To know and be known is the essence of a relationship. To know — and understand — your customers, you need to listen to them. It seems so obvious, yet many marketing efforts miss this perspective. For all the claims of being “customer-obsessed,” brand stories focus too much on the brand itself and not the reason for its existence. 

B2B buyers need even more empathy, information and reassurance when deciding to purchase. Here are some key ways to ensure the customer’s voice is captured and conveyed to help establish a long-term, mutually valuable relationship.

1. Recognize who the hero is 

Customers aren’t interested in your story; they’re interested in learning how your product or service will help them survive or thrive in their story, according to Donald Miller, who developed the StoryBrand framework. 

The customer is the hero, while your brand is the guide in navigating and successfully overcoming the customer’s problem. Focus your marketing on making your customer the star, demonstrating the benefits they’ll gain from your brand. Save your company’s story and accomplishments for the boilerplate and your website’s About Us page.

2. Create your customer personas 

Starting out in public relations, knowing your audience is one of the most important lessons you learn and carry with you. For example, don’t pitch a reporter who doesn’t even cover your industry. You have to do research to understand who you need to communicate with, what messages will resonate with them and which channels will be most effective in delivering the messages. 

In addition to demographics, look at psychographics that include values, interests, priorities and also potential objections. Although buyer personas are fictitious representations of customers, they must be based on reality. That means conversing with existing clients and prospects and incorporating those insights into your profiles. 

Dig deeper: How to develop a winning B2B ideal customer profile

3. Build your brand for them 

The art and science of branding is about creating a lasting impression in consumers’ minds, distinguishing your brand’s goods and services from those of others in the market. Again, establishing or refreshing your brand isn’t about you. It’s about your customers. What promise of value are you making to them, and why is that important to them? 

I work with many highly specialized technology companies and organizations that get caught up in their industry’s jargon or way of talking about their products and services. But B2B buyers are humans after all. Be sure the messages you or your agency partners develop are clear and compelling, and don’t shy away from humor or other emotional appeals. Test your concepts with some of your customers, especially if translations will be required for global adoption. 

Dig deeper: Building a brand strategy: Essentials for long-term success

4. Quote them whenever you can

In my first job at a software company, I was the customer communications manager responsible for documenting case studies. This role produced success stories and videos that helped close new business, provided quotes for press releases and publications and featured speakers at our annual user conferences. I talked to hundreds of people who used our software and cultivated relationships that were beneficial in terms of PR for us and them. 

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

Nothing is more powerful than your customers’ stories — including reviews and mentions in social media posts. Don’t forget to ask if they’re interested in writing a guest blog. Some organizations won’t go on record. Even if this is a challenge, capture the narratives about the problems solved and the results achieved. This information can still shape your marketing and influence buying decisions, even without revealing the source.

5. Ask for feedback and do something with it 

In the software job I mentioned, I also managed the annual customer satisfaction survey, collaborating with an external firm to update the survey, conduct interviews and provide the results. 

That was a while ago, so numerous tools are now available to digitize informal or pulse surveys and formal NPS and CSAT programs. Integration with CRM and customer success systems is also possible, giving organizations a more comprehensive view of how their products and services are helping customers. 

This feedback — good and bad — needs to make its way to the appropriate departments for action. Commend employees who ensured an implementation occurred on time and within budget and let product management know if there are repeated questions or complaints about a particular feature. 

If your company has a product forum, you’ll want to monitor it for trends and insights and run those up the chain as well. You also might get some good ideas for blogs, webinars or other marketing materials.  

Ensure your marketing efforts reflect the voice of your customers

“What’s in it for me?” This is the fundamental question prospects and existing customers seek to answer when they encounter your marketing, whether that’s your website, a webinar or a conversation. If you don’t clearly articulate how you can solve — or keep solving — their problems and make their lives better, you’ll probably be ignored. 

Avoid wasting time and resources by tuning into your customers and being vulnerable enough to hear what they say. Then harness that information in ways that inspire you, your creative talent, the sales team and those who make your products. Customer-focused, value-based messages will take your marketing where it needs to go.  

Dig deeper: How to build a B2B brand that delivers lasting value

The post 5 big ways to turn up the voice of your customer in your marketing appeared first on MarTech.

Responsive search ads are very flexible ads that automatically adapt to show the right message to the right customer. You enter multiple headlines and descriptions when creating the ad. Google’s machine learning systems will mix headlines and descriptions and test different combinations of the ads to learn which performs best over time. The most relevant message will be shown to the customer.

Responsive search ads are the default ad type in Google Ads Pay Per Click (PPC) search campaigns as of February 18, 2021. This change isn’t surprising, considering Google’s increased focus on automation in Google Ads.

Since responsive search ads adapt their content to show the most relevant message to match customer search terms, they help you reach more customers and may help to increase conversion rates and campaign performance. According to Google, advertisers who use responsive search ads in their ad groups can achieve an increase of up to 10% more clicks and conversions as compared to standard text ads.

But responsive search ads have many more benefits:

Here is an example of a responsive search ad from Google search results:

How to set up responsive search ads in your Google Ads PPC search campaign

Sign into your Google Ads PPC account and select Responsive Search Ad from the Ad menu:

Select Ads and extensions in the left menu

Click on the blue plus button on the top

Select Responsive Search Ad in the menu

Now you can enter the headlines and descriptions and the landing page for the responsive search ad:

Select a Search Campaign

Select an Ad Group

Enter the Final URL ( this is the landing page URL).

Enter the display paths for the Display URL (this is optional).

Enter at least 5 unique headlines. The minimum is 3 and the maximum is 15. The tool will suggest keywords from the ad group to include in the headlines.

Enter at least 2 unique descriptions. The minimum is 2 and the maximum is 4.

As you create the ad, an ad strength indicator will indicate the ad strength.

As you type the ad, you will see a preview of the Ad in different combinations in the preview panel.

Save the ad

Follow the best practices below to optimize responsive search ads for better performance.

5 best practices when using responsive search ads in your Google Ads PPC search campaigns

These tips will help you optimize your responsive search ads in your Google Ads search campaigns and increase clicks and conversions.

1. Add at least one responsive search ad per ad group with “good” or “excellent” ad strength

Google recommends adding at least one responsive search ad per ad group. Use the ad strength indicator to make sure the responsive search ad has a “good” or ”excellent” ad strength, as this improves the chances that the ad will show. Remember, the maximum number of enabled responsive search ads allowed per ad group is three.

It’s best to create very specific ad groups based on your products with at least three quality ads, as recommended by Google. This enables Google’s systems to optimize for performance and may result in more clicks.

2. Add several unique headlines and descriptions

The power of the flexible format of responsive search ads lies in having multiple ad combinations and keywords that can match customer search terms. This helps to increase search relevance and reach more customers.

When building your responsive search ads, add as many unique headlines as you can to increase possible ad combinations and improve campaign performance.

The headlines and descriptions in a responsive search ad can be shown in multiple combinations in any order. It’s therefore important to ensure that these assets are unique from each other and work well together when they are shown in different ad combinations.

When creating a responsive search ad, you can add up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions. The responsive search ad will show up to three headlines and two descriptions at a time. On smaller screens, like mobile devices, it may show with two headlines and one description.

Here are tips for adding headlines and descriptions:

1. Create at least 8-10 headlines so that there are more ad combinations to show. More ad combinations helps to increase ad relevance and improve ad group performance.

To increase the chances that the ad will show, enter at least five headlines that are unique from each other. Do not repeat the same phrases as that will restrict the number of ad combinations that are generated by the system.

You can use some headlines to focus on important product or service descriptions.

Include your popular keywords in at least two headlines to increase ad relevance. As you create the responsive search ad, the tool will recommend popular keywords in the ad group to include in headlines to improve ad performance.

Make sure that you DO NOT include keywords in three headlines so that more ad combinations are generated. Instead you can highlight benefits, special services, special hours, calls to action, shipping and return policies, special promotions, taglines, or ratings.

Try adding headlines of different lengths. Do not max out the characters in every headline. Google’s systems will test both long and short headlines.

There are 30 characters for each headline.

2. Include two descriptions that are unique. The maximum is four descriptions.

Descriptions should focus on describing product or service features that are not listed in the headlines, along with a call to action.

There are 90 characters for each description.

An example of creating a responsive search ad with headlines and descriptions is shown in the figure below.

3. Use popular content from your existing expanded text ads

Use headlines and descriptions from your existing expanded text ads in the ad group when writing your headlines and descriptions for the responsive search ads. This helps you get more ad combinations with keywords that have already been proven to be successful in your marketing campaign.

4. Pin headlines & descriptions to specific positions to control where they appear. Use sparingly.

Responsive search ads will show headlines and descriptions in any order by default. To control the positions of text in the ad, you can pin headlines and descriptions to certain positions in the ad. Pinning is a new concept introduced with responsive search ads.

According to Google, pinning is not recommended for most advertisers because it limits the number of ad combinations that can be matched to customer search terms and can impact ad performance.

Use the pinning feature sparingly. Pinning too many headlines and descriptions to fixed positions in the responsive search ad reduces the effectiveness of using this flexible ad format to serve multiple ad combinations.

1. If you have text that must appear in every ad, you should enter it in either Headline Position 1, Headline Position 2 or Description Position 1, and pin it there. This text will always show in the ad.

2. You can also pin headlines and descriptions that must always be included in the ad to specific positions in the ad. For example, disclaimers or special offers.

3. To pin an asset, hover to the right of any headline or description when setting up the Ad and click on the pin icon that appears. Then select the position where you want the headline or description to appear.

4. Pinning a headline or description to one position will show that asset in that position every time the ad is shown. For increased flexibility, it is recommended to pin 2 or 3 headlines or descriptions to each position. Any of the pinned headlines or descriptions can then be shown in the pinned position so that you still have different ad combinations available.

5. Click Save.

The image below shows a headline pinned in position 1 and a description pinned in position 2. The Ad will always show this headline and description in the pinned positions every time it runs.

5. Increase ad strength to improve performance

As you create a responsive search ad, you will see an ad strength indicator on the right with a strength estimate. The ad strength indicator helps you improve the quality and effectiveness of your ads to improve ad performance.

Improving ad strength from “Poor” to ‘Excellent’ can result in up to 9% more clicks and conversions, according to Google.

1. Ad strength measures the relevance, diversity and quality of the Ad content.

2. Some of the ad strength suggestions include

Adding more headlinesIncluding popular keywords in the headlinesMaking headlines more uniqueMaking descriptions more unique

3. Click on “View Ideas” to see suggestions provided by the tool to improve ad relevance and ad quality.

4. The ad strength ratings include “Excellent”, “Good”, “Average” , “Poor” and “No Ads”.

5. Try to get at least a “Good” rating by changing the content of headlines or descriptions or by adding popular keywords. If you have a lot of assets pinned to specific positions, try unpinning some of the assets to improve ad strength.

Are expanded text ads still supported?

Expanded text ads are still supported but they are no longer the default ad format in Google Ads paid search campaigns.

You can still run expanded text ads in your ad groups along with the responsive search ads. Google recommends having one responsive search ad along with two expanded text ads in an ad group to improve performance.

However, Google has removed the option to add a text ad directly from the Ads and extensions menu. When you add a new ad, the menu now lists only options to add a Responsive Search Ad, Call Ad, Responsive Display Ad and Ad variations.

You can still add an expanded text ad although you cannot add it directly from the Ads and extensions menu. Follow these steps,

In the Ads and extensions menu, click to select Responsive search ads.

This opens up the editing menu to create a responsive search ad.

Then click on “switch back to text ads” on the top to create a text ad.

The removal of expanded text ads from the Ad and extensions menu certainly suggests that Google may be planning to phase out expanded text ads in the future. However, they continue to be supported at this time.

Conclusion

In summary, responsive search ads continue the progression towards automation and machine learning in Google Ads. We have used responsive search ads in PPC search campaigns at our digital marketing agency, and have seen an increase in clicks and CTR as compared to expanded text ads.

You can improve the performance of your Google Ads PPC search campaigns by following these five best practices for responsive search ads:

Add at least one responsive search ad per ad group.

Add several unique headlines and descriptions.

Use popular content from your expanded text ads.

Pin some of the assets to control where they appear in the ad.

Increase ad strength to at least a “good” rating to improve ad performance.

Other best practices recommended by Google include:

Have other optimization tips? Share them with #MozBlog on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Marketing technology, or martech, refers to tools and systems designed to support marketing efforts. It can also encompass technology used for sales and advertising. Because of its broad scope, it’s crucial for marketers with diverse expertise to participate in setting up and managing the martech stack.

There’s no single best way to organize martech oversight. The structure should be flexible and involve people from various disciplines. It needs to adapt as technology changes and as the company grows, while ensuring the technology remains effective and provides a good return on investment. 

Here’s how marketers can take part in — and even lead — the teams managing marketing technology.

Competencies needed for effective martech management

To effectively lead and participate in managing marketing technology, you must think about it strategically. Developing skills in martech architecture is crucial, as this expertise is essential for martech management and is not limited to IT teams.

You can add significant value by seeing how all marketing processes fit together and using martech to enhance them. Because managing martech requires teamwork, you can become a key advisor or even a leader in these collaborative efforts.

To prepare you in guiding and leading martech teams, I’ll use the six key martech skills outlined by Austin Hay in his Reforge course. These skills can be learned and developed within marketing teams.

1. Generalized system understanding

This involves having an overall understanding of how data flows throughout the martech stack and why each element of a system is chosen. You should be able to bring your understanding of the overall business strategy, including why customer data points are being collected and how to use them to improve the customer experience. 

2. Tool management 

You should be able to safely set up, integrate and administer tools of any kind. Ensure the marketing team understands why the setup was done in such a way and how this setup matches and can improve/automate marketing processes beyond top-of-funnel activities. You may (or may not) help in the setup itself, but you need to understand why things are set up the way they are.

3. Architecture vision

This competency is about planning how the next version of your stack will manifest to accomplish business goals. This is the most important of the competencies, as it allows for the continuing evolution of the martech. 

As a marketer, you are well-positioned to excel here because you understand the marketing processes that technology supports. You should be able to show how updates to the martech stack can help achieve business goals and improve marketing processes.

4. Capability assessment

This one is about the ability to assess tools/vendors’ value. Consider tools/vendors that could solve a problem. Work closely with other teams also involved and lead these efforts (such as IT and procurement) to ensure the right marketing problems are defined and considered during this assessment phase.

5. Tool procurement

This involves establishing vendor relationships based on business needs and the martech landscape. You can facilitate this by engaging the right stakeholders from both the vendor and client sides, ensuring the process starts correctly.

6. Organization management

It’s crucial for companies to hire and train teams to meet martech needs and grow effectively. You must build and maintain a team that develops diverse competencies, avoiding reliance on one platform or method. The goal is to align marketing processes with technology to enhance both and achieve overall business objectives.

By leveraging a systemic, big-picture view of marketing processes and how customer data can be used to improve customer experience, marketers can bring unique insights and perspectives into selecting, deploying and maintaining marketing technology. This creates a marketing technology virtuous cycle, where the return on investment of such technology is realized not only from customer-related outcomes but also from improvements throughout marketing processes. 

The post 6 core competencies every martech manager needs appeared first on MarTech.

In 2009, by issuing a call to arms to “make the web faster”, Google set out on a mission to try and persuade website owners to make their sites load more quickly.

In order to entice website owners into actually caring about this, in 2010 Google announced that site speed would become a factor in its desktop (non-mobile) search engine ranking algorithms. This meant that sites that loaded quickly would have an SEO advantage over other websites.

Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile exceeded those performed on desktop computers. That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices.

Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project. This initiative is aimed at encouraging website owners to create what is essentially another mobile theme, on top of their responsive mobile theme, that complies with a very strict set of development and performance guidelines.

Although many site owners and SEOs complain about having to tend to page speed and AMP on top of the other 200+ ranking factors that already give them headaches, page speed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study where the results very much justified their focus on making the web faster. They found that “As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.”

In July of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches, and today Google will incorporate even more speed-related factors (called Core Web Vitals) in its ranking algorithms.

With the average human attention span decreasing all the time, and our reliance on our mobile devices growing consistently, there’s no question that page speed is, and will continue to be, an incredibly important thing for website owners to tend to.

How to optimize a website for speed
Think like a race car driver

Winning the page speed race requires the same things as winning a car race. To win a race in a car, you make sure that your vehicle is as lightweight as possible, as powerful as possible, and you navigate the racetrack as efficiently as possible.

I’ll use this analogy to try to make page speed optimization techniques a bit more understandable.

Make it lightweight

These days, websites are more beautiful and functional than ever before — but that also means they are bigger than ever. Most modern websites are the equivalent of a party bus or a limo. They’re super fancy, loaded with all sorts of amenities, and therefore HEAVY and SLOW. In the search engine “racetrack,” you will not win with a party bus or a limo. You’ll look cool, but you’ll lose.

Image source: A GTMetrix test results page

To win the page speed race, you need a proper racing vehicle, which is lightweight. Race cars don’t have radios, cupholders, glove boxes, or really anything at all that isn’t absolutely necessary. Similarly, your website shouldn’t be loaded up with elaborate animations, video backgrounds, enormous images, fancy widgets, excessive plugins, or anything else at all that isn’t absolutely necessary.

In addition to decluttering your site of unnecessary fanciness and excessive plugins, you can also shed website weight by:

Reducing the number of third-party scripts (code snippets that send or receive data from other websites)

Switching to a lighter-weight (less code-heavy) theme and reducing the number of fonts used

Implementing AMP

Optimizing images

Compressing and minifying code

Performing regular database optimizations

On an open-source content management system like WordPress, speed plugins are available that can make a lot of these tasks much easier. WP Rocket and Imagify are two WordPress plugins that can be used together to significantly lighten your website’s weight via image optimization, compression, minification, and a variety of other page speed best practices.

Give it more power

You wouldn’t put a golf cart engine in a race car, so why would you put your website on a dirt-cheap, shared hosting plan? You may find it painful to pay more than a few dollars per month on hosting if you’ve been on one of those plans for a long time, but again, golf cart versus race car engine: do you want to win this race or not?

Traditional shared hosting plans cram tens of thousands of websites onto a single server. This leaves each individual site starved for computing power.

If you want to race in the big leagues, it’s time to get a grown-up hosting plan. For WordPress sites, managed hosting companies such as WP Engine and Flywheel utilize servers that are powerful and specifically tuned to serve up WordPress sites faster.

If managed WordPress hosting isn’t your thing, or if you don’t have a WordPress site, upgrading to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) will result in your website having way more computing resources available to it. You’ll also have more control over your own hosting environment, allowing you to “tune-up your engine” with things like the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Varnish caching, and other modern web server technologies. You’ll no longer be at the mercy of your shared hosting company’s greed as they stuff more and more websites onto your already-taxed server.

In short, putting your website on a well-tuned hosting environment can be like putting a supercharger on your race car.

Drive it better

Last, but certainly not least, a lightweight and powerful race car can only go so fast without a trained driver who knows how to navigate the course efficiently.

The “navigate the course” part of this analogy refers to the process of a web browser loading a webpage. Each element of a website is another twist or turn for the browser to navigate as it travels through the code and processes the output of the page.

I’ll switch analogies momentarily to try to explain this more clearly. When remodeling a house, you paint the rooms first before redoing the floors. If you redid the floors first and then painted the rooms, the new floors would get paint on them and you’d have to go back and tend to the floors again later.

When a browser loads a webpage, it goes through a process called (coincidentally) “painting.” Each page is “painted” as the browser receives bits of data from the webpage’s source code. This painting process can either be executed efficiently (i.e. painting walls before refinishing floors), or it can be done in a more chaotic out-of-order fashion that requires several trips back to the beginning of the process to redo or fix or add something that could’ve/should’ve been done earlier in the process.

Image source: WebPageTest.org Test Result (Filmstrip View)

Here’s where things can get technical, but it’s important to do whatever you can to help your site drive the “track” more efficiently.

Caching is a concept that every website should have in place to make loading a webpage easier on the browser. It already takes long enough for a browser to process all of a page’s source code and paint it out visually to the user, so you might as well have that source code ready to go on the server. By default, without caching, that’s not the case.

Without caching, the website’s CMS and the server can still be working on generating the webpage’s source code while the browser is waiting to paint the page. This can cause the browser to have to pause and wait for more code to come from the server. With caching, the source code of a page is pre-compiled on the server so that it’s totally ready to be sent to the browser in full in one shot. Think of it like a photocopier having plenty of copies of a document already produced and ready to be handed out, instead of making a copy on demand each time someone asks for one.

Various types and levels of caching can be achieved through plugins, your hosting company, and/or via a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs not only provide caching, but they also host copies of the pre-generated website code on a variety of servers across the world, reducing the impact of physical distance between the server and the user on the load time. (And yes, the internet is actually made up of physical servers that have to talk to each other over physical distances. The web is not actually a “cloud” in that sense.)

Getting back to our race car analogy, utilizing caching and a CDN equals a much faster trip around the racetrack.

Those are two of the basic building blocks of efficient page painting, but there are even more techniques that can be employed as well. On WordPress, the following can be implemented via a plugin or plugins (again, WP Rocket and Imagify are a particularly good combo for achieving a lot of this):

Asynchronous and/or deferred loading of scripts. This is basically a fancy way of referring to loading multiple things at the same time or waiting until later to load things that aren’t needed right away.

Preloading and prefetching. Basically, retrieving data about links in advance instead of waiting for the user to click on them.

Lazy loading. Ironic term being that this concept exists for page speed purposes, but by default, most browsers load ALL images on a page, even those that are out of sight until a user scrolls down to them. Implementing lazy loading means telling the browser to be lazy and wait on loading those out-of-sight images until the user actually scrolls there.

Serving images in next-gen formats. New image formats such as WebP can be loaded much faster by browsers than the old-fashioned JPEG and PNG formats. But it’s important to note that not all browsers can support these new formats just yet — so be sure to use a plugin that can serve up the next-gen versions to browsers that support them, but provide the old versions to browsers that don’t. WP Rocket, when paired with Imagify, can achieve this.

Image source: WP Rocket plugin settings

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Lastly, optimizing for the new Core Web Vital metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift) can make for a much more efficient trip around the racetrack as well.

Image source

These are pretty technical concepts, but here’s a quick overview to get you familiar with what they mean:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) refers to the painting of the largest element on the page. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you which element is considered to be the LCP element of a page. A lot of times this is a hero image or large slider area, but it varies from page to page, so run the tool to identify the LCP in your page and then think about what you can do to make that particular element load faster.

First Input Delay (FID) is the delay between the user’s first action and the browser’s ability to respond to it. An example of an FID issue would be a button that is visible to a user sooner than it becomes clickable. The delay would be caused by the click functionality loading notably later than the button itself.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a set of three big words that refer to one simple concept. You know when you’re loading up a webpage on your phone and you go to click on something or read something but then it hops up or down because something else loaded above it or below it? That movement is CLS, it’s majorly annoying, and it’s a byproduct of inefficient page painting.

In conclusion, race car > golf cart

Page speed optimization is certainly complex and confusing, but it’s an essential component to achieve better rankings. As a website owner, you’re in this race whether you like it or not — so you might as well do what you can to make your website a race car instead of a golf cart!

Google’s Gary Illyes shares an unconventional but valid method for centralizing robots.txt rules on CDNs.

Robots.txt files can be centralized on CDNs, not just root domains.

Websites can redirect robots.txt from main domain to CDN.

This unorthodox approach complies with updated standards.

While retail media networks (RMNs) continue to evolve, they are fragmented and confusing for brands. Two experts in data and marketing  — Keen CEO Greg Dolan and Len Ostroff, SVP of sales and partnerships at Crisp — spoke about RMNs at The MarTech Conference (free registration to view the entire program).

Here are the three biggest challenges of RMNs and insights into how marketers can overcome them.

Dig deeper: Why we care about retail media networks

Include multiple retail media networks in your strategy

Your customer’s journey is more complicated than ever. If you’re a brand that depends heavily on retailers — for instance, a consumer packaged good — many of the important steps the customer makes are on a retailer’s website or in a store. Much of the data that proves the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is owned by these retailers.

Len spoke about his experience in digital advertising, where he found that retailers shared a lot of data with their suppliers. The tricky part for marketers is that there’s no standard for how the data is shared and no standard way to compare measurements across retailers. (Last year, the IAB kicked off a process for the industry to standardize by releasing measurement guidelines.)

Although the disparity in measurement standards presents a challenge to marketers, brands must explore the advertising opportunities available through each retail network — because within those networks are the touchpoints close to your customers’ sales.

Here, Len explains why data from different retailers is important and how marketers use it.

Understand each retail media network’s unique approach

Just because your valued customers make purchases through similar processes at different retailers doesn’t mean the retailers themselves have similar RMNs. Each retailer has taken a unique approach in building its RMN.

The consequences of this mean that a media strategy that works well at one retailer might not necessarily follow for another. Each RMN has its own particular “spin.” Marketers must compare and match what the RMN offers with the brand’s campaign goals.

In the video below, Len and Greg discuss how RMNs have evolved. Hearing about their experience makes it easier to see why each RMN is so different.

Loyalty is the gold standard for data

Not all customer data is equal. When engaging existing customers, loyalty data is perhaps the most valuable in driving repeat purchases and finding out what campaign strategies work best.

Many retailers have loyalty programs and memberships. Sam’s Club, for instance, requires membership for retail customers and also has an RMN. Brands can establish loyalty programs of their own. These programs are crucial for amassing first-party data, which is more important than ever with the deprecation of third-party cookies and new privacy regulations.

Len explains here why he thinks loyalty data is so important. If you’re a retailer, it’s driving your RMN. If you’re a brand, it’s a game changer for which RMNs you include in your digital strategy.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

The post 3 challenges for marketers as retail media networks evolve appeared first on MarTech.

Successful ecommerce websites remove as many obstacles as possible between users and the products they’re looking for.

This list of features and policies was chosen based on their impact on user experience. Each removes friction from purchasing journeys to keep users engaged on your website.

29 Essential Ecommerce Website Features1. User-Friendly Navigation With Breadcrumbs2. Internal Site Search3. Product Filters4. 5. Product Videos6. Product Comparisons7. Product Reviews8. Generous Return Policy9. FAQ For Products10. Simple Checkout11. Multiple Payment Options12. SSO Integration13. Support/Help Center14. Order Tracking15. Mobile App16. Email & SMS Opt-In17. Push Notifications18. Chatbots19. Coupon Codes20. Special Offer Programs21. Wishlists22. Gift Registries23. Multilingual Support24. Loyalty Program25. Carousels26. Local Store Information27. Personal Data Policy28. An Affiliate Program29. A TikTok Shop30. Conclusion

1. User-Friendly Navigation With Breadcrumbs

The key to helping customers find the products they need quickly is to offer a user-friendly navigation system. Products should be logically categorized, with the most popular categories listed first.

Sephora knows how customers like to shop.

Some specifically seek out products by brand, while others shop by category. The navigation bar reflects this organization, along with quick links to value sets and current sales.

To help the user get back to the main page or product categories, Sephora also implements breadcrumb navigation throughout its site.

Navigation features should be tested rigorously on mobile devices to ensure that customers used to the desktop website can just as easily find what they want to purchase.

2. Internal Site Search

In addition to user-friendly navigation, site search is a feature found on most of the top ecommerce sites.

It allows customers to bypass the navigation and search for exactly what they want.

Nordstrom offers a site search with suggestions for popular brands and products matching your entry.

This site search even includes popular searches and trending searches near the customer.

3. Product Filters

For stores with a large selection of products, product filters can help customers quickly find the product needed based on features, size, availability, and other pertinent information.

Walgreens offers customers an item availability filter to sort products based on pickup, same-day delivery, shipping, or in-stock availability.

In addition, many product categories have filters related to specific types of items, separating medicines from cosmetics.

Have you considered the best way to utilize your website’s footer to help customers find your top products?

Try a list of links to the top products, services, and information that customers want to find.

T-Mobile uses its footer to direct customers to its social media profiles, English and Spanish sites, featured phones and plans, support, and company information.

The footer effectively includes links to everything the company wants customers and search crawlers to discover from any page on its website.

5. Product Videos

Adding video to your product pages can increase conversions.

Most ecommerce platforms allow retailers to add videos and images to their product pages.

Apple uses video to highlight features of its latest iPhone on its sales page. The high-quality product images and videos help sell its products online and in-store.

6. Product Comparisons

If you have a large selection of products to choose from in any category, let customers quickly compare the main features of each.

REI allows customers to do this with products like hiking bags.

When customers go to the comparison screen, they receive a detailed description of each product, ratings, reviews, and pricing.

7. Product Reviews

Product reviews and ratings are the most popular form of user-generated content on ecommerce sites.

This section of an ecommerce product page is crucial to providing social proof to shoppers that a product will fit their needs.

Amazon allows customers to add photos and videos to reviews, marking relevant reviews as verified.

Amazon has also experimented with AI-generated customer review summaries on some products.

While generative AI features are increasingly present in the ecommerce landscape, retailers should proceed cautiously, as AI content can be inaccurate.

8. Generous Return Policy

Want to increase consumer confidence in the products you sell? Offer a generous return policy and include it on your product page.

Better yet, make your return options as easy as possible.

Zappos does both by giving customers 365 days to return or exchange products and an additional way to return items with minimal hassle.

9. FAQ For Products

Another way to incorporate user-generated content into your ecommerce store is by adding a section of customers’ most frequently asked questions.

This section can help your store in some ways.

Increase the number of sales by answering your customer’s top pre-sales questions about your products.
Reduce the time your customer service has to answer product questions before and after the purchase.

Magic Spoon offers an FAQ section after customer reviews of its cereal.

When potential customers click on view more FAQs, they discover an organized section of answers for shipping, orders, and other inquiries.

10. Simple Checkout

The last thing you want to do before a customer is about to enter their credit card information is frustrate them.

Make sure that customers can easily find the shopping cart to check out. Urban Outfitters does a great job by adding a little checkout popup each time you add a new item to the shopping cart.

On the checkout page, you can see details about the items in your cart and can checkout quickly using PayPal or continue for more options.

You are also reminded of items you’ve saved for later and items that complement what you are about to purchase.

You can sign in or checkout as a guest on the following page.

11. Multiple Payment Options

Another way to make the checkout process easier is to offer customers multiple payment options instead of an account sign-up.

Online retailers like Xena Workwear let customers checkout using Shop Pay from Shopify, PayPal, and Venmo.

Customers using these payment methods on other sites will automatically be comfortable with the process.

12. SSO Integration

To help users create new accounts and sign in faster, integrate single-sign-on for your customers.

This allows customers to create an account and sign in quickly with their Google, Microsoft, Apple, LinkedIn, or another often-used account.

eBay is one of many major shopping destinations that offer this option.

Reducing friction during the signup and sign-in could improve your store’s sales volume.

13. Support/Help Center

In addition to the FAQ for your product pages and store, consider adding a help center.

This should cover any general questions people may ask about online privacy, security, payments, shipping, returns, and other shopping concerns.

Etsy offers help for many of the top support issues customers face in its help center, as well as help for sellers on the network.

This saves the Etsy support team from having to answer general questions and gives them more time to solve complex issues.

14. Order Tracking

Once your customer places an order, the top question on their mind is: When will my order arrive?

Make it simple for customers to check their current order status on your website.

AutoZone has an order tracking page that doesn’t require customers to log in.

Customers simply enter their email address and the order number they received in their order confirmation email.

The page is easily discoverable throughout the website in the footer.

Ecommerce brands on Shopify can also encourage customers to use the Shop App for easy order tracking, social posts, and review reminders.

15. Mobile App

In addition to having a mobile-friendly website that shoppers can access from any device, consider having a mobile app for your store.

Mobile apps allow you to keep your brand in customers’ minds by placing your app icon/logo on their smart devices.

You don’t have to wait for customers to open up a browser or another app for social media or email to get your latest sales messages.

You can push those promotional updates through your app to any customers with notifications as Home Depot does with its app.

16. Email & SMS Opt-In

Having a revenue-generating email list is a must-have for retailers.

If you can’t get visitors to purchase on your website, one of the next best conversions for your store would be to attain the visitor as a subscriber on your email list.

This would allow you to reach them with future sales and email promotions.

Another way ecommerce retailers can capture email addresses is by adding an opt-in form with a special promotion in the header and footer of their website.

Betabrand uses an introductory offer popup for new customer discounts via email and SMS.

A regular reminder for others is included in the website’s footer, product review highlights, and an order status page.

17. Push Notifications

If you want to bypass spam filters and social media algorithms, push notifications will be the next best way to capture your ecommerce store visitors as subscribers.

Push notification services allow visitors to subscribe to your latest updates in their browser.

When you have a promotion you want to notify subscribers of, you can send a message that will be delivered to their notification center via their browser.

Shein is one of many ecommerce brands that allows visitors to subscribe to push notifications.

Once subscribed, visitors will see the latest messages from the brand in their desktop notifications.

18. Chatbots

One of the benefits of running an ecommerce website is its ability to generate revenue 24 hours a day, seven days a week, throughout the year. That also means providing support to your customers during those hours as well.

Many ecommerce stores use chatbots to assist online shoppers with basic questions and navigate them to a specific product or support page.

Lowes uses “Leo,” an automated assistant with specific prompts for visitors to choose from when looking for a specific answer, finding a specific product, or solving a basic customer service inquiry.

Note that the chatbots for ecommerce stores are not necessarily the same as AI chatbots, like ChatGPT.

It’s important to research chat features before implementing them into an ecommerce store.

Even if the chatbot offers inaccurate information, your company may have to honor the information it provides customers, as Air Canada found out in a recent case where it had to pay a refund that its chatbot initiated.

19. Coupon Codes

We know that consumers often search for coupon codes on Google when presented with a coupon or discount box on a checkout page.

In the United States, 88% of consumers use coupons when shopping, using coupon sites like slickdeals.com, groupon.com, and retailmenot.com.

If you want to keep customers on your website throughout the checkout process, give them great deals via your own coupon codes.

Victoria’s Secret has an offer codes page to compete with coupon sites and publishers with coupon sections that double as affiliate revenue generators.

20. Special Offer Programs

Does your ecommerce store have special discounts for students, military, first responders, and others?

Ensure your product pages highlight those offers – especially for high-ticket items.

Samsung does a great job of doing this for new website visitors.

21. Wishlists

Add wishlist functionality to help customers find the items they wanted during previous visits.

The Nintendo Store makes it easy for logged-in users to save an item to their wishlist – they just click or tap the heart.

This will ensure they know exactly what they want the next time someone needs a birthday present idea or wants something for themselves.

22. Gift Registries

If you search gift registries on Google, you will find dozens of well-known brand retailers.

Target, Amazon, Walmart, Crate & Barrel, and Bed, Bath, & Beyond are just a few that appear on the first page of SERPs.

Why are gift registries important to driving sales? Let’s just look at wedding registries for a moment.

CNBC reported findings from Baird’s 2022 survey that Amazon leads as the top wedding registry provider with 45% listing penetration.

Walmart offers gift registries for babies, weddings, and classrooms. You can also create a custom registry to celebrate any occasion you choose.

23. Multilingual Support

If your ecommerce store caters to customers in a specific region, you have two options to support the top languages spoken in their region:

Depend on Google Translate to help customers translate your website into their language.
Create multiple versions of your website for specific languages.

Xfinity uses English on the www subdomain and Spanish on the es subdomain.

24. Loyalty Program

Do you want to increase customer retention? Offering a loyalty program is one way to encourage people to shop from your e-commerce store again.

These are typically free or paid programs where customers get private or early access to the best deals.

Many allow customers to accrue points per purchase, leading to rewards such as a specific dollar amount off your next purchase or a free product.

Ulta is one of many brands offering a free rewards program for loyal customers.

Customers can join for free and earn points redeemable for products and services online and in-store.

25. Carousels

While marketers may disagree on the value of homepage image and video carousels, many ecommerce brands use them.

Major retailers such as Walmart, eBay, Home Depot, Samsung, Wayfair, Lowes, Costco, Sam’s Club, and Kohls have carousels with their latest promotions and sales.

Chewy is another ecommerce brand that features a carousel on the homepage. This carousel promotes discounts for auto-ship orders, healthy pet food, flea & tick medications, pet bedding, and more.

26. Local Store Information

If your ecommerce brand also has physical store locations, you can boost offline sales by adding details for the nearest store to your website’s header.

This would allow customers to shop online, reserve for in-store pickup, or browse their local store inventory before making an in-store purchase.

Brands like Hobby Lobby ask about website visitors’ location to bring them more from their nearest store.

27. Personal Data Policy

Depending on where your ecommerce store is based and the customers it serves, your site may need a policy that notifies visitors of the data collected about them on your website using cookies from the website and other analytics tools.

Michael’s ecommerce store displays a popup advising visitors about cookie usage to enhance user experience and analyze website traffic.

Visitors then have the option to accept the policy, learn more about it, and adjust cookie preferences.

28. An Affiliate Program

Offer an affiliate program to get more content creators talking about your product.

This lets your top customers monetize their content by promoting their favorite products.

Major retailers like Target offer an affiliate program and creator network to create more brand ambassadors.

29. A TikTok Shop

Having an established presence on social media is a given. However, some brands have extended their ecommerce selection to TikTok Shop.

TikTok offers Shop products in a dedicated feed, allowing brands to partner with content creators on the platform for influencer marketing content.

Brands like OtterBox have even added vertical videos and branded hashtags to their websites to promote social commerce further.

Conclusion

Building a successful ecommerce website requires focusing on what you know about your customers, their journeys, and their needs. Then, you need to make those journeys as easy as possible to follow on your website.

The following principles apply as you build ecommerce shopping experiences:

Prioritize a seamless user experience for all devices and platforms.
Make navigation intuitive, search functions intelligent, and information readily accessible across all site sections.
Product descriptions should be detailed and immersive, featuring user-generated content like reviews and customer photos. In the near future, expect technologies like augmented reality (AR) to revolutionize how customers interact with products online.
Blend your online presence with brick-and-mortar locations, allowing for convenient options like buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) or in-store returns for online purchases.
With growing concerns about data privacy, clearly outline your personal data policy and emphasize secure payment options.
Make a strong commitment to transparent customer service and simple return procedures. This fosters a sense of confidence crucial for long-term brand loyalty.

The success of any ecommerce website ultimately depends on exceeding customer expectations.

Stay current on the latest trends with new technologies, and strive to deliver an exceptional online shopping experience.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

In a recent Instagram Reel, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, revealed a top signal the platform uses to rank content: sends per reach.

This metric measures the number of people who share a post with friends through direct messages (DMs) relative to the total number of viewers.

Mosseri advises creating content people want to share directly with close friends and family, saying it can improve your reach over time.

This insight helps demystify Instagram’s ranking algorithms and can assist your efforts to improve visibility on the platform.

Instagram’s ‘Sends Per Reach’ Ranking Signal

Mosseri describes the sends per reach ranking signal and its reasoning:

“Some advice: One of the most important signals we use in ranking is sends per reach. So out of all the people who saw your video or photo, how many of them sent it to a friend in a DM? At Instagram we’re trying to be a place where people can be creative, but in a way that brings people together.

We want to not only be a place where you passively consume content, but where you discover things you want to tell your friends about.

A reel that made you laugh so hard you want to send it to your brother or sister. Or a soccer highlight that blew your mind and you want to send it to another fan. That kind of thing.

So, don’t force it as a creator. But if you can, think about making content that people would want to send to a friend, or to someone they care about.”

The emphasis on sends as a ranking factor aligns with Instagram’s desire to become a platform where users discover and share content that resonates with them personally.

Advice For Creators

While encouraging creators to produce shareworthy content, Mosseri cautioned against forced attempts to game the system.

However, prompting users to share photos and videos via DM is said to boost reach

What Does This Mean For You?

Getting people to share posts and reels with friends can improve reach, resulting in more engagement and leads.

Content creators and businesses can use this information to refine their Instagram strategies.

Rather than seeing Instagram’s focus on shareable content as an obstacle, consider it an opportunity to experiment with new approaches.

If your reach has been declining lately, and you can’t figure out why, this may be the factor that brings it back up.

Featured Image: soma sekhar/Shutterstock

Having a website that doesn’t convert is a little like having a bucket with a hole in it. Do you keep filling it up while the water’s pouring out — or do you fix the hole then add water? In other words, do you channel your budget into attracting people who are “pouring” through without taking action, or do you fine-tune your website so it’s appealing enough for them to stick around?

Our recommendation? Optimize the conversion rate of your website, before you spend on increasing your traffic to it.

Here’s a web design statistic to bear in mind: you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. If your site’s too slow, or unattractive, or the wording isn’t clear, they’ll bounce faster than you can say “leaky bucket”. Which is a shame, because you’ve put lots of effort into designing a beautiful product page and About Us, and people just aren’t getting to see it.

As a digital web design and conversion agency in Melbourne, Australia, we’ve been helping our customers optimize their websites for over 10 years, but it wasn’t until mid-2019 that we decided to turn the tables and take a look at our own site.

As it turned out, we had a bit of a leaky bucket situation of our own: while our traffic was good and conversions were okay, there was definitely room for improvement.

In this article, I’m going to talk a little more about conversions: what they are, why they matter, and how they help your business. I’ll then share how I made lots of little tweaks that cumulatively led to my business attracting a higher tier of customers, more inquiries, plus over $780,000 worth of new sales opportunities within the first 26 weeks of making some of those changes. Let’s get into it!

What is conversion?

Your conversion rate is a figure that represents the percentage of visitors who come to your site and take the desired action, e.g. subscribing to your newsletter, booking a demo, purchasing a product, and so on.

Conversions come in all shapes and sizes, depending on what your website does. If you sell a product, making a sale would be your primary goal (aka a macro-conversion). If you run, say, a tour company or media outlet, then subscribing or booking a consultation might be your primary goal.

If your visitor isn’t quite ready to make a purchase or book a consultation, they might take an intermediary step — like signing up to your free newsletter, or following you on social media. This is what’s known as a micro-conversion: a little step that leads towards (hopefully) a bigger one.

A quick recap

A conversion can apply to any number of actions — from making a purchase, to following on social media.

Macro-conversions are those we usually associate with sales: a phone call, an email, or a trip to the checkout. These happen when the customer has done their research and is ready to leap in with a purchase. If you picture the classic conversion funnel, they’re already at the bottom.

Micro-conversions, on the other hand, are small steps that lead toward a sale. They’re not the ultimate win, but they’re a step in the right direction.

Most sites and apps have multiple conversion goals, each with its own conversion rate.

Micro-conversions vs. macro-conversions: which is better?

The short answer? Both. Ideally, you want micro- and macro-conversions to be happening all the time so you have a continual flow of customers working their way through your sales funnel. If you have neither, then your website is behaving like a leaky bucket.

Here are two common issues that seem like good things, but ultimately lead to problems:

High web traffic (good thing) but no micro- or macro-conversions (bad thing — leaky bucket alert)

High web traffic (good thing) plenty of micro-conversions (good thing), but no macro conversions (bad thing)

A lot of businesses spend heaps of money making sure their employees work efficiently, but less of the budget goes into what is actually one of your best marketing tools: your website.

Spending money on marketing will always be a good thing. Getting customers to your site means more eyes on your business — but when your website doesn’t convert visitors into sales, that’s when you’re wasting your marketing dollars. When it comes to conversion rate statistics, one of the biggest eye-openers I read was this: the average user’s attention span has dropped from 12 to a mere 7 seconds. That’s how long you’ve got to impress before they bail — so you’d better make sure your website is fast, clear, and attractive.

Our problem

Our phone wasn’t ringing as much as we’d have liked, despite spending plenty of dollars on SEO and Adwords. We looked into our analytics and realized traffic wasn’t an issue: a decent number of people were visiting our site, but too few were taking action — i.e. inquiring. Here’s where some of our issues lay:

Our site wasn’t as fast as it could have been (anything with a load time of two seconds or over is considered slow. Ours was hovering around 5-6, and that was having a negative impact on conversions).

Our CTA conversions were low (people weren’t clicking — or they were dropping off because the CTA wasn’t where it needed to be).

We were relying on guesswork for some of our design decisions — which meant we had no way of measuring what worked, and what didn’t.

In general, things were good but not great. Or in other words, there was room for improvement.

What we did to fix it

Improving your site’s conversions isn’t a one-size-fits all thing — which means what works for one person might not work for you. It’s a gradual journey of trying different things out and building up successes over time. We knew this having worked on hundreds of client websites over the years, so we went into our own redesign with this in mind. Here are some of the steps we took that had an impact.

We decided to improve our site

First of all, we decided to fix our company website. This sounds like an obvious one, but how many times have you thought “I’ll do this really important thing”, then never gotten round to it. Or rushed ahead in excitement, made a few tweaks yourself, then let your efforts grind to a halt because other things took precedence?

This is an all-too-common problem when you run a business and things are just… okay. Often there’s no real drive to fix things and we fall back into doing what seems more pressing: selling, talking to customers, and running the business.

Deciding you want to improve your site’s conversions starts with a decision that involves you and everyone else in the company, and that’s what we did. We got the design and analytics experts involved. We invested time and money into the project, which made it feel substantial. We even made EDMs to announce the site launch (like the one below) to let everyone know what we’d been up to. In short, we made it feel like an event.

We got to know our users

There are many different types of user: some are ready to buy, some are just doing some window shopping. Knowing what type of person visits your site will help you create something that caters to their needs.

We looked at our analytics data and discovered visitors to our site were a bit of both, but tended to be more ready to buy than not. This meant we needed to focus on getting macro-conversions — in other words, make our site geared towards sales — while not overlooking the visitors doing some initial research. For those users, we implemented a blog as a way to improve our SEO, educate leads, and build up our reputation.

User insight can also help you shape the feel of your site. We discovered that the marketing managers we were targeting at the time were predominantly women, and that certain images and colours resonated better among that specific demographic. We didn’t go for the (obvious pictures of the team or our offices), instead relying on data and the psychology of attraction to delve into the mind of the users.

We improved site speed

Sending visitors to good sites with bad speeds erodes trust and sends them running. Multiple studies show that site speed matters when it comes to conversion rates. It’s one of the top SEO ranking factors, and a big factor when it comes to user experience: pages that load in under a second convert around 2.5 times higher than pages taking five seconds or more.

We built our website for speed. Moz has a great guide on page speed best practices, and from that list, we did the following things:

We optimized images.

We managed our own caching.

We compressed our files.

We improved page load times (Moz has another great article about how to speed up time to first Byte). A good web page load time is considered to be anything under two seconds — which we achieved.

In addition, we also customized our own hosting to make our site faster.

We introduced more tracking

As well as making our site faster, we introduced a lot more tracking. That allowed us to refine our content, our messaging, the structure of the site, and so on, which continually adds to the conversion.

We used Google Optimize to run A/B tests across a variety of things to understand how people interacted with our site. Here are some of the tweaks we made that had a positive impact:

Social proofing can be a really effective tool if used correctly, so we added some stats to our landing page copy.

Google Analytics showed us visitors were reaching certain pages and not knowing quite where to go next, so we added CTAs that used active language. So instead of saying, “If you’d like to find out more, let us know”, we said “Get a quote”, along with two options for getting in touch.

We spent an entire month testing four words on our homepage. We actually failed (the words didn’t have a positive impact), but it allowed us to test our hypothesis. We did small tweaks and tests like this all over the site.

We used heat mapping to see where visitors were clicking, and which words caught their eye. With this data, we knew where to place buttons and key messaging.

We looked into user behavior

Understanding your visitor is always a good place to start, and there are two ways to go about this:

Quantitative research (numbers and data-based research)

Qualitative research (people-based research)

We did a mixture of both.

For the quantitative research, we used Google Analytics, Google Optimize, and Hotjar to get an in-depth, numbers-based look at how people were interacting with our site.

Heat-mapping software shows how people click and scroll through a page. Hot spots indicate places where people naturally gravitate.

We could see where people were coming into our site (which pages they landed on first), what channel brought them there, which features they were engaging with, how long they spent on each page, and where they abandoned the site.

For the qualitative research, we focused primarily on interviews.

We asked customers what they thought about certain CTAs (whether they worked or not, and why).

We made messaging changes and asked customers and suppliers whether they made sense.

We invited a psychologist into the office and asked them what they thought about our design.

What we learned

We found out our design was good, but our CTAs weren’t quite hitting the mark. For example, one CTA only gave the reader the option to call. But, as one of our interviewees pointed out, not everyone likes using the phone — so we added an email address.

We were intentional but ad hoc about our asking process. This worked for us — but you might want to be a bit more formal about your approach (Moz has a great practical guide to conducting qualitative usability testing if you’re after a more in-depth look).

The results

Combined, these minor tweaks had a mighty impact. There’s a big difference in how our site looks and how we rank. The bottom line: after the rebuild, we got more work, and the business did much better. Here are some of the gains we’ve seen over the past two years.

Our dwell time increased by 73%, going from 1.5 to 2.5 minutes.

We received four-times more inquiries by email and phone.

Our organic traffic increased despite us not channeling more funds into PPC ads.

We also realized our clients were bigger, paying on average 2.5 times more for jobs: in mid-2018, our average cost-per-job was $8,000. Now, it’s $17,000.

Our client brand names became more recognizable, household names — including two of Australia’s top universities, and a well-known manufacturing/production brand.

Within the first 26 weeks, we got over $770,000 worth of sales opportunities (if we’d accepted every job that came our way).

Our prospects began asking to work with us, rather than us having to persuade them to give us the business.

We started getting higher quality inquiries — warmer leads who had more intent to buy.

Some practical changes you can make to improve your website conversions

When it comes to website changes, it’s important to remember that what works for one person might not work for you.

We’ve used site speed boosters for our clients before and gotten really great results. At other times, we’ve tried it and it just broke the website. This is why it’s so important to measure as you go, use what works for your individual needs, and remember that “failures” are just as helpful as wins.

Below are some tips — some of which we did on our own site, others are things we’ve done for others.

Tip number 1: Get stronger hosting that allows you to consider things like CDNs. Hiring a developer should always be your top choice, but it’s not always possible to have that luxury. In this instance, we recommend considering CDNs, and depending on the build of your site, paying for tools like NitroPack which can help with caching and compression for faster site speeds.

Tip number 2: Focus your time. Identify top landing pages with Moz Pro and channel your efforts in these places as a priority. Use the 80/20 principle and put your attention on the 20% that gets you 80% of your success.

Tip number 3: Run A/B tests using Google Optimize to test various hypotheses and ideas (Moz has a really handy guide for running split tests using Google). Don’t be afraid of the results — failures can help confirm that what you are currently doing right. You can also access some in-depth data about your site’s performance in Google Lighthouse.

Tip number 4: Trial various messages in Google Ads (as a way of testing targeted messaging). Google provides many keyword suggestions on trending words and phrases that are worth considering.

Tip number 5: Combine qualitative and quantitative research to get to know how your users interact with your site — and keep testing on an ongoing basis.

Tip number 6: Don’t get too hung up on charts going up, or figures turning orange: do what works for you. If adding a video to your homepage slows it down a little but has an overall positive effect on your conversion, then it’s worth the tradeoff.

Tip number 7: Prioritize the needs of your target customers and focus every build and design choice around them.

Recommended tools

Nitropack: speed up your site if you’ve not built it for speed from the beginning.

Google Optimize: run A/B tests

HotJar: see how people use your site via heat mapping and behaviour analytics.

Pingdom / GTMetrix: measure site speed (both is better if you want to make sure you meet everyone’s requirements).

Google Analytics: find drop-off points, track conversion, A/B test, set goals.

Qualaroo: poll your visitors while they are on your site with a popup window.

Google Consumer Surveys: create a survey, Google recruits the participants and provides results and analysis.

Moz Pro: Identify top landing pages when you connect this tool to your Google Analytics profile to create custom reports.

How to keep your conversion rates high

Treat your website like your car. Regular little tweaks to keep it purring, occasional deeper inspections to make sure there are no problems lurking just out of sight. Here’s what we do:

We look at Google Analytics monthly. It helps to understand what’s working, and what’s not.

We use goal tracking in GA to keep things moving in the right direction.

We use Pingdom’s free service to monitor the availability and response time of our site.

We regularly ask people what they think about the site and its messaging (keeping the qualitative research coming in).

Conclusion

Spending money on marketing is a good thing, but when you don’t have a good conversion rate, that’s when your website’s behaving like a leaky bucket. Your website is one of your strongest sales tools, so it really does pay to make sure it’s working at peak performance.

I’ve shared a few of my favorite tools and techniques, but above all, my one bit of advice is to consider your own requirements. You can improve your site speed if you remove all tags and keep it plain. But that’s not what you want: it’s finding the balance between creativity and performance, and that will always depend on what’s important.

For us as a design agency, we need a site that’s beautiful and creative. Yes, having a moving background on our homepage slows it down a little bit, but it improves our conversions overall.

The bottom line: Consider your unique users, and make sure your website is in line with the goals of whoever you’re speaking with.

We can do all we want to please Google, but when it comes to sales and leads, it means more to have a higher converting and more effective website. We did well in inquiries (actual phone calls and email leads) despite a rapid increase in site performance requirements from Google. This only comes down to one thing: having a site customer conversion framework that’s effective.

Customers’ expectations are rising and marketers are working to meet those expectations with personalized content at a growing number of touchpoints — from social to website to mobile app to drive-through menu, and even to virtual reality experience. It’s that need to maintain a compliant, on-brand experience that is leading more marketers to adopt or upgrade digital asset management systems (DAM).

Here are some of the ways a DAM can aid an organization:

Better communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.

Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.

More efficient utilization of existing resources. 

Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals. 

Faster conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types for different marketing applications.

Higher efficiency on the front end, in the creation of brand assets, and on the back end, in the distribution of those assets to various martech and adtech systems.

Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms. 

Improved branding consistency to the customer with an eye toward loyalty and retention.

Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution. 

While these are all highly desirable capabilities, your organization may not need all of them. Deciding whether or not your company needs an enterprise-level digital asset management platform requires you to follow the same evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including conducting a comprehensive self-assessment of your organization’s business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources.

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Adobe, Bynder, Cloudinary and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

Use the following questions as a guideline to determine the answers:

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