At one point, personalisation in marketing was nothing smarter than putting a location in a banner ad, or a [Firstname] in an email subject line. Thankfully, times have moved on.
Customer journey optimisation is a key objective in modern personalisation. You have a tight window of time to hook in an audience that has a lot of choices and can be expensive to acquire. Thankfully, by curating your tech stack with the right platforms, you’ll be in a position to execute an efficient, data-driven approach with incremental improvements that impressively add up over time.
Metrics to measure include increasing lead captures, conversions, average spend, or lifetime value. Here’s a quick snapshot of ideas of things to experiment with optimising on your website:
1. Which visit?
One of the things we have noticed from tracking a giant number of customer journeys is that the first visit often looks fairly different from the final one before a call/purchase is made. In order to optimise your success rate, it makes sense to tweak your site to fit what works on different visits. Maybe present different search options or a more targeted content theme.
“Different people will have different needs depending on their previous experiences with your brand. A first-time website visitor's journey on your site is likely to be very different to a returning customer, returning visitor, or a loyal customer. This is why you need a more curated experience to drive better results based on the different website visitor personas. Tailoring the experience a website visitor gets based on where they have come from, what they have interacted with, and what they have done previously drives far greater conversion rates, ROI on acquisition spend, and lifetime value"
Daniella Gregory | Global Partnerships Director, Yieldify
2. Social proof
When you strip things down to basics, we’re social creatures and the movements of the crowd can play a strong influence on our decision making. For a while now, holiday booking sites have seen success by driving urgency with their live updates on how many rooms are left at a hotel, or how many people are browsing a particular offer.
This exact approach won’t work for everyone, but there’s no reason you can’t utilise your data, reviews, and expiring offers to deliver a tailored website visit based on what other similar visitors have enjoyed.
3. Predict actions
Behavioural analytics is a fast-growing discipline within marketing technology. Learning what tends to immediately precede an action puts you in a tremendous vantage point to influence the web visitor’s next step.
For example, a mouse moving into the top-right corner may be a common indicator that the visitor is about to close a window. To keep that visitor as a lead for retargeting later, open a window that offers a 15% discount in exchange for an email or social connection. Or perhaps when people are going to the checkout, highlight discounts they could qualify for if they increase their order.
4. Reducing calls
In a lot of instances, you would want to increase your volume of calls as these are often customers enquiring about very high-value purchases and they may have questions before committing to buy. But what about support calls for easily-solved issues, which could have been solved online? These put unnecessary strain on your contact centre, taking up time and resources that could have been allocated to more complex matters.
A customer will often pick up the phone to contact you for support as a last resort. Constantly optimising your website to solve their problems quicker will reduce the number of basic support calls you receive. Identifying patterns that lead to common support queries will empower you to personalise your FAQ pages for visitors displaying those patterns.
Infinity is currently being used by Sky to execute their call deflection strategy, watch the case study here.
