Organisations can no longer be satisfied with 3% conversions from customer acquisition strategies, argues Wayne Morris, General Manager at Maximiser.
In a world of declining margins and increasing customer fragmentation, the pressure is on organisations to attain far more value from the online channel. Organisations can no longer be satisfied by 3% conversion rates from acquisition activity; nor should they settle for one off transactions. The objective should be to complement acquisition and retention strategies with highly targeted online content management to develop a destination web site and create a highly engaged customer base that not only transacts repeatedly but shares that experience via social networking to attract additional customers.
The starting place for improving the overall relevance of online content and improving the customer experience is transactional optimisation via A/B and multivariate testing. With every content change tested against a performance baseline, organisations can continually hone the customer experience.
And the direct impact of an improved customer experience can be astonishing – from 100% improvement on performance for one off tests, to a typical annual uplift of 10s%. But this is just the starting point: to meet the demands of a sophisticated online customer base organisations must now build upon transactional optimisation with highly focused segmentation, recommendation and behavioural targeting.
To be truly customer centric, organisations need to engage customers in the right way, with the most compelling content to make sure they come back for more. Evolving from the tactical conversion via mass optimisation to a strategic approach to win a customer for life, demands intelligent content and promotion management. Organisations need to exploit real time insight into a customer’s online behaviour to continually evolve and refine the experience and ensure every decision regarding online content is correct, reflects customer behaviour and, critically, improves customer engagement.
Today, mass content optimisation should be business as usual. No organisation can justify the risk of not knowing the impact that unmeasured and uncontrolled content changes might have in disenfranchising hard won customers and their potential effect on revenue.
By Wayne Morris
General Manager
Maxymiser
www.Maxymiser.com