Decoding Online Consumer Experience

There is a plethora of literature on how to improve site design, conversion, engagement, etc., but there is something to be said about not ignoring the obvious and not repeating the mistakes of the past. Keeping it simple sometimes is “simply” avoiding the common mistakes!

Navigation – ease and appeal determine how well was the digital strategy executed, be it content, eCommerce or communication. Optimize your website to ensure all elements are covered. Bounce Rate and return frequency are good metrics to measure the effectiveness of your site navigation strategy.

Fewer Clicks – helping customers and stakeholders reach the goal fast is critical to achieving the desired results. This does require that goals for each site section and page are clearly defined, and in-line with the overall strategy. Website optimization for the desired goal(s) will help ensure that customers are not “bumped” around for more page views, while the conversion funnel gets deeper and deeper.

Search Efficiency – make it easy for the customers to search across your site. Up-sell and cross-sell opportunities and an urge to “over-educate” and “impress” your customers may come in the way of making the search and results more complicated than they ought to be. Conversion efficiency will be a direct indicator of how well is this working. I have been asked to show other products as a customer is going through the purchase cycle for product  X, so we can get their attention – my reaction is always that the best it will do is distract and the worst it will achieve is a lost sale.

Brand Communication – ensure a consistent brand experience across all customer touch points including, site, blog, community, social, sales and direct mail is a no-brainer, yet sometimes over-looked as organizations try and keep up with the evolving digital landscape.

Tracking and Reporting – make it focused around what a customer is doing on the site. Is the goal to drive engagement, e-commerce, education, etc.? Make sure the metrics are customer-centric.

I am proposing a common-sense approach to achieving desired results out of the online experience – set simple goals for each task and design the experience around that. It is easier than we often think, especially when we have to be burdened with conflicting brand and organizational asks!

Tracking - make it customer centric!

Knowing what your customers want or need, I believe, is the type of intelligence that is best obtained from internal data, rather than market studies. While the latter are a good source of market intelligence and trends, a more focused “consumer centric tracking” will ensure that we are better prepared to serve our consumers’ needs. The possibilities could be endless, from right targeting of offers, to lower acquisition costs, to greater conversion and monetization. I spoke about the customer focus (http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/01/customer-is-always-right.html), and now we need to ensure that our tracking is helping us achieve some of the benefits identified in that approach.

Achieving this level of granularity may be tricky, given consumer privacy issues, but we can aggregate user data in the right buckets to define our unique segments, design a scorecard to monitor appropriate metrics and create a process to quickly supplement our offerings to changing user needs.

While I talked about measuring the value of web traffic by promotion source, here the theory is that we build an understanding of user segments. For instance, if we are a content site, we may want to learn about the browsing behavior of our sports readers, segmented into say, MLB/NBA/Olympics/Soccer fans, etc. Metrics such as, time spent on the site, navigation pattern to other site sections, number of pages per visit, frequency of visits per month, shopping tendencies, awareness towards brands, etc. Following these segments may yield better returns per marketing dollars spent than a wide targeting of content and offers through the generic sports page.

What this data does is that it helps define our user experience, site navigation and product offers that are truly unique to this user segment. And we need to respect the findings to an extent that if our sports readers tell us that they are not interested in shopping (hypothetically), then we make the experience richer by showing them more content and leaving out the “useless” product ads from their pages – talk of a no-frills attached user experience. How else does one define relevance and targeting?

Customer is always right!

This cliché has been the mantra of customer centric organizations for a long time, however, we often find ourselves at the cross-roads of believing in the principle, vs., living by it. How many times as a customer have we wished that the corporations were more responsive to our needs? If our customers are asking that question, then we need to look inward again and redefine our corporate strategy, products, processes, etc.

During the discussions with my clients, following themes around operational excellence emerged at the core of customer disinterest.

1. Not sure of the key success metrics as they relate to the consumers
2. Not sure of the primary metrics to focus on
3. Lack of adequate data tracking and analytics to support change

And if the above have been addressed, we run into the all powerful organizational processes and legacies that create greater hurdles to change!

I think the root cause is that we often try to do too much in one go through a “one size fits all” website experience.

The point I am going to make is to instead “we need to keep things simple.”

Take for instance, the page layout. A quick look at the click map will reveal the areas/links that 80% of our consumers click on. However, we keep the page cluttered and unappealing to please the other 20%. Once we decide to cater to the top 80%, we need to ensure that the pages are light and current, and in-line with the evolving consumer needs. In other words:

1. Identify the needs of the top 80% of your audience
2. Keep it current – consumer needs are dynamic
3. Leave some white space on the pages

Site navigation across the site is another sore point that clients have often mentioned as not the best across their site. I liken this to a shopping experience – if I can’t find the stuff in a shop, I can’t buy it. Moreover, if it takes me forever to go through the maze of aisles every time I come looking for it, I will probably find an easier store to shop at. Designing the best navigation experience is highly dependent on the consumer demographics, needs, relevance of the promotion, business unit strategy, etc. – a wider topic that should be well left for the next discussion.

If you are having these discussions, please share those and I would love to start a conversation about how do we nurture a customer-centric analytics culture.