5 Steps to Capturing Fickle Consumers

With expendable income being scarce in today’s economy, consumers have become highly skilled at comparison shopping. While shopping for the best deal once required serious effort — driving from store to store and/or comparing catalogs — it’s an easy process now. With just a few clicks, consumers can typically (and quickly) find the best price or sale available. It’s not as though consumers even need to be at home in front of a computer. Smartphones, now almost ubiquitous, allow consumers to have access to this information in their pocket. As a result, consumers are more fickle than ever and cultivating loyalty is a real challenge for retailers.

To meet this challenge, retailers need to deliver value and personalization as consumers go through each stage of the buying cycle — e.g., price comparison, coupon search, checkout, etc. But there’s never a one-size-fits-all approach for consumers. They come with different budgets, purchasing habits, locations and shopping lists. Where do retailers begin?

Step 1: Find Out How Your Customers Behave
As online shopping has evolved, consumers have come to rely on certain features to assist in their decision making. Things like 360-degree product views, product comparison tools and customer reviews give consumers confidence that they’re selecting the right product. For retailers, making sure these features are easy to use and linked to their checkout is the key. Changing, adding or removing these features, even something as simple as a button change, should never be done before being tested.

Many e-commerce shops now employ multivariate and A/B testing to gain statistically valid results about the elements that yield the highest conversion rates. These tests also discover segmentation insights that can be leveraged for targeting practices. Testing elements, all the way from a button color to multiple intertwining elements in the browsing and checkout phases, will reveal your customers’ hidden wants, needs and behaviors.

In addition to this, testing and analytics let you in on deeper data about your customer, such as unique vs. returning visitor, traffic sources, keyword search, geographical location, prior purchases or research, abandonments, the list goes on. Don’t ignore this information. It can be used to drive compelling and tailored offers for each visitor.

Step 2: Personalize Your Offers for Individuals with CRM Integration
If you want to get personal at the individual level, it’s time to ditch the old school “insert name here” manual process of rules-based targeting and employ an automated solution. With automated behavioral targeting you’re empowered to present highly personalized offers to each individual shopper. Instead of presenting a set of five offers on your homepage in a tab or rotating manner, automated behavioral targeting dynamically presents offers that will yield the highest conversion rates based upon all the unique data you have for each visitor.

Behavioral targeting isn’t limited to online behaviors. Don’t forget about your existing customer data, such as current products owned or a propensity score, which can be used to identify the best offer for each customer. This data can then be married to the customer’s current online behavior.

While targeting can be effective, more automated and individual targeting using behavioral information can quickly require a complex set of rules that’s impossible to maintain or even test. A more sophisticated method of behavioral targeting uses mathematical models to predict the most compelling content and offers based upon all that’s known about a visitor. This type of model learns and adjusts over time to dynamically optimize visitor experiences with content that yields the highest conversion rate. This approach enables a broader range of content, such as destinations or travel packages to be presented to the right visitor based upon predictive attributes for that visitor.

Step 3: Design and Test Product Pages
It’s safe to say that nearly every aspect of your site — aesthetic, navigation, products, product descriptions and online features — has an impact on consumers’ shopping experiences. Their online experience ultimately influences their decision to keep buying from your brand. Once you’ve captured visitors’ attention with personalized content on the homepage or a landing page, they’ll begin to navigate through your product pages. Therefore, it’s important to determine the best online experience for them.

A proven way to do this is through A/B and multivariate testing. Virtually all site content can be tested, from the homepage and category pages to site navigation to product page content and layout all the way through purchasing funnels and shopping carts.

To get started, identify your business and site goals. Figure out what you want to optimize for your visitors, such as calls to action, layout images and user reviews. Then determine your optimization goals, such as clicks to add to cart, revenue per order, cart size, response rates on offers, etc. — any metrics that you feel provide insight into the consumer experience and impact on your brand.

Testing a variety of experiences across thousands of visitors will help you not only improve your site, but will validate the impact of these content changes on your business, thus enabling you to determine their impact on live visitor conversions before making any permanent changes to your site.

Step 4: Streamline and Optimize Your Registration, Log-In and Checkout Processes
Abandonment rates continue to plague online retailers, and ease of use with the checkout process can be a decisive factor in drop off as well as loyalty. Forrester Consulting found that 88 percent of online shoppers are likely to return to a site if it’s easy to use, particularly during registration, log-in and checkout processes.

Here’s where multivariate testing can be used to validate that your user log-in, registration and checkout processes are optimized for site visitors. Even the slightest changes to a checkout process can impact your overall conversion rates and customer loyalty. By testing metrics such as clicks to the next step, errors in entering form data, completion of the process and revenue per order, you’ll be able to evaluate different visitor experiences and their impact on results.

The checkout process is a sensitive area for presenting offers to visitors. For starters, you shouldn’t offer competing products at this stage. Price sensitivity relative to their current cart size is important with offers that you present. The offer content and placement also need to be tested. For example, retailers may offer a premier service which gives customers free delivery on all orders for the next 12 months if they sign up and pay a small annual fee. Different options for copy and placement of the offer during the checkout process can then be tested to find the option that increases sign-ups but doesn’t distract visitors from completing the checkout process.

Step 5: Using Product Recommendations to Drive Engagement and Increase Average Order Value
When visitors are navigating category and product pages on your site, they often rely on product reviews and ratings from other customers. However, reading reviews can be time consuming and distracting, and aggregate ratings alone are ineffective without reading the supporting comments. By providing product recommendations based upon the activity of other customers, you can help reassure visitors of their purchases. Of course this strategy will increase conversion rates and average order values.

Product recommendations are based upon item and visitor affinity models, such as “visitors who bought this also bought that,” “visitors who were interested in this were also interested in that.” They’re commonly placed on category pages, product pages, and the shopping cart or basket page, with different models being used for each location. With this approach you can measure the success of the recommendations by monitoring the increase in conversion rate and average order value for visitors who click on recommendations. You can also monitor the number of customers who purchased recommended products. The result is an increase in revenue and average order values that can be traced directly to product recommendations.

When it comes to improving cross-selling and upselling on your site, product recommendations are the way to go. However, recommendation content itself — placement on the page or the specific models used in different locations on your site — plays a role in the success of product recommendations. Understanding and measuring the conversion impact on the recommendation content will help you identify the combination that yields the highest conversion rates for your visitors.

Today’s retailers could actually learn a lesson from today’s fickle consumers. That lesson? Do your homework. Use available technologies and tailor your deals and process accordingly. Give consumers what they want, when and how they want it, and their loyalty will surely follow.

Mark Simpson is president and founder of multivariate testing, personalization and optimization solutions firm Maxymiser. Reach Mark at mark@maxymiser.com.