The 5 Cs of consumer engagement!

I have spoken a lot about consumer engagement through this forum, but I wanted to share the 5 Cs of consumer engagement - from a Forrester research study. So here they are:

1) Customer experience
2) Contextual
3) Consistency
4) Communities
5) Consumer behavior measurement

Customer experience across the site is a function of business focus, product/service, and objectives for the site and the page. If consumers come to the site to read an article, I would like to see the article be the main focus of the page, however, if the intent was to drive conversion, then that conversion message or the link needs to be clearly visible. That is a no-brainer, a lot of us would argue, but we often tend to ignore this simple rule of "simplicity" by provide a lot more in the hope that we will engage the consumer beyond the first landing. That is where we tend to hurt ourselves ... leaving some white space is OK, and so is to include relevant details from the original promotion, such as, rich media, related articles, products, searches, etc., whatever the case may be! Do make sure not to overwhelm the consumer with information overload and/or cause user-fatigue!

Contextual is simply building on the note above, in that, we need to ensure that besides the leader article on the page, there is other related information, such as, the related topics, relevant ads and any local information - again relevant to the topic. I have seen a lot of sites running mortgage rates ads on the same page as my local weather report. It is not just annoying but also "habit-creating" - that of a tendency to not look beyond my immediate interest, thereby robbing me of valuable engagement.

Consistent goes well beyond the site and the page. Here the goal should be ensure that the site is consistent in look-and-feel, value proposition, products/services with the overall corporate promotions, both online and offline. After all, familiarity and recognition of the brand does breed positive experience and hence better engagement.

Communities is a feature that companies are using more and more, but managing consumer experience and expectations could prove to be tricky. It is imperative to manage our social presence with careful planning in order to prevent any unwanted side effects. We need to define goals for our social media presence and participate and empower users to reach us through our social platform; And, we need to also make sure that we are responding to their voice and capturing the feedback, as needed, which would be a valuable addition to our data set on consumer analytics.

Consumer behavior on the site provides valuable insights about what works and what doesn't. We need to be constantly validating our experience through A/B or multi-variate testing to ensure we are current and responding to users' changing proclivities. I have seen businesses realize 25% to 50% improvements in user response rates by simply changing the color and test of the sales offer, after running an A/B test.

Overall, I feel like the 5Cs capture a good deal of how we can go about improving our user experience. When coupled with a sound online business strategy, operational focus and clear goal measurement, we can better engage our users, improve brand awareness and loyalty, and create real bottom-line value for the business.