kathy. “In other words, the experience. That’s where the future lies.”

3. Shifting Your Digital Mindset to Be Customer-Centric

with Jesse Channon, Chief Growth Officer of Columbia Care, and Harvey Bierman, former VP Global eCommerce Technology & Operations at Crocs

Even before the pandemic, cannabis-based health company Columbia Care faced its fair share of challenges. Luckily, that’s kept the company on its toes so when the pandemic hit the Columbia Care team was ready to adapt. Even though cannabis was declared an essential business, many dispensaries were still shut down. “We had a decision to make: are we going to lose that engagement with our patients and customers or are we going to adapt?” said Jesse. “What we did was we spun up the virtual care platform, which is the only virtual shopping experience in cannabis.”

“Companies have access to data that shows us a more complete picture of the customer journey than ever before.” — Harvey Bierman

Harvey also thinks customer connection is all about providing the experiences your customers need and want in the moment.  “Where I see successful businesses moving is to what I’ll call a non-channel business or a customer-centric business. That’s really hard to do organizationally, technological, but not hard to do data-wise,” said Harvey.  The good news, he says, is that “companies have access to data that shows us a more complete picture of the customer journey than ever before.” Harvey said companies need to capitalize on this data to better target and personalize experiences for key audience segments. Identifying and resolving friction points along the customer journey is a key step in how to digitally transform your business and will help your brand deliver a seamless digital experience that inspires loyalty and repeat business.

4. Building a Lasting Connection with Your Customers

with e.l.f. Cosmetic‘s VP of Digital, Ekta Chopra

For those unfamiliar with the brand, e.l.f.—which stands for eyes, lips, and face—started selling high-quality cosmetics at affordable prices online. Few beauty brands understand the importance of digital as much e.l.f., which decided to close all of its physical stores in 2019 to focus on building a digital-only experience for customers. This digital-only mindset helped the team adapt quickly when the pandemic hit. 

For Ekta and her team, customer experience is always their top priority. “Data is the currency that drives the digital ecosystem. If you think of the three legs of a stool, they are your product, content, and consumer insights. You need all three to look holistically at the customer experience,” said Ekta. Only then, can you serve your customers in the way they want to be served.

To keep up with evolving customer needs and behaviors during the onset of the pandemic, Ekta and her team launched two new site initiatives: e.l.f. Cares and e.l.f. Discovery. E.l.f. Cares shared how the company took action to fight the pandemic, keep employees safe, and stand with the Black Lives Matter movement. While e.l.f. Discovery featured tutorials, lookbooks, application tips, and product finder quizzes to help customers discover and learn more about e.l.f. products. They leveraged their digital presence to bring about change, build a positive connection with customers, and give visitors the information they need to learn about and try new cosmetic products.

5. Personalizing Your Digital Experience

with Vab Dwivedi, the Director of Digital Customer Experiences at Dell

Personalization doesn’t and shouldn’t have to be intimidating, Vab urged campers. “Sometimes we think of personalization and the data that powers it as something that is straight out of the matrix or science fiction,” says Vab. While personalization is complicated, it’s not unattainable. Companies just need to take advantage of the wealth of customer and website data they have to build customized experiences for their various audience segments. 

If that still sounds intimidating, don’t worry. Vab shared a simple explanation: “Personalization is a collection of different actions and experiences that you set up for your customers so they’re seeing the most relevant thing, at the relevant time during their journey.” The website experience for customers simply learning about your brand, looking to make a purchase, or needing to contact support would all look extremely different. Showing customers what’s most relevant to them at that moment is what helps set your brand apart and give all visitors a great experience. 

Lastly, Vab left us with one piece of advice on how to digitally transform your business by increasing your digital agility. “You have to get in a mindset that your customer’s problems are your business problems” he said.

“You have to get in a mindset that your customer’s problems are your business problems” — Vab Dwivedi

In order to give your customers the most valuable experience you can, your business has to use data and user research to understand their perspectives, needs, and behaviors. Only then can you understand the underlying customer problems that are holding your business back and solve for them.

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Craving even more digital experience insights? Lucky for you, all our Contentsquare Summer Camp sessions are available on-demand. Click here to view past sessions and start learning how to digitally transform your business today.