Marketing

Sarah Worsham / Feb 13, 2014

Data-Driven Customer Experience as a Competitive Advantage

Companies are always looking for competitive advantages — what can make them stand out against their competitors. Using data and analytics to drive customer experience improvements can be a long-haul competitive advantage — increasing conversions and repeat business. While some data analysis can be complex, there are a number of metrics that a business can look at to see basics like where website traffic is coming from and where people get stuck during the conversion/sales process. Econsultancy has a great roundup of why data-driven customer experience is important and what to look for:

Great customer experience is one of the hardest things for your competitors to copy.

A strategy of continuous improvement can offer clear differentiation from competitors.

However, it’s only when we measure what customers are actually seeing and doing when they are interacting with our digital channels, that we can understand where they might have issues or unmet needs.

Rather than theorise about potential problems or rely on closely monitoring small samples of test users, we need to let the data lead us to areas of concern. — Data-driven customer experience is tough to copy by Geoff Galat

Sarah Worsham / Jan 22, 2014

Why Phone Calls Are Important to Email Marketing Metrics

English: This is an example of the angst cause... — (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The point of marketing is to get the sale. Marketing often crosses channels — people will see a tv ad, and then check out a website — or see something on Facebook and decide to stop into a store. The same is true of email marketing — it often drives phone calls. These phone calls are often very high quality leads and so should be attributed as a success metric for the email marketing that generated them. Marketo has a great article with more detail on why phone calls are important and what metrics to look at…

Inbound phone leads are different. A 2012 BIA Kelsey Group study found that inbound callers are 10 times more likely to make a purchase than leads that simply clicked a link. That’s because leads that call you are most often further along in the buying process and ready to engage with a sales rep. So even if your email campaigns only generate a low volume of inbound calls compared to clicks and downloads, the calls are the leads that most often translate to revenue. Therefore, these leads are the ones marketers most need to track.

Failing to account for the sales pipeline and revenue from these inbound calls does a big disservice to your email campaigns. This practice also falsely deflates the ROI metrics you present to your executive team. — Why You Should Include Phone Calls in Your Email Performance Metrics by Blair Symes

Sarah Worsham / Jan 20, 2014

Tips for Improving Contact Form Conversion [Infographic]

The entire purpose of a business website is to get a potential customer to either buy from you, or at least ask questions that propel them down the sales funnel. One of the main ways for customers to contact a business is through a contact form, which are also key conversion methods on landing pages. Designing a contact form that is easy to fill out and still gets the information you need can be tricky. This infographic from Marketing Ninja explores some key ways to improve your contact forms to increase conversions…

Infographic: Contact Forms for the Marketing Ninja (Minja) by Lisa Margetis

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