By Graham Cooke, Founder, CEO, Qubit
It’s fall and there are two things on the mind of every American: Football and the sales season that kicks off with Columbus Day and lasts us through the holidays. If you’re not in the mindset of keeping your customers first, then be prepared to continue to see your retail sales figures slump.
Today, it’s customers, not marketers, choosing how they engage with brands. Because consumers choose how they interact, brands have to be ready to anticipate their every movement. And in this game of customization or real-time retailing, the best offensive playbook comes in the form of digital marketing technologies so that marketing quarterbacks can be sure that fewer Hail Mary strategies are deployed and rather customized, unique offers are passed and successfully taken down the field to retail touchdown by the 12th man.
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Why Blitzing Isn’t Getting You Yardage
Imagine if the game never moved beyond the 20 yards surrounding the 50 yard line. That’s actually the reality for online retailers and marketers today. To move the ball, most retailers are still deploying a blitz strategy, or more commonly, “throw it against the wall and see what sticks.” Most first time visitors, 84% in fact, will never return to a site because they’re not met with compelling offers, products or language that speaks to them. This makes it critical to make a good first impression by applying personalized call to actions to incentivize them to purchase.
Get in the game by adding a sense of urgency message to your website such as “Only x items left in stock” – might be a cheap shot but it’ll drive conversions. This tactic guarantees retailers more completed passes on the consumer journey and reduces unnecessary fumbling wherein the user will find elsewhere to shop. And during holiday shopping season, these are the type of penalties to avoid.
Excessive Time Outs From IT
However, even with a man in motion, marketers struggle with optimizing the digital customer experience because they are increasingly scrambling for their budget – 14.5% of marketing budgets are spent on marketing technology but 72% of this is currently redundant and overlapping across solutions. Additionally, with over 10% of the budget controlled by IT – a department more often than not disengaged with and “out of bounds” of the marketing strategy – it can feel like the retail quarterback is being clotheslined by their own defensive line. Businesses have enlisted too many optimization technologies and often don’t have the correct skills, organizational structure or partnerships to manage them, bringing a potential touchdown to a dead ball. With 60% of companies citing that the marketing playing field is far too fragmented to gain the yards they need and that several solutions circle teams back to a “first down” (Forrester), it’s time for the CMO to become a free agent and take more digital ownership.
Crafting A New Field Position
With an increased budget and role in IT, marketers can move their fantasy teams onto the playing field. Imagine the best players and coaches collaborating to achieve super bowl champion status; this is essentially what marketers are doing when tracking customer behavior, listening to demands, implementing live personalizations and seeing the results through rapid and sustained ROI. Now, 50% of marketers are focused on improving the customer experience to drive conversion.
A personalized web experience produces loyal customers and loyal customers have the biggest impact on ROI – like having Jerry Rice, in his prime, all day, every day. The latest research from Qubit – a marketing platform that analyzed 950 million page views from more than 123 million website visits – found 1.06% of visitors generated 40% of a site’s income. The loyal users, nicknamed “big spenders”, visited their preferred sites 300 times more often than the average user – talk about a home-field advantage.
Although, audience acquisition technology still dominates the field of play, investment in optimization is growing. e-Commerce and digital marketing communities are increasingly realizing that building digital traffic volumes alone is not good enough; real-time retailing is needed for greater conversion rates and revenues. Between 40% and 55% of respondents are expanding and/or upgrading various optimization technologies that can enhance customer experience. Additionally, e-Commerce teams are poised to take greater ownership as optimization technologies improve conversion and IT’s marketing technology role will continue to decrease.
Graham Cooke has been working with web technology since 1995, designing and building websites with emergent technology. Prior to founding Qubit, he spent 5 years working at Google. His most recent role there was as global leader on Google’s strategy for conversion rate improvement. This involved working with Google’s largest and smallest customers to improve their online conversion rates as well as developing the Google Conversion Professional program. Graham has also worked extensively with Product Management and Engineering teams to deliver tools to build more effective marketing solutions with the AdWords auction system as well as management of campaigns with millions of keywords. Prior to Google Graham ran his own technology company delivering Internet Protocol television systems to the advertising industry.
