About Carlos and StoneX’s website relaunch

As the Head of Digital Experience at StoneX, Carlos Ma and his team are responsible for optimizing the digital experience of the company’s retail and commercial clients.

StoneX, a Fortune 100, Nasdaq-listed company, is celebrating its centenary this year, and it recently launched a new brand website to help seamlessly connect its clients to the major global financial markets.

What are your key challenges and priorities?

For StoneX, optimizing cross-channel customer experiences across product teams can be a challenge.

“Given that each product has its own roadmap and priorities, being able to quantify the impact and demonstrate the potential ROI becomes crucial when deciding what to optimize,” explains Carlos.

“My personal priority is to provide an open and safe environment for the team to think creatively about how we can deliver the best digital experience for our clients.”
– Carlos Ma

What stood out to you most about Contentsquare?

When StoneX launched its rebranded corporate website (www.stonex.com) to provide a streamlined platform for connecting clients with StoneX solutions and services experts, the company needed a digital experience solution that would help with website analysis—and ultimately drive business growth.

“When we were looking for a solution, our Head of Websites Marina Muncescu, who had met Contentsquare at a CX event, recommended that we take a look at the platform,” Carlos says.

“The visual representation of client engagement metrics and the ability to segment client session replays to gain insights from clients’ interactions on the website were particularly valuable features for us, and really stood out as potentially offering a lot of value.”

“Contentsquare empowers us to gather valuable customer insights, enabling us to optimize the user experience and drive business growth.”

– Carlos Ma

What are your favorite features so far, and which features are you most looking forward to using?

Carlos explains that Contentsquare has already been successfully implemented across the majority of StoneX’s public websites, encompassing both B2C and B2B platforms.

He cites his favorite feature so far as CS Live, because “it’s an excellent starting point for someone new to Contentsquare or for demonstrating to stakeholders how easy it is to draw engagement data within just a few clicks, something that was previously not possible.”

And this is just the beginning:

“We are continuously expanding Contentsquare’s reach by integrating into StoneX’s digital properties, enabling us to capture the full end-to-end customer digital journey,” Carlos says.

“Thanks to the integration between Contentsquare and our Google Analytics, we discovered some of our MetaTrader clients were trying to log in using our proprietary platform login window, which had been causing some frustration.”
– Carlos Ma

Which teams will be getting their hands on the platform?

Carlos’ digital experience team is driving Contentsquare’s adoption within the organization: “We’re working closely with Contensquare’s experts to maximize the tool’s potential,” he says.

“A diverse group of web editors, marketing specialists, copywriters, designers and UX/UI experts are also regular users of Content Square, contributing to its widespread adoption and success,” Carlos adds.

“Contentsquare empowers us to realize our inspiration of delivering exceptional digital experience, seamlessly connecting clients to the markets that they seek.” —Carlos Ma

If you were to recommend Contentsquare to a contact in the industry, what would you say?

“Contentsquare is a powerful UX analytics tool that helps companies to become more data-driven when optimizing their digital experience. It’s easy to use and integrates well with most mainstream technologies in the market. At StoneX, we provide comprehensive market intelligence insights to our customers. Data is a powerful driver for both our business and our clients’ businesses and helps us to make more informed decisions.”

Carlos is also impressed with the support offered by Contentsquare, which he describes as “exceptional” and “second to none.”

“The accounts manager and customer success team have been instrumental in supporting us to drive wider adoption of the platform. They are consistently prompt when addressing queries. They proactively share platform updates and provide relevant use cases to inspire our team to extract valuable insights,” he says.

The post Why StoneX chose Contentsquare to ensure website relaunch success appeared first on Contentsquare.

Today, website personalization is table stakes for companies that want to stand out in a crowded online marketplace and to provide the kind of personalized experience that customers expect and love. 

70% of attendees at a Contentsquare event said their companies saw website personalization as a company-wide priority. Brands are aware of how important personalization is becoming to their bottom line. However, only 24% said that they had the right resources in place to run personalization, meaning that knowing how to make personalization a reality remains challenging, even for those companies that understand how important it is. 

“Most companies know that personalization is the future and what they should be striving to achieve. Not every brand is there yet, but certainly, the majority is working towards that level.” Harry Hanson-Smith, Regional VP – Nordics, APAC & UK,  Dynamic Yield.

This blog aims to explain website personalization, outline the key benefits, and offer practical answers to the following questions using real-world examples and insights from leading brands, such as John Lewis, Ocado, Dynamic Yield and many more. 

• How to take your web personalization to the next level? 
• Why is personalization best thought of as a company-wide initiative? 
• How can you create a more human, personalized customer journey? 
• What does the future of personalization look like?

What is website personalization?

Website personalization is the process of creating customized experiences for website visitors. It involves understanding the emotions, motivations, and intent of website visitors so you can create more humanized digital experiences. 

The benefits of website personalization

Online shopping has become a way of life for most people since the pandemic, and most of us now expect a personalized online experience. 

According to Salesforce, 66%  of customers expect companies to “understand their unique needs and expectations”, while 52% of customers expect offers to always be personalized A study by Accenture shows that 91% of customers are more likely to shop with “brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.”

“Consumers expect to be recognized across devices whether that’s on the web or apps. They also expect to be able to interact 24/7, whenever it best suits them. Brands that are already doing this well have raised the level of expectation among consumers.” Veronica Saha, Head of Analytics, Zoopla.

Top 6 benefits of website personalization

1. Increased user sessions on-site

The more relevant the website experience is for users, the longer they will stay on the site, which in turn leads to more product views and, ultimately, sales. This was the experience for Office Shoes when they personalized recommendations for their paid search traffic.

As the company’s eCommerce Trading Optimisation Manager Hiral Patel explains: “We have recommendations live for any paid search traffic that lands on PDP [a product detail page]. That helped us reduce our bounce rate by 29% for that specific group.”  

2. Higher conversion rate

Easier customer journeys, repeat visits, and more time on site tend, in turn, to lead to higher conversions. That is, more of your website visitors will become customers and make a purchase. 

According to Statista, 63% of marketers have seen increased conversion rates as a result of personalization. Hiral Patel of Office Shoes backs up this statistic with her company’s experience:

“Last calendar year, our recommendations campaign drove a 28% y-o-y uplift in direct revenue.” 

3. Repeat eCommerce sales

When you tailor your online experience to reflect what your customers want to achieve, you make that customer journey easier. This leads to longer time on site as well as more repeat visits, which, in turn, leads to repeat sales. As Zoopla’s Head of Analytics Veronica Saha puts it: 

“As a user, if you experience a product that’s delightful, easy-to-use, and tailored to you, you’re more likely to come back.” 

McKinsey has found that “78% of customers will make repeat purchases from companies that personalize effectively.”

4. Cross sales and up-selling

Stimulating cross-sales and up-selling is another way that personalization leads to increased revenue. BCG has found that personalization can drive an average revenue uplift of 6% – 10%. 

Increasing cross-selling is often the first direct impact of successful web personalization. According to Adriana Scala, Optimization Manager at Now TV: “We started our personalization journey by focusing on existing customers and building home pages for them, so if they had purchased an Entertainment membership we could try to cross-sell them a Cinema membership, and so on.” 

Vivienne Yong, Senior eCommerce Product Manager at Made.com, tells the same story: 

“We’ve been implementing cross-sell on baskets, recommending other products that are complementary to an item that you’ve added to your basket. And again on the cart page, recommending complementary products.” 

5. Increased trust and loyalty

The underlying impact of an easier customer journey is to increase customer trust and loyalty. One example of this is John Lewis, which has tested loyalty offers for specific customers in the health and beauty space. When the company started offering high-end beauty brands at a discount as a loyalty reward, the brands sold out in 10 days. After testing, the discounted high-end products now sell out within two days of a campaign launch. 

“This is a huge growth opportunity for all firms if you want to inspire loyalty,” says Jamie Levrant, Product Owner, John Lewis.

6. Increased Customer Lifetime Value

Ultimately, increased trust, higher conversions, repeat sales and more cross-selling all add up to a higher customer lifetime value. As Vivienne Yong of Made.com explained at a recent Contentsquare-hosted event, her company started a personalization proof of concept which saw a “significant percentage uplift in revenue per user” as well as an increased average order value and increased page views.

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Tactics to take your personalization to the next level

We’ve seen the many potential benefits of personalizing and humanizing the digital experience for your customers. This chapter takes you through how you can achieve this in your organization, using practical examples from major brands in the UK and beyond.

Using data and customer behavior insights

Using and analyzing user data enables you to examine their changing needs and behaviors that visitors exhibit as they interact with your site. This is key to really understanding your customer behavior and being able to react accordingly.

For example, a customer may have their needs met the first time they visit a website or app. Yet they could require a completely different experience when they return to your site a week later. They are likely to feel disappointed if the brand fails to adjust quickly enough to this new expectation and they may leave the site never to return. 

Monitoring visitors’ micro-signals – including mouse moves, scrolls and taps – helps brands to draw patterns and uncover anomalies to better understand behavior. Using rich data from experience analytics brands can quantify customer experience at multiple touchpoints and personalize individual users’ site experiences.

Customer segmentation

One very powerful tip from Jessica Bartlett, CRM Manager EMEA at New Balance, is to use your existing customer data to segment your website visitors: 

“It’s possible to create segments in your CRM on the data that you already have based on previous shoppers, but you can also go on to your website and create segments.”

Segmenting is a crucial step in understanding customers and personalizing their experience: “Building segments is important because you’re really understanding the journey that your customers are taking.”

Customer journey mapping

The digital customer journey is the path followed by a website visitor from the awareness stage right through to the purchase stage. Understanding how your visitors move through your website, where they linger, what they look at, and where they go is essential. If you don’t know what your visitors are doing, you cannot improve your customer journey. 

This means you need to map your customer journey. According to HubSpot, a customer journey map is “a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a company. It provides an understanding into the needs and concerns of potential customers which directly motivate or inhibit their actions.”

Here are some examples of customer journey maps to help you in mapping out your own digital experience.  

Customer experience testing

Website personalization is an iterative process of constant improvement. Most optimization and CX experts agree on the importance of continuous testing as part of this process. 

Hiral Patel of Office Shoes gave the example of testing a static asset versus a gif on certain product detail pages. The gif drove an uplift in clicks and three times the revenue when compared with the static asset. 

Using a gif on PDPs drove an uplift in clicks and 3X the revenue when compared with the static asset. (Office shoes)

Matthew Wilson, Digital Development Manager at online supermarket Ocado, advises incorporating user studies into the testing process: 

“Where I’ve seen tests be most successful is where they’ve incorporated user studies into the process. It might add some time to the process, but the end results speak volumes.” 

Jamie Levrant of John Lewis described how he prioritized what to test for personalizing the online shopping experience at his company: “Say you’re seeing x amount of bounces on the page, or less AOV in certain places, then you test around that. You have the problem, and the problem is the strategy, and then we tactically build around that, so no matter what you’re doing, you’re on the path to getting somewhere.”

“If the teams know their priorities then testing is a doddle, because you will know exactly what you need to hit and what constitutes success,” he added. 

Process automation

Once you have tested a proof of concept, it makes sense to automate the process of analysis, testing and interaction. 25% of the experimentation John Lewis is doing on its website is machine-learning driven, for example. 

Veronica Saha says that using machine learning is on the cards for the next phase of Zoopla’s personalization journey. “We need to learn how to use data in better ways, like with machine learning,” she says.

Good internal communication

Internal communication is essential for effective website personalization because successful personalization needs to be practiced by multiple teams within an organization, from Marketing and CX to product teams and more. 

As James Levrant from John Lewis puts it: “Teach and share with other people how to do this stuff. One of the reasons we’re seeing such success with this is the incredible uptake of this new method of experimentation from our product teams. No change happens alone. You can drive it, but it does take adoption and adaptation from your teams in order to find that success.” 

Senior leadership sponsorship

All of the steps above are important to upping your personalization game and taking it to the next level. However, nothing happens without the support of your senior leaders. 

As Harry Hanson-Smith of Dynamic Yield makes clear: 

“The first thing is to make sure you have C-suite buy-in, and that is then passed down. Our most successful clients have the strategic side set – people with ideas – and also front-end developer resources. Once that’s there and you’ve got the exec sponsor that can bring in other teams and other channels, that’s when we see real growth in these program types.” – Harry Hanson-Smith at Dynamic Yield 

Future of customer experience

Talking to Contentsquare client companies, partners, and other website personalization pioneers, we get a clear picture of how personalization is likely to develop over the next 18-24 months:

• Mobile app personalization. App personalization aims to present user experiences that are customized to their specific needs rather than a broad, one-size-fits-all experience for all users. Most companies have begun their journey with their website and are looking to move into app personalization next.
• True omni-channel customer journeys – across web, app, telephony, email, etc. According to this blog by Dynamic Yield:
  

“From email to mobile app, call centers, digital kiosks, and more, brands are discovering the key to acquiring and maintaining customers requires delivering a tailored experience, regardless of whether they are interacting on-site, or off.” – Dynamic Yield. 

• Connecting online and offline experiences. As part of the drive towards omni-channel personalization, companies with eCommerce sites and physical stores want to replicate the same 1-2-1 customer experience across both. Examples of this include health and beauty retailer Avon and diamond company De Beers.
• Being able to be more reactive. Companies will also benefit from being able to respond to customer needs more proactively, which depends on having the right data available alongside a strong understanding of what customers want. One example of this is Ocado, whose Digital Development Manager recently spoke about the benefits of being able to offer potential delivery slots to customers at certain prices, based on their previous habits and the availability at nearby delivery centers. 
• Knowing where to focus effort to get the best ROI. In a world where data volumes are increasing all the time, it is important to maintain focus and “pinpoint what’s useful”, according to Now Optimization Manager Adriana Scala. “It’s a really good point; making sure you’ve got the data, you know where to focus, where to spend your time that’s going to see results,” adds Harry Hanson-Smith of Dynamic Yield.
• Moving towards cookieless analytics. Although digital intelligence is critical, the global internet standard is moving towards removing cookies (see Google’s recent announcement to stop supporting third-party cookies in Chrome, and Apple’s earlier action to limit first-party cookie retention in Safari to seven days). Using Contentsquare, companies can turn first-party cookies on or off when using digital experience analytics, deepening trust with consumers. 

Real-world examples of successful personalization

It’s much easier to picture how you could apply personalization to your brand, your website, and your customers when you look at some real-world examples. What the following case studies show is an increasing appetite from brands to offer an equally responsive browsing and shopping experience in-store and online. 

Just as an art gallery owner asks your preferences before showing you some pieces for sale, or a tailor gets a sense of your preferred style before taking your measurements, successful website personalization is about being able to ‘listen’ online and react in real-time. 

Example 1:De Beers

The challenge: Redesigning the digital experience
In 2018, De Beers recognized the need to rethink and redesign its digital experience to reflect its in-store customer experience. 

Solution: Personalizing the experience for engagement ring customers
Using customer journey analysis, the company compared jewellery customers vs bridal customers looking for engagement rings. They noticed on engagement rings that people were browsing a lot more and spending a lot more time on the pages, so they launched a test to direct these customers to book an appointment once they had been browsing for a certain amount of time. 

Results:
Testing appointment pop-ups personalized for engagement ring customers resulted in a +27% average conversion to in-store appointment requests from bridal product pages.

Example 2:Rakuten

The challenge: Users weren’t adding items to their carts
eCommerce company Rakuten noticed that, despite 11.3% of website visitors viewing their shopping cart pages, conversions were way lower than expected. They didn’t know why this was, so they set out to uncover and remove any friction in the user journey. 

Solution: Changing the checkout process
Rakuten analyzed the in-page behavior of new visitors and returning customers. They found that non-buyers were spending 15 seconds longer on the page than converting users. 

The team decided to split the existing single long checkout page into four quick steps: 

1. Initiate checkout
2. Shipping
3. Payment
4. Order confirmation

Results:

• Breaking the process into multiple steps helped new customer segments to more easily understand and navigate their way through the process. 
• This increased conversions from Initiate checkout to Shipping by 10%. 

Example 3: Avon

The challenge: Replicating Avon’s 1-2-1 customer experience digitally
British multinational cosmetics, skincare, fragrance, and personal care company Avon wanted to replicate its 1-2-1 customer experience via its digital channels and provide a seamless multichannel experience. 

Solution: Testing a personalization proof of concept
Avon worked with Dynamic Yield to deploy a personalization proof of concept on its UK. Czech, and Polish websites. They began by:

• Identifying important audience behavior by segment 
• Breaking departmental silos in CX delivery
• Targeting their most profitable customers according to recency, frequency and the monetary value of purchases 

From there, the team tested product recommendation campaigns targeting visitors in the UK, Czechia, and Poland on product listing pages and product detail pages, experimenting with “Recently Viewed” and “Similarity” algorithms to determine the most relevant strategy per location at these key stages in the customer journey.

Results:

• Incremental uplifts in cart value and revenue generated from products bought after clicking and buying an item from the widgets.
• Looking to launch recommendations to operations in over 26 countries.

Example 4: ASOS

The challenge: Generating relevant product recommendations for website visitors
eCommerce giant ASOS wanted to be able to ensure its website visitors were recommended suitable products from a selection of over 85,000 products. 

Solution: Deploying machine learning
To make relevant recommendations to web visitors, ASOS quickly realized they would need to deploy a machine learning solution that was capable of making systemic and quantitative data-driven decisions across thousands of products.

They deployed a machine learning model capable of completing an outfit based on a given seed product. The technology and marketing teams focused their efforts on analyzing how customers interacted with their products to create truly accurate and relevant personalized recommendations based on image and text recognition of visitors’ searches. 

Results: More accurate personalized product recommendations, higher conversions, and significant revenue uplift. 

Example 5: Waitrose 

The challenge: Replicating the immersive and personalized in-store experience online
With a reputation for offering an immersive and enjoyable in-store grocery shopping experience, high-end supermarket company Waitrose wanted to find ways to replicate this for digital customers. 

Solution: Testing automated personalization on recipe pages
The company wanted to test personalized recipe recommendations on its popular recipe web pages. The marketing team began exploring which contextual factors would be most influential in determining the best recipe to display to each customer. 

They decided to apply Kibo’s Automated Personalization to automate testing these factors. The experience was targeted to the entire audience using default context and additional CRM data, with a goal metric of driving clicks.

Results:

• In its initial test, the Automated Personalization Experience drove a click-through lift of +6.21%.
• When scaled to the homepage, the recipes experience drove a click-through lift of +66.8%.

Learn about Zoopla’s personalization strategy from their Head of Analytics here. 

Recommended personalization tools for your website

Companies increasingly seek the benefits of personalization at scale and have several options to choose from, including building their own data and analytics platforms and using marketing cloud solutions such as those offered by Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle. However, those solutions don’t necessarily offer the same functionality as the best-of-breed solutions, which include customer data platforms and personalization tools. 

Highly targeted personalization tools that are designed to help customize online customer journeys can also be highly effective and simple to use. Let’s explore some of these tools in more detail:  

Optimizely

Optimizely is a digital experience optimization platform that allows companies to deploy AI-powered personalization and experimentation encompassing A/B testing, multivariate testing, and server-side testing. Companies can work out what hypotheses to test, analyze results more effectively, and optimize the customer journey through more rapid, impactful testing. 

AB Tasty

AB Tasty is a  comprehensive brand and product experience optimization platform for marketing, product, and technical teams. AB TasTy offers feature management, experimentation, and personalization solutions that help businesses to develop and launch new products faster.

Kibo

KIbo is an eCommerce platform that combines AI-driven personalization, omnichannel commerce, and enterprise-grade order management to support a wide range of commerce strategies. Global clients include Office Depot, Taco Bell, and Patagonia.

Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield helps companies quickly deliver and test personalized, optimized, and synchronized digital customer interactions. Marketing, Product, Development, and Digital teams from more than 400 global brands use Dynamic Yield’s experience optimization platform as the technology layer that works alongside existing CMS, commerce, and ESP solutions to iterate faster and algorithmically match content, products, and offers to each individual for the acceleration of long-term business value. 

Kameleoon

Kameleoon is an A/B testing and optimization platform that uses real-time data signals from Contentsquare to trigger experiments and personalization campaigns. Thanks to their two-way integration, brands using Kameleoon and Contentsquare can trigger personalized promotional campaigns and directly engage with users when error signals or repetition actions are observed – both in real-time – while also refining purchase intention predictions.

Webtrends Optimize

Webtrends Optimize offers brands a range of testing, analysis, and personalization tools to enable extensive experimentation and enhance digital experiences. The company’s solutions empower their clients to analyze and consolidate the results of their personalization campaigns across their digital portfolio so they can deliver experiences that create happy customers and drive better results.

Insider

Insider is a personalization and AI-powered optimization platform. Its deep learning recommendation algorithms increase average order value, conversion rates, and lifetime value to help generate fast results for global brands across all major industry sectors. 

Contentsquare

Contentsquare is a digital experience analytics platform powered by AI. It provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. 

Contentsquare integrates with personalization, testing, and customer engagement solutions (like the ones listed above) to help scale the use of behavioral insights in your personalization efforts. 

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Key takeaways

To summarize, website personalization is the process of creating customized experiences for website visitors. It involves understanding the intent, emotions and motivations of website visitors, so you can create more human and immersive digital experiences. 

While many companies are currently focused on transforming their eCommerce experience to make it more personal – and some are already extending this process to include web applications – the future will see complete omnichannel personalization across all digital and offline channels. Customers now expect the same level of service whether in-store or online, and organizations will need to leverage customer data effectively in order to achieve that. 

There are many potential benefits to increasing personalization. By better understanding customers’ needs and motivations, you can build digital journeys that build trust and increase loyalty. This will result in more time spent on-site, leading to higher conversions, higher spend, and a marked increase in lifetime customer value. 

According to the industry experts quoted in this ebook, there are 7 key steps you can take towards elevating your web personalization:

1. Get senior leadership sponsorship. Nothing will happen with personalization unless you have someone on the senior team to drive the change.
2. Communicate effectively. This is true at all levels. Effective personalization is a multi-team and multi-disciplinary effort. Make sure to communicate your reasons for personalizing, as well as communicating well between teams.  
3. Analyze customer data. Gather and analyze data from your existing customers as a starting point for your personalization efforts. 
4. Segment your customer data. This is a crucial step in understanding customers and personalizing their experience
5. Map your customer journey. This will help you understand the needs and concerns of potential customers, as well as where you can potentially personalize the experience.
6. Test. Optimization and CX experts agree on the importance of continuous testing for optimizing your website personalization. 
7. Automate. Using machine learning and other forms of automation allows you to scale your testing and optimization process, thereby increasing the speed and effectiveness of your personalization efforts. 

The post How to take your website personalization to the next level appeared first on Contentsquare.

However, for leading CRO practitioners, this definition doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s too short-term and too tactical. As the saying goes, what got you here won’t get you there.

Becoming successful at CRO today means going beyond short-term, tactical thinking. To drive digital transformation in your organization and influence the C-suite you need to think strategically, not tactically.

But what does it mean to think strategically about CRO? What’s the difference between CRO strategy and tactics? Most importantly, what steps should you take to become a strategic CRO mastermind?

This ebook aims to define the mindset and goals of strategic CRO. To help you diagnose where you are now on that journey. And to give you the practical, actionable insights you need to become a successful strategic CRO practitioner.

What is a CRO strategy?

A CRO strategy is a systematic approach utilized to improve the conversion rate of a website or digital platform. It involves analyzing visitor behavior, identifying areas that can be optimized, and implementing changes to increase the desired actions, such as purchases or sign-ups.

The B2B Conversion Playbook for Digital Teams

6 user-driven insights that go beyond lead generation

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CRO tactics

The main goal of a CRO strategy is to enhance the user experience and maximize the effectiveness of a website in generating conversions. This can be achieved through various tactics and techniques, including:

1. Data analysis: A CRO strategy heavily relies on data to understand user behavior. By analyzing metrics and conducting user research, businesses can identify trends, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.
2. A/B testing: This technique involves testing multiple versions of a webpage or element to determine which one performs better. By comparing different variations and measuring their impact on conversion rates, businesses can make data-driven decisions to optimize their digital assets.
3. User journey mapping: Understanding how users navigate through a website and interact with different touchpoints is crucial. By mapping out the user journey, businesses can identify gaps or friction points that hinder conversion and optimize those areas for a seamless experience.
4. Personalization: Tailoring the user experience based on individual preferences and behavior can significantly impact conversion. By leveraging data and technology, businesses can deliver personalized recommendations, offers, and messages to engage users and increase the likelihood of conversion.
5. UX/UI improvements: Optimizing the user interface and enhancing the user experience play a vital role in CRO strategies. Simplifying navigation, improving page load speed, and ensuring mobile-friendliness are key aspects that can positively impact conversion rates.
6. Communication and trust-building: Establishing trust and effectively communicating value propositions are essential for conversion. Implementing trust signals, such as customer reviews and security badges, and crafting compelling content can instill confidence in users and increase their likelihood of converting.

By implementing a well-defined CRO strategy, businesses can continuously enhance their digital presence, improve conversion rates, and ultimately drive revenue growth. It is an ongoing process that requires monitoring, testing, and iterating based on data-driven insights to ensure continuous optimization and success in the digital landscape.

CRO strategy: TLDR The key takeaways

While tactical CRO is important, strategic CRO helps to optimize ROI and lead digital transformation across your organization. Implementing a CRO strategy entails a mindset shift towards long-term rather than short-term thinking. You must gain a deeper understanding of your customers and align CRO goals with the broader goals of your business.

To diagnose where you are on your journey towards strategic CRO, work out where the gaps are. These could be in the skillset of your team, in your processes, or in the data points you currently have access to.

According to the industry experts we interviewed, there are 7 key steps you can take towards becoming a strategic CRO mastermind:

• Align your optimization goals with the wider goals of your business
• Focus on generating long-term insights rather than short-term metrics
• Create a CRO roadmap and focus on testing one thing at a time
• Build a culture of continuous experimentation and improvement
• Use a combination of software tools
• Build a multi-disciplinary CRO team
• Use multiple data points to gain a deeper understanding of your customers

Defining a CRO strategy The first step in becoming a strategic CRO mastermind is to define what strategic CRO is.

CRO strategy vs tactical CRO

Marketers and CRO practitioners are used to thinking tactically. They run multiple A/B tests across a range of variables and then try to draw conclusions from the results.
This tactical CRO mindset focuses on conversion percentages, averages, and benchmarks. But having such a data-led approach can lead to not focusing enough on long-term goals. It can also lead to a lack of joined-up thinking.

A strategic CRO mindset instead starts with the bigger picture. On the one hand, that means trying to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and prospects. On the other, it means looking at where CRO fits into the broader CRO strategy goals of the business.

CRO strategy is about defining long-term goals, and then working out what data points you need to help reach those goals. Then focusing on the KPIs and tactics that will get you closer to those goals.

Long-term vs short-term thinking

Moving from short-term goals to a long-term vision means shifting focus. Rather than focus purely on front-end tests—for example optimizing landing page conversion—strategic CRO defines the long-term goals and then works backward.
To get a long-term view you need to:

• Understand visitors’ intentions
• Identify and resolve any user experience issues or friction on your website
• Understand and overcome visitors’ objections

Tactical CRO might aim to maximize conversions to a sale. Strategic CRO aims to attract and convert customers who are more likely to spend more money with you. These customers buy more of your products or services and stay with you longer.

As another example, tactical CRO might aim to maximize click-throughs from a specific page. Strategic CRO looks at the entire customer journey and aims to optimize every stage of the customer experience.

KPIs for CRO strategy

Here are examples of the kinds of KPIs that help drive strategic CRO:

Annual recurring revenue (ARR): used to work out the annual value of a subscription or contract. Because ARR is the amount of revenue that a company expects to repeat, you can use it to predict future growth.

Customer lifetime value (CLV): the total value to your business of a customer over the whole period of their relationship with you.

Sales pipeline: a representation of your prospective customers/clients, what stage they are at in the sales process, and how much revenue you expect to earn from them.

Sales velocity: how quickly sales move through your pipeline and generate revenue, based on four metrics:

• Number of opportunities
• Average deal value
• Win rate
• Length of sales cycle

Domain authority: an SEO concept that describes the strength of a given web domain, and how findable it is on search engines. usually measured on a score out of 100 using specific digital tools.

Sentiment analysis: an analysis based on aggregated reviews or social media mentions, which indicates whether your audience feels positive, negative or neutral about your brand. There are a variety of digital tools that can do this for you.

Diagnosis: Where are you now on your CRO strategy?

To become a more strategic CRO practitioner, you need to work out where you are on your CRO strategy journey.

Every organization is different, and you’ll need to work out where you are in the context of the strategic priorities in your business. But there are some simple rules that everyone can adapt to suit their circumstances.

Here’s a handy set of questions you can use to diagnose where you are with your CRO, split into three parts:

Step 1: People and skills

• Do you have someone on your team to act as an advocate for users/customers?
• Do you have someone on your team who understands the business priorities of your organization?
• Do you have someone to carry out UX research?
• Do you have someone to carry out UX design?
• Do you have someone to carry out UX analysis?
• Do you have a web engineer on your team?
• How data literate is your team?
• What skills gaps can you identify?
• How can you fill those gaps? (Based on your resources, can you hire new staff, develop the skills of existing staff, or access those skills on a freelance or contract basis?)

Step 2: Process

• Are you clear on your overall CRO strategy goals?
• Can you measure your progress towards those goals?
• Do you have a quarterly or monthly CRO roadmap?
• Are you constantly optimizing the customer journey?
• Are you surveying or interviewing your customers to get feedback about the user experience on your website?
• Are you surveying or interviewing your customers to understand what drove them to the site and whether they were able to achieve what they wanted?
• Are you regularly generating new ideas and design concepts to test?
• Do you leverage expertise and insights from other parts of your organization, e.g. Marketing, Commercial/Sales, Product, Support/Customer Services, etc?
• Do you share your results with other parts of your organization and encourage feedback?
• How far ahead do you plan your CRO testing?
• How do you prioritize which issues to solve?

CRO strategy optimization works best when you are clear about your strategic goals and can measure your progress towards those goals. Business priorities and external pressures change constantly. So you do need to revise your goals periodically, as well as update them in line with your progress. Once you reach your goals, it’s time to set new ones. CRO strategy is about establishing a process of continuous improvement.

Step 3: Technology and data

• Are you able to measure every step of the customer journey? 
• Can you assess where visitors are leaving your website?
• Can you identify common usability issues across your website?
• Can you identify frustration on your site?
• Can you identify your most frequent conversion issues and opportunities?
• Are you measuring the ROI of your content efforts?
• What tech tools are you using right now? 
• What knowledge gaps do you have?
• What data do you need to fill in those knowledge gaps?
• Which tech tools could help you collect or analyze that data?

Tactical CRO often falls into the trap of testing what you know you can measure. CRO strategy focuses on working out what you want to test and then finding the data you need to be able to carry out those tests. It’s important to understand where you may need more data, and then look into how you can get access to it. 

Next steps: Insights from industry experts on CRO strategy

Now you know where you are, it’s time to look at some practical steps you can take on the path to boost your CRO strategy. We reached out to leading CRO experts to get their insights. Here’s what they told us. 

Align the optimization goals of your CRO strategy with the wider goals of your business

“You need to have a clear direction on where the company is heading, understand how this fits in with your customers and what your value proposition is, and then ensure that you choose strong metrics that help you to move in this direction across the whole company.” — Evie Brockwell, Senior Product Manager, Booking.com

“The most transformational thing we’ve employed with our clients is the use of OKRs—objectives and key results. They help provide focus, alignment and direction by their very nature. I’m a huge advocate for them and if you can align your optimization goals to what the wider business is trying to achieve, I think you’re on to a winning path.”— David Mannheim, Global VP Conversion Rate Optimization, Brainlabs

Focus on generating long-term insights rather than short-term metrics

“Focusing on insights means prioritizing a test that might not drive a lot of impact in the short term but can help you learn a lot about your customers and drive new and future product or testing ideas.”—Thorsten Tekieli, Customer Success Lead EMEA Central, Contentsquare

“Understand what you’re trying to improve and why, as well as fundamentally how you’ll measure its success.” —Sam Counterman, Vice President of Brand & Growth Marketing

Create a CRO strategy roadmap and focus on testing one thing at a time

For Sam Counterman, “you’ll never achieve everything in one go, so you have to create a roadmap and test one thing at a time”.

According to Thorsten Tekieli, running small tests in series is the best way to prove a hypothesis and create support in your organization for larger budgets:

“Think about the smallest possible test you can run to prove a hypothesis. Quick and small experiments like this can help you drive excitement and unlock budget for a bigger test – or to pivot before sinking a lot of money.”

For David Mannheim, speed and focus are the keys to success. He employs an Agile methodology based on sprints, because “sprints give us the pace we need to rapidly identify, understand and execute solutions”.

Build a culture of continuous experimentation and improvement

Thorsten Tekieli suggests sharing results across your organization. This helps the company to see the value of CRO strategy. It also encourages them to suggest new hypotheses to test.

“Share your tests via email newsletters, in your Slack channels. Create small videos or executive summaries. People will start sharing ideas or challenging your hypothesis. Whatever the response, it will drive your program and the focus on your customers,” he says.

Use a combination of software tools

Successful CRO strategy calls for a mix of different tools that supply different data points. When combined these can give you a full picture of the activity on your site.

David Mannheim breaks the tools he uses down into three categories:

1. “Experimentation tools – for example, software that allows you to run A/B tests and other technical UX optimizations.”
2. “Behavioral tools – for example, heat mapping software that measures in-page behaviors and visitor interaction, segmentation analytics software, and others.”
3. “Voice of customer tools – this is qualitative analysis, for example user testing, surveys, and feedback polls.”

Build a multi-disciplinary CRO strategy team

To implement your CRO strategy, the team needs a range of skills. For Evie Brockwell, every team needs to be able to:

• Use data and insight to understand where you need to focus your efforts
• Be able to prioritize problems based on those insights—as well as your time or resource constraints
• Generate ideas and design concepts to test
• Be able to execute on those tests

According to David Mannheim: “Specialists working together to achieve an outcome is optimization. When you have a UX analyst, a UX designer, a UX researcher, an engineer all working on problems, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Sam Counterman notes a rising trend of “cross-functional CRO teams involving data scientists, web managers, paid media managers, etc.”

For Thorsten Tekieli, the key skillsets include:

• Someone to represent your users’ needs
• Someone who understands the business vision
• A web developer
• A UX designer
• A quality assurance (QA) analyst “who can test your solution for every possible use case and uncover things about your site you never knew about.”

Use multiple data points to gain a deeper understanding of your customers

The exact mix of data points will vary according to your CRO strategy priorities, your industry, and your target customers. But the recommendations of our experts provide a good starting point for thinking about which data would be most effective for your CRO strategy.

David Mannheim believes in using funnels and segmentation to identify and resolve any discrepancies. He recommends segmenting your funnel using the following order of priority:

1. Mobile vs desktop
2. Country or region
3. Traffic source

“Continually diving deeper into segmented funnels and comparing them on attributes will help you understand your areas of concern,” he says.

For Evie Brockwell, the simple answer is to combine as many relevant qualitative and quantitative data sources as possible, including:

• Funnels
• Analytical in-page data
• Customer research
• Usability testing across the site
• A digital experience analytics tool such as Contentsquare

Sam Counterman agrees on the effectiveness of combining multiple data sources: “The Contentsquare platform (zoning specifically) gives us a real-time view of what is happening on the front end with CTRs and exposure times, whereas Salesforce will give us the performance-based view informing us of pipeline and ROI. Bringing these data sets together in a single dashboard view lets us quickly understand the what, why, and how of what’s going on,” he says.

Thorsten Tekieli specifically recommends the click recurrence metric in Contentsquare because “it’s such an easy way to identify friction points in a specific zone”. “In combination with Quantify I can easily tell if that issue has an actual impact on conversion or how many visitors were impacted,” he adds.

Examples of CRO strategies (you’ll want to copy)

Example 1: on of our customer, a restaurant online

How this restaurant drove $7.8 million annualized uplift in revenue through one A/B test:

The restaurant’s team noticed customers on their highly-visited ‘Our Deals’ page weren’t clicking on the deal cards, but they couldn’t understand why. 

Using Contentsquare’s zoning analysis tool, they identified that customers were much quicker to click the “View Basket” CTA rather than the deal cards.

The team hypothesized that the lack of CTA on the deal cards themselves might be making them look unclickable to customers. So they decided to run a test to find out.

The solution of the CRO strategy

The restaurant’s digital team A/B tested adding a CTA to each of the deal cards.

• Control: No CTA visible on the deal card
• Variant: ‘Select’ CTA visible on the deal card

In the variant, when a customer clicked on the deal card CTA, it opened up the deal builder experience where they could select their choice of pizza, toppings, and drinks, then add that to their basket. They ran the test for two weeks.

The results of the CRO strategy

The variant (with the deal card CTA) was the clear winner. Extrapolating on the results seen, our customer anticipates an annualized uplift of $7.8 million in revenue. 

“We use Contentsquare to discover opportunities where there’s friction, where there are pain points, where we can potentially improve the customer experience, and where we can see the customers are having a tricky time interacting with our website. We were able to see the ROI within three or four months of having onboarded the product,” says Global Head of Analytics. 

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Example 2: New Look

How New Look increased conversions by 19% with user-generated content

New Look’s test and target team were looking to experiment to increase the CRO strategy with User Generated Content (UGC). They knew UGC got high engagement on other areas of the site, so they wanted to see what would happen when it was placed on product pages.

During the test, they exposed users to UGC on both the PLP and the PDP, replacing the first image in the carousel in both instances.

The results

They saw a marked improvement in page performance. The number of users reaching a PDP increased by 23%, indicating the new images were driving users to click. And overall product conversion increased by 19% — proving the images were helping users to purchase, too.

Topline incremental uplift on revenue was +5.5% over a week. Faith estimated the potential revenue uplift when using UGC imagery on more products throughout the site was 98%.

“Contentsquare helped us look at the results in a much more visual way and also understand the customer journey as a whole.” says Faith Dallas, Test and Target Specialist at New Look. 

How the CRO relies on strategic data

The digital experience you offer on your website should be a source of competitive advantage. A strategic approach to CRO strategy helps ensure you offer the digital experience your customers want by helping you focus on their needs and frustrations. 

But you need to be able to see the user behaviors and the barriers that are negatively impacting your customers once they’re on your site. For this, you need access to the right data.

With advanced digital intelligence tools, you can see:

• How users behave on your site
• Where they get stuck, and why they leave
• Which pages and CTAs are working best
• Which content gets the most views and clicks, and which is underperforming
• Which forms users are abandoning – and even why they’re abandoning
• The effectiveness of the digital experience you offer for mobile devices
• Customers’ direct feedback on your digital experience

Armed with these insights, you can then:

• Score and quantify insights on consumer digital behavior that feed into your long-term CRO strategy goals so that you can prioritize opportunities for optimization.
• Record and playback user sessions to reveal exactly how users are moving between content and between pages, highlighting key friction points on the customer journey.
• Quantify voice of customer feedback to gain a deeper understanding of where customers experience frustration on your site.

This level of deep insight fuels a CRO strategy approach. You can define your CRO strategy goals, set out your roadmap, and prioritize which hypotheses to test. 

You can measure your progress effectively and prove the impact you’re having on your organization’s bottom line. 

More importantly, you are able to understand your customers and adapt your digital experience to their expectations. You can adapt web pages to match your visitors’ drivers so they know where to find what they need when they land on your site. You can amplify the hooks that get your visitors to move through the customer journey by using elements they find persuasive. And you can minimize the frictions and barriers to action in your funnel. 

This in turn helps you influence the C-suite, increase your budget, and drive the digital and CRO strategy of your company. 

The post CRO strategy: What is it and how to get started appeared first on Contentsquare.

“I feel the need, the need for speed!” —Peter “Maverick” Mitchell, Top Gun

Today’s customers want instant gratification and access to information. As digital consumers, we’ve undoubtedly faced the frustrations of slow loading sites; pictures and fancy fonts that take too long, videos that buffer, and poor response times to user actions. Research has shown that a delay of 1 second in page load speed leads to a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and fewer page views.

“First impressions matter as much online as in person, so when a website fails to impress, customers will bounce off quicker than they got there.” — Sam Counterman, Vice President of Brand & Growth Marketing at Contentsquare

In a digital economy, we have become inherently impatient. This often means that online user experiences matter more than brand loyalty and trickle down to customer conversions and retention. To use a personal example, I was a loyal customer of a particular airline for many years; however, their dreadful website experience recently left me so fed up that I don’t fly with them anymore!

Beyond good design and site navigation for seamless user experiences, website loading speed is a crucial element often neglected. Loading speed also matters to search engine ranking as Google considers a site’s user-friendliness. Relevant sites that launch faster, avoid dynamic elements while loading and allow users to interact faster will be placed higher on a Google search.

Site metrics are fundamental to a brand’s digital success

According to Google, the probability of bounce rate increases by 32% between the first 1 to 3 seconds, which means brands don’t have much time to meet or exceed visitor expectations.

As website performance becomes a vital marker against business goals, organizations require specific data to measure a site’s user-friendliness. Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWVs) are three important metrics to measure a brand’s digital success, comprised of:

1. Largest Contentful Pain (LCP) measures loading performance: how long must a user wait before seeing the main element of the page on their screen?
2. First Input Delay (FID) measures input responsiveness: how long must a user wait before interacting with a page?
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability: how much is a user exposed to layout shifts?

Optimal site performance relies on getting all three elements right to decrease bounce rates, boost visitor retention, increase conversion and optimize the site for search engine discovery. Once you’ve uncovered your CWVs, it’s pretty amazing to discover how small changes, such as converting image formats from PNG to SVG, can vastly improve site performance and loading speeds.

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Getting CWVs right starts with advanced speed and performance insights

At Contentsquare, we’re committed to building better digital experiences for everybody. Certainly, for my team, we work hard to help brands consistently monitor and improve their performance against CWVs with our proprietary Speed Analysis tool. This allows you to monitor the loading of your pages from different mobile terminals and network qualities. It also analyzes site performance by comparing two or more site versions to determine the better option.

An example of Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis interface.

Top tips for improving your CWVs

As you set out to improve your CWVs, it’s important to remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. On that note, here are some of our top tips for improving the three CWVs elements.

Improving LCP

Sites should ideally aim for an LCP score of 2.5 seconds or less. In one real-life example of site analysis using our Customer Journey Analytics tool, we found the bounce rate for poor LCP was 32.9% compared to 18.6% for a site with good LCP. Some ways to fix this issue include:

• Analyzing and improving the efficiency of your server-side code will directly improve the time it takes for the browser to receive the data.

• Introduce a content delivery network (CDN) to avoid your users waiting for network requests to faraway servers.
• Boost your priority of the LCP image by specifying fetchpriority=”high” on the image element, causing LCP to happen sooner.

Improving FID

Sites should aim for an FID score of 100 milliseconds or less by:

• Optimizing pages for interaction readiness.
• Breaking down long-running code into smaller, asynchronous tasks.
• Using a web worker to run JavaScript on a background thread.

Improving CLS

Sites should aim for a CLS score of 0.1 or less. Here are some remedies:

• Include size attributes on all video and image elements to ensure the browser allocates the correct amount of space while the element loads.
• Pre-load fonts so the font assets have a higher priority in page rendering. If you have large images in PNGs and illustrations or icons, it’s quick and easy to swap these out for SGV formats, saving the browser a lot of time and helping your CLS score.
• Use the transform (scale) property in CSS for animations to avoid unexpected layout shifts. Also, minimize the use of GIFs and, if you can, swap these into SVG formats and avoid using heavy custom JavaScript and configuration.

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How does your website stack up?

Measuring our site’s performance and speed is a top business priority, particularly when we want to replicate best practices for Contentsquare customers. And suffice to say, we really do practice what we preach…

In 2022, Contentsquare rebranded and revamped our website, analyzing CWV using our analytical tools. We realized our new site was slow and didn’t pass CWVs scores on most pages. This was impacting our bounce rate and conversions. To address these website issues, we adopted a three-step process:

1. We used Contentsquare’s Page Comparator to quantify our pages and rank them based on their performance.
2. We followed up with Customer Journey Analytics to examine user journeys and identify drop-off areas.
3. We used Speed Analysis to measure our CWV scores.

Previously, for me to come up with this data and end up with a roadmap, I’d have had to use several tools to draw conclusions. Access to this data as a one-stop shop within Contentsquare is hugely beneficial for speed and efficiency.

Get up to speed

Ensure your website is set up for success to win new customers and retain loyalty. Get started by checking out our 2022 Digital Experience Benchmark report to give you a baseline. You can also experience our Speed Analysis tool for yourself and your team by booking a demo with our experts today.

The post The need for speed: How to supercharge your website for conversion and retention  appeared first on Contentsquare.

What’s more, the majority of your prospects’ time isn’t spent talking to your sales team—it’s spent independently doing research on your and your competitors’ websites. Your website is the first, and arguably the most important, impression of your brand (and products) for prospects. Your website needs to perform better than your best sales representative and your competition.

B2B customers today progress more than 70% of the way through the decision-making process before ever engaging a sales representative (source: Forbes).

With websites playing such a pivotal role in the B2B buyer journey, knowing how to create better B2B digital experiences while increasing your team’s efficiency and productivity is critical. That’s why we’ve created a playbook for digital teams at B2B tech and SaaS organizations packed full of examples and actionable tips for delivering truly outstanding B2B experiences.

So, here are three BIG reasons to read our new B2B Conversion Playbook for Digital Teams.

Learn how to improve B2B digital experiences to maximize conversions and ROI.

As a digital team, you have a wide variety of responsibilities and each day is often different from the last. Whether you’re trying to make a dent in that never-ending to-do list or trying to spend less time putting out fires, our playbook will show you how to improve your day-to-day activities and achieve your long-term goals.

We dive into things like A/B testing, site performance, user journeys, lead scoring and qualification, error monitoring, and more. Learn how improving these aspects creates a better digital experience for your visitors while making your life a lot easier.

See the results of a user-centric digital experience.

Throughout this playbook, we cover real-life examples from our customers on how focusing on user experiences creates a multitude of positive results, such as more organic traffic, more conversions, more form fills, increased content and tech stack ROI, and additional revenue.

See the benefits of digital experience analytics for your team in action: lookout for the ‘DXA in play’ sections throughout the playbook.

See how Contentsquare helps B2B teams in our on-demand B2B product demo.

Don’t just take our word for it—hear from the experts.

Focusing on your digital experience and creating a more user-centric digital strategy is one of the most impactful things you can do to improve your user journeys and conversions. But don’t just take our word for it—read what experts from B2B organizations such as RingCentral, NVIDIA, and Dell along with digital experts from large organizations such as T-Mobile have to say about digital experiences. (Hint: it’s very important.)

Ready to turn your website into a powerhouse of lead generation and revenue? Read our B2B Conversion Playbook for Digital Teams today!

The post 3 reasons to read our B2B Conversion Playbook for Digital Teams appeared first on Contentsquare.

About Moss Bros

Moss Bros is the UK’s number one men’s formalwear retailer. Their mission? To inspire, guide, and help men feel amazing whatever the occasion. “And we’ve been around for a very long time,” says Matt, “Since 1851!”

During that time, Moss Bros has adapted and expanded its services in line with changing consumer demands. In 2022, there are now four parts to Moss Bros’ business.

“Firstly, there’s our ready-to-wear menswear across both formal and casual wear ranges,” explains Matt. “Then we’ve got our custom-made tailoring service called Tailor Me which allows customers to choose from 1000s of different styling options, fabrics, linings, and buttons to craft their own design.”

On top of this, Moss Bros’ most famous offering is their hire service. “That’s what a lot of people know us for,” says Matt. “This offering is very occasion-led, so people hiring for weddings and black tie events—that kind of thing.”

And finally, their latest venture: Moss Box, a subscription-based business launched in 2021. “Subscribers can have any two items from a Moss Box collection at any time, swapping them as many times as they like. We take care of delivery and cleaning. And if you love something, you can keep it!” he explains.

Preparing their website for success

With seven years’ experience at Moss Bros, plus previous roles including Head of eCommerce at luxury fashion retailer my-wardrobe.com and Marketing Director at parts retailer eSpares, Matt has a wealth of eCommerce knowledge at his disposable.

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So how does Matt’s team prepare for success throughout the year?

For Matt, understanding his customer’s digital behavior on the deepest level, then implementing changes to make their lives easier is the name of the game. “We just love coming up with better ways of doing things.”

“We’re an optimization-focused team at Moss Bros. We love getting under the skin of our visitors and analyzing what they’re doing on-site. We take pride in uncovering their pain points and finding the areas of friction that are stopping them from doing what they want to do.”

For this, Matt and his team use Contentsquare’s advanced intelligence platform to analyze their customer behavior, diving into individual page performance and in-depth customer journey analysis to better understand what their customers are doing. They also feed testing and personalization data from Dynamic Yield into the Contentsquare platform to see how different A/B tests are performing. “We then use all of this data to help craft better experiences for them,” he says.

Alongside Contentsquare and Dynamic Yield, Moss Bros works closely with Endless Gain; a research agency that uses biometrics, psychology, and experimentation to optimize customer experiences and improve conversion rates. “They help us run testing sessions where we get remote volunteers to try various tasks on-site,” Matt explains. “We watch how they perform the tasks and ask them to explain any difficulties they’re having as they go.”

This mix of qualitative and quantitative data helps Moss Bros paint a thorough picture of their customer behavior. And armed with these insights, they’re able to continuously adapt and improve their site to better cater to their users’ preferences. 

Want to learn more about data-driven approach to design?  

Download our latest Retailers on Retail Report to read the full article and gain access to actionable advice from 12 other retail experts, too! 

From insights on how to leverage digital customer experience data to future-proof online journeys to tips on using empathy-driven design to improve site experience, this report is packed with real-life learnings and use cases to help you have a successful year in retail.

The post Data-driven web design: The recipe for success according to Moss Bros appeared first on Contentsquare.

Alongside Charlotte is Laura Rademaker; a Customer Experience Manager who manages both product owners and UX specialists within the Digital Operations team. “I’m in charge of ensuring the customer has the best possible experience on our site and becomes a loyal returning customer.”

About G-Star

G-star is a luxury fashion brand dedicated to the cloth, craft, culture, and history of denim. “We want to be the most hardcore denim brand,” says Laura. “Denim is in our blood. It’s what we live and breathe.” 

This means every digital interaction a customer has with their brand needs to demonstrate their essence and these values. But not just that: “We want to exceed their expectations, so every time they visit us they come back thinking the experience was the most on-brand and amazing experience they’ve ever had,” says Laura.

Each customer needs to feel as though the content they received was relevant to them and fitted their needs. “We believe in being fierce, authentic, and outspoken—so we should show this to our customers,” says Laura. But, as a brand, how do you know if you’re actually achieving this? 

Taking it back to basics

The team at G-star wanted to measure how their customer experience was performing in light of their brand goals. However, like many digital teams, they weren’t sure where to begin. “You have heaps of data everywhere and can feel unorganized and chaotic. You’re not sure where to find the information you need to make the right product decisions,” says Laura. 

So the team decided to start by learning what the different levels of customer experience involved before working out how to accurately track their progress against each level. 

Here’s what they found…

The different levels of CX

Interaction. “Firstly, there’s the interaction level: the specific touchpoint a customer has with your product,” explains Laura. “Things that affect the interaction level are the information architecture of your site, for example. Or your visual design, which also includes the quality of your product.”

Customer journey. Each interaction happens at a specific point in time, so the next level of customer experience is an in-depth understanding of your customer journey. “We need to anticipate customer needs, understand where they’ve been and where they’re trying to go,” she continues. It’s all about giving your customers a consistent experience so they build confidence with the brand. 

Relationship. Beyond the customer journey is the relationship you have with your customers. “It’s the sum of all interactions and journeys and is ultimately how your customers feel about your brand,” says Laura. 

“Things that impact the relationship stage can be the experience they have with your product, whether it’s a digital product or a physical one. It’s any touchpoint they have along the customer journey, from speaking to customer services to purchasing something. And it’s also your branding.” 

Do you live and breathe your brand values, and is this evident in all of your interactions and journeys? Is your marketing team delivering content that accurately reflects the experience your product actually offers? All of these things help to build a relationship with your customer, and they’re imperatively important.

Armed with this understanding of customer experience levels, it was time for the team to start tracking their progress. But how can you measure if your brand is delivering the customer experience you think it is? What metrics do you need to measure? And are your typical analytics tools enough?

A framework for success

To analyze their customer experience, the team turned to Google’s HEART Framework for a holistic view of their data points. Here’s what the framework looks like: 

• H is for happiness: How do customers feel about your product? This is measured through metrics such as satisfaction surveys, ratings, reviews, or NPS scores.
• E is for engagement: How often do customers return to your brand? This is measured through metrics such as visits, session length, and pages viewed.
• A is for adoption: Do customers become new users or converters? This is measured through metrics such as the conversion rate of new versus returning users and account signups. 
• R is for retention: Do customers like our product enough to buy it again? This is measured through metrics such as churn rate, repeat purchases, and app usage. 
• T is for test success: Can users achieve their goal quickly and easily? This is measured through metrics such as time on specific tasks (i.e. the time to complete a checkout flow), surveys with goal completion rates, and customer effort score to understand if there are bottlenecks.

Want to learn more about how G-Star’s using the Google HEART framework?

Download our latest Retailers on Retail Report to read the full article and gain access to actionable advice from 12 other retail experts, too! 

From insights on how to leverage digital customer experience data to future-proof online journeys to tips on using empathy-driven design to improve site experience, this report is packed with real-life learnings and use cases to help you have a successful year in retail. 

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The post How to use the Google HEART framework to optimize your CX with G-Star appeared first on Contentsquare.

At Contentsquare, we’re committed to creating better digital experiences for all. Our advanced customer journey analysis shows you exactly how visitors progress through your site from entry to exit. So you can discover your biggest opportunities and frustrations within minutes.

Mapping the customer journey

A few decades ago, the customer journey was pretty straightforward.

A customer may see an ad in a magazine or on television, and then head out to buy your product from a local shop. For marketers, life was relatively simple.

But thanks to social media and advancements in digital marketing, the way we shop has changed. What may have once been a three- or four-touchpoint journey from awareness to purchase, can now be influenced by hundreds of messages coming from a broad range of channels.

Display ads, WhatsApp, social media promotion, Amazon Alexa, email marketing; in 2021, the available touchpoints for you to get in front of your customer are almost endless.

This means customer journey mapping is a necessity if you want to make sure you’re getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Why? Because the key to success is making sure your customer’s path to purchase is as smooth and frictionless as possible. And customer journey mapping will help you do just that.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every touchpoint a customer has with your company, from the awareness stage right through to the purchase and then the advocacy stage.

An in-depth customer journey map can help you understand your customers better by uncovering common pain points in their path to purchase.

In eCommerce, for example, marketers will use a customer journey map to identify which stages of the buying journey are causing problems with their target audience.

Then, by mapping out the content you have against each stage of your customer’s journey, you’re able to pinpoint gaps in your content marketing strategy. 

Maybe you don’t have enough case studies to help get bottom-of-the-funnel prospects over the line? Perhaps customers are losing interest in your site because you don’t have buyer’s guides for those in the consideration phase?

One of the main benefits of a customer journey map is being able to ensure you have content ready for each stage of your buyer’s journey to help progress them down the funnel, entirely friction-free.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map. This is a super important process and, while it may take some time and energy to complete, will be worth it in the long run.

It means getting to know your customers as best you can; where they hang out online, what problems they’re trying to solve, what their budgets are, what content they like to consume and how they like to consume it.

The customer journey mapping process

Now you know why you need a customer journey map, how do you create one? 

A basic customer journey map is relatively straightforward to build, but it will take some time to research and populate with great content.

You’ll also need to keep it updated in line with a fast-paced marketing environment and be prepared to adjust and optimize it as you go.

How to create a customer journey map

Step 1: Persona research 

The first step is finding out as much about your customers as possible. 

Remember, effective research relies on more than just current customer interviews. So you’ll want to find out why people didn’t choose you too.

Speak to your sales team about opportunities that you’ve lost historically and what issues were sighted most commonly. Why did people choose to go elsewhere? What might have persuaded them to stay?

Take a look at your web analytics to see what content your customers are engaging with and what impact these touchpoints have on moving people down the funnel. 

Speak to your customers and ask them directly what made them choose you over competitors.

• What do they like most about you?
• What improvements have they seen since choosing you?

Step 2: Define touchpoints

Once you know who your customers are and what they need, you can start plotting the touchpoints they have with your business. 

These touchpoints will depend on what industry you work in and how your specific customers interact with your brand. 

For example, the first few touchpoints for a coffee shop might look like this: 

• The customer sees a geo-targeted ad
• The customer visits your shop
• The customer buys coffee
• The customer follows your brand on Twitter

Whereas for a clothing company, it might look like this: 

• The customer sees a social media promotion
• The customer clicks on your website
• The customer browses your site
• The customer adds an item to their basket

The stages of the customer journey are different for everyone, but here are the most commonly used stages to get you started:

Awareness > Consideration > Purchase > Retention > Advocacy

And here are some examples of the types of content you’ll need for each stage: 

• Awareness: Social media ad, PPC 
• Consideration: Blog content, buying guides
• Purchase: PLP, PDP
• Retention: Email nurture
• Advocacy: Co-creation, social media posts

Step 3: Choose your tools

Once you know your customer and what their touchpoints look like, it’s time to plot these onto a customer journey map. 

A Google Sheet is a great place to start. It’s easily editable and shareable with dropdown functionality and conditional formatting to keep everything organized.

Step 4: Populate your customer journey map

Next up, add columns for each stage of the buying process that you defined earlier. These don’t have to be too granular to start with, though you may want to expand them later on down the line to create super personalized content.

Add in details about how your customers are feeling at each stage of their journey, plus what pain points they might have. The more detail you can add here, the easier it will be to create the right content.

Step 5: Create kickass content

Once mapped, it’s time to make sure you have kickass content for every stage of your customer journey map. Your map will inform your content strategy; such as creating more upper-funnel content (such as PR stories and SEO-focused blog content) or better optimizing your bottom of funnel content (such as Product Listing Pages and Product Detail Pages).

Next up: Layer your audiences

If you want to go one step further, you can layer more specific audiences to ensure your content consistently hits the right spot with different audiences.

For example, you may want to create customer journey maps for different job roles or industries to make sure you’re delivering the right messages to them at the right time.

Whether you decide to segment your audience by most common pain points, job title, or industry, your customer journey map will help you spot points of friction and content gaps to ensure a smooth customer experience for everyone.

Example customer journey maps

What does a customer journey map look like in practice? Here are two examples of customer journey map layouts that you may want to use for inspiration.

Example 1: NN Group

NN Group has defined their buying stages based on their customer’s very specific buying cycle. Consider, explore, compare, test, and negotiate. They’ve also included quotes from customers at various stages to better understand their pain points and feelings.

Example 2: UX Hints

This second example from UX Hints uses a grid format to map out what their customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage of the buying process. Using emojis is a quick and engaging way to share feelings, something you may want to emulate in your customer journey map.

Take away the hassle of digital customer journey mapping with Contentsquare

Once a customer lands on your site, our customer journey analysis software tells you everything you need to know about their digital journey.

From uncovering their most common pain points in seconds to understanding where unexpected drop-offs occur and what optimizations will increase engagement on your website, we can help you get as close to your customers as possible.

What’s more, our signature sunburst visualizes aggregated data from every single one of your customer journeys, allowing you to make quantitative and qualitative decisions about which website optimizations will have the most positive impact.

If you’re interested to know more about your customers and how they interact with your site, get in touch with us today.

The post How to use customer journey mapping to improve your business appeared first on Contentsquare.

And in today’s world, there are plenty of touchpoints for you to talk to your customers. From social media to search engine optimisation, online events to Google advertising; the world is your digital CX oyster.

But with all of these channels open to you, what actually makes a good customer experience? And how can you use these channels to build a brand that your customers will love? Let’s take a look.

What is a great customer experience?

This depends heavily on your business and your customer, so the ideal customer experience will look slightly different for everyone. If you’re an online fashion retailer, for example, your business goals will be different from a charity website, or a bank. But, luckily, there is common ground.

We spoke with members of our Contentsquare community to understand what a good customer experience means to them. Unsurprisingly, the same things came up time and time again. Why? Because there are some aspects of customer experience that are entirely universal – the absolute CX necessities if you will.

Here are the top three…

1. Ease and simplicity

Steven Biggs, Digital Analytics Lead for Samsung, explains the concept of the customer experience in one word: “seamless”. It’s all about creating experiences that need as little thought as possible. “On every page, the customer shouldn’t even have to think or look around the screen,” he explains, “When they move the mouse to the top-right corner to search; that’s where the search box is already open. When they move the mouse to the top-left corner to return to the homepage; that’s where the company logo is. The less the customer has to think, the better the CX.”

The less the customer has to think, the better the CX.

And H&M’s Data Analyst Kelly Chies agrees; “Every additional click needed for our customers to find what they are looking for increases the risk of losing them. Customers shouldn’t have to dig through our site to find what they are looking for.”

So first up; create a site that’s as simple as possible to use. That means understanding exactly how your customers use your site; how they enter, what they click on, what pages they use most, what content makes them bounce, what they interact with or skip over. And the difference between a good customer experience and a great one is being absolutely ruthless with how you analyse and act upon those insights.

If 90% of your customers click on a CTA below the fold, move it higher up – don’t make them scroll to find it. If your navigation is messy and customers don’t use it, swap it up and use CX insights to uncover what needs to be there, and what can be removed. It’s all about simplicity.

Our customer journey analysis helps you see how visitors progress through your site, showing you your biggest opportunities and customer’s frustrations within minutes. This helps you create digital journeys with as few touchpoints as possible, which improves your customer’s perception of your brand.

2. A customer-centric mindset

We’re going to be blunt here (it’s for your own good, promise): It doesn’t matter if you think you’ve written the best blog post ever if your customers spend less than 10 seconds on the page. It doesn’t matter if you’re proud of your homepage video if your customers bounce immediately. And it really doesn’t matter if you love the copy on your product page if no one’s buying your damn product.

Know what your customers want, not what you want as a business.

“Know what your customers want, not what you want as a business,” says Tianyi She, Digital Experience Manager at NatWest Group. “Too often [companies] build a new tool or new functionality that looks cool but the usability is really poor” or even worse; customers simply don’t engage with it at all. This means it’s a waste of time for you and it’s causing friction for your users, and a bad customer experience.

So this one’s simple; if it’s not working for your customer then you gotta kill that content. Even if you love it. Even if you spent hours on it. Because you’re not working for 45 hours a week to sell your product to yourself. So make sure you put your customers first – at all times.

Customer journey mapping and zone-based heatmaps will give you the confidence you need to kill that 10-minute CEO interview lingering on your homepage. A great customer experience is not about you, it’s about your customer. Always. This is non-negotiable.

3. Brand consistency

No matter how big or small your business, ensuring you communicate a clear and consistent message across all your channels is critical to success. “A good customer experience should be omnichannel,” says Johanna. “As a customer, I would expect the same tone of voice, interactivity, and service on all channels.”

As a customer, I would expect the same tone of voice, interactivity, and service on all channels.

Strong and consistent branding helps to reinforce your brand identity and build a stronger relationship with your customers. Over time, your core messaging, tone of voice, and visual branding will become ingrained into the minds of your customers, helping to drive positive sentiment and trust. But even more importantly, it helps to ensure your brand is recognisable and easy to remember – an absolute must in today’s heavily saturated market.

“It’s human nature to want to feel connected to everything around us, including the brands we interact with every day,” explains Tim Sisson, Consumer Experience Analyst at Trader Interactive. So the stronger connection you can build with your customers – through consistent branding and a clear message – the easier it is to convert them. It’s all of those little branded interactions, pieced together, that create “the experience that wins the customer over and has lifetime value”, says Tim.

It’s a no-brainer: A consistent story helps to build a better connection with your customers, so make sure all your channels are singing from the same hymn sheet.

The Contentsquare difference

And if you need a little help ensuring your customer experience is as good as it can be, Contentsquare is here to make that happen. From optimising content to enhancing experimentation performance, we’ll help you make better, smarter, faster decisions. How? By going beyond traditional clickstream analytics to give you all the metrics you need to truly understand your customer behaviour.

Join us at our upcoming virtual CX Circle event to learn more about building customer experiences that actually convert.

The post What does good customer experience mean to you? The hottest CX priorities from five top brands appeared first on Contentsquare.

So, in one sentence; what is mobile-only indexing? 

Mobile-only indexing means that Google will now only use the mobile version of your site to evaluate the relevance of your page to the user’s search query.

Let’s break that down. When you search for something on Google, Google crawls hundreds of sites, creating a customer journey analysis, to find you the most relevant and authoritative pieces of content. The Google Search algorithm looks at multiple factors (such as what keywords you used, your location, the usability of pages, and the expertise of available sources) to give you the best possible answer, thereby creating an incredibly satisfying user experience. You got what you came for; you’ll use Google again.

Now, Google used to crawl your desktop site for these ranking signals. Then, in 2019, it moved to mobile-first indexing which prioritised your mobile site (but still fell back on your desktop site if needed). In 2021, Google is moving to mobile-only indexing which means – yep, you guessed it – they will now only crawl and index your mobile site.

Is mobile-only indexing a big deal, then?

Yes, it’s a big deal. And here’s why: if you’re currently showing content on your desktop site that you don’t also show on your mobile site, that content is now essentially invisible in the eyes of Google. So this could be a big issue for your SEO efforts if you’ve been tailoring your content by device. What will this look like in practice? Well, you’ll be seeing a pretty hefty drop-off in your organic visibility if your SEO-optimised content isn’t visible across all devices.

What are the two biggest factors in the mobile user experience of your website: why, Google, why?! 

While true this is a major Google update, it’s one that should come as little surprise. Google has been making moves towards prioritising the mobile experience for a while now, so consider this the latest cherry on top of the mobile customer journey cake, if you will.

And in fairness to Google, this switch to mobile-only indexing makes a lot of sense; 80% of internet users own a smartphone and people spend 69% of their media time on mobile. The world is going mobile and it’s not slowing down any time soon, so creating better experiences for mobile users is a no-brainer. After all, Google wants to keep you coming back, right?

So….panic stations?

No, don’t panic! It’s likely the fix is relatively simple – you might just need to devote some time and resources to tweaking the setup of your website now and then refining how you manage content going forward (we’ll cover this more further down).

If you’re looking for more insight on the technicalities of this change, then there are plenty of resources online that provide an in-depth lowdown – we loved this incredibly informative piece from Traffic Think Tank, for example – so there’s no point in us regurgitating the same. What we can do, however, is share our expert insights based on visual merchandising analytics, customer journey analysis, and AI analytics. In no time you’ll know how to nail your desktop and mobile customer experience because AI analytics is what we do best.

What are the two biggest factors in the mobile user experience of your website: top tips

1. Ensure your desktop and mobile content is the same

The easiest way to ensure your website doesn’t take a nose dive off an SEO cliff is to keep your mobile and desktop content the same, especially the content signals that directly impact crawling, indexing and ranking (such as on-page content, internal links, titles and descriptions). Gone are the days of creating mobile and desktop versions of the same content.

2. Double down on responsive web design

If you’ve been flirting with responsive web design for a while, then now’s the time to launch full speed ahead. Why? Because a responsive website serves one consistent ‘version’ of the page code and is the single most straightforward way to ensure parity between your desktop and mobile content, and a great online browsing experience for both.

By prioritising the creation of a simple and intuitive mobile user journey (one that’s the same on desktop thanks to responsive web design), your SEO efforts won’t be in vain and your website will continue to rank on Google.

3. The mobile-friendliness test

If your site is not mobile-friendly, you’re going to really struggle to rank. Luckily, there’s a super simple way to check how mobile-ready your site is – Google’s mobile-friendliness test. Remember, ensuring your website passes this test is an absolute minimum for your 2021 digital strategy. If your site fails, you’d better believe you’ll pay for it in search engine rankings. But not only that, your business will pay for it in unhappy customers, meaning your bottom line will pay for it in lost revenue. Yes, you really need to pass this test.

4. Optimise your customer journey (with your mobile hat on)

‘We know mobile users behave differently from desktop users, with different goals, and in a different context,’ says Chris Camps, Product Marketing Manager at Contentsquare.

Being able to spot differences in behaviour and conversion gives you the insight you need to go beyond best practice and tailor the experience for your customers – then build a customer journey that works across both mobile and desktop.

Ask yourself some simple (but very effective) questions; does your site load quickly on mobile? Is your landing page too text-heavy? Do you really need that many images clogging up your homepage? Be ruthless in your answers. With Google now prioritising the mobile experience, it has never been more important to understand how your customers interact with your site and what’s causing them to bounce.

At Contentsquare, we believe that building stronger mobile experiences can help remove ‘fluff’ from your desktop experience too, so analysing your website with a mobile-first hat on can help you achieve an all-around digital journey glow up – and we’re really here for it.

5. Your desktop UX still matters (So pay attention to your UX analytics)

Let’s make one thing clear: this change doesn’t mean you can gleefully chuck your desktop UX plans into the bin. Oh no, they’re still just as important. In fact, for certain industries (such as B2B), the mobile revolution is yet to arrive – with mobile traffic accounting for just 17% of traffic for B2B brands according to our 2021 Digital Experience Benchmark Report.

‘Mobile-only indexing shouldn’t be thought of as a death knell for desktop,’ says Nicholas Teddy, Global Director of Digital Marketing at Contentsquare. ‘Instead, this update just codifies what has been a best practice for more than a decade: Create parity between your mobile and desktop experiences, whatever your industry. Don’t hide content from mobile visitors or give them impoverished experiences.’

Because quite simply, your site will suffer whether it’s B2B or not.

And we’re here to help!

At Contentsquare, we know a thing or two about creating digital experiences that your customers will love. Our expert capabilities (such as journey analysis, zoning, and session replay) help you understand how users are interacting with your site and give you the tools you need to optimise and level up your customer experience.

And thanks to Google’s mobile-first index, it’s never been more important to create seamless experiences across all devices. So why not join brands like Dreams, New Look, and Natwest Group and use Contentsquare’s world-leading digital experience insights platform to optimise your customer journey? Book a demo with us today.

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The post What are the two biggest factors in the mobile user experience of your website? appeared first on Contentsquare.