Understanding the touchpoints between you and your potential customers is crucial to competitive advantage. One way to do so is mapping user journeys and defining buyer personas
3. • Old methods no longer work – Buyer
Persona Marketing
• No industry unaffected
• Multiple touchpoints
• Empathise and understand the customer
Understanding the user journey
“ 88% of companies say their growth depends on personalising
the customer experience – but lack the resources and expertise to
design an improved customer journey”
IBM
4. • Where you’ve lost a customer?
• Where your customers are active?
• All the touchpoints between you and your customers?
• Most people have made a decision about you before
direct contact in ‘stealth mode’
• Who are your customers?
Do you know…
“ People want to exercise choice and control”
World Economic Forum
5. • Hard work undone in a second
• Lose trust
• You could be oblivious
• Lost revenue
The real pain of a poor customer experience
“ By 2020 the key brand differentiator will not be price and
product but the customer experience”
Walker Information Inc
6. 45% of consumers state: “A bad website is worse
than nothing”…and never return
Let’s look at a scenario
New
customer
wins
11 per
week/month
/quarter
Conversion
rate 50%
Potential
customers
22
Reality check
18
Actual reach
27.5%
‘Lost’
50
Actual rate
7. Why is this happening?
• Can it be solved?
• How?
• Be one of the 17%...
• And establish TRUST
• PERSONALISE
• ADAPT
8. • Attitudes, feelings and goals
• Using interviews (8 – 12)
• Define each aspect of buying cycle
• Add the comments and observations
• Identify personas
• Target your message
The buyer persona – what you need to know
9. • What triggered the buyer to search?
• What criteria needed to fit?
• What result was sought?
• Who else was considered?
• What was important?
• How did they feel?
• What were the risks?
The key information
10. • Email alert
• Website
• Registration email
• Marketing collateral
• Brochures
• Social media channels
The touchpoints – highs and lows
Online and offline
11. • Decide optimum number
• Over exposure you risk
unsubscribes/negativity
• Under exposure you’re
losing an opportunity
• Devise a structured plan
The email alert
12. • Convince
• Tantalising title & copy
• Award and discount
• Split test titles
The email alert:
Think CTAs
Fact: 38% higher levels
of oxytocin Roger Dooley neuroscience marketing
13. • Weak headline
• Cynical sales pitch
• Irrelevant landing pages
• Poor loading time. 1 sec delay = 7% fall in conversions
• Buried content
Your website – what turns people off?
Fact: 96% of website visitors are only researching,
NOT BUYING
17. Winning people over: Sunways Business Travel
• Banners with
impact
• Value proposition
• Convince
• Video footage
18. • Ask just enough
• Plain speaking ‘When is your birthday?’
• Do ‘stuff’ later
Registration forms – what the best do
19. • Zero consideration and slow loading, 57% will leave
• Desktop experience prioritised
• Content is too hard to digest
• Expect users to pinch and zoom or squint
Where many go wrong with mobile
Fact: poor mobile experience, more people go to your
competitor
20. • Use analytics to determine
journey
• Simplify forms
• Test, try and adapt
• Watch your scrolling!
Top tips for mobile
“ On average, each household has access to 7.4 devices”
Internet Advertising Bureau
21. • Irrelevant post
• Cluttered business cards
• Illegible letterheads
• Weightless, insipid flyers
Does your offline material reflect online?
We all hate:
22. • All design elements should
be consistent
• Use white space
constructively
• A little more thought reaps
its own rewards
• Force a positive reaction
‘Do I care?’
Rules for all marketing collateral
23. • Still works if well planned
• Underpins your identity
• Generates positivity/trust
• Enforces online messaging
• Starts to help forge a
relationship
The perfect brochure
24. • Outdated
• No action promoted
• Tone now inconsistent with web voice
• Branding not uniform
• Too technical
Done badly…
25. • Think about a consistent
tone
• Consider character length
• Research where your
audience is most active
• Respond quickly and on the
right channel
Social media channels
26. Social media channels
• Twitter – be concise
and to the point
• Facebook – expand
your story
• LinkedIn – be wise
27. • Use your map to steer a strategy for improvement
• Concentrate on providing a seamless experience
• We’re brand agnostics
• Use data wisely…
Takeaways
Good evening.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sarah Pooley and I’m account director at mso
I’m going to take up 30 to 35 minutes of your time to talk about how you may need to rethink your approach to the customer sales journey and now consider the multiple touchpoints your customers now use
It’s a very hot topic at the moment and although the concept has been around for a while, in the last 2 years it’s really come to the fore
Buyer persona marketing can really shift a company’s focus and help it adopt a buyer centric approach
I think everyone here will be able to apply to their own industry (whatever that may be) and help you to leave here and tomorrow start addressing this as a real activity that needs to be done which will help you see where changes need to be made, it enables you to accommodate your customers and provide them with a more personal experience which will ultimately boost sales
It’s a new approach so think empathy – it’s all about them not you so put yourself in their shoes:
How are they feeling?
What are they thinking?
What’s their expectation?
Be part of their team not on the opposing side
I’m going to ask this:
Have any of you spent time really analysing at what point you have lost a potential customer and why?
Have you considered sitting down and mapping the journeys people are taking and the various routes that they will use that should ultimately lead to them buying your product or service?
There’s a real business case for undertaking a mapping exercise and the following scenario should be proof enough that if any part of that journey is less than satisfactory, you could be losing potential customers
According to Google research, most people have conducted research about you before you’re even aware that they exist, many of them are in ‘stealth mode’
Recognise that people expect to be able to move between different digital touchpoints without waiting for companies to catch up
Mckinsey backs this up - 2/3s of the research is conducted by the customer ie review, word of mouth recommendations and recollections
People want exercise choice and control
We all know that poor customer service can undo all your hard work in a second but what about a poor experience before you even know that that individual exists?
Think about this stat:
45% of consumers believe that a bad website make a worse impact that a business with no website at all.
I know this is just regarding your website but what if we were to apply that percentage?
45% of people have found your business but decide not to go any further
Say you pick up 11 new customers over a quarter/month, or whatever timeframe is applicable to your business
With a conversion rate of 50%, there’s 22 potential customers you actually know of
However your conversion rate is actually 25% because 18 of them have already dropped out
If you know what your average contract cost is, it’s not difficult to do the maths and see what you’re losing in lost revenue
It’s very easy to extract data and turn that into real insights which is what I do for a number of my clients but how do we glean information before we have that data?
Why?
So the leading question you need to ask is why is this happening and what can you do to solve it?
At any given touchpoint between yourself and that potential customer you’re not giving them what you want which you can label in many definitions but basically come downs to trust and the fact that you haven’t established it – you’re not convincing them that they should be continuing on their journey and that you can deliver what they want
According to a survey of 2000 marketers between June and July of this year, only 17% are mapping out customers journeys or buyer persona whilst the remainder know they should and are trying to play catch up
Don’t think persona is the same as segmentation, what you’re doing here is actually digging deeper than that
You need to identify comprehensive personas to steer real targeted marketing campaigns
There are various things you need to find out but conducting interviews with recent wins as well as clients who went elsewhere will provide great insight so seriously think about getting 8 – 12 to help you
You should have aspects of the buying cycle that are backed up by comments and observations
Try to see if from these results you can see various personas emerging so you can start to think about tailoring a message for each
You may find that some needs cross over so you can address multiple personas at once
Really helps you focus on the type of message that will resonate and ultimately solve the buyers problem whether that’s in email or website content
Try to get these questions answered during the process so you can compile some good results
So let’s think about the various touchpoints that you’ll be familiar with and I’ll give you the dos and donts
This is all about establishing the highs and lows of interaction so you can adapt to meet expectation (you have the personas now so see how these fit) and see how touchpoints over time result in either a good or negative relationship
You’ll see in this list that I’ve included both online and offline activty – the 2 come hand in hand and you can’t separate one from the other (no different from people who separate social media channels from any other sort of communication – I wouldn’t recommend that you do so)
And remember these are people that you might know about ie they’re on your mailing list but haven’t actually bought anything from you yet:
Email alert
Website
Registration email
Brochure
Communication channels (Twitter, FB, Linked In)
Email alert
What will turn people off?
Too many emails – what’s the optimal number of emails to send per week
But there is a temptation to send out too many because it can mean more sales
Subscribers don’t have uniform reactions so the reality is that you can’t define the exact email frequency
However, most people will say they get too many. These stats are interesting – you can see that most people are OK with weekly or even less, only a small number want them every day
(insert Sherpa email)
Contrast this with Gap and the company is starting to lose credibility
Find the balance because if it’s too few:
You’re missing opportunity to sell
You’re not getting exposure and keeping at the forefront of the recipient’s mind
Risking your reputation – infrequent contact might scare people off
People will forget about you
Too many and they’re simply stop opening them
Risk of unsubscribing
Too many unsubscribes and you’ll end up in spam reports which will damage reputation
What will encourage them to take action?
1. Relevant content of real interest to the recipient
2. An engaging title will whet the appetite and maximise the number of opens (be mindful of using symbols in subject lines).
Whilst they have been seen to boost email response rates and they do stand out more it doesn’t always it will work for you and I suggest you carry out some A/B split testing particularly for some mobile devices they appear as empty rectangles
3. Incentives, people like to receive vouchers and discounts when aimed at a specific audience (38% higher levels of oxytocin, a hormone related to emotions such as love, trust and happiness surged when a discount coupon offered, 32% lower respiration rates – Roger Dooley neuroscience marketing)
Website
What will turn people off?
A weak headline means more people will leave and whilst the majority do after 8 seconds, you don’t want to be actively helping them to do so
A cynical sales pitch - 96% of visitors are not looking to buy anything, they’re doing their research and establishing whether you appear to be what you say you are
Not enough good landing pages with relevant content
Poor loading time – a 1 second delay can result in 7% reduction in conversions
Obviously going to be a poor experience
Who is doing this right?
Insert mailChimp’s image – Easy Email Newsletters
It’s all about the ease of it
Lands’ End
These guys convert even better than Amazon on 4 total pages in its checkout process
The Sims 4 – the previous version Sims 3 underwent a design revamp since it had 4 primary CTAs and the people behind SIMS knew that they could still increase conversions so decided to test 6 variations, this time with only having one CTA.
They’ve carried this through to number 4 – still fundamentally they’re just asking people to purchase:
Insert image
So think about obstacles and how you can win over people with a company behind the scenes video, a banner with testimonials, your unique value proposition (how long you’ve been in business, customer satisfaction rate, how long you’ve been around and tell people what benefit they’re going to receive by engaging with you now…
Insert Sunways?
A registration form
What turns people off https://blog.kissmetrics.com/what-converting-websites-do/
Don’t expect people to spend ages filling out a form, you’ve got them that close so don’t lose them at a pivotal moment because you need their inside leg measurement
For example ask ‘When is your birthday’ not ‘the date when you were born’
Use Drop box as a eg of a good one
Fewer forms will produce better conversions, but test your own to see what works best
Using natural language on forms has been shown to increase conversions by 25-40%
The mobile experience
We all know what the major turn off is for those on a mobile device and that’s a website that isn’t responsive or if it is, no consideration has been given to the actual experience on the mobile
Don’t assume that the objectives of the mobile user is the same as desktop user – mobile users need information quickly and easily digestible
57% of mobile users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 secs to load
One quarter of global web searches is conducted on a mobile (that’s one billion users)
90% of people move between devices (multi screening) – covered on my last Tech Talks back in April
Unreadable content, having to pinch and zoom or squint will result in a high bounce rate
This is damming: if mobile experience is bad, more people will go to your competitor than actually go to your desktop version
A good mobile site can double conversions (according to Kissmetrics)
So what should you be doing?
Define and then match the visitor’s needs, ascertain how they will most likely be browsing your website. On desktop you can afford to put more content on pages but if you know that a form is just as likely to be accessed on a mobile as per my earlier slide make the process as intuitive as possible
The mobile experience
So what should you be doing?
Define and then match the visitor’s needs, ascertain how they will most likely be browsing your website. On desktop you can afford to put more content on pages but if you know that a form is just as likely to be accessed on a mobile as per my earlier slide make the process as intuitive as possible
Always check key information is not and the end of an never ending scrolling exercise
Offline material
We all know what the major turn off you receive something in the post that appears to have been sent out with no regard to its relevance and whether you even what to read it
Business cards that appear to use up every inch of white space (consider that they may be passed around internally so they can’t associate the card with an actual person – what impression do they give a newbie?
Letterheads that are illegible
Keep to consistent design elements, logo, typefaces, graphics and colours
Make sure your logo stands out and colour themes match your online version
Letterheads, are they communicating your professionalism and underpinning your company ethos?
Don’t have Times New Roman on your offline material for people to compare with Arial on your website
Consider white space and use it effectively
Ask yourself : if I got this given to me, would I care and read what’s in front of me?
Brochures are a brilliant way of gaining a competitive advantage
Plan and map the design and layout – use Sunways – perfect echoing of the online experience
A printed brochure is still an important piece of corporate communication even if you have a strong online presence
Done well with time invested, it can help generate positive results and leave potential customers with a good impression
Define who the brochure is aimed at – is it for everyone or is there a specific market – speak to the right people
Use language that resonates with your target audience
Be faithful to your brand identity – match colours and use imagery that is sympathetic to your other channels of communication
Something that was written years ago that you only send out periodically because you bought so many copies you need to get rid of them
You give customers a bible without leading them to perform a function i.e. email you, pick up the phone, go to the website – ultimately you want people to engage with you
The tone sits awkwardly with your current online messaging
Branding is inconsistent with email signatures, email alerts basically anything that is digital since it has the capability to be adapted quicker and at less cost
A brochure that offers no real gain will lead it to be dumped immediately
only write in technical terms if you know for a fact that the people reading it will understand
Communication channels
Common fault, whatever channel is used, tone has to be consistent. That’s a challenge when you’re limited on characters
Communication channels
Common fault, whatever channel is used, tone has to be consistent. That’s a challenge when you’re limited on characters
So when you’re thinking about Twitter, think Han Solo – man of few words but could pack a punch
Luke Skywalker – consider your demeanour, enthusiastic – vocal – keen
Yoda – the wise, go to character for advice an authority – the ultimate jedi master
Remember, LinkedIn has the highest rate of ROI, 3xs higher than FB and Twitter
Be consistent with design elements
Repeat your messages between online and offline
Assume the same tone
Make the experience seamless, a unified brand experience
Communication channels – your customers should feel they’re talking to the same person
Test and review and change and remember that digital is a much more fluid environment to do this at relatively low cost
Embed video
Answer the questions before it’s even asked…and create an experience people won’t forget