End-to-end personalization from first ad impression through web conversion

Customers no longer tolerate siloed channels or touchpoints: they want a consistent experience that offers real-time personalization. This highlights the importance of end-to-end personalization, an approach wherein personalization influences the customer journey throughout the funnel.

An overwhelming 98% of marketing professionals agree that personalization helps improve customer relationships, as 72% say that they only interact with commercial messages if they are personalized. However, only 22% of consumers are satisfied with the level of personalization they receive from brands. It is clear that a good marketing strategy must be based on the creation of a unique experience for each user.

What is hyper-personalization?

Personalization need not only apply to one or two customer touchpoints, say a homepage banner or a mobile push notification. We have to consider all the steps in the funnel that customers go through in the journey from discovery to re-engagement. From social media advertising to checkout page fulfillment options, each commerce touchpoint offers frontend and backend opportunities for personalization.

The process of hyper-personalization consists of using a combination of data analytics, automation, and AI to collect and process all kinds of data to provide highly customized and targeted experiences. This practice has become a powerful tool for engaging and building unique relationships with customers.

As digital marketing becomes more and more competitive, hyper-personalized marketing provides the opportunity to engage meaningfully with customers to improve the customer experience.

How can hyper-personalization benefit campaigns?

Implementing this type of strategy in campaigns not only increases customer satisfaction but also drives brand loyalty, willingness to spend, and overall marketing effectiveness. Hyper-personalization strategies:

– Increase conversion rates, because it shortens the previous process and improves user engagement.

– Simplify the conversion path, reducing the number of steps required to fill out an information request or purchase a product.

– Streamline the work of the sales department, since leads will arrive at the bottom of funnel better informed and with a more favorable perception of the brand.

– Reduce the rate of returns, providing recommendations that are more likely to match the customer’s characteristics, which contributes to a well-founded purchase decision.

– Increase ROI, as traffic acquisition investments will be more effective.

How can hyper-personalization be applied to campaigns?

Through hyper-personalization, it is possible for an e-commerce company to adapt web content, activate email workflows, or customize display ads based on the brands that each user consulted, as well as the time they spent browsing, the internal searches they made, the average spend per order, or even their inclination towards certain colors. This strategy can be applied throughout the funnel:

1. Data collection
   The first step is to collect the right kind of data, because hyper-personalization is only as good as the quality of the data. The more data is collected, the more segmentation can be added, and the more personalized the campaign will be. This also ensures that the right customers are impacted, which results in a higher potential for conversion.
2. Customized offer
   People will likely only engage with a brand’s offer if it is tied to their previous interactions with the brand. Therefore, it’s a good idea to start with some simple personalization (like age or gender) and then start adding more segments based on who consistently buys certain products or when they purchase.For example, if there’s a group of repeat customers who always buy in April and October, it is good to start sending them hyper-personalized messages, adapted to their previous purchase patterns, with specific products in March and September.
3. Personalized messages
   Enterprise marketing software now makes it possible for companies to create personalized, contextualized, dynamic end-to-end experiences for individual customers across every touchpoint. These experiences help make it possible for customers to develop an emotional connection to the brand and product, which ultimately helps fuel business growth and drive loyalty. For example, if you want to send contextualized emails, you can include:
   • Products that someone browsed before
   • Content that changes based on the time and place the email is opened
   • Dynamically changing SKUs when a product goes out-of-stock
   • Real-time pricing
4. Various channels
   Combining the huge amount of consumer data with multichannel marketing takes hyper-personalization further by helping you create one-to-one relationships with users. Email, websites, social media, and smartphones all enable businesses to offer higher levels of customization.
5. Automated data
   Attempting the process manually can be difficult since there are vast amounts of data to sort through, but there are several ways to make the process easier.In addition to using an automated marketing platform, businesses can also use predictive analytics to help them determine optimal times to deliver specific messages to drive desired responses.
6. Consistent testing
   Multivariate testing can make identifying the most captivating elements of the messaging considerably easier. Also, through A/B testing, it is possible to measure the effect of several elements at once (headlines, images, copy, etc.) to determine which combinations perform best. Based on the results of the initial campaigns, it is appropriate to send even more accurate messages.

Best practices in hyper-personalized campaigns

End-to-end personalization is the end goal, but every digital journey must start with a first step. The beauty of personalization is that it can be implemented in bits and pieces, wherever it makes the most sense to tackle first.

For example, a retailer might need to personalize product recommendations within their mobile app in order to push inventory. Another company might decide it’s most important to personalize imagery on their homepage to decrease bounce rates. Both approaches are correct, but to pave the way for an ever-expanding personalization strategy, it’s important to follow these best practices:

Create a Short-Term and Long-Term Roadmap

Take some time to consider your ultimate end-to-end personalized experience and envision what the benefits could be.

Then, look at your immediate goals; how will you evolve from what you want to do now to what you envision in the future? Create milestones to expand your capabilities so that you can achieve your long-term and short-term goals.

Establish Buy-In

With a plan, you don’t have to worry about going to your boss with a one-off request – now you have a strategy. Use research-driven proof and competitive examples to show exactly how personalization can drive value. Involve your C-suite if possible, which will help when it comes time to incorporate disparate data sources and get help from your development team.

Set Measurable Goals and Build a Strategy

Once the plan is approved, determine how each goal will be met, involve the right stakeholders, and work backwards to ensure time is allotted for testing, integrations, and development.

To make goals more realistic, develop use cases that can be directly applied to current customer experiences. Remember that your strategy should be omnichannel — personalization doesn’t need to be limited to the website, or just to digital channels. This also applies to data; bringing all data together can unify your personalization efforts, the view of the customer, and ultimately, their customer journey.

Conduct a Data Inventory

Understand what is available and how it could be leveraged to achieve your goals. Some companies have a robust CRM that can be integrated into a personalization strategy, while others rely on 3rd party data or search behavior.

Many others combine a bit of both. Be creative: call center data, information about product returns, and loyalty information can all add to a good personalization strategy. Align on an Internal Governance Model: Make sure that stakeholders are empowered to operate as an autonomous “Personalization Task Force” that can prioritize new personalization efforts fairly against currently existing projects and priorities.

Modern consumers won’t forgive brands for not recognizing them in a mobile experience, or not acknowledging a recent purchase in one-size-fits-all promotions. That alone is justification enough for a unified personalization strategy. Bringing disparate data points together to create a single view of the customer, orchestrating order management to empower customers with seamless purchase and fulfillment, and providing ever-improving experiences by incorporating real-time inputs. End-to-end personalization shouldn’t be just a moonshot goal, it can be grounded in reality for inspiring organizational action.

The “Get it Done” Guide to CRO

The term Conversion Rate Optimization, also known as CRO, may seem mysterious. But here at Making Science, we know how impactful it can be for businesses. If you want to ensure you’re getting the highest returns possible from your website and campaigns, CRO and experimentation is a great place to start.

To understand Conversion Rate Optimization, we must first understand a conversion.

What is a Conversion?

Simply put, a conversion refers to a visitor completing a specific goal on a website. For example:

• Purchasing something – Booking a hotel, a pair of shoes online
• Signing up for a newsletter – Receive up to date news or information
• Adding something to a shopping cart – I’ll come back later. I need to think about this purchase a little more
• Filling in a form to request more information – I’d like to learn more about your school courses.
• Downloading an app
• Downloading a form or document to get some more information about something I am researching

These conversions occur when the user takes action. This is often the main goal or the purpose of the website.

So what exactly is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Wouldn’t it be great if we put up a website and everyone who visited bought something or we had success with our website goal? Absolutely! Well, Conversion rate optimization helps us do that.

CRO refers to increasing the percentage of conversions on a website, mobile device, or app. In other words, turning visitors into leads and leads into customers.

The idea behind conversion rate optimization is you are able to understand how users move through your website, what actions they take, and what is stopping them from completing the goals that your site has. Frequently, this is done through experimentation.

How do you calculate Conversion to measure success?

Conversion is calculated to help us understand how many of the people visiting our website actually convert.

Total Users That Converted / Total Users That Visited Our Website x 100

EXAMPLE:

• I had 5,000 users buy beer on my site this month (caught your attention didn’t I)
• But I had 10,000 visitors to my site this month
• x 100 (to get a percentage)

5,000 / 10,000 x 100 = 50% Conversion Rate of Beer!

Why is Conversion Rate Optimization important?

At this point, we likely understand the basics of CRO. We understand that when we have found an opportunity on our website we should ensure it’s both data-driven and user-centric. At this point, we form a hypothesis and we should test it. The same way as when a doctor aims to find out his patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, or perhaps how tired their body feels under certain levels of physical strain or activity. Our take on stress testing with Making Science is about ensuring your team, the tool you are using, and your organization can pass a stress test! Knowing your limits will help you figure out how to plan.

By introducing conversion rate optimization into your business, you can quickly improve conversion rates on your website. You have facts that show you what to test, where and how.

You’re losing money—a lot of money. That is of course if you are not focusing on CRO (conversion rate optimization) on your website. CRO is an indispensable tool for any individual in e-commerce.

Why?

Easy. It optimizes your conversion rate.

*End blog post*

I kid. I kid. Though, in reality, that is the crux of it all. Let’s breakdown some more reasons why CRO truly benefits all who leverage it:

• You are able to reduce advertising costs
  • With the rising costs of CPCs, CPMs and essentially everything else in digital advertising, reducing costs for a better overall ROI is imperative. By optimizing conversion rates, you can retain your traffic more efficiently without having to rely on additional spend to bring them back.
• More profit, more traffic
  • In conjunction with the above, once you are able to effectively increase your profits through CRO, you can pocket some of that profit to invest in more paid advertising. Unlocking new surges of traffic with a site that is optimized for them will beget revenue—and more revenue. A beautiful cycle indeed.
• Stay ahead of the competition
  • By maximizing the revenue that you are able to generate per visitor to your site, you maintain a strong advantage over your competitors who may not be implementing CRO-related strategies.

CRO In Action

So now that we love conversion rate optimization, what is a use case we can look at?

We have you covered.

Meet our persona, Harry. Harry is a price-sensitive middle-aged man with a family of two children. He is an avid online shopper. Harry hears about a product from one of his friends that he desperately wants.

He searches for it on Google, finds a paid search listing, clicks and browses for it. He finds the product right away, but he notices that it is a little pricey. Harry is the type to abandon his cart more frequently than others—in order to compare to other sites.

With the price too high for him, Harry tries to abandon. This time, however, he is greeted with an abandoned cart modal, a pop-up that populates when a user tries to leave the purchase funnel. It reads ‘Don’t let this offer slip away! Purchase within the next 15 minutes with code MAKINGSCI for 10% off’. Harry hesitates for a moment, but he figures that he will buy the product eventually, so he should take advantage of the limited time offer that he is presented with now before it slips away. He converts.

This is CRO in action. This very same experience has been run at Making Science for multiple brands with amazing success (upwards of 50% increase in conversion rate).

If we did not have that modal, Harry would have abandoned, possibly indefinitely. We mitigated abandonment rate and, of course, optimized our conversion rate. These smart changes to the user journey allow sites to prosper.

Conversion rate optimization is a tool that is most certainly underutilized in today’s world. Stay ahead of your competition and start now.

Get in touch

As brands begin to re-open, there is a lot of talk about personalization and the importance of creating a positive customer experience. But, what does this really mean?

A personalized digital experience is about feeding your users the information they will be most likely to consume, a service tailored to their needs and desires. Before we can personalize the user journey, we need to understand who our customers are today, what are the new user traits, if these customers are willing to buy, and what are the new questions they need answered prior to considering your product.

We can define 3 key points to understand your personalization opportunities:

1- Analyze your data

It’s time to take a deep dive into your analytics and data platforms to see what data is available. This way, you can better segment your customers. Check your CRM for loyal customers and marketing channels flow for behavioral data points on prospects. The shift to a digitally dominated experience forces brands in build out conversion profiles such as deal hunters, last-minute buyers, and new online shoppers. They will do so to better understand how people navigate their sites and the repeat visits that will drive conversion.

2- Listen to your customers

This has always been a crucial part of the journey building to personalization. Emotions are the driving force. We need to take a fresh approach to understand how users are feeling now. Also, we should see how their emotions have changed post-Covid. Knowing what the current frustrations are, what health and safety guidelines customers need to feel safe and trusting, what is the #1 complaint in your call centers, what are they saying on social media about your brand.

3- Implement a testing tool  

Why is this important? With the need for faster execution and learnings, testing tools are an asset to any business. You will be able to test new features and understand their impact on the different segments (new vs. returning vs loyal customers, geo-location, 2nd visit, 3rd visit) and then be able to iterate quicker.

A personalized customer experience will be your ultimate brand differentiator. Brands should leverage technology such as AI and Personalization engines to create tailored, real-time experiences that will go beyond meeting customers expectations. The goal for any digital marketing team should be developing a cadence of iterative testing and learnings, to be able to update customer behaviors and prompt them with their preferred experiences.

4th of July represents America’s freedom, a day of national celebration and fireworks. Many of us will try to enjoy the Freedom from being cooped up indoors after the COVID-19 lockdown. But what does that mean for businesses? Some will celebrate their customer’s loyalty during these tough times and others the fact of still having a business. First and foremost, most companies will acknowledge the importance of adapting to new behaviors. I like to see things by putting myself in the shoes of the consumer, and the user, and under that lens, I can map out the journey that users have to get their perspective, and one thing is very clear: the customer journey has completely changed.

This Fourth of July will come with changes in the user journey, both online and offline. Many cities are skipping fireworks due to the challenge of maintaining social distancing protocols with big crowds. Others will use drones to broadcast the popular summer tradition. Fireworks or not, people are hopeful and ready for an economic rebirth.

The Hospitality business is slowly recovering, seeing a spike in bookings for the Independence Day weekend. Hotel properties have measures in place to ensure masks are worn while walking around indoors and installed multiple sanitization stations for easy access. You will have your temperature taken during check-in, and some hotels even have a new ‘gym by appointment’  policy to allow the staff to disinfect the area.

What does the July 4th user journey look like?

You are relaxing on the sofa watching TV, and you see a Fourth of July advertisement promoted by your local hotel. You get excited and grab your phone to browse the hotel website. You click on the hotel’s Instagram profile and start dreaming of being outdoors. You are dying for a change of scenery, so you pull up the site on your tablet or laptop where you can see more and better.

You visit the new hotel health and safety guidelines to understand what your experience will be like in these times.  Is all that clear for you? Is the information easily available without too much browsing? Does the idea of going on vacation still sound fun after reading about masks and hand sanitizer? Is this enough to book online, or do you need to stop and pick up the phone to make a reservation and ask more questions instead?

Customer journey analysis means stepping into your user’s shoes to see the business from their perspective. A graphic representation of the journey will help you see where and how they interact with your business, focusing on the different stages of the buying process. Understanding how they behave in your website will tell you what to improve so they keep coming back. Let’s not forget, insights from the journeys also help your UX, design, and development teams create better websites. Ones where customers can actually feel comfortable when converting.

This fourth of July will be very different. Is your website user-ready? Do you understand that many people will not flock to the web expecting to ask questions or try to figure things out? Are you catering for the different types of users, new and existing customers, and across devices?

What happened to all the data you gathered two months ago from interviews, workshops, and surveys? Users’ behaviors have drastically changed, so the hypothesis you were trying to prove in February is no longer valid.

Is more always better? Some still believe that extensive user research at the beginning of a project is the best approach, when in fact most of this information deprecates as you iterate in each sprint. Inevitably, your users tend to feel different about your product as their reality changes, and the world’s reality has changed. The faster you understand your users’ new problems and frictions with your product, the more effective your solution might be.

How to apply continuous delivery to CX research?

1. Simplify your scope based on priorities. Create short 15-30 minutes sessions rather than the standard 1-hour workshop or focus group for example.
2. Leave your opinions behind and wear your listener hat. You are not there to show the users how to use your product but to learn what they have to say about it.
3. Repeat interaction every two weeks if possible, but not necessarily the same activity. If you started with workshops, maybe you want to do interviews later.
4. Mix it up by engaging the same users from previous sessions and adding some new participants. By doing this, you will understand how (if) your users’ reactions evolved in this time period, while you also learn about new user trends.
5. Combine this qualitative data with quantitative data from Analytics (if available).
6. Convert users’ insights into actionable opportunities to improve your product.
7. Include AB testing if applicable and available.
8. Implement and launch.
9. Collect new feedback to validate your implementation.
10. Iterate and adjust the frequency of new CX research and testing to your business needs.

It is paramount to encourage user discussion during your sessions, and constantly try to appeal to the deepest honest emotions. This feedback will define the direction and success of your product. Rival groups and Love Stories are two of the techniques recommended to deeply connect with your existing or potential audience. More about these techniques in future articles.

Making erroneous assumptions should not be the norm. Allow yourself to make mistakes but, Fail fast and Recover faster.

One of the most fundamental aspects of understanding your current audience is through persona and customer journey building. When you know the users who are interacting with your brand, and their respective journeys on a granular level, you can take action to ensure the journey you have laid out for them is seamless and optimized.

When we refer to ‘personas’, we are referring to a collective, working example of users—their behaviors, demographics and psychographics. This ‘persona’ allows us, as marketers, to understand audiences at both a microscopic and macroscopic level.

Making Science looked into a retail site in the UK. We analyzed their database in order to determine trends in their users and derive personas from them. This deep analysis consisted of group studies, one-on-one interviews with clients, data analytics, surveys and much more (some tools leveraged were: UXPressia, Respondent, eSurvey, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics & Contentsquare).

After aggregating our findings, we were able to identify several personas that had the most impact on the brand as a whole. One such persona, the one we will focus on today, is Jen.

Jen is a 28 year old female who lives in Bristol UK. She is single, works as a curator at a local museum and makes £20,000 per annum. Jen uses this retail outlet to plan for events, such as vacations. She generally struggles with too much information on these retail sites, as there tends to be few filters and guidance on goods she may actually enjoy. The channels she interacts with on a quotidian basis are Instagram, Google, Email, Mail and her friends & family.

How do we know this, and how are we able to be so precise in our findings to define such a persona? Let us break it down:

1. We observed an emerging trend of a younger (average age of 28) female segment that were predominantly single—about 37% of total audience
2. Most of the occupations were relating to the arts or creative areas of work
3. Of these people, it was observed that most of the time their intentions to shop online were driven by special events coming up with the general sentiment of wanting time to browse for items they were thoroughly interested in
4. The general time from inspiration to purchase was about 1 to 2 weeks—much longer than other personas observed

Now that we have identified a persona, how do we map their journey? For that, we take the subset of candidates who participated in the above methods of research, analyze the data they have already provided (through the tools and procedures above), and map out their journey, visually. Through this process, we can ascertain pain points, opportunities and everything between.

There is a 5 step approach in visualizing the user journey map:

Step 1: Identify the different touchpoints

Touchpoints are all the different places your customers can interact with you as they go through the buying purchase. This includes your website, social channels, paid ads, call centers, in store etc. It is important to understand and define these touchpoints as it will give you an overview of how many touchpoints a user interacts with to convert. It is important to note that when interviewing these customers, always inquire what channels they are referring to when detailing their journeys. A simple, “I went back to the site”, could mean many different things: direct, email, paid search, or even through a voice-activated device.

Jen, again, can be reached on the following channels: Instagram, Google, Email, Mail and her friends & family.

Step 2: Actions users do at each touchpoint 

Now that we know the channels, we need to understand the actions, on a granular level, during each step. Fundamentally, we need to ask the following question incessantly: are they able to find what they need to continue to the next step of the journey? Understanding the actions of our users at each touchpoint illustrates how well each part of the journey is optimized.

For Jen, an example of a notable insight for her actions was that she does not directly engage with paid social advertisements through the native apps, but she will instead go to the site via direct.

Step 3: Understand the user emotions & motivations

Every action your customer takes is motivated by an emotion. We expect our users’ emotions to change as they navigate through different parts of the journey, and the driver is usually caused by a problem they have experienced. Pro tip: sound like a therapist and always ask, “how did that make you feel?”. Even if it is neutral, it is important to know the ebbs and flows of a user’s emotions.

Jen’s emotional journey steadily declined as she made it to the site. She noted no easy way to view recently viewed items, as she tends to browse, not add to cart, and then come back later—this made her journey on the website needlessly difficult. However, the delivery process and post-purchase aspects of her journey were mostly positive—with contactless delivery and being engaged via email concerning sales and promotions.

Step 4: Identify obstacles and pain points that our users are going through 

As you go through the user journey, you will get to know what roadblocks are stopping your users from making the desired action. The most common obstacle is usually cost, when users see the price for the first time it often triggers them to abandon their cart. By understanding what these roadblocks are, we are able to come up with solutions to guide them through them.

Jen notices a wide array of products that she is skeptical about in terms of their pricing, as she spends quite a bit of time researching other brands and their pricing. This is a large pain point, as Jen is now put in a position to ‘leak’ to other competitors and abandoned indefinitely.

Step 5: Provide recommendations to reduce friction 

This is the most rewarding part! You now know who your customers are and have used the data to discover the pain points as they navigate through their journey. Now, you are well equipped to provide opportunities that directly address the pain points! There are some solutions that will work across the board for all personas and some that are personalized for specific personas, so always note whether opportunities are universal or not.

It doesn’t stop here; as you come up with solutions, it is imperative that you test them (barring the opportunities that are of immediate attention—i.e., bugs, typos and blatant errors) to ensure the remedies are truly ameliorating the issues, not exacerbating them.

Combating the pricing issues noted in the previous step for Jen, an opportunity identified here, that the brand moved forward with, is merchandising around the concept of being the best price guaranteed. This effort proved successful for the brand, as Jen, the persona, saw a 22% lift in conversion directly attributed to the messaging.

You now have successfully completed a persona & user journey—congratulations! Make sure that you have a set cadence on how often you conduct these journeys for these personas. This world of user journeys is never stagnant, but everchanging. Whether it is grasps the slight deviations in behavior exhibited by a persona like Jen or identifying an entirely new persona, journey mapping is crucial for business longevity and staying ahead of the competition.

Tools Overview

UXPressia, Respondent, eSurvey, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics & Content Square

Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics 

Website:

• https://business.adobe.com/products/analytics/web-analytics.html
• https://analytics.google.com/

How we use it for User Journey Mapping: As part of our methodology, we use data to help us analyze the online behavior of our customers. We can use analytic platforms such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics to provide data points on who users are, what channel they are coming from, their path on site and highlight the drop offs along the way.

Contentsquare

Website: https://contentsquare.com/

How we use it for User Journey Mapping: Contentsquare is a digital experience insights platform that helps us to quickly understand our users actions on site and empowers marketers to make data-drive decisions to optimize the user journey. There top features include: customer journey analysis, zone-based heatmaps, session replay.

Respondent

Website:

• https://www.respondent.io/
• https://www.esurveyspro.com/

How we use it for User Journey Mapping: As part of the persona and user journey analysis, the best data resides in our customers. We can use tools such as Respondent and eSurveys Pro in launching surveys and questionnaires to evaluate our users behavior, needs and pain points.

UXPressia

Website: https://uxpressia.com/

How we use it for User Journey Mapping: After we have created the personas and analyzed the user journey we use UXPressia to help us visualize the customer journey. It is a very user friendly tool and we are able to integrate with other data sources.

Seems like a simple question right? But we still see many online marketers asking us this question ….

The customer journey is a key piece of any website, online selling, or lead generation process. It’s not easy to fully understand a user’s behavior considering there are many touchpoints and channels they could come from, routes they can take when they get onto your website, and many interactions they can have along the way.

Analyzing and understanding the user journey end-to-end can be challenging. Here at Making Science focusing on optimizing the customer journey, ensuring your business remains customer-centric is at the heart of what we do.

But when does the journey really begin? Customer profiles help provide us with the characteristics and behavior of a group of users. When starting a business one of the first steps taken is understanding who your end-user is. Analyzing data related to the user profile and understanding the target customers through for example demographic, motivation, psychographic, geographic segmentation, etc. are just some of the characteristics used. Understanding where their journey starts and what drives them to the end requires more than the average day to day, basic analysis.

User journeys are extremely important to understand – where a user is when browsing your website, what triggers them to react and take a certain path and how can we better fulfill their needs? A first time visitor to your website would have a totally different behavior than a user that has come three or more times and searched for a handful of products. The first time user may be investigating what is sold, whereas the returning user may be ready to buy or passed through that discovery stage.

By knowing our website journeys, we can also identify the existing pain points and try to improve them. One of our mottos at Making Science is: We believe in putting ourselves in the user’s shoes. It’s about feeling their pain points and fixing them to help them convert sooner. And the first step is to understand their journey and what they really want or need.

Ready for change and challenges?

We all might be dreaming of the day we wake up and the COVID-19 nightmare will be over, but let’s face it: your business will never be the same again. Not while we are living in a lockup, nor afterwards and not even when a vaccine will be in the market.

Welcome to a new journey!

The expectations, concerns and behavior of your existing clients and your returning users have changed and they will continue to change: they will probably need more time to explore your offers, they’ll be looking for answers to new questions in your FAQ section, they might even visit your not-so-easy-to-read Terms & Condition page, they’ll be searching for very special offers and compare prices since they live on a much tighter budget.

In other words their customer journey won’t be the same – and your site will have to deal with it, whether  you like it or not.

Have we met before?

You better get your site ready to meet some new people. We just entered a time of “hyper-digitalization” and your digital channels will be visited by people who just discovered the variety of great products and services they can find, compare and buy online without leaving home. You’ll have to adjust the usability of your site, making things even more simple without loosing on engagement. Unfortunately, even this won’t be sufficient.

Nice to meet you!

The real challenge might be another one: your pages and online stores will have to cater to groups of very different people. People with different profiles, expectations, skill sets and “online-purchase-maturity”. Accordingly providing segmented or personalized user experiences will no longer be an option: it has now become a matter of survival.

I don’t know if I am ready for this

This sounds like a threat, doesn’t it? Are you thinking about your reduced team and the remaining available resources for these times of crisis and the coming recession? Afraid of big projects that you can’t afford nor deal with?

So are we.

To cope with all challenges and opportunities of your company’s new digital future it will be mandatory to use the right tools and effective methods to analyze and to understand new customer journeys and new user behavior and to adjust user experiences accordingly.