A bit of a trick question: If you had $100 to spend, would you be better off devoting that money to doubling the traffic to your site?

Or doubling your conversion rate?

Many marketers get this wrong.

Despite years of front-line, real-world experience to the contrary, more and more online marketing budgets are disproportionately aimed at driving traffic, rather than conversions.

There’s the notion that things like SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing and the like are far more important than increasing shopping cart sizes, decreasing abandonment, upselling and cross selling.

To be sure, driving traffic is a critical mission for any e-commerce site.  After all, no visitors, no sales.

But at the same time, even the most brilliant SEO or affiliate strategies will be for naught if the site itself fails to entice customers to actually buy.

That’s precisely where site testing, optimization, and personalization come in.  Failing to actually sell goods on the site can cost brands the effort, the dollars, and the brand equity that they devoted to attracting all that traffic.

Doubling your conversions can be dramatically more profitable than merely doubling your visitor numbers. And here’s why:

You want insight, not just raw numbers

Slice and dice your site traffic analytics all you want. But at the end of the day, they are still just numbers. What rings the cash register is actionable solutions you can use to improve your customer experience.

The first step is to employ an internal test-and-learn methodology to understand what visitors to your site are engaging with, where they’re dropping off, where their gravitating towards. (Hint: this may even differ by traffic source!)

But only through continuous A/B and multivariate testing, can you actually begin to understand your visitors and place content decisions in their hands. You can fundamentally change how your organization learns about its online traffic. In other words, nobody should be increasing traffic or making a site without a focus on improving conversions.

You want sales, not just visitors.

Yes, going to your boss and detailing how you doubled site traffic in the last quarter is a grand accomplishment! But can you really document how that increased traffic contributed to sales? Do you really know?

If you aren't tracking conversion rates, or attempting to optimize the site in any way, boosting traffic rates is simply doesn't matter.

Once visitors land on your site, your goal is to get them to buy (and hopefully become repeat customers). This is where testing and personalization are essential to turning traffic into sales.

Optimizing your site for content, design, offers, and copy is the only way to ensure your are taking full advantage of your site traffic. If the experience is irrelevant, frustrating or cumbersome, you might as well have not ever invited them to your site in the first place.

Better experience, more dollars

Today’s consumers are good at comparison shopping. They research, they sign up for emails, they track down deals.  Which may lead you to believe that the key is to boost your traffic as much as possible.

But the reality is, if you provide a really stellar online experience, they will want to come back, again and again. Which makes the overall job simpler, and clearer.

Thanks in part to more advanced testing methods, it’s a lot easier to listen to what your visitors want (and need).  Customers have become a lot more vocal even if they don’t know it. Through their clicks, page views, bounces, reviews and purchases, your online customers offer real-world feedback about their online experiences, in real-time. So pay attention to them. Make website changes and marketing decisions based on your customers, not on what your gut — or marketing budget — is telling you to.

Personalizing wins

Getting into a traffic war with your competitors is a sure-fire way to waste resources and precious attention.  It’s far more effective step up your game by using testing and conversion optimization to gather data and visitor profiles that can dramatically increase actual sales and repeat visits.  You may even find that segmenting your customers by where they came from can help you convert them into loyal and repeat buyers.

When it comes to their websites, major e-commerce players need to realize that only through a customized combination of multivariate testing, optimization and personalization best practices can they truly begin to tailor experiences in meaningful and profitable ways. It’s an ever-evolving practice that reaches miles beyond SEO, ad targeting and landing page optimization. But the rewards of it means a lot more return traffic, and a lot more improved conversions.

Follow the money

No matter how you define a conversion, at the end of the day, the holy grail for e-commerce marketers is to increase site sales. And the dollars are in the details, not just the volume. Focusing on conversion rates is where you’ll see not only site engagement improve, but revenue as well. Your traffic drivers might bring you more people, but conversion strategies bring you more money. No contest.

When it comes to site optimization and traffic acquisition, the best brands aren't just surviving — they’re thriving. By focusing on the deep analytics and insights gained from testing with online customers, not just boosting traffic, not only improves the efficiency and effectiveness of their e-commerce site, but several other aspects of their businesses as well. They have a better grasp on who their customers are, how they buy, when they buy and what they buy.

In short, they can offer experiences more suited to customer needs and wants — and that is the true goal of any e-commerce business.

These days, consumers have more choices, more incentives and more reasons to comparison shop for the best deals out there. But marketers can use online behavior and Web analytics to reveal patterns and warning signs indicative of the types of customer retention issues that lead to “online cheating.” The question is, are they?

If caught early enough, these issues can be easily connected. To do so, marketers must identify which types of data patterns to pay attention to and use that data to inform their next steps.

1. Home Page Bounce Rates of 55 Percent or More

If more than 55 percent of visitors are turning around as soon as they reach your site, it’s a major red flag that something is terribly wrong. It’s likely that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for. (BTW: You should know that the average industry home page bounce rate is around 50 percent, and that a well-performing home page has a bounce rate of between 0 percent and 25 percent.)

So what gives when this issue arises? It’s usually due to something with layout, design, navigation, site elements, functionality, content or messaging. By conducting A/B testing and multivariate testing on these home page elements in various combinations, marketers can discern which elements are contributing to a higher conversion rate, and which are contributing to the high bounce rates.

2. High Average Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates

Many online shoppers initiate a purchase only to leave the items behind in their cart. The Baymard Institute found that the average cart abandonment rate is about 65 percent. Luckily, there are a number of options you can test to bring this number down. These options include estimating shipping costs at an earlier point in the buying process, allowing guest checkouts, highlighting in-stock versus out-of-stock status, providing auto-fill forms based on cookie tags for repeat visitors, and using shipping discounts or specials.

3. Low Search Engagement

The importance of search on visitor engagement and purchases is often overlooked. By encouraging consumers to explore the site and streamlining the shopping process, the chances you’ll turn more visitors into customers increases. Every single component of the search feature—placement, layout, default search box text and even the color, size and design of the graphic elements—affects engagement with this important tool. Multivariate testing can help marketers discover which combinations work best for their target audience

4. Unsatisfactory Average Order Values

What about those customers who just aren’t buying as much as they could be? Chances are they have a very specific product in mind and aren’t being persuaded to add more items to their cart.

This is where personalization can really help. By inserting and/or customizing information that’s relevant to a specific user based on implicit behaviors (items purchased, pages viewed) as well as explicit details (location, age, gender) provided by that particular user, you’ll be able to customize their recommended items. Product recommendations and behavioral targeting are two common ways to combat this problem.

5. One-Time Buyers

Sixty-six percent of Amazon.com’s sales are attributed to repeat buyers. Remarkably, only 7 percent of the entire e-commerce industry can say the same. But it’s going to be tough to match this success without employing automated personalization with behavioral targeting solutions.

Using data such as previous purchases, searches, page views, geography, demographics, type of button click, transactions, etc., is crucial to keeping customers loyal. Behavioral targeting tailors content and offers to individuals based on both their past behaviors and their unique “buyer personas.”

Placing customers at the heart of online content decisions and giving them unique, personalized experiences is an important part of faithful consumer relationships.

It doesn’t take a record-breaking holiday shopping season to realize that most online shoppers are vulnerable to the advances of competing online retailers. But when it comes to a decline in return customers, blaming a lack of customer loyalty on the competition is the easy way out. As we enter the new year, now is the perfect time to commit to tracking the number of first-time shoppers who actually come back in months to come—not to mention, those who don’t. And from there, put a plan in place for increasing customer loyalty.

There are many reasons customers will only buy from a site once. It could be that you offered them something they couldn’t get anywhere else, but didn’t give them a good reason to return when they were there. It could also be the overall usability of your site, a lack of necessary information, a poor checkout process… The list goes on. The bottom line is that they didn’t find the shopping experience memorable—and you may never see them again.

But fear not, there is a proven method for visitor retention. And it’s called personalization—aka using what you know about your online visitors to create highly individualized experiences for them. Personalization can be simple, based on one or two collected insights, or a highly complex interaction of detailed formulas and algorithms. Either way, it’s better than just ignoring tailored content altogether.

Because many marketers aren’t taking advantage of personalization techniques—or they’re doing them wrong—there is a lot of opportunity for those who are. So, instead of blaming a lack of loyalty on the aggressive competition, get ahead of competing sites using testing and personalization to avoid making these three common mistakes:

Misinformed website updates

Companies often invest tons of time and money into a complete website overhaul each year (or even every few months), only to find that the new site fares no better—or even worse—than the old. Instead of being attracted to the sparkly new changes, consumers often feel alienated by the inconsistent and constantly shifting branding. After all, if they don’t recognize you, how will they know you’re, well, you?

Even more, companies often don’t fix the actual problems; instead, they focus on the superficial elements they perceive to be the problems. Solving a problem requires first knowing what it is. Let the actions of your visitors show you what works and what doesn’t using A/B and multivariate testing. Testing your website elements and pages will not only reveal your problem areas, it will reveal where on your site you’re experience positive visitor behavior. All of this information should then go to informing minor (or major) site updates, which can lead to significant lifts in conversions. But our end goal goes beyond initial conversion—we’re focused on retention.

Neglecting mobile and tablet

It’s especially sad when a brand goes all out updating their website, but doesn’t take mobile or tablet responsiveness into consideration. There’s little point in having a gorgeous website that’s impossible to navigate on a smartphone. Consumers now expect the same look and feel across web, mobile and tablet-specific apps or sites, yet each platform has its own unique capabilities—and opportunities to learn more about your customers. This additional knowledge can then be used to personalize user experiences across channels. And vice versa.

Landing page tunnel vision

Landing page optimization is a go-to tactic for many marketers looking for a quick fix, but even the best landing pages can’t sustain customer loyalty on their own. Focusing on single pages distracts from the larger picture, which should be the 360-degree customer experience. Knowing what individual customers do, what they like, and how they prefer to engage with your brand can help accomplish this. This knowledge can come from multiple data sources, online and off.

Behavioral targeting is a form of personalization that relies on using these user actions and preferences to inform custom experiences for individual visitors as they navigate each and every page of the site—including landing pages.

Most e-commerce sites still struggle to leverage the growing wealth of customer data to which they have access. This failure to integrate customer relationship management (CRM) activities with online visitor behavior is wasting a significant opportunity to transform CRM into Customer Relationship Marketing.

During the last economic downturn, the Web was the only sales channel that grew, while brick-and-mortar businesses contracted significantly. The Web is now such a powerful, commanding route to market that in some pre-Internet sectors, more than 90% of business is now done online. Moreover, this year Cyber Monday sales alone hit $1.98 billion.

One of the best examples of this growth in e-commerce is the airline industry, which was once dominated by call center activity. Today, JetBlue now handles more than 80 percent of its reservation transactions online. Yet, while Internet businesses have made great progress in catching up with more traditional sales outlets in terms of the breadth and sophistication of their product offerings and how they are presented online, they have failed to integrate their CRM activities, which limits their impact as they try to personalize promotional offers.

Following the Leaders

Amazon.com certainly set the gold standard for best practices in personalization—with its unparalleled ability to recognize and deftly exploit consumers' online browsing and buying habits. But, it also has the advantage that its route to market was 100% Web-based. Certainly, many ecommerce shops attempt to mimic Amazon's highly successful interactions with returning customers ("You were interested in XYZ, so you may enjoy ABC," etc.) -- but most companies are not going far enough, allowing customers to slip through the cracks. For instance, an insurance business may not realize that the person making a call center inquiry about auto insurance was just browsing life insurance offers on the Web the day before calling.

Going for Cross Channel Optimization

However, the website is just one of several channels—and consumers don’t think in channels, they think in brands. So, as hard as some have worked to blend their operations and business data across their brick-and-mortar, call center and Web operations, many gaps still exist.

Disjointed marketing and sales practices are leading to frustrated and disgruntled customers when they are forced to rehash the same details whenever they switch between channels. This scenario is one that causes many customers to abandon their inquiries and take their business elsewhere.

Consider financial services as an example. A bank, which might use its CRM system and propensity modeling to address gaps in a customer's portfolio of products, may suggest a new account upgrade, an improved insurance policy, or a more favorable home equity line through the customer's local branch or a direct mail offer. But what if that same bank knew that a customer had visited its mortgage calculator facility when last visiting its website? This would present an ideal opportunity to make a timely, customized offer. Even more compelling would be to have the offer serve as the primary landing page content presented the next time the customer goes online to transfer money or pay a bill.

The ability to adapt online content for customers and prospects based on their known preferences is a powerful way to build and strengthen relationships, particularly if dovetailed with offline activities.

The Path to CRM Nirvana

he potential impact of personalized marketing over the Web is undisputedly enormous. E-business owners have about seven seconds to capture the attention of an online visitor and engage their interest. If this opportunity is lost, the customer will move to a competitor. And if that competitive experience provides more relevant, personalized content and a pertinent offer, the customer may never come back -- despite previous loyalty to the brand.

Imagine if it were possible provide real-time targeting your visitors while they were still browsing your site, therefore able to influence their final purchase— no hoping for the next visit, no lost opportunities. Instead, you seize the moment, right when it matters. Imagine the possibilities and the revenue potential it could bring.

It is imperative that companies integrate customer data across all channels. Understanding what customers have been doing across channels can make every interaction an extension of what they may have begun elsewhere -- creating a more personal, relevant and rewarding experience for both the customer and the business.

While the majority of organizations appreciate the value of personalization (Forrester Research notes that organizations have wanted to personalize their Web marketing for the past 15 years), only a small minority have actually followed through.

The building blocks exist to get e-businesses started -- organizations can model what customers do as they navigate a site's Web pages, and they can segment this data so it can be used for tailored promotions both on the Web, during a current or future session, or across other channels. Nirvana is a fully integrated CRM solution that feeds into specific online offers.

By waiting to see what the competition does first, companies risk losing the advantage -- and customers. Use the personalization capabilities available today to move swiftly, offer a killer deal, and potentially gain a lifelong customer.

While mobile commerce stats have been rising for quite some time, many retailers have yet to nail its optimal experience. The quick fix of mirroring an online site for mobile applications won’t help here. The trick is figuring out what your customers need most in their on-the-go lives—and acknowledging that your mobile technology and strategy are only as good as the behind-the-scenes commerce ecosystem they support. Your mobile app or site connects the customer with the product, but its success can be greatly affected by several non-mobile factors—especially during the holidays (or other high-traffic buying seasons).

The gravity of factors such as product availability, shipping and delivery times, and seasonality are compounded in the holiday conversion game—online, mobile and in-store. Not only can you expect to see an influx of new visitors, but also previous customers who have switched from site to mobile shopping. And remember, they aren’t shopping for themselves.

This being said, waiting until the day before Christmas to test and optimize mobile promotions or discount offers is too late to start converting visitors into paying customers. However, there are a few checks and balances you can plan for now to ensure that the next few months bring those revenue goals that have been dancing in your head. In particular, make sure you aren’t making any of the following five common commerce mistakes (and if you have, fix them quickly!).

Forgetting to Highlight Holiday Sales and Specials

Nearly every retailer has an abundance of sales and products planned for the holidays to both entice your current customers and bring in new ones. Hopefully you’re planning to deck your site out in a fun, festive style. Are you planning the same for your mobile site?

Many holiday retail consumers use their handheld devices to compare prices and promotional offers. Make sure you are clearly displaying buttons and items within your mobile-friendly site and navigation bar that will lead customers to seasonal hot-ticket items, so you steal their attention before a competitor does.

Concealing Shipping and Stock Status

During the last-minute holiday rush, shoppers who are reassured their precious presents will arrive in time are more likely to buy—regardless of pricing wars. Take a look at your mobile site and consider how this very important holiday shopping information is displayed on both product pages and the purchase funnel.

Specifically in a mobile environment, the impact that font size, location, showing/not showing, color of stock and shipping status has on website conversion rates might surprise you. While no single stock/shipping status strategy is correct for all brands, don’t be afraid to test it thoroughly and make sure your consumers are fully informed to make quick on-the-go purchases.

Forgetting to Integrate Product Reviews

Shopping for others isn’t always easy…and the stress of a holiday gift doesn’t make it any easier. While not all of us are the perfect present pickers, we do prefer gifts that our friends and loved ones (hopefully!) won’t return. So when it comes to holiday shopping, product reviews can have one of the biggest impacts on customer buying decisions.

As we know, with mobile real estate there’s a much smaller surface to play with. But not giving the option of reading product reviews on the mobile site can actually lead to higher bounce rates than desired. Remember that mobile shopping is a fast, on-the-go decision—the more information you can give a consumer, the better. Look at your product pages and determine where a mobile-friendly drop-down menu or selection for reviews can go. Even just having an aggregated “rating” or “star” system placed near the product is a green-light indicator of a great product.

One caveat, though: leave the product reviews for the pre-shopping cart phase. Once customers have clicked “Add to Cart,” don’t distract them with information that isn’t focused on entering credit card details and hitting “Place Order.”

Recommending Products Based on Past Purchases

Behavioral targeting and product recommendations—especially in a very personalized mobile environment—are great ways to increase your average order values and your upsell/cross-sell opportunities, as well as keep your consumers loyal. You’re already expecting an increase in traffic and purchases with the holiday rush, which makes targeting, recommendations and segmentation both easier to achieve and a must-have.

But as holiday shopping ramps up, don’t forget: people are buying gifts, not shopping for themselves. If your targeting engine is set up to promote products based on past purchases made in the off-season, you’re wasting your time. Instead, target based on items they have browsed, clicked or added to their cart or favorites in the past few weeks. If your application or site allows for push messaging or email integration, follow up with messages around those products and/or promotions. And once again, make price comparisons and your sale items easy to find and navigate to on the small screen.

Poorly Designed Error Messaging at the POS

Imagine your prospective buyer with his smartphone in one hand and credit card in the other, precariously typing his card number, expiration date and security code with his thumbs. He hits the submit button and BOOM—no dice. An error has occurred; was it a wrong number? Wrong zip code? Invalid code? The real question is, does your mobile shopper even know what happened? Or is he just giving up, leaving you with yet another abandoned mobile cart to add to your analytics report?

Testing error messaging options is an important component for any site, but it’s especially crucial for small mobile screens. Most user-input errors occur during checkout, registration or form process. Careful attention should be paid to the location, design, display and wording of your error messages. If a mobile visitor can’t see or understand it, repeated frustrations will only lead that customer away from your site before the most important conversion of all—the sale.

So think about applying this to your mobile marketing strategy.   Is how you engage with end users aligned to their daily routines – what they do day in and day out, how they actually behave – or solely based on ‘who’ they are?    We’re all familiar with traditional segmentation.   But what’s more helpful – knowing that I’m categorized as a “suburban sports enthusiast” or knowing that I make the same drive, around the same time each day and am 73% more likely to respond to a SMS offer in the morning rather than in the afternoon?

One might argue that marketing to ‘segments’ isn’t much better than mass marketing.  So, what is the alternative?  The alternative is having a ‘dynamic understanding of the user’.   What is that you ask?   Bear with me and let’s break it down:

dy·nam·ic/dīˈnamik/ (of a process or system) Characterized by constant change, activity, or progress

+

un·der·stand·ing/ˌəndərˈstandiNG/ the power to make experience intelligible by applying concepts and categories

+

us·er/ˈyo͞ozər/ one who consumes or employs a good or service to obtain a benefit or to solve a problem

=

Delivering an experience aligned to an individual’s needs which is driven by continuous analysis and application of learnings over time.

Taking a snapshot of a user delivers little value for a mobile marketer.   Sure, someone standing on the street corner in NYC may be interested in an offer from the local Thai restaurant.   But they could also hate Thai food, be visiting from the west coast, and have zero time in their schedule to swing by for your Pad Thai lunch special.

With mobile, it’s about being able to determine patterns and habits – and just as important – aligning how you engage with the user to that understanding.    Easier said than done, right?

It’s not an easy task but the good news is – it’s not an impossible task either.   Mobile marketers are beginning to use technologies that not only aggregate the massive amounts of ‘big data’ that mobile brings in, but also continuously analyze the data to determine a user’s behavior (aka: habits) and time series (aka: best time to engage the user).   With ongoing analysis that takes into account changes, patterns, and actions taken, marketers gain insight into a user’s lifecycle – versus capturing a mere snapshot in time – and are able to base customer engagement off of the predicted action of an individual user.   For the mobile channel, this is the golden ticket.   We’re bombarded by email and snail mail but with something as personal as our mobile device – which is with us constantly I might add – none of us are as forgiving to irrelevant, impersonal communications.   By determining the dynamic understanding of a user, marketers can move beyond one-off, hit or miss mobile campaigns to delivering ongoing experiences that are valuable and relevant for the user.

Let’s go back to the user on the street corner in NYC.  By leveraging analytics we can go beyond the fact that it’s 11:23 am on Tuesday morning and determine that this user works in a business park three blocks away, is more likely to go out for lunch on Mondays and Fridays, and has a higher probability of opening a SMS offer with a dollar discount versus a percentage discount.

Yes, it’s possible.  It just requires a shift from traditional segmentation to newer techniques that incorporate an ongoing and dynamic understanding of a user’s needs and the best contexts to meet those needs.  For those who are doing it, the results speak for themselves – dramatic increases in conversions and revenues and reduced cost of revenue.

Whether you’re a mobile operator, brand, retailer, or other mobile marketer, leveraging the data (ALL of it) to engage with your users when it matters most can make or break your mobile marketing success.

So ask yourself – are you delivering experiences that are aligned to your individual users’ needs and habits?   Are you engaging individuals in ways that drive the behaviors you’re trying to influence e.g., accepting an offer, driving them to your retail location, building awareness of your brand?

If not, now’s the time to rethink your strategy.

Buyer Trend: Buyer Behavior Changing Rapidly and Buyers Are Saying – Get Me Please!

Evident over the past two years are monumental shifts that are occurring in buyer behavior.  We’ve seen buyers entering the buying stages in unpredictable ways and deferring direct interactions further down the buying process.  There have been generational differences noted between the rise of the younger social buyer as well as hybrid behaviors of traditional buyers.  Buyers at first seemingly consuming information at a rabid thirst pace while other buyer groups demonstrating content fatigue and rejecting content outright.

Rather than rehash the mountain of information that can be found about what buyers are exhibiting, suffice to say that buyers are adapting, changing, evolving, and developing new processes along the way.  We know, to a degree, what buyers are doing.  And data-driven marketing and BIG data has become BIG business to tell us what buyers are doing.

In the past two plus years, we are seeing a rise in the analytical push and explosion in the wont for data.  This is turning into a Catch-22 dilemma for C-Suite executives.  While research can be found that data-driven companies do outperform non-data driven companies, the C-Suites in corporate worlds can be drowning in data and can never hear the still voice of their existing customers and prospective buyers.  This dilemma is most certainly compounding the issue of unpredictability about buyers in the future.

What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?

There is no question that the C-Suite and perhaps in particular the CMO is under constant duress to figure out how to find the right mix of products, services, and experiences that make loyal customers and wins over prospective buyers.  I suspect that on any given day of the week, a C-Suite member is pouring over the data explosion taking place and attempting to decipher what insight can be useful for predicting how buyers will behave and buy.

Here’s a problem we all know business has.  When it comes to looking at the future – we just do a plain bad job at it.  We’ve been trained, conditioned, brainwashed, whipped, and had the fear of the devil put in to us to rely on BIG data as a way of planning and predicting the future.  And to some degree, analytics and data help us to find out what buyers are most likely to do in the future.  But, is BIG data on its’ own a reliable measure of outcome?  While I am not certain, I am willing to guess that the 80/20 rule applies here with 80% of the C-Suite not being able to give an affirmative yes to that question.

What the C-Suite needs to do is balance the equation on finding out how to predict as well as meet buyer goals.  The C-Suite of the future will come to rely on BIG insights and see such interwoven into their strategy planning.  By BIG insights I refer to the qualitative nature of research that gets to the most important questions of how and why buyers behave as they do to make purchase decisions.  Giving us the BIG insights that can help us to plan for a future in ways buyers have yet to envision even for themselves.  The C-Suite today must add BIG insight to the equation of being informed about buyers and making sound decisions that will put them on their existing customer’s and prospective buyer’s computer or tablet screen consistently.

The problem that has always plagued BIG data is that it is an analytical view of past results – it is rooted in a past-to-present orientation.  And past results are important.  I am not saying they are not.  What I am saying is that buyer behavior is changing so rapidly that the C-Suite must balance out the equation to attain the deep understanding of buyers that is focused on future orientation.  An equation that leads to BIG insights that also shapes the organization’s future relationships with existing customers and prospective buyers

The Future

In the present and in the future, C-Suite leaders will be called to lead their organizations in distinguishing between data that is factual in nature and insights which helps to inform decisions.  This is where it gets tricky.  The existing dialogue about BIG data uses language about insights – and to be sure there is insight to be had quantitatively.  However, there are BIG insights to be had qualitatively that propel the organization forward into a future that they co-create with existing customers and prospective buyers.  The C-Suite of the future will look at shifting resources to be more balanced between quantitative data and qualitative insights that are achieved through mixed qualitative investigative methods.  The quest for deeper insights will grow as it becomes the path to finding ways to differentiate in a constantly changing social world.

What buyers are saying today is pretty simple.  They are saying “you are not going to get me just on numbers and facts.”  Buyers are evolving a new expectation.  That is, they want you to "get" them qualitatively and they want you to “get” them in ways that will help them.  What I’ve discovered through qualitatively research is that while today buyers want to self-direct their own buying processes and minimize sales involvement, they are future oriented towards committing to a relationship that will help them grow.

Are you ready to invest in the BIG insights that will guide your organization to exactly what that relationship is suppose to look like?

(Photo by Kenny Madden © All rights reserved)

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This is the first of a series of articles planned on looking at buyer trends that will influence marketing and sales in the near and foreseeable future.  This article looks at how buyers are seeking experiences and the new role of the C-Suite as experience creators.

Buyer Trend: Overwhelmed By Content

During the past two years, we’ve seen a significant rise in focus on content and how content is the new marketing.  While some may debate that content marketing is messaging in new clothing, it is now a competency that marketing executives need to assure getting right.  We’ve learned in the past few years about the value as well as the role content can play in the early stages of buying processes.  In light of the heightened and almost frenzied attention paid to content marketing, there has been much written - and I’m sure internal meetings held in corporations all over the world  - on the “how-to” of content creation.  This has led to a crying game in the corporate halls bewailing the need for publishers and journalists to come in and help.

Content creation has become a driving force in marketing and sales organizations.  So much so, buyers today are faced with the unintended consequences of information overload and content fatigue.  They are often faced with the daunted task of sorting through myriads of information that will allow them to learn and hopefully help them to make an informed purchase decision.  In essence, a buyer trend is evolving whereby managing and filtering information is becoming overwhelming.

Experience, as a unique form of competitive advantage, has suffered through its own identity crisis during the past decade.  Customer experience has had the unintended consequences of being identified as predominantly beefing up customer service capabilities.  At the same time, we have seen companies who have done admirable innovation of truly unique experiences that cut across an entire organization’s functions.  What we are seeing today however is resurgence in the original intentions of The Experience Economy as put forth by B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore.  That is, people - be they consumers or B2B buyers - want to be part of an experience in its totality.  They want to enter stage left or stage right into a theatre of experience and onto the business stage being offered.

What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?

I chose to use the word creation intentionally to label from content creation to experience creation.  Both require that mixing of skill, talent, knowledge, and intuition to put forth something new and creative.  What C-Suite leaders can do is begin to shift the focus from purely on content creation and lead the organization to see the context of the end game.  The end game being creating experiences that provides a stage in which buyers can play a leading role.  This requires new thinking.  What may sound like a semantics difference is truly a corporate mind shift that must occur.  While on one hand it is important to provide excellent customer experiences, on the other hand it is entirely a different matter for an organization to see themselves as experience creators.

Instilling such a mind set into corporate culture is no easy shift.  Companies seeing themselves as experience creators’ means looking at content creation in terms of how it fits as an essential piece of creating an experience buyers want to be a part of.  It requires the C-Suite to discover new talent that can in effect create a theatre of experience.  Using the metaphor offered by Pine and Gilmore, leaders today will need to find producers of experience and find directors who are skilled at interweaving content, conversations, interactions, and roles into the production of buyer experience.  Content creation can be likened to, in this metaphor, as scriptwriting.  Writing content that makes the experience vision and the artful direction required come alive for buyers.  The focus becoming one of creating content that fits into the overall vision of the experience and discovering, just as scriptwriters write in pauses and silence, that less can be more.

The Future

As we look to the future, the C-suite will in effect become the producers and directors of the experience theatre a company builds.  Allowing buyers to participate in as well as experience a story on a business stage that unfolds and marvels them each and every time.  One of my favorite theater productions has been A Chorus Line.  No matter how many times I see it, I still get emotionally wrapped up in the story, the script, the music, the choreography, and the experience of the production.    Organizations today must create their own version of the longest running Broadway show that buyers want to return to and revel in the experience more than once.

While the corporate hallways may be filled with talk bemoaning the need for the talents of journalists or publishers, the C-Suite who sees themselves as experience creators will have a keen eye towards finding the brilliant producing, directing, and scriptwriting talent that can build a theatre of experience.  Creating a theatre of experience that builds the anticipation, engages buyers in the story, and has them talking afterwards – each and every time.

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Any way you look at, the competition, both online and offline, will likely be cut-throat, yet again. As consumers becoming more shopping savvy and consult your website for their gift-buying tasks, it’s important you make sure you’re ready to serve them the best performing content, offers and online experience that turns them from browsers and bargain-hunters into paying customers.

1. Get in the holiday spirit. #Obvious

Hopefully you’re already on this one, but customizing your website with a festive look and feel lets people know your holiday sales have started. Clearly display the items most likely to sell during the holiday season on the most popular pages.

2. Don’t Overdo Dynamic Elements

Resist the urge to have snow falling, lights flashing and stars sparkling all over home page. Video, banner ads and flash can be great elements to enhance the online customer experience, but only in small doses. Numerous tests with our clients have shown that visitors need at least 1-2 static page elements in order to maintain their focus, and thus their ability to convert into a paying customer.

3. Test your campaigns, now and later

Yes, retail sites undoubtedly stay busy year-round, with peak selling times during the obvious seasons. But if you’ve waited to test and optimize your promotions or discount offers on the day before Christmas, you’re too late.

Holiday shopping is going to bring you wealth of new and returning visitors. It’s a great time to (well any time is) to enlist the help of live multivariate testing and iterative tweaking to drive higher conversion rates. Even subtle changes such as font size, color and language can have a huge impact on revenues. Continually test different variations to see what yields the best results, and monitor results for both in-season and off-season traffic.

4. Segment & Personalize for the Season

As I said, you know you’ll have an influx in traffic and purchases, and you’ve put in a lot of work into your sales, promotions and branding. Personalization and targeting are excellent for increasing conversion, but remember, people are buying gifts, not shopping for themselves. So don’t spend too much time targeting based on their past purchases in the off-season—it may not have much of an impact since they are shopping for a loved one, friend, co-worker, etc.

5. Highlight the Timely Items: Shipping and Stock Status

For the inner-procrastinator in all of us! Those visitors who fall into mad-dash-last-minute shopping segment are need to focus on two important elements: shipping dates and stock status. The comfort this consumer receives in knowing that you have it in stock and they’ll receive it on time, no matter if there is a slight price difference, can help to ensure you win the business instantly. This is a huge factor in behavioral targeting and personalization, since consumer mindset inevitably changes, and purchase behavior, as well as browsing activity, will be impacted.

6. Analyze your Shopping Cart

Speaking of customer behavior, there is no better place to plan for and understand your actual consumers than at the check-out process. Analyzing buyer behavior from all your channels (not just the website!) is the most indicative and predictive data set for setting up successful segmentation and recommendations: discover what people actually buy, uncover buying patterns and help influence inventory decisions.

Marrying offline and online data from CRM, web analytics, POS output, call centers and mobile commerce will ensure you have a 360-degree buyer view to begin targeting and tailoring for your consumers. After the all the data nuptials are complete, analyzing behaviors such as “Bought this, Bought That” and “Best Sellers” will have you homing in on the best cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, for all your point-of-sale outlets.

7. Play Around with Pricing Presentation

You’ve probably got a few sales, discounts and promotions planned this season, but have you thought about how they actually look, rather than what they say? Time and time again, marketers are surprised at the impact that font, location, showing/not showing, and color of product pricing has on website conversion rates, While no single pricing strategy is correct for all brands, don’t be afraid to test it. We have found that some sites perform better without revealing the price before the product gets to the cart, while others convert visitors better by being up front about it. See what your visitors think—the results may surprise you.

8.  Don’t Be Afraid to Let Go of Brand Guidelines

It’s not likely that your brand guidelines always fit directly with the website elements—especially during the holiday season—that are the best converting content. That’s why multivariate testing and A/B testing is an investigation not only into your website elements, but also your brand. If your consumers perceive you differently than you believe them to, your website approach could be hurting conversions. Sticking strictly to the brand guidelines—whether in what you choose to test or change—might never lead you to discover that some brand-approved copy, tone, colors, page template, or call-to-actions, are holding you back from higher conversion rates.

9.  Share the Love, Corporately Speaking

It’s no secret that it takes many forms (and people) of marketing in order to meet your brands revenue goals. And today’s internet-savvy consumer population is sure to land on your website at some point, so it’s best keep the lines of optimization communication open. Ensure all marketing departments and relevant employees are in the loop about your goals, website changes and promotions for this holiday season —so that SEO, direct mail, email, PPC, call centers, etc. are primed to collect and use the right optimization data when you’re ready to move to a true multi-channel marketing approach.

10. Get ready for the January sales

Many consumers are now spending just as much money in the New Year as they are in true holiday buying season. Make sure you are able to hit the ground running in January with fresh mobile content and product offers in order to stand out from the crowd. Remember to use live testing to help determine which offers have the most positive impact on your sales.

To learn more about conversion rate optimization in the online retail industry, check out the new retail white paper, "Capturing the Promiscuous Customer: How Online Retailers Can Use Testing & Targeting to Curb Disloyalty & Increase Conversion Rates" just released by Maxymiser—a company specializing in increasing the online revenue potential of online retailers. Find out more on to make your business faster, smarter and better with testing and optimization.

Relationship marketing is a hot topic in marketing today. It’s definitely not a new concept. But still there continues to be a lot of buzz around the concept. Why? Because it evolves. As our society, media and technologies evolve, the practice of relationship marketing evolves along. So it’s not the concept or thought that changes, but our ability to actually practice relationship marketing in more and more effective ways. The latest in relationship marketing is the concept of Customer Experience Management (CXM), and it might just enable us to make a big leap forward.

Targeted marketing
Marketing becomes more effective once it becomes more specific. That’s a given. In today’s web 2.0 environment, we use social media and targeting to reach very specific audiences with specific messages. And it’s proving it’s worth. Targeted ads work better then non-targeted ads. The biggest web 2.0 media companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn) owe their success to exactly this practice. Allowing advertisers to bring the right message to the right person at the right time.

Is targeting relationship-marketing?
But we all know, the more targeted the ad, the higher the price. Reaching out to the right people costs money. So we have to ask ourselves, do we generate enough return from this investment? Driving the right audience to our website using targeted ads sounds like proper start to relationship marketing, right? But how do we really leverage this? Right now, we often try to create the best landing page and aim for that conversion or sale. Great, except what if your visitor leaves, and comes back later. Do you still know what targeted group that visitor belonged to? Probably not, your ad network has that data, but you don’t.

I’d almost say that if a prospect clicks on a targeted ad on an external site, lands on our landing page and the conversion doesn't happen, we forget who that prospect was again. At later encounters, we just start over again. Don’t we care anymore? Didn’t we pay premium to know who this person is? It seems like we’re often still using relationship-marketing tools for transactional goals. Why? Because it was simply the best we could. Relationship-marketing can only be used as effective as the methods or systems that we have at hand.

Introducing CXM
Today, marketers start to see issues like this, and increasingly are building/adapting solutions to solve them. A recent popular solution seems to be a central hub that captures and tracks profiles of visitors on you site, gathering all kinds of demographic, behavioral and relationship information, to give them a better experience, build a relationship and sell more targeted products. These holistic online marketing hubs are what we since recently call Customer Experience Management solutions.

Customer Experience Management is a concept that describes how we are integrating all dialogues (potentially both offline and online) with our audience. The idea is to have a central marketing hub that holds information about the interactions that an individual has had with your brand. Enabling you as a marketer to always build on from where you left off. In the earlier example of the targeted ad, we’ll remember the demographics or the specific interest of that visitor. So from now on, building profiles includes more then just the social media channels, it’s encompasses your website, your mobile app, your e-mail channel, and any other online (or occasionally offline) channels that you might hook up to it. More then that, marketers also make sure their CXM platform talks to the CRM, DAM, PIM or other databases.

Not just listening
But the main thing that makes CXM so popular right now among online marketers is that it doesn’t just track conversations and relationships across channels. It also allows us to actively run campaigns that extend upon these relationships again, on all these different channels. Imaginable, this holistic and actionable view of the visitor will have major implications for the developments of relationship-marketing that we are going to see in the coming years. Marketers are not only gaining insights about their audience like never before, the ROI on social media marketing and online relationship-building efforts might finally grow out of its experimental phase.

With the introduction of CXM, we might just be making a great leap forward in getting a grip on our drifting audience again. So keep an eye out for these developments. Or to learn a little more about the details, listen to this short interview I recently had with industry analyst Tony White about CXM for a webinar that he recently gave.

Online engagement is about just that. Creating the best online experiences for the visitors on your different channels. Experiences that clearly benefit both your visitor and your brand. Whether discounts, give-aways or promotions, win-win is still one of the best ways to win customers. So how can we create win-win experiences with our increasingly dispersed and heterogeneous audience? One way is to use profiling to get to know your audience. Here’s an introduction on how to make online profiling work for you and your online visitors in 4 steps.

1 Objectives go both ways

When designing an online experience, always start with an objective in mind. That’s a no-brainer. But do you also realize that every one of your goals should be linked to your visitor’s goals?
Think about it. If you were Ikea for instance, and wanted to sell more children’s furniture, your customer’s goal might be to buy a bed for their five-year-old child. More specifically perhaps, a bed that can last for at least five years as the child grows. From the match in these objectives, we can create ideas for an online experience.

What if you would create a simple tool on your website that allows parents to predict what their child’s length will be after a number of years. The information filled into this tool could be used not just to offer a suitable bed, but also for later promotions. For instance because age, length and perhaps even gender of the child is known, the Ikea website could offer the right products, promotions and even send tailored e-mails.

2 What’s in it for them

“Why would I spend my time on your website”, a question that every visitor poses, consciously or unconsciously. The answer is straightforward. An appealing benefit. This can be a game, a download, information, a discount, anything. In case of the previous example it’s easy, you help your customer in their buying journey. But even before your online visitor is ready to buy, you can offer them things that can help you to get to know who they are. In the case of Ikea for instance, what if you were to offer them coloring pages? All your website’s visitors who download one, are potential buyers of children’s furniture products. In other words, producing content that holds value (or fun) for your online visitors, could very well become very useful to get to know the person on the other side of the cable.

3 What’s in it for you?

Producing ‘free content’ isn’t free, nor is offering ‘free give-aways’. So what’s the benefit for you as an online marketer? The answer is, we want to get to know our online visitors and target the right content to them on our website, in order to sell more effectively. Isn’t it strange that we pay a premium for targeted ads, but once a prospect leaves the specific landings page that we build, we seem to forget exactly what we paid that premium for: the visitor’s profile info. But online engagement is not just about selling products. What if you find out there’s a lot of parents on your website, or a lot of students. This can tell you how to steer your content-production efforts, or how to tailor online experiences and create a more effective overall website.

4 Measuring online engagement results

Obviously the way you measure online engagement depends on the goals that you set. Likes, traffic, conversions, sales, etc. The more you want to know, the more complex measurement will become. That’s why planning how to measure the success of your online engagement is an important part of the process prior to actually rolling it out. Keeping it simple is usually the golden rule here. Two or three metrics usually give enough information about campaign performance.

More importantly, metrics from online engagement campaigns can lead to great ideas on new online engagement experiences. Say you were to discover that e-mail campaigns based on online behavior is really well received. Or downloads that guide your visitors through the buying cycle boost conversions. That’s some actionable knowledge!

Think about it, what engagement would you create if you had access to your visitor’s online profiles?

The entrance into the social age and the emergence of the new buyer experience economy has challenged our understanding of who the buyer really is.  As we entered this year, I predicted that it may very well be the year of the buyer.  And the pronounced use of the term buyer has undoubtedly increased substantially.  The buyer however can easily be referred to as an object of our inside-out efforts and represent a shell of which we do not really know what is inside.  In essence, we do not know the soul of the buyer.

Since post World War II, we’ve engaged in our view of the buyer in a very factual and quantitative way.  We could call it something like “object thinking”.  We relied on numbers and facts to tell us exactly who buyers are.  Treating buyers as objects in the larger scheme of producing products and services where, particularly in the B2B context, we delivered the product or services to the buyer.  This seemed to work – merrily in fact for many companies.  This all changed when the Internet came along.   It seems like slowly buyers were set free from the delivery mechanisms that existed in both B2B and B2C worlds.  Buyers were suddenly allowed to search for other ways to get the products or services they needed.

In a previous article, I offered up the notion that we are entering into the new buyer experience economy.  This shift into a new economy based on buyer’s demanding rewarding buying experiences means peering into the soul of the buyer.  Finding ways to break through the current mode of the buyer as a shell and learning what is inside.  And this is where experience matters.  Experiences allow us to learn the how and why of buyer journeys, behaviors, and decisions.  These types of qualitative variables come together to give us a window into the soul of the buyer.

The world of social networking and advances in B2C experiences has caused consumer sentiments to overlap into business sentiments now.  Putting it plainly, the expectations of B2B buyers are starting to mirror that of B2C buyers.  Why shouldn’t they receive the same level of buying experiences that they may get from a Zappos for instance?  At issue is how to examine the soul of the buyer – or – how do we get inside the soul of the buyer?

Many of us have had soul searching moments and periods throughout our lives.  In life, soul searching takes contemplation, deep thought, struggle to makes sense out of what seem to be disconnected moments, life changes, and most of all time.  To examine the soul of the buyer in this transformative period, should we not take the time to learn qualitatively about who the buyer really is now?  Should we really be taking shortcuts or continue to work from decades old assumptions?  What would we learn if we treated the idea of giving the same amount of time and examination that we may give to personal and life affecting soul searching?

Gathering deep buyer insight, whereby buyer persona development is a rich qualitative means to do so, gives us clues to buyer character, thoughts, attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, and most importantly goals.  Perhaps emerging from the economic crisis of the past few years, just as we see consumer sentiments blending with business sentiments, we are seeing life goals blending with business goals.  Thus, learning about buyer goals is essential for this reason – our failure to do so means we will continue to view the buyer as soulless.  The buyer remains an object of our efforts to deliver products and services as well as lacking in understanding about exactly who the buyer is.

How we hold our view of buyers has significant implications for the world of marketing strategy whereby content strategy, content marketing, demand generation, and the changing role of sales is on center stage.  Leaders in C-Suite roles are making decisions today in these areas and also in the trajectory of their organizations as they navigate the turbulent waters of the changing economy and buyer behaviors.  The view they hold of buyers directly affects the decisions they make and the trajectory they chart for their organizations.  If a C-Suite has an “object view” orientation of buyers beholden to traditional methods of factual and quantitative data, or shall we say buyers without a soul, then where they take their organizations into the future may be a place undergoing a dwindling buyer population.

The overriding imperative appears to be that C-Suite leaders will need to change their view of buyers and will need to gather deep buyer insights.  Recognizing that when they change the way they look at buyers, how they view buyers will change.  This recognition will allow for a window into the soul of the buyer that ultimately changes the trajectory they chart for their organization.

According to a recent Satmetrix Net Promoter study, one in five consumers switch brands based on a bad buying experience and/or bad customer experience.  Satmetrix, in their 2011 Net Promoter Industry Benchmarks study, conducted surveys with over 20,000 consumers.  What they found was that approximately 22% of consumers stopped doing business based on a bad customer experience.  The study also found that the number one source of trusted recommendations came from family, friends, and colleagues with a majority very willing to share their buying and customer experiences.  Consumers surveyed further showed that they put more trust into what their friends and colleagues shared than in advertisements or content.

What I found most interesting is that a whopping 83% trusted independent sources with which they had a personal relationship over advertising or content.  Family, friends, and colleagues made up the majority of these independent sources.  However, the impact of social media and the digital age is becoming evident in this study.  Nearly 20% of those surveyed indicated they engaged in the buying behaviors of researching online product reviews and other buyer opinions.  This will undoubtedly grow over the next decade.

The Satmetrix study also showed that buyer experience interactions were closely associated to defection.  The three top reasons, in order, why consumers switch brands were:

• An interaction with a rude employee
• Unexpected charges or fees
• Poor quality of the product or service

This study shows that the buyer experience is becoming the primary difference maker in at least the B2C world.  With an increasing blending of consumer sentiments into B2B business sentiments, this has profound implications for B2B organizations as well.  If organizations, be they B2C or B2B, have not evaluated their spending on advertising and content recently, this study indicates that the tidal wave of change in consumer and buyer behavior is quite large and that organizations should get this on their agenda.  Likewise, this study is also a de facto manifesto to assess how well they are doing on buyer experience.  The study serves as a mandate to attain relevant and timely insight into how consumer or buyer interactions with their organization can be reinvented.

The rise of the digital age and social media networks makes experience highly visible to interested communities of buyers.  Bad buying and customer experiences will travel through these networks like a flash flood leaving organizations gasping for air as they attempt to stymie the tide of defections.  The admission price may be the obvious of a high quality product or service but getting the not-so-obvious buyer experience right is where a business will succeed or fail on buyer retention and acquisition goals.  Getting at the not-so-obvious buying and customer experiences that consumers or buyers desire will require companies to shift resources they may be devoting to advertising and content currently.  These shifted resources going towards first attaining critical buyer insight through in-depth qualitative research and second towards designing buyer experiences that reduces the risks of defections.

What is obvious in the digital age and in the new buyer experience economy is that no amount of advertising or content produced will overcome bad buyer experiences.  If consumers or buyers encounter an unsatisfactory buyer experience, you can be sure that others are going to find out about it.  The difference now is that instead of just a few family, friends, and colleagues finding out, the potential for hundreds and even thousands of existing and potential buyers to find out is very real.

In the past decade, we have undergone a monumental shift in how sellers and buyers engage.  The digital revolution has ushered in a new age of how products or services reach people that were unimaginable just a short ten years ago.  Advancements in technology and digital media coming in waves causing organizations to be caught unaware of the impact the totality of these waves have had on their businesses.  In many ways, buyers and sellers are attempting to engage as if they are in a department store and sellers are on the down escalator and buyers are passing them by on the up escalator.   This is most notable in the B2B spectrum of marketplaces.

In 1999, B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore published The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business is a Stage.  A truly groundbreaking book that made a lasting impression upon me around the same time persona development was taking shape.  Pine and Gilmore can be characterized as oracles for they offered the premise that we were entering an experience economy where value was created by staging memorable experiences for customers.  Many successful B2C entities, such as Disney, leveraged the principle of staging a theme to create memorable experiences.  As the digital age takes root into the fabric of our economy, CEO’s today, and most appropriately those in the B2B marketplaces, must begin to think about the new era of the buyer experience economy and how it impacts their organization.

Let’s take a look at some areas where the new buyer experience economy will cause rethinking:

1. Buying channels versus selling channels: since the dawning of the industrial and manufacturing age, selling became a downstream endeavor.  The mandate being finding channels to push and distribute products or services out to buyers.  The digital age has ushered in a new way of thinking.  That being, creating channels that are upstream and enabling buyers to find you and engage.
2. New media adoption: for some B2B markets, adopting new forms of digital media that enable buyers to engage and find you is proving to be disruptive.  I am going to shy away from using the often used term of content marketing for the moment.  While quality content is important, the larger strategic question for CEO’s to think about is what new forms of media are relevant to their buyers?
3. How to organize:  This may be especially tough for companies who have a long and rich tradition of large field sales departments where in some cases today even free doughnuts cannot buy an appointment.  The old school of compartmentalizing processes into sales, marketing, and service is in serious need of an extreme makeover.  Companies need to discover new ways to organize that allows for exceptional buying experiences and removes barriers.
4. Buyer experience design as a core competency: While experience design and the notion of customer experience have been around for a few years, B2B organizations as a whole have not embraced these as necessary core competencies.  Yes, there are exceptions and some B2B companies have done well in reinventing themselves.  By and large though, these efforts have been coined under the labels of initiative, project, program, and the likes.  And we all know what happens to those things called initiatives, projects, and programs after the first year.
5. Buying conversation versus selling conversation:  Interwoven into the DNA of B2B organizations is the many years of sales training, sales programs, and sales systems that have as its aim to begin a selling conversation with buyers.  Tremendous investments have been made in selling methodologies and sales systems all promising the results of improved sales performance and increased revenues.  Additionally, marketing structure and purpose has been oriented towards supporting selling conversations.  There seems to be a problem however if organizations continue to be wedded to their existing sales processes and marketing support systems.  Buyers, in the new buyer experience economy, appear to want entirely different conversations.  This is not a dire prediction about the end of sales.  Far from it.  What is true in a new buyer experience economy is that there needs to be a new understanding and rethinking of exactly what constitutes a conversation with buyers today.

Companies who embrace the notion that the new economic difference maker will be that of the buyer experience will find themselves as the market leaders of a new era.  A new era that not only sets a stage and theme for experience but also enables buyers to create buying experiences that are unique to them.

Content marketing has become more and more part of the planning dialogue for organizations as the digital age continues to mature.  The concept of content marketing recognizes the growing importance of content to move buyers and consumers towards an action such as a decision, purchase, subscription, and enrollment.  Undoubtedly, the proliferation of the varietal forms and media of content that has arisen in the digital age has helped position content marketing as the overarching term to fit these new formats into an understandable phrase, idea, and concept.

What is becoming more evident each year is that organizations need to move from thinking about which forms and media to use to employing experience design thinking into content creation.  While experience design has its’ roots in product design and later with customer experience, there are crossover applied principles that can be beneficial to the emerging field of content marketing.  What I believe content marketers need to be careful with is taking the term Marketing or Marketer too literally.  What I mean by this is that if content creation is done solely through marketing thinking, it can be hard to stop the inertia of that rolling boulder buyers refer to as spin coming right at them.  Thus, we could fall into the trap of spinning our way right out of the buyer’s mind.

One of my favorite comments I heard last year was Paul Greenberg’s manifesto that buyers and consumers do not want to be an object of a sale but rather a subject of an experience.  Content creation, without experience design thinking, is prone to the former versus the later.  The end result the same – the continual feed of spin in different forms and media that leaves buyers and consumers feeling more like an object of a sale.

Where should content marketing start then?  It should start with understanding the buyer and the consumer at a very deep level.  Content creation is a powerful way to respond to ideas, emotions, perceptions, behaviors, moments, and mindsets.  Note I use the phrase respond to as oppose to shape.  All too often, what is attempted in sales and marketing is done under the false presumption that we can fully shape a buyer’s or consumer’s mind to how we want them to think.  One of the main reasons I’ve seen organizations place little value on qualitative research and overemphasize quantitative research for targeting those they want to shape.

One of the key principles of experience design is to obtain a deep qualitative understanding of your user, buyer, or consumer.  It is only through this means can we begin to understand how to respond to the buyer’s or consumer’s mind through content creation.  We respond to an understanding of processes, mental perceptions, issues, and goals of the buyer or consumer.   Designing the content experience to help buyers or consumers reach understanding and decisive moments that maps back to their issues and goals.  As a long-time advocate and proponent of the use of user, consumer, and buyer personas, it is important for content marketers to fully grasp the power of personas to help them reach this deep understanding that is a prerequisite for effective content marketing. While the role of content designer has been around for a short while specifically for web development, I would advocate that organizations think about the role of content experience designer that is a member of an experience design group in the consumer world or a member of a buyer experience design group in the B2B world.

The emerging field of content marketing’s long-term success and role in the digital age is predicated on the blending of experience design and marketing thinking.  Challenging organizations to overcome the ever present problems associated with silo thinking and non-aligned sales and marketing.  One thing we do know now is that the failure to incorporate experience design thinking into content creation can mean that the overall effectiveness of content marketing in an organization can prove to be fruitless.

Forrester recently came out with their 2010 Customer Experience Index. The index was based on three measures: 1) meeting needs; 2) easy to work with; and 3) enjoy-ability. Their CxPi index ranks 133 organizations across 14 industries. Note: there wasn’t a measure on exceeding customer expectation. Meeting customer expectations, and being cheerful when doing it, is all customers want.

Consistency matters most
Several years ago, I worked at Starbucks heading up Starbucks.com. One thing all new (non-retail) employees were required to do was go through an “immersion” where you work in a store for a period of time. The purpose was NOT to learn how to make a perfect cup of coffee (actually the store manager would only let me grind beans and sweep) but to get a rich understanding of the Starbucks culture and customer experience.

For three weeks, I became witness to what makes the Starbucks’ experience so great. It wasn’t a free scone, drink coupon, or magical moment. It was consistency. Starbucks is amazing at setting customer expectation and meeting it throughout the delivery process. Baristas and managers see the same customers each day and know what they expect.

Imagine going to your favorite Starbucks to buy your regular nonfat vanilla latte and instead they serve you a venti caramel macchiato. The barista says, “We value you so much I made you this instead. Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay anything extra.” On the next visit, you order your regular drink and instead get a small frap. And this time the barista says nothing.

At Starbucks, some baristas start preparing a customer’s drink before they walk in the door. That’s intimacy based on trust. Customers trust that Starbucks will get it right every time.

Dig into the data
What industries ranked in the top half of the Forrester study? Retailers and Hospitality. What industry ranked at the bottom half? Telcos and Cable providers.

What makes Starbucks able to deliver such consistency? It’s all those baristas and managers who monitor what’s going on in the store, from how long the queue is to when the drip is down, to if tables need to cleaned. It’s THE data they collect.

Most businesses talk about delivering exceptional customer experience, but most barely know what the current experience is. As a result they tend to shoot for the moon; because most times they have no idea what kind of service they are actually delivering.

Experience IS every touch
So if delivering a great customer experience is all about gathering data, why do other industries like telcos rank so low? With so much data (e.g., CDR, billing, purchase, profile, network data, etc.), wireless carriers should have a holistic view of the customer. So why aren’t they delivering a great customer experience?

It’s because when most wireless carriers think of the customer experience, they do so through the very narrow lens of either marketing or customer care.

With the former, customer experience is viewed as a “marketing” thing comparable to loyalty. “Let’s have marketing target customers with offers and upsell. And don’t forget to try to recon them before their contract is up.”

With the latter, customer care is the “spill bucket” capturing all of the customer complaints, and dispensing credits for misalignment in what the customer expects and what is delivered . “I am sorry you were sold our wireless service when we don’t offer coverage in your neighborhood. How about a new handset?”

What carriers often forget is that every interaction adds or detracts from the customer experience. Something as seemingly benign as the bill is the biggest touch point (and symbol of service value) carriers have with their customers. It can either meet a customer’s expectation or smack them in the face with a whopping surprise.

Let’s face it. Even more than your favorite beverage, there is nothing more personal than a customer’s mobile device. Wireless carriers are well poised to deliver that simple experience that delights customers just by doing what they say will each and every time.

The coffee guys have it right. A great customer experience is about doing consistently what the customer expects, delivering it in a personalized way, and without all that marketing fluff.

“Oh, thank you for my nonfat vanilla latte. It’s just the way I like it!”

Initially, service will only be provided to San Francisco (SFO) and LAX from DFW. However, I’ll be shocked if Virgin doesn’t expand in the near future because of how different their approach to air travel is compared to their competitors. Virgin America’s mission is to provide low-fare, high-quality service for long-haul, point-to-point service between major metropolitan cities on the East and West Coast. This seems like a typical goal for a major airline, but is Virgin America really focused on customer service, not just more transactions? Based on everything I’ve read to date, I believe they are trying to do three things better than their competition.

1.         Ensure its brand experience is consistent across all touch points. It is irrelevant how new the aircraft is or how great the onboard amenities are if potential customers have a negative experience booking travel. Most likely it will be consumers’ first contact with the brand. Virgin America has won the Zagat’s annual airline survey for midsized domestic airlines since its inception in 2007; their Web site being one of the four primary factors evaluated. This year, the carrier received praise for the quality and usability of its Web site.

2.         Provide a delightful guest experience. “With touch-screen entertainment offering live TV, movies and hundreds of entertainment choices and new aircraft that look like nothing else in the skies, we think our service will be a breath of fresh air for Dallas-Fort Worth travelers,” said Virgin America President and CEO, David Cush. What a shift from the current experience one expects when flying out of DFW on the other domestic airlines. Branson summed it up this way during a recent interview. “Here in America, people expect quality service from hotels and restaurants. Why are the airlines able to get away with offering an experience similar to a cattle drive?” As for me, the more comfortable seats and additional leg room are what will make me consider switching from the airline where I have accrued almost a million loyalty miles. Now that there is a better choice in regards to airline service, how long will it be before we all jump ship?

3.         Align its practices with the values of the community. As the only California based airline, Virgin America is working hard to ensure that its daily operations are as sustainable as the relationships they hope to cultivate with new customers. Along with many green design elements, including the vast utilization of natural light, modern ventilation systems that require 20 percent less energy and a reclaimed water reuse program; the airline isinstalling “hydration stations” in T2, Virgin America’s new terminal at SFO.  These allow flyers to fill reusable water bottles once past security, reducing the volume of waste created by single-use water bottles. How often have you had to throw away an almost full bottle of water before going through security? In addition, they are pushing the “slow food” concept. T2 will be the first airport dining program in the country to feature organic food vendors, offering wholesome food grown locally and prepared in a healthful manner.

As Virgin America settles into DFW, I look forward to my first opportunity to try out their fleet of new planes with great amenities and onboard entertainment. But I anticipate this approach to customer service will be what brings me back again and again. I predict in the near future that they will be flying enough routes to justify redesigning their current terminal at DFW so my Virgin experience is delightful from beginning to end.