Notes on the New Rules of Engagement Optimization

Last year, around this time, I watched an interesting webinar about how an organization can make the most out of its website in terms of engaging with its customers and optimizing the online experience.

The two industry experts who gave the webinar were Mark Taylor from Wunderman, and Brent Hieggelke from Omniture.

It was called Actions Speak Louder Than Clicks: The New Rules of Engagement Optimization and you can probably still check it out here. There is also this PDF version.

I was really excited about it, so I took notes.

I just dug them up the other day to reference and I want to share some of the points here for a few of my friends who read this blog. This topic may be especially of interest to them, as they work in CRM, web development, user experience design and other areas of technology in marketing.

So, here are some selected notes I took:

A click does not mean a customer, so it’s necessary to get smart on both sides of the click, before and after.

So, after the click, turn a motivated visitor into an engaged customer through a relevant conversion process. The on-site experience determines the conversion rate, and is the bottleneck point of all the off-site marketing spending. It’s where customers demand a dialogue, not a monologue.

And the Old Rules still apply:

• Customer comes first
• A communication must elicit a response you can measure
• Innovation is the key to solving client problems

Marketing has to be a starter of conversations, not just "selling and telling." An "after-the-click" marketer will:

• Establish the truly important KPIs
• Segment and target the different audiences
• Constantly test and measure
• Treat their landing page as a hypothesis and not as a creative product (create personalized content)
• Optimize the engagement opportunity

So, that’s where the Filter of Experience Optimization comes in. It’s the sincerest form of listening and it goes beyond usability and web analytics. It consists of:

• A/B Testing – testing different versions of headline, offer, lead, benefits, images, or look/feel
• Multivariate testing - testing a variety of different elements and test them in various combinations to determine which individual element contributes which part of the conversion lift. For example: Which navigational structure best performs? Where should the search box be placed? How prominent should the privacy and security statement be? Which overall page layout reduces bounce rates?
• Customer Segment targeting – For example, the second visit content targeted based on content affinity
• Predictive 1 to 1 targeting - real-time data mining, predictive modeling, serve offer if behavior indicates interest

So, in summary, to put those Old Rules through the Filter of Experience Optimization, the critical business strategies become:

• Listen to the customer - use real-time customer intelligence to enhance the customer experience on the website
• Measure what matters: What are the key behaviors on the customer's journey through the site? What are the highest priority metrics? How do they impact the end goal?
• Only measure those things that you can impact
• Innovate - invest 10-15% of marketing dollars in engagement optimization: testing and targeting

So, do actions speak louder than clicks?

If you want to read more on this topic, I would recommend reading Customer Experience Matters, Technology in Marketing and Web Analytics Demystified.