For proactive online enterprises, conversion optimisation is non-stop. Their teams test, measure, and tweak in a continual rotation to refine the customer experience and surface new opportunities. Most importantly, they do it in good times and bad. In return, they see not only business growth, but also lower CPCs and CPAs.
While there are some rules of CRO that are eternal (e.g. UX is king, test small changes and often), consumer behaviour and expectations are fluid, which means today’s optimisations may not work for tomorrow’s site and app visitor. That has definitely proven true during these pandemic-altered times.
In the eighth post of our CRO Insights series, Thomas Lawson, UK sales director at leading customer experience optimisation company AB Tasty, writes on the trends, challenges, and lessons in the optimisation industry in the recent past.
With so many aspects of commerce turned upside down by Covid-19, there were bound to be shifts in conversion behaviours. Trends in customer experience optimisation (CXO) have mirrored pandemic mindsets. From our vantage point as a customer experience optimisation platform, we’ve seen some revealing trends, including how testing can serve as a protective buffer against volatility.
Contactless commerce is here to stay
The past 18 months have made contactless payment, BOPIS, curbside, and drive-by the norm, and consumers may not want to go back. Brands must continue to innovate and experiment with touch-free interactions using QR codes, AI, 5G and more while keeping in mind vulnerable audiences who may be on the low-tech side.
No time for hassles: sync your services
Pandemic-related constraints created a new appetite for convenience. Synced services like social commerce, voice ordering, in-vehicle payments and more are setting new customer expectations.
Show them the way with beneficial intelligence
AI will play an increasingly essential role in all aspects of CXO as consumers come to expect and rely on machine learning tools to help them with decision making. Think: financial apps that assist users in building good credit and sound financial habits.
Testing can help you weather the storm
As the pandemic continues to evolve, it’s crucial for businesses to continue to test and experiment as a way to get ahead of trends and avoid emerging threats. As always, high-volume, small-scale changes are ideal, as is consistency. One of the most common mistakes we see in our industry is a “fair-weather” approach to CRO. It’s an exercise some organisations associate with stability and certainty rather than a way to manage risk and surface opportunities.
The bottom line is that optimisation isn’t just about comparing today’s performance against yesterday’s. It’s also a tool for real-time agility that keeps you doing what’s best for the current situation and ready to adapt as needed.
While variants, regional surges, and ongoing supply chain issues make the next 12 months hard to predict, businesses must be ready for anything.
The question is: how can they retain the large online customer bases they have built up during lockdown? How can they keep up the momentum? Testing and discovery will be absolutely essential to keeping online customers active and engaged as they are tempted back to physical stores.
Lean teams for lean times
On the operational side of the CRO equation, we’re also seeing businesses put more pressure on their teams to do more with fewer resources. That’s one reason we’ve been investing in new capabilities for workflow efficiency – helping our platform users do more with the time they have and reducing their scope of work. Needless to say, our customer service team is doing a lot of extra support.
Too much experimentation isn’t dangerous; too little is
After so many months of uncertainty and flux, there’s a temptation to batten down the hatches and ride things out below decks. But when it comes to CRO, now is the time to be aggressive and creative with continual testing, exploration, and adaptation.
Keep the changes small, be ready to fail, but keep experimenting. It’s one of the best ways to deliver the best possible customer experience, in particular when the customer journey keeps changing.
This is the eighth of a series of posts where we speak with leading customer experience optimisation brands on trends and the future of digital growth. Check out the previous conversations with the likes of VWO, Fresh Relevance, Webtrends Optimize, and Nosto.
Stay tuned for the next one!