The Digital Happiness Index: Quantifying Your Customer Experience

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

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

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.

 

Conversion Funnel Optimization: How a Good UX Plays a Role

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?

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.

The different stages of a conversion funnel

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:

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.

Elf Cosmetics skincare finder, an example of conversion funnel optimization at the awareness phase

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. 

Blog Post from Slack, an example of conversion funnel optimization at the interest phase

Source: Slack

Other useful content for stimulating user interest are:

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:

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

A personalized SuperDry promotional email, an example of reaching out to a customer in the desire stage

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.

How to Create Customer-Centric Advertising Campaigns in 2021

Most customer journeys start the second a new user clicks on your ad. That is… if you can get them to click your ad! 

We sat down with David Rodnitzky, the founder of 3Q Digital, an New York City-based growth marketing agency, and Anne DiNapoli Block, SVP and Head of Communications at creative agency Trade School to hear their perspectives on how the paid media landscape has changed since the pandemic and how their clients are shifting to more customer-centric advertising strategies. 

Here’s what they had to share on how brands can combine performance marketing, customer experience, and ai analytics to understand complete consumer journeys – from the moment a user clicks on your ad, arrives on your website, and, ideally, moves all the way to checkout.

What effect has the pandemic had on media spend and strategy this year? 

Anne DiNapoli Block: Marketing has intrinsically changed. We saw every big-box retailer across America dissolve Black Friday. Brands offered savings during all of November and for the first time ever, we were not pushing to drive that influx of in-store traffic the day after Thanksgiving. 

Last year, many of our clients invested in getting an early start on holiday gift-giving inspiration, building online experiences that drive that eCommerce, and growing the role of the influencer. Some of that is because of the production challenges that COVID has poised brands. We used to be able to do shoots in less than four weeks, but now there’s a lot more planning and nimbleness that has had to go into ad production. On the media side, that’s meant looking at different types of units to drive what we would have historically thought of as inspirational and more upper-funnel reach strategies. It also means looking at how to create a more collapsed funnel strategy so that we can really create a storyline on-site and ensure that the experiences our clients are building lives cohesively across the board. 

Every brick-and-mortar brand investing in developing that inter-connective experience by defining how their in-store and online experiences work cohesively together.

With digital consumption up so significantly, the new normal is here to stay. I don’t see that shift back happening. Trends across the media landscape right now show that there is this deeper immersion, especially in mobile commerce. I think now it’s a matter of every brick-and-mortar brand investing in developing that inter-connective experience by defining how their in-store and online experiences work cohesively together. That will help brands identify where somebody is in their DXP journey and know exactly what to serve them the moment they land on an experience.

 

David Rodnitzky: During the pandemic, I’ve seen companies optimizing for macroeconomic trends and not microeconomic trends. There has been a lot of reactive behavior from companies based on news that’s happening. When the pandemic first started, we had clients outright pause spend. People said, “The sky is falling, pause spend!” but I would say in the last three to four months, we’ve had clients increase their spend aggressively as the stock market recovered and, as it turns out, the sky hasn’t fallen! 

But, I’m not sure that either of those approaches is the right answer. I think the right answer is to look at and act based on your metrics. For those companies that had paused spend early on, had they looked at their numbers, seen their conversion rates remained unchanged, and noticed their competition had paused their spend, they would have realized their cost per acquisition was lower and they had a huge market share opportunity. They would have been in a great position. A lot of people came back and tried to achieve that, but it was too late. The answer is to look at your data and adjust in real-time. 

The answer is to look at your data and adjust in real-time. 

 

How have you seen media budgets shift as a result of the pandemic? 

DiNapoli Block: The role of brand continues to be really strong, the reason for that being it really continues to build consumer trust, especially during these more uncertain times. There’s a lot of different ways to do that and it’s important to note that the tactical execution of brand has shifted. You might need to change which channels that you support brand on, or really look at how audience data and first-party data could be layered into some of those strategies to help you be more effective. Those are the larger shifts that I have seen. 

The role of brand continues to be really strong, the reason for that being it really continues to build consumer trust, especially during these more uncertain times.

When it comes to focusing on channel selection, the biggest takeaway from 2020 that we’ve seen is the Facebook boycott was an interesting time. We just did a huge competitive audit across many different verticals for one of our clients. It was interesting to see there are a lot of different challenges not only with social injustice, but also the shift in consumer privacy. I’m curious to see what that owned data strategy could look like, knowing that some of our brands are trying to build their own walled gardens with their data so media exposure pumping into their data sets is becoming increasingly important. I do think the long-term effects of privacy may start changing social media significantly. 

 

Rodnitzky: We did a survey of 1,000 CMOs back in July and one of the questions we asked was, “Where is your main concern: top of funnel, bottom of funnel, or post funnel/upsell and retention?” We found most CMO’s top concern was actually top of funnel followed by retention followed by performance marketing or bottom of funnel. I think that you can interpret that in a couple of different ways. Firstly, it helps people feel more confident around their direct response marketing. It’s much more quantifiable and easy to understand. You could also interpret it as, during the pandemic, being on-brand and maintaining a lift and preference with consumers is really challenging and requires a lot of pivoting. 

We also asked people “Who do you most want to hire right now?” We found that there was a pretty low interest and prioritization in hiring media buyers and coders, which is another way of saying the soft and hard sciences aren’t in demand. Interestingly enough, the area that was most in demand was data and analytics. Those are the people who understand hard science, but can turn it into soft science. When you look at this intersection of brand and performance marketing, that’s where analytics become particularly important because you can understand the full conversion funnel and attribute credit appropriately.

Brand marketers have to understand performance metrics and performance marketers need to understand brand storytelling. Data is in the center of that.

There’s no longer a business case for CMOs to throw all their money into brand and then win an award in France and say,” Look, this worked!” There has to be a data-driven component to everything you do. Brand marketers have to understand performance metrics and performance marketers need to understand brand storytelling. Data is in the center of that. I have seen a change in the way people are thinking about the intersection of performance and brand because of digital experience analytics. 

 

What are the most common mistakes you see clients make?

DiNapoli Block: Across the board, we see that brands don’t have someone or a process in place to do a lot of dot-connecting. You need one person dedicated to your online experience, optimizing where media should even drive to be more effective, and ensuring you’re not using duplicative messages and audience sets. 

Oftentimes, we have brands compete against themselves in some of the biddable environments with their own data sets. You need a careful balance when you have up to 50 different campaigns and messages in-market. That goes back to the infrastructure of your data and analytics, how you’re tracking customer exposure across their many activities over time, and how you’re identifying a customer when they land on your experience. Where have they come from? What are they looking at? What have they been exposed to over time? What actions are they taking? Being more informed on all of these touchpoints and which campaigns you have in-market can help you prioritize certain messages for certain audiences.

 

Rodnitzky: If people don’t buy-in to the concept of testing and user experience at the top, it will never trickle down anywhere. I think that unfortunately there are a lot of CMOs that say they are in favor of testing but, ultimately, believe in testing some things, but not others. 

I think that unfortunately there are a lot of CMOs that say they are in favor of testing but, ultimately, believe in testing some things, but not others. 

If I had a magic wand to stop inter-office politics, I would let you know. At the end of the day, everything has to come from the top, as everything relating to culture does. If the CEO and CMO don’t really believe in being agnostic and instead believe in what their favorite employee thinks is the right decision, you’ll never get anywhere. 

 

How can performance marketers partner with on-site teams to build a better customer experience?

Rodnitzky: Many years ago, I worked for a legal website that allowed people to search for lawyers through the site. The lawyers were paying the company thousands of dollars a month to be listed. We had a big yellow banner on the front page that said “Find a Lawyer,” but our DXP software told us it only had a 0.5% click-through rate. Instead, visitors were clicking on all these blue links on the side of the page. We did live user testing with CS Live and realized people were going right over the yellow banner to use a blue link because they thought it was an ad. We thought the flashy yellow button would get everyone’s attention, but in reality, people were avoiding it to go to the little blue links. 

We changed that banner into blue text links that said “Here are some useful resources if you’re looking to find a lawyer” and by not being market-y and instead focusing on user experience, the click-through rate went from 0.5% to almost 8%. It was a massive success for the business.

 

DiNapoli Block: The role of content as we know it is really changing. Brands are becoming publishers and taking more prevalent roles in providing customers with the inspiration and education that leads to conversion. 

 

What advice do you have for performance marketers trying to create more customer-centric advertising campaigns?

Rodnitzky: My first piece of advice is to avoid the HiPPO, or the highest-paid person’s opinion. It’s very easy to have the CEO come in and tell you that you need to have flying toasters on your site and that’s the only way to drive conversion, but, everyone’s opinion is just an opinion

Avoid the HiPPO, or the highest-paid person’s opinion.

The second piece of advice I always give people is from a guy named Chris Goward who wrote a book called, “You Should Test That: Conversion Optimization for More Leads, Sales and Profit Or The Art and Science of Optimized Marketing.” No matter what suggestion someone has for conversion rate optimization, his answer is to say, “You should test that.” That ultimately is the essence of conversion rate testing. If you can create a process where you’re rapidly and intelligently creating a testing methodology: isolating variables, coming to statistical significance, finding a conclusion, determining the success of one test, and moving onto the next one. Do that as fast as you can and you’ll be successful. 

One of the things I tell clients all the time is, “If you do one conversion rate test a month for 12 months, you’ll probably have a 20% lift in performance.” It almost doesn’t matter what it is, just do it. It’s amazing how many clients or just companies, in general, don’t do that. 

 

This interview is an excerpt from a recent Contentsquare event, “CX Talks: Candid Conversations about The Intersection of CX and Media.” To watch the full event and hear even more ways brands are building customer-centric advertising campaigns, click here to watch the event on-demand. 

Humanizing The Digital Experience: The Art of Making Data Talk

While most businesses are navigating the new demands of a hyper-connected society, the (re)emergence of the human-digital customer relationship is the real challenge of the future. As sales and communication channels continue to multiply, how can we humanize the customer experience with the help of data?

 

 

From Mass Marketing to Personalization

Personalization: What is it? 

Mass marketing was all the rage during the 20th century. It viewed the market as a single, homogeneous mass. Brands served up the exact same messages and products to every customer. This allowed businesses to standardize production and scale quickly. For example, the cost of a direct mail campaign targeting only 50 people might be $0.50 per person, but if you increase the size of that group to target more customers, you can lower the cost per person.

With the arrival of the internet, other new sales channels, and more advanced marketing techniques, mass marketing is often seen as a thing of the past. It has been replaced by "precision marketing" (concentrating marketing efforts at existing customers to encourage brand loyalty and drive repeat sales) and "personalization" (customizing communication and product/service suggestions to each consumer).

In fact, 91% of consumers admit they would be more likely to buy from a company that recognizes them, remembers them, and provides relevant offers and recommendations.

 

A Strategy for Every Stage of The Funnel 

So how do you formulate your personalization strategy? It depends on where your consumers are in the marketing conversion funnel. Here are a few examples of personalizations you can make at every stage of the customer conversion funnel:  

  • Discovery phase: Send out a variety of messages with the aim of winning over different types of profiles. For example, you could offer downloadable upper-funnel content related specifically to the visitor's industry.
  • Consideration phase: Make your navigation experience more relevant to your users to increase on-site and in-app visitor engagement. For example, you can use a personalization token to address consumers by their first name in an email campaign. This can result in a higher open rate and make the customer feel valued by the brand.
  • Decision phase: Deliver the right messages to push visitors to convert or to upsell existing customers. A great way to do this is to identify visitors who are about to leave your website or app and trigger a personalized message to try to win them back, like triggering a lead nurturing campaign to push more content to your leads after they downloaded a whitepaper from your site.
  • Loyalty phase: Build trust with your consumers. To increase the on-site or in-app personalization for your existing customers, try setting up augmented salespeople who can provide free personalized advice to customers.

What's the best part? Every sector reaps the benefits of personalization.

Ultimately, it's "precision marketing" management (duration, frequency, scenario, priority ranking, capping) that will determine the success or failure of a personalization campaign.

But is using data to offer the consumer a better service really "humanized"? Couldn't more be done to understand and improve the customer experience? 

Reconciling journeys to get to know your customers

The customer experience can be difficult to understand and measure. To be able to truly understand your customers' expectations, you need to have the right data. The biggest challenge is often that this data lives in different tools that don’t speak to one another. Still, it’s crucial to reconcile all the data you’ve collected in order to get a unified view of your customers.

Reconciling online and offline journeys

The physical point of sale is now complementary to the virtual point of sale. Both enrich the sales experience, particularly helped by the data generated. However, marketers have difficulty reconciling the data from these two separate entities, especially the ROPO effect: Research Online, Purchase Offline. The ROPO effect refers to a purchase that begins on the internet and ends in a physical store. 

How can we reconcile online and offline data? 

There are a few ways:

  • Deterministic: Comparing online and offline data expressly communicated by the customer in-store
  • Probabilities: Using algorithms to collect customer data, like IP addresses or geolocation, to identify consumers and make a connection between in-store customers and internet users

 

Reducing friction points for an optimal experience

Once the data reconciliation between the offline and online is complete, you must put a strategy in place to reduce friction and build an exceptional customer experience:

  • Identify all the channels used by customers (Physical, email, chatbot, etc.)
  • Put yourself in your customer's shoes and identify what could be negatively affecting your customer experience. For example, not having enough customer reviews for products, slow page load times, or a confusing checkout process. 
  • Find and fix technical bugs. On-site issues greatly impact the customer experience and can reduce the number of users who move down the funnel from leads to consumers. For example, a 404 error, which indicates the page in question was not found by the server, will impact the customer experience and cause many visitors to bounce. 
  • Tap into statistics. Look into what percentage of your users abandon carts or churn.  
  • Ask your customers what they think of your experience with interviews, questionnaires, and surveys to collect clear and precise answers.

Combining big data and client insights: a feat that still challenges marketing departments...


De-siloing jobs

When it comes to optimizing customer journeys and reducing customer friction points, it’s also important to look within your organization and take stock of who “owns” this type of work. There are many departments interested in marketing and the customer experience; however, departmental silos often keep collaboration at bay, which ultimately, hurts your consumer. 

Why is this a problem? Different teams often use different sources of data to make decisions, which can cause internal confusion and often give different teams conflicting insights. To avoid this problem, it is important to identify everywhere that data is stored (databases, tools, apps etc.) and better understand how it flows between these different places. To achieve this, different departments and roles need to work more closely with each other, especially your CRM, analytics, business analysis, media, developer, and data teams. For example, the implementation of a new marketing automation tool will not go well if marketing, sales, and IT don't communicate and don't work hand in hand. 

 

Augmenting the Customer Experience with VoC Tools

To humanize the digital experience, you have to know how to listen to your clients. There are many businesses that have started investing in so-called "Voice of the Customer" tools to get a better understanding of their customers' expectations. However, only 33% of marketing specialists surveyed say they use these tools to improve the customer experience, a long way behind A/B tests or personas. 

 

Yes, but what is VoC? 

Collecting feedback from users on their experiences, requirements, and expectations is the promise that VoC tools deliver. This behavioral data is a gold mine for companies seeking a more human relationship with their customers. 

Several types of feedback can be processed and all of them serve a purpose, such as:

  • Explicit, navigation-related feedback collected directly by companies, 
  • Feedback posted on forums where users can express themselves freely, 
  • Or customer journey data. 

There are so many sources for feedback for you to leverage. Just remember that your customers want to express themselves and it's our duty to listen to them. 

 

The power of "Voice of the Customer"

The power to explain: 

Analytics and UX analytics tools provide the first layer of user insight, but customer feedback can explain the specific frustration points that your visitors encounter. For example, a page's bounce rate will alert teams to a potential problem, but customer feedback can explicitly explain why a specific on-page element may have been an obstacle to a purchase. 

The power to prevent: 

Imagine that a company has set up a satisfaction score. Depending on how the site changes, this score may vary. Feedback will play a crucial role in helping you understand why a customer scored you the way they did. If satisfaction scores decrease, feedback can shed light on the precise reason for this change, empowering your teams to prioritize what they need to do next.

The power to predict:

Your customers are on your side! They will be happy to tell you all their ideas for improving your digital experience, but it’s up to you to take advantage of this and listen. You need to adapt your offerings to meet their expectations and optimize satisfaction levels and conversion rates. 

VoC tools can offer many benefits like improving the customer experience, managing risk, and optimizing conversions. So why are companies still not using these tools? Collecting feedback is one thing but, without a defined strategy, these tools can be costly as they require resources to generate quantifiable, actionable insights.

 

Quantitative vs qualitative: the same goal

In a world where we ask ourselves what (data) but rarely why (research), can we say that we really know our customers' expectations? Marrying the two approaches makes it possible to gain customer knowledge that is both overarching and precise. 

Many solutions make it easy to connect these two concepts by integrating the VoC tools' solution with their own. When we can replay a dissatisfied user's session or identify a friction point, we can now quantify a feeling, making it even more explicit and, ultimately, more human.   

Deeper customer knowledge at every level

Building one single view of customer knowledge

One of the main challenges companies face is that their data is siloed. But, brands need to have a unified view of their customer journeys, so they can make more informed decisions and build the best possible experience for their customers. That said, only 31.8% of organizations use technology to integrate their data management solutions and create a single view of their performance. 

Centralizing your sources of customer behavior data is essential to be able to deliver the right message at the right time.

Having all your data in one place is crucial to understanding users throughout their entire journey, so you can deliver an experience in line with their expectations. The automotive industry is a good example of this in practice. A customer looking to buy a car might start by searching for options on different websites. Once they’ve narrowed their choices down to a few options, they ask for a test drive to try the product first-hand and determine which is the best fit for their needs. Later in their buyer’s journey, customers prefer human interaction in the form of advice from a chatbot, a salesperson, or a dealership. Customers are certainly looking for speed and transparency, but human expertise remains essential to guide them in their choice.

 

Oops... The data is lost.

 

Is hyper-personalization the answer for humanizing the digital experience? 

Offering customers customized experiences shows them you understand their individual wants and needs. This hyper-personalization is a turning point for brands and has been perfected by companies such as Netflix and Spotify. By personalizing their platforms, brands like Netflix and Spotify create a dialogue with their customers and cater the user experience to each individual user. 

In France, consumers want personalized experiences, with 66% of them saying they would be more likely to make a purchase if businesses personalized their purchase journey.

So is hyper-personalization the Holy Grail when it comes to humanizing the digital experience? In theory, yes. In reality, though, launching a strategy like this can be risky and expensive. Pouring money into the creation of thousands of user segments in an attempt to address every possible user interest won’t add value if the basics of customer experience are forgotten. 

In fact, 48% of consumers say they have left a company's website and bought from a competitor because the site was disorganized. The way to rethink the digital experience? Automating what works, identifying what could work better, offering additional features, and adding a layer of personalization as a final touch. You only have one chance to leave a good impression, so don't miss it.

In a nutshell, while personalization has been offering a unique experience for consumers over the past few years, it can, on the contrary, be detrimental. Customers don't like inconsistent personalization and they do not trust companies that collect their personal information en masse. Many online users want more transparency and control over the data that is being shared and to understand how brands will use it. In the future, brands must move towards a more ethical and responsible approach to hyper-personalization. Striking the right balance between understanding the customer and not intruding is the challenge for tomorrow's businesses. 

Contentsquare Data Says People Don’t Like Free Beer

Contentsquare’s marketing team ran a campaign this summer offering a custom consultation with one of our resident UX-perts over a cold beer. Because who can say no to the offer of refreshing yourself and your website at the same time? As it turns out… quite a few people. 

Sure, we assumed there would undoubtedly be individuals who weren’t intrigued by the words “eight complimentary craft beers,” but as a marketing team that has gifted brews in the past, we know just how popular the opportunity for free beer can be. That insight, of course, comes from a pre-COVID era. Quite a few things shifted in 2020 and we realized our methods needed to shift with it.

 

Our Hoptimistic Approach

Surprising people with beer was one of the highest performing direct-mail campaigns that we ran in 2019. Showing up to the office and receiving an unexpected box filled with eight different craft beers delighted many people enough to take the time to chat with us. 

Then, 2020 happened.  

People swapped their daily commutes and office appearances for the shelter-in-place work from home lifestyle. We were remodeled into remote workers. Toilet paper and hand sanitizer became hot commodities. Happy hours were reduced to Zoom calls. It was a whole new world.

What we initially thought would be a few weeks turned into many months and most of our memories took place within the walls of our respective homes. Everything moved digital – we had meetings, events, and happy hours all online. Even online grocery shopping took off. Direct-mail campaigns were no exception.

People were staying in place for (at least) the foreseeable future and one can only send so many digital gift cards. So the question was, how do we continue to utilize our fan-favorite campaign when the element of surprise was no longer an option? We had to revamp our entire approach. Get “crafty,” if you will.

And so we did. Instead of sending beers to the office world to charm people into taking meetings, we shifted to offering digital consultations over a cold one. We asked prospects to sign up for a quick chat with the promise they would get beers delivered straight to their home to enjoy during the meeting, or after. The surprise may have been taken away, but the free beer remained and that’s all that mattered right? Not exactly…

 

Not Ale It’s Cracked Up to Be

As soon as the campaign went live and the first emails were sent out, we expected the meeting requests to roll in. 

Ok, we aren’t that presumptuous, but we did expect to get at least a few requests the first week. Or maybe by the second week… The third? More than a month into the campaign, we only had two people claim their opportunity to parlay over pilsners. Where did we go wrong?

It was time to take a closer look at the experience and why people weren’t converting. 

Luckily, we have this tool called Contentsquare (shameless plug). As a marketing team, we’re the exact audience to whom we often market our tool and often use it in-house. We activated our CS Live extension to see what was working and, more importantly, what wasn’t on our campaign landing page. People were getting to the page, they just weren’t converting – but why? 

The promise of complimentary craft beers clearly wasn’t enough. We wanted to know where we went wrong. Why were people bouncing without claiming their brews?

We started by investigating click rates. Where were the hot zones on our page? Were any elements particularly frustrating to our landing page visitors? 

Our first move was clear. One of the highest clicked elements on the page wasn’t even clickable! Rookie mistake. An arrow that was meant to signify that scrolling down would reveal more details about the offer was not relaying that message. 

We also checked our click recurrence and noticed that the same element wasn’t just getting clicked, but getting clicked multiple times! The frustration was obvious. 

 

Step 1: Remove Visitor Frustration

To start, we removed the arrow and replace it with the copy, “Scroll down for more info 👇.” Just like that, no more clicking frustration.

This was, of course, only frustrating for the people that actually saw this ultimately annoying arrow. When we checked our exposure rate, we were surprised to find that 50% of our header content (and the CTA!) wasn’t being seen by almost half of our visitors. The good stuff was below the fold.

We may be offering eight hand-selected craft beers, but what good is it if no one sees the offer?

 

Step 2: Bring Key Info Above The Fold

Next, we shrunk the top banner to make sure the most relevant content is above the page fold and entice visitors to scroll down to learn more. 

One of our biggest quick wins was to make sure the submit button was visible when you loaded the page. As one of our client onboarding managers once told me, in order for someone to buy shoes on a website, they need to see the button that says “Buy Shoes.” It was time to cut the dead weight in the contact form and bring that button further up the page. We turned back to our click rate and noticed that 2.58% of visitors clicked to add their postal code but only 1.28% clicked to select their state. Did we need the state if we knew the postal code? No.

 

Step 3: Increase CTA Visibility

Again, we noticed our “Submit” CTA on the page’s form was hiding beneath the fold. People landing on the page couldn’t immediately understand what action we wanted them to take and bouncing. To increase the visibility of the CTA, we cut unnecessary form fields and moved privacy and shipping rules to the bottom of the form. That raised the CTA above the fold and made it easier for viewers to understand what the page was for. 

The last thing we checked was the attractiveness rate, or what percentage of visitors seeing a page element is likely to click on it. Turns out our CTA at the very bottom of the page, or “Book My Hoppy Hour,” was a very popular option for the people who actually reached the bottom of the page. We had some good news, something was working as it should. 

Once we made these slight tweaks to our simple landing page, we saw immediate improvement. Our page visitors were finding the information they needed to feel more confident booking a meeting and the requests started rolling in. 

 

Our Hoppy Results

People do still like free beer! But, it’s not just about the end result, it’s about the journey they have to take to get there. Contentsquare helps uncover exactly how your prospects and customers navigate the digital experiences you create. And sometimes, a few small tweaks can have big results – as we can confidently attest to ourselves!

What to hear how Contentsquare can help your business?

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Driving Personalization through Marketing and A/B Testing

This article was written by our partner REO, as part of our series highlighting direct insights from our large ecosystem of partners.

In 2019, for the first time ever, digital ad spend represented more than 50% of total global marketing spend. Whilst the UK was considerably ahead of this trend (63.8% of UK’s total ad spend was attributed to digital in 2018, 66.4% in 2019), the US has now joined the group with online ad spend going from 48.6% in 2018 to 54.2% in 2019. With eMarketer forecasting a 17.6% year-on-year growth (to $333.25M) in worldwide digital marketing spend, the need to ensure each of your marketing channels is delivering the best possible ROI has never been higher.

Within the conversion rate optimization (CRO) space, most brands conduct A/B testing without fully considering which marketing channel or source their customers have come from. Customers are typically bucketed into various user segments based on their purchase history, onsite behavior, geographic and demographic data. However, users within the same audience segment can often demonstrate varying behavioral attributes when navigating through the purchase funnel, across countless online and offline touchpoints.

Let’s Take Paid Search as An Example

If a user arrives on your website via paid search, you already know what they searched for and which ad they clicked on; however, users who click on the same ad, but searched for different terms/items, will often experience the same customer journey. For instance, if a customer has searched for “luxury men’s white shirt” – not only do you know the item they are looking for, you also know they are looking at the higher end of the market.

A/B Testing the landing page a user is taken to is quite common, but you can go a step further and explore how to change the experience for the customer based on their search criteria.

A potential testing idea could involve pre-sorting these shirts by highest price first, and on the Product Listing Page (PLP), displaying all the available men’s white shirts. This can develop into personalization if the user has visited the site previously, within the cookie period; e.g. by storing size data within the cookie, you could pre-select the shirt size which the user filtered by on their previous visit. 

Reducing the number of clicks and filters it takes a user to find their item can only have a positive impact on conversion rate, especially on mobile. So, by showing a customer the items they’re looking for, sorted by their desired price point and filtered by their size, you will make the purchase journey more tailored to that specific customer.

Understanding a visitor’s context (location, date and time of day, device, internet connection, etc) as well as their intent (are they here to complete a quick purchase, to research and compare products, to seek inspiration, to test a coupon, etc) add an invaluable layer of behavioral understanding to your analysis, and will allow you to execute a more impactful form of personalization.

Making the Affiliation between A/B Testing and Voucher/Cashback Partners

By applying this testing method to the affiliate channel, you can optimize the largest click and revenue drivers; namely voucher and cashback websites. After all, you can already assume that users coming from these two affiliate types are both online-savvy and price-sensitive.

Voucher and discount websites should have a conversion rate of at least 20-25% on mature affiliate programs – so any of these affiliates who have a conversion rate lower than that, represents an opportunity for incremental revenue. For cashback sites, expect this figure to be upwards of 40%.

A test idea for these two affiliate types could be to re-enforce the discount or cashback offer listed on the affiliates’ website. For instance, if the deal was “Save £15 when you spend over £100” – you could use a “loading bar” at the top of the page which gradually fills up as you add items to your basket, until the user hits the spend threshold to activate the discount. 

For cashback sites, you could test a cashback calculator onsite, which automatically calculates the amount of cashback the user will earn if they purchase everything currently in their basket. This type of gamification can be incredibly effective in increasing the number of units per sale and, in turn, the average order value.

Serve Less Content, but More Dynamically

“Content is King” – we’ve all heard it before, but how can you be smarter in how you serve it? Content, and specifically dynamic content, is another channel where source-based A/B testing can improve engagement, click-through-rates and leads/ sales. If you know the article or blog post a user has come from, you can use this insight to serve them relevant and dynamic content, making their customer journey more seamless and less detached across the two sites.

User journey analysis shows that visits to content sites usually happen in the “Discovery Phase” of the sales funnel – including on product review sites, influencer social posts, news/magazine sites and blogs. Such content is informative and persuasive; perfect to push the user towards the bottom of the funnel.

Some of the more content-heavy merchants, such as insurance brands or high-end technology retailers, will have an eclectic and extensive array of content across their website, making navigation more muddled. A solution? Reducing the amount of content on-site and instead, storing the less frequently visited content pages elsewhere, to then be served dynamically.

For example, if a user looking to buy insurance is reading up on excess and the impacts it has on a claim and future premiums, the existing content about excess could be tweaked accordingly – which could be as simple as changing the title of an article, calling out the keywords or changing the order of the content on that page.

Again, a granular analysis of how customers are interacting with individual elements of content will help paint the complete picture of engagement. Measuring clicks alone will only tell one part of the customer behavior story: tracking metrics such as exposure, attractiveness and conversion rate per click (to name a few) will give a more complete view of how content is contributing to (or stalling) the user journey.

As the capabilities of A/B testing and personalization platforms continue to evolve, the way you test and analyze a customer journey should follow suit. One of the major challenges of channel/source-specific testing can be a lack of traffic volume. If you have insufficient traffic, it will take a while before a test reaches significance. For example, the 5th highest paid search term, or 4th largest voucher site probably won’t have the volume to justify running an A/B Test on.

Want to Know More?

Contact us! REO is a digital experience agency. We are an eclectic mix of bright and creative thinkers, embracing the best of research, strategy, design and experimentation to solve our clients’ toughest challenges. We work across a variety of sectors, with companies such as Amazon, M&S, Tesco and Samsung. 

Also invaluable to our company is our scope of partners, including Contentsquare, which allows our customers to capture the nuances of their end users’ behavior for even more sophisticated segmentation and ultimately, deeper personalization.  

Whatever the challenge may be, REO applies design thinking to identify and deliver big growth opportunities.

 

Hero image: Adobe Stock, via blankstock

Why Digital Experience Analytics Matters

Analytics have made a splash in the realm of marketing, to say the least. The need for data is more apparent than ever, as more brands are marketing themselves under the coveted category of “data-driven.” In reality, they are not becoming data-driven fast enough, if at all. 

We can vouch for the fact that data trumps intuition, but aside from arming yourself with industry data that relates to your vertical for market research, it’s also vital to compile site data on your own site visitors. That’s where digital experience analytics solution enters the picture, and it does so in a substantial way. 

Most web analytics platforms show how a websites is accessed, along with some of the activity that occurs on it. Granular digital experience analytics takes this further, in a concerted effort to measure digital customer experience (CX). As such, it offers acute data sets, visualizations and metrics that evaluate and quantify how visitors interact with the individual elements of your website. But not all user experience analytics solutions provide the same granularity of data.  

Most analytics platforms do not take user insights a step further, so they do not give you a more granular performance review of your site or app, meaning that you wouldn’t be able to comprehend how each in-page element is used and how it contributes to a broad set of KPIs. 

In short, user experience analytics is a functionality designed to give you insights into visitors’ user experience. It’s incredibly important for both marketers, web developers and designers alike, as it dictates their strategy and implementations. But not all DX platforms offer the same capabilities.

So why exactly does digital experience analytics matter? Let’s find out.

Understanding Your Customers

If you don’t understand your customers, your website will show, leading to reduced activity, heightened bounces and poor conversion rates. Digital experience analytics allows you to segment your audience based on their behavior, and unlock a much deeper understanding of their needs and expectations.

From what visitors are trying to achieve and how they want to go about achieving it, to what causes frustration along their customer journey, analytics gives brands a nuanced read of these occurrences. Pure play brands are masters at leveraging this type of customer intelligence as they hyper-target their offerings to specific segments. With this approach, they are not attempting to be all things to all users, but are tapping into the minds of their most profitable segments, implementing high levels of customization.  

Behavioral analytics can highlight visitors’ distinctive behaviors on your website, such as where they are most engaged, where they click and how often, the frequency of their hovers on a particular part of a page, the time they spend per page or element and much more.

We recently helped, travel leader Pierre & Vacances identify customer preferences for targeted optimizations. After analyzing customer behavior on its holiday property search results page, the brand found that site visitors were interacting heavily with the “number of rooms” filter (it had a high click rate and a hearty dose of conversions).

However, this filter was lost among a wealth of other filtering options. Based on this intelligence, the brand placed the filter in the second position on the filter bar, making it easier for users to find it. 

The moral of their story is that once you’ve figured out through  DX analysis what your users’ precise intentions are, you can then go about improving your digital experience to allow them to seamlessly complete their intended tasks without incurring any frustration. 

Additionally, it’s interesting to learn about online behaviors of visitors in different regions of the world. As per our Global UX Map, a comprehensive report on the user behavior of visitors in 7 countries, we’ve found just that.

For example, we learned that visitors China are happy to engage with visuals, with a slideshow click rate of 5.5, so adding product images on your China site makes for a great UX. On the contrary, using a lot of visuals like slideshows is less well-received by visitors in the US and Italy, which have the respective click rates of 1.3 and 2.5 on the slideshow, the lowest of all the surveyed countries. 

In both of these cases, DX analytics has the prowess to empower digital teams with localizing knowledge that can assure a positive UX for global users. 

Why You Should Invest in Website Accessibility

Creating Data-Driven CX Decisions 

Digital experience analytics matter where website design is concerned, as it dictates what the experience will look like for visitors. If it doesn’t, chances are, your analytics platform isn’t very robust and offers little else aside from a traditional traffic analysis. 

A granular user experience analytics space empowers its users to make data-driven CX (customer experience) decisions, and if you couldn’t tell from this blog, CX is not something to ignore. It is critical for the sake of both acquisition and retention, especially the latter, which is important for maintaining a steady revenue stream.

With data providing multiple reference points to optimize your content, you can do so innovatively and confidently. An optimized CX will make it so that you can streamline your customer journeys and remove frustrations, the latter of which impedes conversions. It can also help you detect if there are any errors in the elements that yield conversions themselves, such as CTAs, form fields and buttons that signal making a purchase.

But it doesn’t end with conversion-bound elements. A deep experience analysis can identify a host of other faulty site elements which stir your site visitors into leaving. That’s where a data-driven analysis comes into play, finding pesky problems in the design and structure of your website that can have grim consequences on your CX.

A data-backed CX optimization plan acts as a security net for brands seeking to try new things on their sites. Perhaps there’s a trendy feature you want to try out or a new setup of a crucial site element. Delving into new implementations is a rocky road, but with data on your side, you’ll be informed as to what works and what doesn’t.

Furthermore, making data-driven decisions allows all team members to own business goals, measure the contribution of their revenue and quantify the ROI of the experience.

 

Making Headway in Conversions

After you’ve done your CX homework, testing what strategies work and keeping close tabs on how your website is used, you check to see the impact. Which ROI is more important than conversions? Most marketers would agree that conversions are of the utmost importance for a business if not one of the most important.

Aside from boosting conversions, digital experience analytics assists in all the steps leading up to conversions, as it visualizes user flows with customer journey mapping. Understanding how users navigate your site is the first marker of what needs to be improved, along with indicating what works and what drives interest among visitors.

As such, granular analytics provides the relevant data and metrics for CRO (conversion rate optimization). Optimizing conversions always starts with measuring the experience on your site and/or app. As for preserving retention, a chief business goal, digital experience insights will assure you know what works and what doesn’t — essentially giving you more knowledge into how to retain conversions by keeping hold of the same site visitors.

Getting The Most Out Of Digital Experience Insights 

Digital experience analytics carry weight with the entirety of your user experience, as it can quantify a host of user data: their interactions, hesitations, frustrations, etc. on your website. Because of this, it should be a top-priority implementation into your marketing plans. However, not all user experience platforms have the same built-in capabilities — particularly the actionable, full-picture data of all the goings-on of your website. 

For example, not all of such platforms analyze individual site elements and how they fare in traditional metrics, let alone more robust ones. So you should be selective when choosing your experience analytics software. Don’t forget: you ought to aim for retention over acquisition, as once your users visit your site and enjoy what they experience, the likelihood of them returning shoots up.