How customer behaviour online can make you a smarter marketer
In large organisations, when it comes to key marketing decisions it’s often the HiPPO who rules – that’s the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.
Often HiPPOs are formed in the wilderness without access to all the information, or they’re based upon what’s worked in the past, or they’re simply personal preference. The problem for online marketers is that HiPPOs tend to be large, over-inflated beasts that are reluctant to change direction.
Using data to tame the beast.
The good news for marketers (if not the HiPPO) is that modern online marketing techniques can effectively make the HiPPO extinct, allowing decisions to be made based upon measurable customer behaviour, rather than ‘gut feel’.
In today’s world, as many HiPPs will tell you, the ‘customer is king’. Yet many businesses are still unsure how best to understand one of the best sources of customer research available to them – their own website.
One of the benefits of new website analytics and testing solutions is the depth and value of insight into customer behaviour that can be gleaned from a website. Reams of valuable customer behaviour data can be mined for insight and action.
The advantage of a robust testing programme is the ease with which this insight can influence the HiPPO. By making customer preference visible and actionable, a successful testing programme will yield improvements in conversion, return on investment and customer satisfaction.
Multivariate testing. A big word for a simple idea.
It’s no longer good enough to build a website, push it live and then sit back and wait for the results. Continuous improvement is what sets you apart.
Multivariate testing (MVT) is a direct marketing technique that e-commerce providers and other online marketers have applied to the web. With MVT, you can test the effectiveness of a range of messages, designs, offers or promotions simultaneously on real customers in a live environment.
For example, a test might compare three different promotional headlines, three different product images and three product descriptions on a page. Each of these options is then served to a percentage of your live website traffic, and by comparing user behaviour you can discover which combination is most effective for most of your online customers.
The result of this particular experiment might be that headline A, combined with image B and product description C provides the best sales uplift.
Sophisticated online testing shouldn’t be in a ‘too hard’ list.
Until recently, online testing programmes weren’t easy to implement. Now, however, there are a number of technical solutions for conducting multivariate website experiments, ranging from free solutions to enterprise-level products, which are simple to set-up and provide results very quickly.
For online retailers, even a small increment in the number of customers who stop browsing and start buying can make an enormous difference to your bottom line. Multivariate testing can quickly identify which elements of your website can be improved to deliver incremental gains. With an on-going programme of testing and improvement, the performance of your website will be optimised.
The outcomes of a successful testing programme are improvements to your website which create more leads, increase sales and provide better return on investment. All without increasing your advertising or media spend.
Multivariate testing is a way to market smarter, not harder – something that is becoming much more important during the current economic downturn.
Best of all for online marketers, the results of a successful test will be real-life data that makes your customers preferences visible and allows you to influence your businesses direction. If it becomes apparent from your website that customers prefer a red widget to a blue one, then you can quickly take this discovery and apply it to your other marketing efforts, such as advertising, sales promotions, even product development, and respond to your customers preferences faster and better than before.
In a market where getting more from your existing spend, or even reduced marketing budgets, testing and optimisation is becoming much more important to online marketers. Online testing and optimisation can provide you with the roadmap to improved performance online.
And remember – nothing makes a HiPP happier than knowing they’re on the right path. If you’re the one with the map, you may soon be a HiPP yourself.