It is essential and crucial for brands to understand the changing patterns for digital consumer behaviour. Virtual environments are increasing and brands have to meet consumers and their needs anywhere at anytime. It can be a challenge but it is possible to provide targeted and just-in-time information about a product or service in a seamless and effective way.
The consumer journey is already getting influenced by big data, The Internet of Things, and coding and design. In 2016, the web influenced more than half of all retail transactions, representing a potential sales opportunity of almost $2 trillion (Mulpuru, 2016). Many brands think that they are already on the right track, and that they just need to add some social media platforms to their portfolio of digital channels to influence digital consumers on their journey. This is wrong as tools and standards are changing faster than brands can react. How brands manage to engage consumers in these new and changing digital channels are crucial, and brands have to take another approach to manage the consumer decision journey by focussing on these three areas research by Bommel et. al, 2014: Discover, Design, and Deliver.
Discover: Build an analytic engine
Despite a widespread of digital information about consumers, a lot of brands still lack a 360-degree view of their target audience, and brand performance is measured of direct sales and with ‘last-action attribution’ analyses of campaigns. However, these measurements and analyses only show an isolated version of how digital consumers make decisions and not an entire cross-channel consumer decision journey.
To get the full story and not only snapshots of the journey, brands must combine all the digital touch points and contacts that the consumers have with the brand in a central data mart. This includes browsing history, transactions, interactions, and basic consumer information. Teredata and BryterCX are tools that can help marketers with this work.
With this central data mart it is easy to undertake a quick-hit ‘shop diagnostics’ to find the insight in the digital consumer decision journey. This can be done with analytic software programs like R and SAS. This will create an understanding of the target audience and, for example, they when and if read emails, if digital shopping is preferred, triggers, etc.
Individual consumer needs and triggers are essential to identify and understand as well to create a higher conversion rate. Business-process software from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pegasystems, and Responsys help brands identifying basic triggers in real time for what the individual consumers value and need. This way brands can develop targeted offers for consumers and create effective and high digital conversion rates.
Design: Create frictionless experiences
48 percent of US consumers think that brands should be better at integrating online and offline experiences. By delivering targeted marketing messages at various points in the digital consumer decision journey based on data, personalisation, and testing tools, brands can create really effective digital marketing campaigns in which every step for the consumer is tailored to help them make the best decision.
Brands must find a way to be able to test new user experiences and constantly evolve their offers for small segments of the target audience. Test-and-learn methods with a lean start-up approach can optimise and customise critical design attributes in different touch points along the way in the decision journey. It is important the most useful information is provided in a non intrusive and creepy messaging. Testing digital product ideas, frictionless experiences, and consumer interactions through feedback is crucial. Elements like page layout, navigation, visual presentation, content architecture must be tested.
Deliver: Build a more agile organisation
Brands have to learn not to be too afraid to launch campaigns. Most often, campaigns are launched way too late due to conservative senior leaders. If it takes too long to get off the ground, only a few new insights will be revealed. It can seem like a good idea to refine campaigns based on the changing consumer behaviour and stated preferences, however, lots of data-driven small-scale experiments from proxy website services to pilot new designs will be better as they prove their value for investment.
To do this, the organisation behind the brand must be build as an agile marketing organisation in which individuals are freed up to iterate quickly. The organisation must consist of the right people, tools, and processes, and it will take time. The brand can start by creating a ‘scrum team’ in which the best people will be brought together with a war-room mentality to test, learn, and scale in a cross-functional perspectives such as marketing, finance, e-commerce, IT, etc.
It is hard work to create an effective digital consumer decision journey but it is possible to engage more consumers and, in the end, end up with a lot higher conversion rate for your brand.
