A whopping $83 billionThat’s how much investment is lost in marketing each year due to poor customer experiences.1 Today’s customers are smart and connected, but also distracted and demanding. They have nearly unlimited choices, and have greater power over when and how they purchase. When customers find what they want from the company that meets their needs, they convert. Yet, despite spending (and losing) billions of dollars on marketing, brands are left wondering: What do customers really want?

Whether growing a big brand or a small business, companies have to focus on giving customers products and services they want so that they will keep coming back for more. However, a huge shift has taken place in recent years. With web, mobile and social channels at their fingertips, consumers can easily and quickly search, compare, interact and make purchases. And they go with the company that provides them with the best customer experience at that moment.

Brands have a choice too.Online marketing often operates within a black box. That’s because much of the data and insights companies use to interact with customers aren’t very deep or relevant. However, with the right set of robust tools and expertise, online content and offers can be as effective as if you were greeting each new visitor or longtime customer face-to-face.

Step 1Deliver the right experiences while customer intent is at its highest A lot of data exists about your customers. You probably know what they did the last time they came to your website, what they searched for and looked at, and which emails they opened and clicked through. You’ve used historical data and purchase history to identify your high-value customers. But do you know what they’re doing on your site right now, and what they want this time?

70%of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.

– McKinsey & Company

Five Steps to Create the Online Experience Customers Really Want

1 Guide | Webtrends® © 2015 Webtrends, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Guide

Here’s why knowing what they are doing right now is important:Just because a customer previously searched for a down coat, ski trip or accident insurance on their last visit does not mean they want the same thing this time. After all, people are unpredictable. Yet, for most brands, data about past behavior is what is used to create offers the customer will see on his or her next site visit, although what they want now is a bathing suit, beach vacation and a credit card advance. Even if brands are trying to leverage data about what customers are doing on their site, most of today’s “real-time” targeting solutions have significant blind spots and lag times.

Customers are looking for a personal level of engagement from companies; it shows that a business values their relationship.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to create a relevant experience in the moment. Because if done right, everyone wins. You earn greater revenue. Customers are happy and want to come back. They’ll even become your strongest advocates.

Webtrends Targeting and Personalization combines optimization with in-the-moment dataHow do you create the right customer experience for each visitor? It’s possible now using a combination of two powerful and innovative products: Webtrends Streams® and Webtrends Optimize®.

Here’s how the two solutions work together, using a

travel site as an example:

Mark is considered a high-value customer of XYZ Travel, an online booking agency. His previous searches and conversions focused on leisure trips, mostly to Hawaii and Florida. But today, Mark is searching the web for the best schedule and value for a quick business trip to Houston, Texas. His search takes him to XYZ Travel.

In this visit to the website, Mark’s past online behavior is not applicable or relevant. However, with Streams and Optimize, XYZ Travel can track and respond to Mark’s online activity in-the-moment. So instead of offering him more Hawaii and Florida vacation packages, XYZ can fill unused inventory by showing fare options to Houston, then immediately target specially priced deals for hotel and car. This provides Mark with the information and service he needs to make immediate travel plans, and increases the ancillary revenue for that purchase.

Webtrends offers a more powerful and effective way to create a relevant digital customer experience. The following five steps help clear a path to better conversion, retention, loyalty and advocacy – the ultimate payoff for an investment in customer experience values and goals.

2 Guide | Webtrends® © 2015 Webtrends, Inc. All Rights Reserved

When asked what aspects of online shopping customers would like retailers to improve, 58% said free or discounted shipping, and 42% said ease of returns and exchanges.2

46%of digital banking customers use three or more channels in a given year to interact with their financial center and access information, according to Forrester.

Step 2Use everything you know to deliver value and relevancyThink of all the data you have about your customers: geographical, previous website activity, loyalty program activity, CRM data, social data, smartphone data and more. Between these interaction points, you have the building blocks to deliver the right experience, and to target the right offers.

From your customers’ points of view, however, every interaction they have with your brand is part of an evolution of experiences, not just isolated incidents with separate data points. While your marketing team may focus on reducing abandoned carts by changing the color of the order button to green (which indeed may have an impact), your customers may actually be deciding against buying because of high shipping charges.

In-session data + historical and offline data = the right experience in the “moment of truth”Each interaction with your brand impacts your customers on a personal level, and it either provides value or doesn’t. If you have the right technology to track and take action on those interactions, you can deepen what you already know about your customers and what you can offer them.

Every interaction your customers have with your brand is part of an evolution of experiences, not just isolated incidents.

Only Webtrends combines in-session data (what the customer is doing at this exact moment) with historical and offline data, such as from a CRM database or with cookies from the last site visit. This combination of data puts brands as close to an in-person customer experience as is possible online. With Webtrends Streams and Optimize, you can observe customer activity, and intervene at “the moment of truth” (when customer intent is at its highest) with relevent offers, helping the customer find the information or product they want, and faciliting conversion.

Customers of banks and other financial institutions routinely share personal information across multiple channels — smartphones, tablets, laptops, social media, ATMs, phones and in-branch. And all those touch points must meet customer needs without fail or banks run the risk of decreased customer satisfaction.

With Webtrends, a financial services brand can provide highly personalized in-session online and mobile experiences even if customers ultimately convert through a different channel. For example, a longtime checking and savings account customer with high deposit amounts may have clicked to your website from Google search for “mortgage rates.” They may be viewing the terms of 30-year and 15-year mortgages. Webtrends can detect this new behavior so that a chat window pops up with the message, “I see you are looking at mortgages, let’s chat.”

3 Guide | Webtrends® © 2015 Webtrends, Inc. All Rights Reserved

What customers care about is themselves. The failure to realize this simple fact about human nature is why most companies have sales and marketing messages that make customers shrug.

– Geoffrey James

Webtrends can also identify this customer as high-value, and make sure that message is routed to the right agent. The agent can come into the conversation already knowing who this customer is and what information they are seeking on the site. This highly targeted approach increases conversions down the funnel, even if the customer ultimately conducts business in the branch.

Financial benefit of high-value customersForrester Research calculated the financial benefit that a higher customer loyalty score as a result of customer service would have on key industry verticals.3 Analysts found that there is significant value associated with an improved customer experience strategy, specifically around incremental purchases made that same year, revenue saved by lower churn, and new sales driven by word of mouth.

Insurance Industry $452 million

Airline Industry $590 million

Retail Industry $31 million

Hotel Industry $1.364 billion

Consumer Electronics $92 million

Credit Card Providers $307 million

STEP 3Optimize across campaigns and outside the websiteMost businesses test and target on websites only, and most often in shopping carts and on landing pages. Some are starting to test and target on mobile channels. But visitors engage with your brand in many ways and at many different stages in their journey. In fact, their interactions leading up to a point of conversion have a great deal of impact on whether they actually do convert or not. Just as your profile of each customer grows over time, their opinion of you grows over time as well.

When you consider the entire customer lifecycle, and delivering the best experience for each unique visitor, you can see there are significant interactions at every stage. A possible conversion can break down at any of these points, even if you are superior at meeting customer needs at most stages of the customer journey. From acquisition to conversion to remarketing, there are continuing opportunities to meet customer needs and build on the experience, or leave them lacking and abandoning your site.

Optimizing large email sendsWhat are some other important milestones of the customer lifecycle to consider optimizing? Any action containing a URL is extremely important, such as ads, social campaigns, email and email remarketing. While email is still the number one lead generator and sales engine, traditional email testing and targeting is notoriously behind the times.

4 Guide | Webtrends® © 2015 Webtrends, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Average spending by 2016 is projected to be $1,738 per online shopper, up 44% from 2012.

Email testing and targeting traditionally works by sending a sample, waiting two days to get results, then sending a “best results” email to the rest of the list. Or, if you are using a tool to test, the often the best you can do is a very basic A/B test that does not yield high conversion lifts. With Webtrends, there is a better, easier way that drives bigger results.

Using real-time multivariate testing, optimal results are achieved early in the email send, and the best variation is automatically sent to everyone else on the list, without any manual effort required by the marketer. This increases click-throughs and gives real ROI on email campaigns — even before results can start to trickle in from traditional email marketing methods. This same principle can be applied to every stage of the customer journey and across all marketing channels (see Step 5). It is a capability unique to Webtrends.

Step 4Optimizing against metrics that actually matterAs described in Step 3, every interaction helps drive conversion and create loyal customers — or not. In fact, a single failure along the customer journey can have the reverse effect, leaving brands wondering what went wrong.

For too long, businesses have been guessing at reasons for nonconversion. That’s because optimization metrics often only map to conversion metrics, not customer experience metrics. To meet customer needs, and to identify areas of measurement that have a big impact on the business, you have to optimize not just for whether customers are converting, but for the whole site experience.

For your company, an excellent experience may mean conversion, but an excellent experience for the customer can mean a whole lot more. There are other aspects of a site visit besides conversion that add up to, and are important for, driving business results.

Engagement optimizationWebtrends engagement optimization capabilities allow brands to test against metrics that formerly had to be guessed at. For instance, in retail it is important to know not only the total number of items in the cart, but whether the online experience is truly increasing the average order value — a metric ecommerce executives are actually measured against. Webtrends can also analyze metrics such as time spent on site and how many pages deep the customer ventured. These capabilities are also unique to Webtrends.

In financial services, mobile is a critical part of the conversion funnel, but it isn’t where most customers purchase. Rather, mobile is used to research financial products prior to conversion, yet it is a necessary step to get customers there. By optimizing to improve the research part of the purchase funnel specifically for mobile, banks and insurance providers can impact revenue and find a better way to give customers exactly what they are looking for on the device they are using for that purpose. Only Webtrends can mathematically and correctly analyze traffic so you can optimize against these other important metrics.

5 Guide | Webtrends® © 2015 Webtrends, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Step 5Optimize the customer journey end to end and through every side trip and shortcutFew online journeys start precisely at A and go directly to B, with the visitor converting in a simple, straight line. Remember, humans are unpredicatable and their paths from search or click to purchase or convert can be a long and winding road. So while it’s important to optimize across the customer journey, it’s equally important to optimize the journey itself — not just pages, but also purchase paths, and paths for new visitors as well as high-value customers.

There are many factors to consider when implementing analysis and optimization at the purchase and customer experience path levels, and it can be cumbersome to evaluate and define this manually. For example, how many steps does it take to get to the shopping cart, and is it different for a high-value customer than it is for a visitor new to the site? Should the experience be different for a returning customer than it is for everyone else?

What about those online-to-offline paths so often used in financial services companies? Or mobile-to-site, social-to-mobile or email-to-app? The possible paths-to-purchase are continuously evolving. Do you know which parts of the path hinder conversion, or which help compel it? And are the reasons different for each visitor segment? All good and important questions to consider as multichannel activity grows even more rapidly.

Capabilities benefit customers and brandsAs you can well imagine, analysis and optimization of an individual’s path through the winding and unpredictable sales funnel is a sophisticated endeavor. Webtrends can help you discover important visitor segments based on attributes and behaviors across digital channels, and help guide the right path for those segments. Webtrends reduces barriers and friction while creating relevancy, no matter where the customer wanders. With Webtrends, your brand benefits by benefiting the customer.

Path optimization capability Brand and customer benefit

Correlate all attributes per customer across the buy flow (observable and unobservable)

Build more accurate customer profiles for greater relevance per site visitor

Use predictive modeling to drive relevance

Improve customer experience, conversion and revenue

Reduce the number of steps toward conversion

Create faster conversions with greater conversion rates

6 Guide | Webtrends® © 2015 Webtrends, Inc. All Rights Reserved

ContactNorth America

1 888 932 8736

sales@webtrends.com

Europe, Middle East, Africa

+44 (0) 1784 415 700

emea@webtrends.com

Australia, Asia

+61 (0) 3 9935 2939

australasia@webtrends.com

webtrends.com

About Webtrends Inc.

For more than 20 years, Webtrends has helped companies make sense of their customer data to drive digital marketing success. By combining innovative technology with our team of trusted and creative advisors, our solutions are designed to provide actionable insights, increase customer engagement and boost revenue.

We partner with companies at all levels of digital maturity and offer solutions in measurement and optimization. We work closely with approximately 2,000 global brands including Microsoft, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Kimberly-Clark, HSBC, Marks & Spencer, npower, BMW, Toyota, The Telegraph, Lastminute.com and many more.

Rely on Webtrends to create an exceptional customer experienceDelivering a customer experience that inspires loyalty and advocacy is not a luxury for a few chosen brands. It is necessary to the survival of all brands. Using advanced in-the-moment and optimization technologies from Webtrends to understand your customers’ needs will not only help your company survive, but also thrive.

References1 The State of Marketing 2013.

2 Online Shopping Customer Experience Study, May 2012. comScore, Inc

3 “The Business Impact of Customer Experience, 2012,” by Megan Burns, Forrester, March 26, 2012

7 Guide | Webtrends® © 2015 Webtrends, Inc. All Rights Reserved