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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Feng Shui for Mobile Marketers


Best-Practices for Creating a Harmonious Mobile Environment

This article first appeared on Marketing Profs on August 15, 2011.

Here's the basic tenet of feng shui: With the mindful arrangement of objects in relation to one another and in the context of their environment, one can attract positive energy and good fortune, and generally usher in the good. That sounds manageable, right?

In theory, yes, but when you start bringing outside forces to bear—a sense of where things are supposed to go, an irrational desire to bring in the new while holding on to the old, the notion that more really is more—things gets a lot more complicated.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the mobile commerce space. For years, marketers have been working to perfect their e-commerce sites, figuring out what clicks and doesn't click with consumers, and creating just the right energy for happy shopping—and buying. Now, they're tackling the new mobile revolution head on—with the exact same strategies and the exact same websites!

Mobile sites are not the same as websites. Full stop.

The screens are smaller, the keyboards are smaller, and the experience people have browsing your site on a smartphone is completely different from how they view it on a computer screen.

Marketers need to take a step back and realize that mobile is a new environment, one that demands a new design and a new approach to keep their customers and win new ones.

Only by prioritizing your mobile strategy and making it a key element of your overall e-commerce planning will you be able to prove its worth—via customer retention, measurable revenue, and a stellar return on investment.
So what does it take to create a harmonious, customer-friendly mobile site?

1. Learn to let go
It's easy to get carried away with offers, content, and information on your website; after all, you have plenty of real estate to work with. But simply replicating that scope in mobile form is like trying to fit your Barcalounger in the breakfast nook: there just isn't space.

As you begin building your mobile marketing strategy, start by removing items from your website that are superfluous.
How do you decide what's essential and what's gratuitous? You're likely already storing a lot of analytics data about how your consumers interact on your site. Use that information to determine what your customers need from you, what can (and should) be translated to your mobile environment—and what you can dispose of. 

But space is not the only factor to consider: load times and screen rendering are just as important. Get out that smartphone of yours, type in your brand's URL, and take note of the load times and overall layout. Are any large graphics or Flash pieces killing the mobile experience? What is hard or easy to find?

Hold on to what works, get rid of what seems clunky or cumbersome in a mobile browser, and if there's must-keep content that will need new presentation, make note of that, too.

When designing your mobile site, less is definitely more.

2. Create a harmonious space
Once you've cleared out the clutter, it's time to focus on making the best of the remaining content.

The first step is to get your hands on the Big 3 mobile devices—iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry—and view your site on each. Next, spend some time visiting mobile sites within your industry or of competitors, and download various types of apps on each device to understand what works—and what doesn't. Do you notice any patterns? What items do you like and dislike? What features and design components seem to be the most user-friendly... or unnecessary?

Though some of your impressions will be subjective, you'll gain a sense of whether your mobile site is set up to perform properly on a small screen. Within that context, you'll be able to focus on improving and optimizing successful elements, rather than wasting time on the irrelevant or unnecessary.

Whether you're simply looking for general inspiration or cross-industry best-practices, look to the successful mobile sites, such as those of Google, Amazon, or eBay.

3. Get a second, third, and fourth opinion
You've renovated and redecorated, but you'll know if you got it right only by testing your new look. A must for e-commerce sites, multivariate and A/B testing are just as important for mobile commerce sites.

With few tried-and-true best-practices for mobile conversion, even the most experienced marketers can't predict what elements of a mobile site will drive desired consumer behaviors. Small elements, such as headline placement, button color, or tone/copy tweaks can have a significant impact on sales—but you won't get it just right until you test.
But don't rest on your laurels: Mobile sites, like their online counterparts, are at the mercy of the ever-shifting demands of consumers and the marketplace. Developing your mobile site isn't a once-and-you're-done project. Mobile requires the same continual care and feeding that traditional websites do.

4. Make your mobile site comfortable (and personal) for everyone
No matter how the small the space, with the right personal touches it can feel like home. Your apartment might be the size of a shoe box, but when it's your shoe box, everything just feels better.

The same can be said for the mobile environment. Yes, there's a lack of real estate to play with, but you can make the mobile experience just as custom and personal as you can on a standard website—and, along the way, draw in and win over your customers. It's up to you to make every visitor feel comfortable and wanted—and eager to visit again and again.
Segmented personalization will allow you to capture behaviors and attributes about your mobile visitors to create content tailored to their location, their time of day, or even their brand of mobile device. Personalization can also be specific to each visitor: Users can be targeted by previous searches, past purchases, the time of their last visits, and even their activities in your physical store, call center, or website.

Personalizing the mobile shopping experience is an essential practice if you want to be on top of the mobile commerce game.

* * *
It's a lot to take in, but before you walk away thinking these best-practices seem too daunting to achieve, rest assured that technology resources can help you automate these processes. Just as feng shui experts and interior designers exist, so, too, do personalization experts who can save you time, budget, and internal resources as you achieve your mobile commerce goals.

Whatever path you choose, know that every successful mobile site specifically addresses both the demands of the medium and the needs of customers.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

How to to build and maintain traveler loyalty with Automated Digital Personalization


This article first appeared on Travel Mole on July 29, 2011.

When it comes to targeting consumers, the travel industry’s got it made. Think about it: to secure any type of travel—hotel, car, flight, tour, etc—customers have to release individual preferences and other information about themselves, which can later be used to personalize marketing efforts, and tailor the travel experience. Now, with the online world playing a major (and often, the only) role in the booking and research phases of trip planning, the opportunity to capture even more data about users and make their brand experience personalized across all channels is greater than ever.

Each visitor that comes to your website is equipped with a wealth of data that comprises their unique traveler “profiles”—powerful information such as previous trips booked, travel –related items they’ve researched, frequency and recency of travel, and ads or offers they’ve responded to (with a click or purchase). Needless to say, this information can help you better target content and offers for each individual, making their visit much more relevant, while helping you increase engagement, bookings and repeat customers. But how?'

One method is to define “rules” (or a set of conditions that must be met) that will dictate which visitor segments will get which experiences.  When defining rules, it’s important that you take into account the various stages travelers go through when planning for their trips; they may visit a site several times before actually booking a reservation. Use this to your advantage. This type of personalization technique allows you to adapt and match each forthcoming experience to the data collected during their previous visits. An example of how a rule can be used to define the experience for a repeat visitor is to re-target them based upon the last destination they searched. This may result in an offer for a vacation package that includes tickets to a local attraction, which could result in enticing them to book, or even extend their trip.

While targeting with rules can be effective, it can be nearly impossible to manually define rules for monstrous websites with copious amounts of daily traffic. So for increased sophistication, another method of behavioral targeting uses mathematical models to predict the most compelling content and offers based upon all that is known about a visitor. This type of model learns and adjusts over time to dynamically optimize visitor experiences with content that yields the highest conversion rate. This approach also enables a broader range of content—such as destinations or travel packages—to be presented to the right person based on their unique predictive attributes.

Examples of predictive attributes used to personalize the online experience:
• Planning days in advance of the trip
• Length of stay
• Number of people (adults and children)
• Last departure point (searched or booked)
• Last destination (searched or booked)

European airline carrier bmibaby, for example, uses real-time personalization to target visitors with different “Featured Destinations” on their home page. The destination each visitor sees is based on the visitor’s geographical region, past trips and searches. By personalizing in this way, bmibaby has seen a 34% increase in clicks on the Featured Destination features, and a 4% uplift in bookings.

Independent of which of these methods you choose, digital personalization will empower you to start targeting visitors at the right time, with the right content and offers based on their individual needs, wants and behaviors. Since visitor behavior can change with each visit to your website, targeting rules alone can grow to unmanageable numbers. When this happens, consider moving to automated behavioral targeting, which will help you properly personalize the real-time experience for each traveler, without the nightmare of creating and maintaining complex rules.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Finish Line, Inc. Teams Up with Maxymiser for Multivariate Testing

As a follow up to last week's announcement about a new Maxymiser retail client, Teleflora, we have another client to add to the docket: Finish Line. 


                                    
In addition to their booming online and mobile shopping presence, Finish Line operates over 660 stores in malls across the United States. More than 11,000 Finish Line sneakerologists help Finish Line customers each day connect with their sport, their life and their style. Clearly, Finish Line understands the value of providing exceptional experiences--both offline and online--to their customers.


With our OneTouch™ methodology, we've been able to get Finish Line multivariate testing and optimization campaigns off the ground quickly, without the need for coding and lengthy change control processes through their internal IT department. This means low cost ofownership, incredibly fast time to market and the ability to launch multiple test campaigns at once. Any retailer knows that being able to stay up to speed with seasonality, holidays, and savvy customers is a key to be successful in retail--that's why we've made Maxymiser's Conversion Management platform easy to launch, use and discover consumer insights.  





Welcome aboard Finish Line! You can find the full press release here.   

Thursday, August 04, 2011

Optimization 3.0: Conversion Management

This blog first appeared on iMedia Connection on July 29, 2011



Several years ago, marketers were in a frenzy – buying as many keywords as possible, hiring SEM experts and pouring tons of resources into the perfectly “optimized” website for Google.com’s number one ranking. This was all of course to drive as much website traffic as possible, since back in the day, this was key success metric.  And over time, the price for keywords went up, while high traffic numbers alone continued to justify this increasing expense. But today, traffic acquisition is not enough. SEM and SEO are still important, yes, but they aren’t the end game to a successful ecommerce strategy.
Today more and more of big players are starting to make conversion optimization a priority. And from there, are starting to get really smart, targeted and personal with their websites. This method is helping to not only acquire consumers, but to keep them coming back for more. These solutions aren’t making SEO/SEM experts and web analytics gurus obsolete, they are simply the missing piece of the customer experience puzzle, and giving all marketers the greatest bang for their buck.
While conversion management is ramping up to be the next must-have technology (just like SEO/SEM was a few years ago), many brands have yet to shift their time, budget and plans to a conversion management program. I realize it’s not always easy to convince decision makers about the benefits of new technologies, but here are three basic reasons why this can immediately impact your business:
1. Technology is Smarter than You
Let’s face it, you know your website better than anyone. You may think it’s ugly and desperately in need of a revamp. Or maybe, your think your website is a rock star— it has after all received multiple “Best Design” accolades and awards. Either way, subjective opinions have no place in your website strategy—if it hasn’t been tested, there is always room to improve.
Remember a little thing called focus groups? Back in the Mad Men era, these were heavily relied on by consumer brands to understand how their customer thinks, what they react to, what they like, what they don’t like, etc. Today, we still need to understand these consumer insights, but focus groups just aren’t scalable, (or smart), when your traffic efforts are driving thousands, if not millions, of unique visitors per month. Are you going to sit them all down in a room and survey them? No. But your website is the perfect place to discover what people like and don’t like—from buttons, to products, to tone and copy—through A/B and multivariate testing. How your customer proceeds through a search or check-out phase on your site is just as important and the product merchandising plan or their brand perceptions.
The best way to gather insights and start making site improvements with testing is the iterative approach: laying out a plan of what you want to test, why and when; discovering the results and implement the changes over time. I’ve seen changes as simple as button copy and color in the shopping cart raise purchases by 3-5% in a month’s time. Every site is different, but every site has opportunity.
2.  Search Marketing and Web Analytics Need You
Going forward, there is no point in purchasing keywords to drive traffic to an inefficient landing page or website. If it doesn’t convert, it’s not justifying budget spend. Like I said, driving traffic to your website isn’t the end goal anymore—Increasing revenue on your website is. And in today’s noisy, competitive market, it’s becoming a more precarious process driving a visitor to your site, capture their attention and convert them into customers. The great news is, all the hard work that your search optimization teams have done over the past few years will provide insights that will help drive and improve your conversion strategies. They have targeted certain types of visitors and customers, products, campaigns, keywords. They have data on what is working and what hasn’t. So it’s time to team up to make everyone’s marketing efforts a successful return on investment.
Testing and targeting once the visitor is at your site is a win-win-win for search, analytics and revenue. When a website is optimized for the customer, most effective content and design elements are used throughout the site), the cost of acquisition through search marketing is driven down, and it becomes easier to convert website visitors into customers. With the excess funds from search marketing budgets available, marketers have the ability to pay for additional key words and drive more traffic to the site.
3. You Need Recurring Revenues
Testing and optimizing your site is going to provide a better site experience for the majority of your visitors. But after that, it’s time to get really slick by enhancing each individual’s experience with personalized, relevant content. Every individual that your visits the site has a different profile— and every time they visit, you learn more and more about them—what page layouts, tone/copy, buttons, etc. they covert best with, what products they search, what they have purchased, what traffic sources they come from, the list goes on. With personalization, you’ll be able to not only serve them tailored content in real-time, but predict what they will want next and serve them up offers that they are likely to buy. Not only do these solutions allow you to collect and analyze more in-depth visitor data, but it will help turn them into loyal, recurring customers if the content, offers and experience fit the individual’s needs and wants.

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Maxymiser's Client List Blossoms: Welcome, Teleflora!


Yesterday we proudly announced one of the newest additions to our Retailer Client list: Teleflora. We first met up with Teleflora this past February at eTail West and have proudly brought them on as a customer to perform A/B testing, multivariate testing and behavioral targeting.


Teleflora, who has been in business for over 75 years, has over 18,000 member florists throughout the U.S. and Canada, and an additional 20,000 affiliated florists outside North America. Wow. With their extensive network, coupled with a commitment to exceptional customer service, we're happy to be working with them to improve the online customer experience.

With our OneTouch™ methodology, we've been able to help Teleflora launch testing and optimization campaigns without the need for coding and lengthy change control processes through their internal IT department. This means low cost of ownership, incredibly fast time to market and the ability to launch multiple test campaigns at once. For a company that runs heavily on seasonality and holidays, this is a must-have in order to target customers effectively. 


So, a big welcome to Teleflora! You can find the full press release here. 


Cheers,

Mark Simpson
Founder and President, Maxymiser


PS: Next week we’ll be announcing another flagship retail client! Stay Tuned.