Tips for Boosting Online Conversion

By Rew Hally

Are you overlooking marketing gold? Your current and potential customers spend more and more time online, both at home and at work. Yet too many retailers overlook the marketing gold buried within their online interaction data. Retailers that use interactive data effectively — tracking each person’s clicks, opens, purchases, views, comments, etc. — can engage individuals with communications tailored exactly to them, at convenient times and in manners they prefer, to boost conversions, revenues and profitability.

Here are seven tips you need to boost online conversions and tap your online gold:

1. Understand the potential payoffs. Do the math: Personalizing content and interactions based on individual online behavior has demonstrable return on investment. Consider these statistics:

The Aberdeen Group reports that email personalization, based on web data, increased conversion rates from 1 percent - 2 percent to 3 percent - 4 percent.
Forrester Research says 58 percent of online marketers who delivered targeted content to customers reported conversion rate lifts of 5 percent or more.

What would these types of increases mean to your business? Six figures of increased revenue? More?

2. Look at what your competitors refuse to see. Despite the underlying power of interaction data, few online marketers leverage it to their advantage, giving a clear competitive edge to those that do.

According to the Aberdeen Group, only 16 percent of marketers personalize emails beyond the recipient’s name.
MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Ecommerce Benchmark Survey found that only 21 percent of consumer websites do any sort of targeted cross-sell/upsell.
A 2009 Aberdeen Group survey revealed that even among companies it defined as “best in class,” only 7 percent personalize online content in real time based on session behavior.
An e-tailing group survey found that only 9 percent of U.S. online retailers dynamically show product based on past customer purchases.

3. Dig into individual-level data. Timely, customized communications depend upon insights into individual activity. Yet too much data about individual behaviors is disbursed among separate, difficult-to-access silos. Successful online marketers need to synthesize rich data from the following sources:

website behavior that reveals how each visitor found the site, what they saw when they got there, what held their interest and what frustrated them;
marketing responses from individual visitors to search ads, website promotions and email offers; and
social media activities, including product rating tools, social networks, blogs, community platforms, photo and video sharing sites, and more.

4. Work seamlessly at every stage. To realize the advantages of personalized communications, marketers must manage every step in one seamless marketing workflow that turns insights on visitor behavior into triggers for precisely targeted, customized content. Follow these four steps:

reporting and analysis that refines raw data into actionable information;
segmentation and targeting for precise marketing to specific subgroups;
content authoring that creates custom offers for on-the-fly campaigns; and
campaign execution that's easily managed across different channels and schedules.

5. Automate for efficiency. There’s simply no way to personalize content and time communications based on individual behavior across thousands or millions of visitors and customers if marketers have to perform each step manually. Marketing automation software allows marketers to define customer behavior triggers and content personalization rules that can turn online interaction data into personalized marketing in a scalable manner. As Forrester Research said in its report Sharpening Web Site Relevance, “trying to accomplish this [online relevance] without the aid of automation is futile.”

6. Give marketing greater control. Most IT departments are already overwhelmed; the more marketing is dependent on IT for elements of its program execution, such as integrating data sources or posting custom landing pages, the less likely it is to succeed. Here’s why marketing teams need platforms that don’t require constant assistance from technical resources:

According to a 2009 Forrester Research survey, only 38 percent of marketers agreed that “my IT department is a key partner in implementing marketing technology.”
A Unica survey found that “IT support of marketing needs” was the most common bottleneck cited by marketing pros.
MarketingSherpa found that the percentage of B-to-C marketers having “some issues” or being “at the bottom of the list” to get help from IT rose 36 percent from 2007 to 2009.

7. Act on insights, quickly and easily. One single, integrated marketing solution puts marketing power back where it belongs — in the hands of marketing people responsible for generating results. With an easy-to-use online marketing suite, you can:

enable fast, fluid marketing workflow across your entire process;
facilitate automated, lights-out execution of personalized, triggered marketing;
build upon early clues from anonymous browsing behavior to engage visitors with greater relevance;
ensure all marketing touchpoints are consistent with others, across time and channels;
learn the channel and timing preferences of different customers, then tailor communications accordingly; and
offer replenishments of consumables to those with relevant products at just the right time.

Access All the Valuable Nuggets in Online Interaction Data
With online marketing now mainstream, you might think it would be easy for marketers to deliver relevant messages to engaged visitors. Yet the benefits of productive dialog remain elusive. What can bring together all the elements to systematically execute more personalized marketing?

An integrated online suite; one that combines analytics, email and web personalization in one intuitive, on-demand application. A suite that brings together all the data visitors provide through web behavior, responses to marketing and offline activities, and incorporates that insight directly into easy-to-use targeting and HTML authoring features.

With such powerful software, you can control and execute all aspects of email and site personalization programs without burdening technical resources. And, most importantly, you can boost conversion rates and drive more business.

Andrew Hally is head of product marketing for Unica's OnDemand suite. Andrew can be reached at ahally@unica.com.