Some marketers tend to believe that, since people increasingly use social network sites to connect with their friends, their businesses also have to be friends with their (future) customers. It’s never a bad idea to treat your customers as your best friends but this doesn’t mean they want to be your friends. They want your social presence to be relevant, and they want you to be a value generator, perhaps even a trustworthy source or someone they ‘like’ but most of all they want you to respect them. As a matter of fact, they want to be the center of your marketing universe, regardless of channels and media.
People want you to enable them to find what they seek rapidly. They want you to respect the tasks they want to perform when visiting your website or interacting in any other way. It’s your job to remove all the unnecessary fluff that keeps them from getting where they want to be. It’s your job to understand that your messages, content and even the channels you use (and certainly the timing) depend on your customer’s preferences.
Most businesses are not ready for the channel-agnostic customer
Your customers are multichannel. They are even getting entirely channel-agnostic. Dialogue flows, conversion optimization processes, lead nurturing scenarios and customer service processes should all revolve around them. However, most businesses are not ready for that.
Look at the average corporate website. We are beaten over the head with Flash intros, unnecessary bells and whistles and ‘content’ that appears to have been made just to make life of visitors difficult and to anger them. We still love to talk about us instead of talking with our customers.
Or think about all the campaigns that send people to online destinations where they first have to look until they are wasted (if not long gone) before they find what you promised them in your call to action. Even worse: think about all the unsolicited messages and interruptions that waste their precious time.
The customer and user experience, in which content, usability and conversion play a key role, are still very poorly treated. Every single day, reports show that most businesses don’t put the customer at the centre of their universe, let alone dispose of means to measure how well they do.
Just consider these data from two recent reports:
- The second edition of the Multichannel Customer Experience Report by Foviance and Econsultancy shows that only 26% of companies have a well-developed strategy in place for improving customer experience. This doesn’t need further explanation.
- Econsultancy's Conversion Rate Optimization Report 2011 shows that only 26% of respondents target shopping cart abandoners, while shopping cart abandonment is mainly a matter of poor customer experience.
The list goes on and on.
Steps to optimize conversions and improve customer experiences
The irony is that by optimizing conversion and improving customer experiences across all channels, business don’t only focus on the behaviour and needs of their customers. They also increase revenues this way, simply by taking into account the preferences of their customers in an integrated way.
It’s understandable that not all businesses can move at the same pace in the realization of the customer-centric Copernican shift. However, this should not be an excuse to take simple and effective ways to improve customer experiences and thus conversion fast.
Here are a few of these simple steps:
- Start listening and take into account the voice of the customer. And don’t only use dashboards to do it: get out there, talk, survey and test.
- Move away from campaign-centric and message-centric marketing to triggered and personalized cross-channel flows, based on the digital footprints of your customers.
- Measure across every possible channel and touch point to identify problems and solve them.
- Integrate marketing tools, channels and CRM in a bi-directional way in order to gain a single customer view and improve future interactions.
- Measure qualitative metrics instead of only simple quantitative ones and analyze behaviour. You don’t need click data but customer intelligence (and obviously act upon it).
- Make sure you provide personalized messages at the right time to the right person via the right channels or online properties and realize that the behaviour and preferences of your customers define what’s “right” in the whole equation.
- Remove obstacles and make it simple and clear. Or as Gerry McGovern puts it: the longer people stay on your website, the worse. Simplicity and efficiency are good friends.
Even if your internal organization and marketing approach is not ready to be fully customer-centric, there are no excuses not to try harder.
Conversion optimization and customer experience improvement are a customer-centric duty for every business. And achieving it is simple.
Just know what your customers want, match it with your business goals and make sure you have what they need (and thus what you are missing right now).
When all this is in place we can start talking about customers and friendship. Although it’s really about respect.
Jean-Paul De Clerck is a 360° interactive marketing consultant, founder of the Fusion Marketing Experience and owner of conversionation. You can connect with him via Twitter.
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