By Geoff Galat, Clicktale
Running a business used to be straightforward. If many people were passing by, looking around but not buying anything in your local market stall, you’d be asking yourself ‘What’s going wrong?’. Today, with the ‘market stall’ now located in cyberspace and potentially accessible to millions of customers, you might only realize that people aren’t buying a certain product when your stock figures are in — which may be too late.
Despite the numerous data tools available to online businesses, today’s emphasis on data may inadvertently disguise failures. For example, your marketing manager may tell you “Hey, we’ve jumped from 2% to 3% in our conversion rate!” But what about the other 97%? The opportunity cost of not focusing on the other 97% — the bigger picture — is enormous.
Advertisement
A hot dog stall owner is much more pragmatic and fast reacting. Ask him, and he will tell you where he put his cart in the morning in order to maximize his profit. He knows which particular subway exit to target for the greatest profit — and at what times. He knows how to adjust prices according to his customers, and he will even add sector-specific products — for example halal meat in a Muslim area — in order to attract more customers.
By contrast, while digital companies are swimming in data, in reality many are falling blind, relying on nothing more than bits ’n’ bytes.
That’s why it’s time to get back to basics. While businesses obsess over generating demand, they sometimes forget the fundamental questions: Why are you trying to market something? And what’s the best way to do it?
Keep It Visual
For example, facing a slump in sales, the hot dog merchant may spend time observing and interacting with his customers: maybe it’s a certain description that’s putting them off? Maybe it’s the price? Or maybe it’s not being advertised prominently enough?
In the digital world, you can’t see what your customer is doing unless you use a data visualization system, which converts all those billions of bits and bytes into coherent patterns of behavior that can be tracked and analyzed in real time. This becomes a common visual language that everyone in your organization can understand — UX, product owners, IT, marketing and most importantly, the people who care about the business results. Keeping it visual helps create alignment across the board about what needs to be done.
In doing so, it becomes possible to do what has been a key obstacle in all businesses: to combine the “left brain” analytical and quantitative aspects of digital marketing with the more “right brain” behaviors, the creative and even emotional insights about your users.
Running a digital business still incorporates the same basics used to run a corner store or a hot dog stand — just on a larger scale. Because business transactions take place online or in an app, gathering and interpreting in-depth data about these digital interactions are absolutely vital if you are to succeed. At the end of the day, it’s still the human touch that will optimize and deliver the best customer experience, no matter which digital platform you use.
For example, a well-known global news site sought to increase its video content viewing by having videos load automatically on its home page. While the move seemed like a sensible idea on paper, in practice, forcing video clips upon users backfired. Instead of greater digital engagement, users were abandoning the page altogether. When we were asked to analyze the data, we discovered that users found the video clips annoying or jarring because their expectations when turning to this news site was to find a place where they could quietly read the news without interruption. The solution here proved relatively simple: allow visitors to choose to click and play a video, rather than having it forced upon them.
Like the hot dog vendor who studies his customers to figure out what it is they want and what it is that might be preventing them from buying a hot dog, businesses need to be constantly tuned in to what their digital customers’ needs are. And if your users are frustrated, it’s crucial to understand why, in order to fix the problem before that frustration turns to abandonment.
Geoff Galat is CMO of Clicktale, a provider of Experience Analytics for Fortune 500 companies such as Walmart, MetLife and Adobe. Galat has held leadership marketing roles at companies including Mercury Interactive, Luminate, Tumbleweed, and Tealeaf, which was acquired in 2012 by IBM. As CMO of Tealeaf, he led creation of the new digital customer experience management strategic market category, focused on strategically enhancing the way consumers interact online using advanced analytics. Once Tealeaf was fully integrated into IBM, Galat served as CMO of another IBM acquisition, Silverpop. He subsequently headed marketing at a new venture of AGT International, serving as CMO of the entire company.
