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Guest Blogger: Chris Lamont, Account Executive, iPerceptions

Why is it so many people are always focused on getting more people to buy versus getting people to buy more? I have asked myself this question over the last few weeks when speaking to potential clients and when discussing online research. The short answer I have come up with is that few see the difference unless explained and those that see it didn’t think they could do it.

I have mentioned previously how I spent time in the onsite behavioral targeting side of the world and pitched numerous companies with varying business goals on the advantages of getting the right message to the right person. This truism still remains. The key is in how we determine right message and right person and most importantly RIGHT TIME. Terms and concepts like conversion rates, optimizing messaging, persuasion marketing, segment/segmentation targeting, predictive analytics, behavioral targeting, etc. all seek to pinpoint the message you should convey to your visitor or the ‘hook’ that will capture their attention and get them to convert from a visitor into someone who transacts with your site. Here’s the secret: most don’t want to transact from you to begin with!

This weekend, my daughter asked if she and a friend could go to a movie. Having just turned 13, we don’t have a problem with her going to a matinee without us, although don’t want her wandering the mall afterwards or instead of going to the movie at all (not that I was ever guilty of that!). After dropping her off, I spent a few hours walking around the mall by myself waiting for John to stop singing. Browsing through stores, preparing my Christmas list err... browsing for others, I noticed something: every store I walked into had someone waiting to pounce on me offering ‘help’ in finding the item(s) I was looking for (as I typically am in the mall for a specific reason and looking to buy something I probably had not been as aware of this until it happened). That’s when it hit me: what I had been telling people in recent meetings, pitches and conversations was true! I had no intention of buying anything. There was no chance I was going to buy something. This is the problem with focusing on conversion – I wasn’t going to convert!

The focus (as I have described to others) should be on understanding and fixing abandonment. Say for instance I had four things in my arms and was heading to the cash when I put one thing down. Shouldn’t the store want to know why? Shouldn’t they try and understand what might have prompted me to pick it up? Why did I put it down? What triggered me to commit one (or better yet both) of these actions?

I was obviously there to buy. I had things in my hands. Whether I left with nothing, one thing or even three things, I didn’t leave with the original number headed to the cash with. Why? From an e-commerce perspective there is tremendously more valuable information in the answers to these questions. If I came to purchase some things, why did I and why didn’t I? Instead, I was targeted the minute I walked in the store (came to the site) by the sales associate (index page) told me about a special they were having (free shipping ad) and asked what they could help me with (product recommendations) in the men’s section (because of the current weather in New York).

There is value in conversion – but only after you have uncovered why people have abandoned in the first place. We use the abandonment percentages all the time. If 100,000 people came to your site, 7% came to purchase and 45% abandoned, what do you do? Well ultimately it doesn’t matter how many came to your site except on a larger reporting scale. The numbers that matter are the 7,000 that came to buy something and the 3,150 that did not (although it is important to know why the 3,850 did buy). How to you get to these key pieces of knowledge, you ask? Seems simple right? Well it is – just ask.

If they asked me as I walked out of Banana Republic why I didn’t buy anything, I would’ve said “because I wasn’t shopping for anything today.” Should that make me a figure in the conversion rate equation? I for one don’t think so. You can’t use technology to turn a browser into a buyer. You can’t use predictive algorithms to accurately determine that because I am from NY and it is a Saturday afternoon I am likely to buy jeans. You can’t say that if we offer free shipping then our conversion rates will increase. Well, I suppose you can although only if I was considering a purchase in the first place. That is the meat of what I am getting at. Unless I am considering making a transaction in the first place, you will only on the rarest of occasions get people to transact with you by serving them an offer or ad based on what you have collected technologically and what their behavior tells you.

This is not to say that behavioral targeting does not have a place or that contextual ad serving is not a viable and inevitably successful option. They should be used once you know certain things however. If you know that 7,000 people came to buy and 3,150 did, do you realize your real conversion rate is actually 55%! It is not the 1 – 3% that has been used by virtually everyone. This is what bugs me, think about these numbers logically. If you really had that kind of traffic and that few people buying from you in an offline world, you would be bankrupt from the floor cleaning bills. That many people walking through your store and 93% of them were not going to buy anyway? Why do you have a store? Why is it open 6 or 7 days a week? Store managers would lose their minds (and their jobs) if that were true. The online world is different and people can come to your site for a myriad of reasons. They could be comparing prices, they could be getting information, they could be finding out about stock levels in store, they could have stumbled upon it by accident, etc, etc, etc. There is a reason that 93,000 online visitors did not buy from you and it’s because they were never going to.

Understand why those that were planning on buying did not. Understand why those who bought from you did. Understand abandonment and you can use that information to in crease the conversion of those that were considering a purchase. Used together, customer experience management and behavioral targeting solutions can provide you with more than merely information and value. They can provide you with ideas, tools and strategies to get people to buy more from you and in turn, you will end up getting more people to buy from you as well. Use voice of the customer research and persuasion marketing to make sure that when I do my Christmas shopping I leave with all four items I planned to purchase (or maybe even a fifth!)

Chris

Why Not Ask Them

Guest Blogger: Chris Lamont, Account Executive, iPerceptions

I spent last week at Ad:Tech NY, going through a maze of exhibitors and listening to well-versed and experienced professionals from a variety of industries and a myriad of companies.

Having grown up on the agency side of things – helping to plan and develop nearly 500 online projects and then entering into the wonderful world of behavioral targeting and persuasion – I now find myself immersed in customer satisfaction. Funny how it took nearly ten years to come back around to thinking that the client is the one we should be focusing on.

As I walked, talked and listened, I continually asked myself the same question: Why not ask them? In the agency world, we used to say (more frequently than I will fully admit) that our clients were ‘too smart’ for their own good. What we meant was that our clients were too close to their own products, too close to their own services, they knew everything too intimately to be able to accurately and effectively know what their customer wanted. They spent much time trying to learn about them so that they could serve their needs. They spent resources trying to understand what was happening. They spent resources scouring data trying to extract meaning and relevancy to what they believed they already knew about their online customer. Interesting though – they never thought to actually ask. We tried to push them to do so. Primarily, we used technology and data to extract information based on our breadth of experience across sectors and business lines. On occasion we would ask: although, we didn’t have the fusion of technology and engagement opportunity that we have today.

Fast forward nearly 10 years and things have not changed much. The difference now is that we are using technology in an attempt to predict what visitors will want. Why not ask them? As I mentioned, there are a number of companies vying for stronghold on the ever-lucrative ad serving and affiliate market. What I refer to as the “this is what someone typed so show them this” technology. There are a number of companies charting a course for search supremacy: the “how many keywords can I fit in your headers” technology. There are still others looking at behavioral targeting and persuasion technologies. What I refer to as the “I know someone from your region who did something similar so this is what you want” type of technology. I was unable to find (although I tried) anyone who was going to actually ask the visitor.

Interestingly though, that is all the speakers wanted to talk about. You can go through the list of conference speakers and virtually everyone one of them (who is a client of these exhibitors I just referred to) was anxious to take it to the next level. They were all looking for a way to gauge customer satisfaction. They wanted someone to actually ask or at least give them the tools to do so. They want to engage their visitors.

Taken from these leaders, it is easy to then say we are in an enviable position at iPerceptions. We do ask. In fact, we have always asked. Users began cooperating years ago. Clients are continually realizing the value. They need to know we are here.

I stood on my chair and tried to shout, but the spinning wheel of chance (ie. what some companies use to identify a target audience) never stopped spinning.

From the trenches,
Chris

How do you do?

Guest Blogger: Fabiana Pereira, Project Analyst, iPerceptions

“How do you do?” was one of the first phrases I learned two decades ago, as a youth attending English classes back in Brazil. It probably came right before or after "Hello, my name is Fabiana. I'm a student." Little did I know that this last phrase would be so overwhelmingly useful, and I would use it repeatedly for the next twenty years to come.

“How do you do?” and “How are you doing?” are, however, very different kinds of questions. Early on I wondered what their usefulness really was. Why ask them in the first place, if we relentlessly get the same phrasing fired back? It intrigued me.

- How are you doing? - Question
- How are you doing? - Answer?

This made no sense to me and I pondered about it in those moments when hyperactive minds swirl around, philosophizing over any available abstraction. I noticed that in Brazilian Portuguese things were no more rational. In Brazil, people ask "Tudo bem?" – meaning "All's well?" and answer back the same "All's well," while trying to give the joyous affirmation the slight intonation of a question. In fact, it seemed even stranger, not only was the solicitation unconcerned with the sincere well being of the other, it actually demanded a positive response. Echoes of the military dictatorship? - I over-interpreted, amused.

Indeed, I now believe it is the cry of an ancient tradition, but not a military one: it is social protocol. In other words, automatically repeating How do you do? or even being more creative and personal and actually saying "Fine! You?" - just to hear, again, "Fine!" - is what we consider to be an example of good manners. Before the global movement towards urbanization and democracy, everyday people didn't make much use of what we now call good manners or refinement - which seems to have been initially developed as norms of proper behavior for the nobility in the royal court environment. However, urbanization and democracy brought the need of constant human interaction. While wanting to acknowledge each other's presence by asking how they are doing, not everyone necessarily wants to know the exact number of fellow citizens who had a terrible night of sleep, or even worse, why!

Unless you sell sleeping pills. And that's my point. When you are performing marketing research, especially in a democratized space such as the Internet - where you don't know exactly whom you are dealing with until you ask - you need to be polite. You need to greet with the most tact, and ask before engaging in any further interaction. Style is an asset in any form of communication, and the online environment is not an exception. This is why, instead of randomly jumping a pop up in front of the web visitor, iPerceptions developed a smooth two-stage invitation that at once makes visitors aware of their own web perception right in the beginning of their browsing, as well as making them increasingly more comfortable with the idea of giving their feedback in the end of the process. We got to a strategic combination of classy friendliness or, if you wish, shrewd democracy. This brings results, as shown by iPerceptions' superior rate of responses and survey completion.

The Reality of it All

Guest Blogger: Claudia Amato, Project Analyst, iPerceptions

These days it seems that every time I turn on the TV, there is another useless reality TV show that is cluttering the airwaves. Whether people watch to see which woman will get a rose from the handsome bachelor du jour, which has-been celebrity will take a wrong step in their Paso Doble this week, or what crazy thing Paris and Nicole will do next (okay so maybe I am the only one who still watches the reruns of this one), regardless, people have a true fascination with the pseudo-voyeurism that reality TV makes acceptable.

A few years ago, when reality TV had just started to rear its head into our TV sets; I thought that the craze would not last long. But here we are, years after the first shows hit the small screen, and a whole new breed of reality TV has emerged. I have no real issues with networks airing reality TV shows, people watching these shows, or even participating in them (as if this ever happens to “real people”).

My issues begin with the branding of these television shows. First and foremost they are not “reality” TV. Most of every show is contrived. The people, places and situations are often times so far fetched from true reality, that it’s difficult to say how they can label them this way in the first place. I mean, how often have you been asked to stay stranded on a deserted island for weeks at a time while facing off against rival tribes to win food, shelter, or immunity. The idea of this is simply ridiculous.

However, these shows have undisputed popularity. In fact, American Idol is the number one rated show in the United States, and around $705,000 for a 30-second commercial (Wikipedia). Therefore, there are some valuable lessons to learn from this. First we can see that TV viewers are hungry for content that reflects their lives even in some minute way. Think about it, nearly every reality TV show has very large culturally diverse cast. It would be nearly impossible for a viewer not to identify with even just one of the cast members. Casting directors are cautious to pick “representative samples” of the population to entice viewers to watch and identify with.

Now, how does all this relate with the business of web analytics? In much the same way as television viewers crave content that reflects them in some way, web site visitors demand content that is relevant to them. Think of the popularity of user-generated content sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, etc. Web analytics can help companies determine what is truly valuable about a users online experience, and then maximize on these elements.

This is why it is integral that companies today incorporate the voice of their customers into their websites. It will give them authenticity and allow website visitors to truly engage in the content and relate to the brand.

It's all about the customer

Guest Blogger: Eric Salpeter, Director Customer Experience, iPerceptions

When I was in graduate school, I used to shop at a pharmacy which had two rules painted on the front wall of the store.

Rule #1 – The customer is always right.
Rule #2 – If the customer is wrong, re-read rule #1.

Last year, I bought a sofa and loveseat from a major furniture store. I ordered the items in July and took possession in November. Unfortunately, over the last few months, one of the sofa cushions began to lose its shape, and a curvature began to form in the seat, causing anyone who sat in it to lean to the right. Naturally, I took the cushion to the store, expecting (yes, expecting) them to fix the cushion.

I walked into the store yesterday, found the salesperson who had sold me the items (and saw her face become ashen as I walked toward her with the cushion under my arm), and explained the situation. She smiled (and was clearly disappointed I wasn’t there to buy anything from her), and told me to go talk to customer service, who would take care of the problem.

I’m very familiar with customer service. In my role as Director of Customer Experience, one of my fundamental responsibilities is to service our clients. First and foremost, this means I manage our client relationships. With that in mind, I expect to be treated as professionally as I treat all our clients.

Unfortunately not everyone adheres to rule #1. I waited a few minutes for customer service to speak to me, and as I began explaining the issue (placing the sofa cushion on the counter), the service person looked at me like I was talking gibberish. Completely unable to help me, she went to someone else (to whom I repeated my story), who then went to what I can only assume to be the store manager.

The man approached me and asked “what is the problem?” Notice he did not ask “How can I help you?”, which is how we answer the phone at iPerceptions (always being customer-centric). Needless to say, he did not start off on the right foot with me; I repeated my situation (a fourth time), and he took my original invoice from me, looked at it, and said “you bought this in July. It’s not October.” At that point, I was getting angry, and said very nicely “I may have ordered it in July but I only took possession of it in November, which means I still have a few weeks left in my original warranty.”

Clearly, the store manager did not want to help me out, and explained that a technician needed to come over to look at the cushion in the context of the other cushions. I can only guess what happens next, as the manager did not explain it to me.

Clearly frustrated and very upset, I left the store and this blog began to take shape. It’s one thing for companies to be focused with increasing revenue and decreasing costs, but it’s something completely different if they lose focus on the people who will get them to where they want to go. Listening to the voice of the customer, whether online or in an offline setting, is vital to the success of any organization. Ignoring rule #1 will only result in increased costs as companies fight off strong competition to maintain their ever-shrinking market share.

Suffice to say, this particular company has lost me as a customer. There are a lot of other stores to choose from and a lot of other stores for me to spend my money. Perhaps if they had listened to the voice of the customer, they would have been able to help me, and service me in the way I wanted (and expected) to be serviced. Sadly it didn’t happen. Perhaps one day they will come to realize the customer is king, and it is the customer that drives the bottom line. One goes hand-in-hand with the other, but if you aren’t listening to the voice of your customers, your bottom line will be the least of your worries.

No second chance to make a first impression

Guest Blogger: Erin Polka, Project Analyst, iPerceptions

After 25 years of living in the comfort of my parents’ home, I decided to take the proverbial leap and move out on my own. Since I had little more than a mattress and television to my name, the first order of business was outfitting my new place. Sofa, kitchen table, chairs, bedroom set, desk, lamps – you name it – I needed it. Whereas 10, maybe even 5 years ago, my first stop would have been to visit the stores themselves, the first place I headed was the Internet. In this day and age, any brick-and-mortar store worth one’s time has an online presence and I counted on this as I began my search.

With the amount of sites I was visiting, it quickly became clear which companies had invested time, money and research into their websites. Without naming names, a certain Swedish company did a great job of presenting their products in a clean, well-organized manner. Navigating around the site was simple and straightforward, and the content was comprehensive. There was no need to hunt for pictures, prices or product information. All in all, a very satisfying experience.

Some of the other sites, however, would have received a failing grade from my perspective. I found everything from cluttered sites where the sheer volume of information they tried to pack into one page was overwhelming, to sites where there weren’t any prices listed – extremely frustrating for someone on a budget. Sometimes the pictures were so small that important details weren’t visible, and this was often compounded by a lack of product descriptions. Dead or broken links was a common problem and inevitably shortened my stay.

Without making a conscious decision to filter stores on the basis of their site, I realized that my online experience had a major impact on my perceptions of the store as well as whether or not I bothered to make the trip in real life. Occasionally a good product would trump a bad site, but even so, my impression of the company’s website would linger.

As an Analyst at iPerceptions, I’m not sure why this struck me as unusual. When I look at survey results, visitors’ site experience has a huge effect on perceptions of the store/brand and on visitors’ propensity to take the next steps – why would my experience be any different?

Whether or not there is truth to these site-store assumptions I’ve made is another story. The bottom line is that a good site is more likely to get me to the store and as a result, more likely to see me shell out any dough. So if you see my house chock full of Swedish brand names you can’t pronounce, don’t be too surprised.

Becoming a Listener

Guest Blogger: Fabiana Pereira, Project Analyst, iPerceptions

In doing some background research for an assignment I’m working on at iPerceptions, I had the pleasure and good fortune to come across Paul A. Samuelson’s article How I Became an Economist . This elegant, insightful and thoroughly enjoyable article describes Samuelson’s trajectory leading up to his1970 Nobel Prize in Economics. The author talks about the role of luck in life, and how in retrospect choosing to attend Harvard, after first envisioning it as “a little oasis on rolling green hills”, was a defining path for him. It reminded me of my first interview for graduate school in Brazil:

So, what do you like to read? – asked the respectable female jury member.
Anything written – I answered.
Your favorite authors?
Depends on the quote.
And… why this specific program?
Because your campus has.., hum…, thought-inspiring colonial trees.

I had decided to be myself and speak with one voice. If they accepted me, I reasoned, it was meant to be. Judging by the terrorized faces of two members of that jury, it may have been a regrettable move. However, a third jury member argued for me and I was accepted into the program. It was not only luck, but in hind sight a worthy instinct. “Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play,” advises Samuelson.

Looking back, I too found that my work was play studying in an environment that included lush rain forest trees and a unique gathering of students and professors who, after class met to drink fresh pressed fruit juice or aromatic plantation coffee and discussed at length, our insights stemming from our different areas of study.

During these discussions, it seemed our respective jargons served to legitimize each of us. Then progressively, I saw clearly that knowledge converges to the same bottom line: an actionable understanding of the world.

A good analogy for what we are doing at iPerceptions, integrating ever more precisely qualitative and quantitative market research to provide actionable decision support. In my previous post, I evoked Di Masi’ insight of the relationship between pleasant processes and quality deliverables. Very applicable to our work, as the delight of listening to the voice of the other, is also a way to refocus on what is important to ourselves and our organizations. It is magical when, after spending long hours analyzing numbers and verbatim feedback, we identify living persons, with recognizable feelings and reason. The customer is not far away. They are our fellows – and this is a rewarding relationship.

“Always, I have been overpaid to do what has been pure fun” Samuelson says, and we hear him!

People in a world of numbers and words

Guest Blogger: Fabiana Pereira, Project Analyst, iPerceptions

I have just started working as an Analyst at iPerceptions and look forward to becoming an active blogger. What is truly exciting about this company is its culture and lifestyle of embracing meaningful discussion and debate. Whether it’s about the latest marketing trends, newest analytical techniques or even new age philosophical questions, the team at iPerceptions is constantly challenging prevailing views and examining issues from many different perspectives. For example, Analyst Michael Whitehouse’s post, The fountain of youth, considers the importance of youth as a factor in better understanding research and the voice of the customer. I would add multiculturalism as another asset of our internal culture that adds to our research expertise. Team members come from across the globe and from varied cultures. One can discover the best Celtic music in the morning, learn Slavic expressions in the afternoon, get valuable travel tips and then dream about visiting South America while driving home.

Why is multiculturalism important? The idea of cultural context is important whenever analyzing human behavior. For instance, a discussion today centered on the relationship between numbers and words, two underpinning concepts of iPerceptions attitudinal analytics.

Let’s start with numbers. Ours come from inferential statistics, which is the art of discovering the dispositions of a wider group of people through the close analysis of a number of direct opinions. I stress the word ‘art’ because although numbers definitely evoke a mystique of truthfulness, they must be carefully mastered through cultural context. Only through a perceptual framework can numbers transform to decision support and efficiently guide business strategy. This is where the intrinsic symbiosis of words and numbers meet: concepts provide the logical background of any statistical analysis.

At iPerceptions, besides hardcore math, many of us have a strong background in the Humanities. We appreciate the nuances of literature, theater, music, and all arts that investigate human beings. It is striking to realize how people do become better professionals by reading a good book over the weekend. Consider Italian philosopher, Domenico de Masi’s ‘ozio creativo’, or ‘creative idleness’.

The edginess of ‘creative idleness’ lies in the combination of ‘art de vivre’ and business efficiency. It makes sense: to understand customers’ needs, marketing professionals need to refine their power to conceptualize, to grasp the complex network of visions, desires, and practical goals that form daily life. Numbers and words are most inseparable and cement together our complex society.

Phil Hood / Alex Lowy : A Fairy Tale - When Stealing Is The Business Model

Guest Blogger: Phil Hood / Alex Lowy, Transcend Strategy Group

Imagine for a minute that I open the world's biggest restaurant and I serve great food at prices so reasonable that people can't figure out how I do it.

But my secret is simple. I steal food. In fact, everything I serve in my restaurant is stolen, often by the diners themselves. They steal food from grocery stores and bring it to my restaurant where my chefs cook it up for them.

Now, if a grocery store complains that I'm cooking stolen food, I'm glad to return the food to them. But I don't go around looking for stolen food. It's not my job to police the customers who bring their own food to the restaurant.

Eventually, my restaurant gets so popular that it is bought by the world's richest restaurant chain. They make me a billionaire. This enrages the grocery stores who are victimized by my customers. So I start cutting deals with the grocery stores. Let me know that you've been robbed, and I'll crack down on anyone suspected of robbing you. But the grocery store also has to agree to sell their food at a significant discount for my customers. And, because I have so many customers, most of the grocery stores want to work with me.

But one of the bigger grocery stores refuses my offer. They feel they have better food than their competitors and they don't want to cut prices just because I say so. So, I encourage my customers to keep stealing from them. And an army of bloggers supports me, telling each other, free food is the new paradigm.

Alert readers will notice that I'm talking about You Tube (my restaurant), Google (the restaurant chain) and Viacom (the reluctant grocer). This recent dustup in the media biz as Viacom sues Google and YouTube reminds me once again of the core dilemma of the entertainment industry: it's Consumers versus Producers.

With consumer tools for creating media and distributing it freely proliferating the walls of the media industry continue to tumble. Movie and TV studios are right to fear the impact of Google on their business and the prospects that customer-created content will disintermediate their advertising (at least to a degree).

At the same time, Viacom's case against Google also seems valid. YouTube built a billion-dollar business networking people who were stealing from Viacom, among others. Now, Google wants Viacom to cut a deal for access to the YouTube users. According to Viacom, there is an implicit threat that the users will go on stealing if Viacom doesn't strike a deal.

What was seen as harmless pranking in the Napster days--stealing content--has now gone on too long. YouTube offers lots of wonderful diversions and content.It's an open global TV agora. But it's also a TV room in the frat house where kids watch clips stolen from Letterman and the Daily Show. Viacom is right that without copyright theft, YouTube would likely have been worth very little. In that sense, YouTube merely has been a vehicle for transferring the wealth of one billionaire (Sumner Redstone of Viacom) to the pockets of the billionaires of Google. Hardly seems fair.

Avinash Kaushik: The Importance of Customer Feedback

Guest Blogger: Avinash Kaushik, Author, Speaker, Independent Consultant & Analytics Evangelist.

The VP of a Fortune 100 company recently asked for some advice. They were heading into their peak selling season that would last only three months max, and they only had an ability to measure revenue from the website, nothing else. They did not have any web analytics tool.

Her question was: Which analytics tool do you recommend because we want to improve our website and increase sales?

My answer: Don’t implement a web analytics tool, implement a short website survey that would be hyper focused on hearing the customer voice, and three things specifically.

Surprised?

There were a number of factors behind my recommendation but one of the main ones was that if you want to move really really fast and you don’t know anything then it is better to ask the customer what you should do rather than implement a tool and try to figure it out based on clicks. You will get better insights, faster than you can imagine.

Web analytics is awesome (you do expect me to say that don’t you! : )), is has to be a critical part of your web strategy because it can yield great insights. But for the fastest way to understanding customer problems there is nothing like asking the customer herself / himself (and yes it will lead to improved revenues).

Consider this example, a simple illustration of a website that has only five pages and only six visitors:

Three of the visitors enter the site at the home page (Page 1) and the other three further down in the site (as they are often wont to in this world where Search Engines and SEO rules the roost). Then each Visitors clicks around to find what they want.

If you had this extremely simplistic customer experience illustrated in the Path Analysis report of your Analytics tool would you get any insight from it? Possibly not. Now imagine what would happen if your website had more than five pages.

A great way to get into your customer’s heads is to ask them and go from there.

The three magical questions mentioned above? Here they are: 1) Why are you here today? 2) Were you able to complete your task? 3) If not, why not? (Open ended text answer).

You can quickly imagine if the same six visitors had answered these questions? You would have gone from scratching your heads to taking action in a quick five minutes.

Qualitative analysis is the perfect spouse for Quantitative analysis, it is a perfectly symbiotic relationship and you can benefit from it.

If you want to learn more please sign up for the upcoming iPerceptions seminar on April 12 (click here to sign up). It is a great opportunity for you to learn about the power of qualitative analysis powered by surveys. You might decide to use iPerceptions or a different solution, but if you attend the seminar you’ll learn about the methodology and see the compelling value proposition that iPerceptions offers.

Please share your feedback and experiences via comments (or email me at blog at kaushik dot net). Thanks.

Jacques Warren: Freedom Fighters

Guest Blogger: Jacques Warren, Bell Business Solutions

At the risk of being cynical, I would say that marketing is the art and science of influencing someone into doing something in one’s favor. Marketers try a lot of things to get customers to respond (i.e. act) in an expected way, which is ultimately getting them to spend their money. A lot of analytical efforts go towards understanding exactly what people do, and how to influence consumers in this specific way.

I would suggest that behavioral analysis pretty much belongs to the above category. By observing what visitors do on websites, we try to re-organize content so that we will get more of our desired actions. We call this “increasing conversion” in interactive marketing language. Change, watch react, change again, watch new reaction. Don’t get me wrong; this is great and fascinating stuff. Not to mention the extra money it can generate!

But we must be careful. Too much of that could make us believe that, after all, customers will react the right way providing we find the right stimuli. If we could just find the right tone of the bell, they would… well you understand. In their latest book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, the Eisenberg brothers warn us about ending up seeing customers as canines with budgets. Through the brilliant use of personas, they introduce some psychological factors that determine how visitors will respond to content. Unlike Canine’s, humans are often complex when it comes to their research and buying decision patterns. However, the Eisenberg’s will forgive me; we are still here in a world of expected reactions to carefully planned stimuli.

Listening to the Voice of the Customer re-introduces free will into the marketing equation. We must leave our cynicism at the door and relearn that people, real ones, still have some freedom of choice in this consumerist world. True, a lot of effort and intelligence are spent at even influencing that, but we would make a grave mistake as marketers in believing we can do without it, and that it is irrelevant. If customers, people, can choose (and they can) we’d better listen to what they have to say about how we do things.

Adding attitudinal analysis to your current behavioral metrics will allow you to connect with that freedom, to respect it, and above all to learn from it. Yes, at the end, more people will act the way you want, which is a good thing. But you will remember it is because they chose to…

Jacques Warren: It’s neither a tail nor a trunk

Guest Blogger: Jacques Warren, Bell Business Solutions

If you understand French, you may have seen Bernard Werber’s latest film, “Nos amis, les Terriens (Our Friends, the Earthlings). The movie is shot as if it was a documentary made by aliens. It is quite funny, because their interpretations (the extra terrestrials) of our human behaviors are completely off the mark. After a while, the reason for so many (and funny) misinterpretations becomes clear; the aliens base their conclusions on what they see!! They just didn’t ask why we do what we do!

I would very much relate behavioral analysis (what most people typically call “Web Analytics”) to “watching” what people do on a Web site. It’s really informative, but at some point, one might start to draw conclusions that are far from being accurate. Unless you ask visitors, a lot can escape you, which means that decisions can be made, with expected results, on false assumptions.

You shouldn’t see attitudinal analysis as the latest trend. A lot of people were not talking about it before, because we all thought that watching was enough (except my pals at iPerceptions!). We should have done it together with behavioral analysis a long time ago. I stress “together”, here. I would even dare to say that, if you have a limited amount of money you can spend on analytics (and who doesn’t?), spend less on behavioral, so you still have enough to seriously conduct your attitudinal analysis.

I repeat: both are essential. Yes, reconciling them demands efforts and analysis acumen. But you wouldn’t describe an elephant based on what a trunk is, would you?

Jim Sterne: Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Guest Blogger: Jim Sterne, President, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara

I'm a web analytics guy. At least that's how I look to the outside world. I wrote a white paper in 2000 about the possibilities of web analytics. I wrote a book called Web Metrics in 2002. I am the producer of the Emetrics Summit, now in its fifth year, and I'm the founding president of the Web Analytics Association (WAA).

All that sort of pegs me as a man who knows all the ins and outs of tracking clickthroughs and pageviews all the way to revenues. But I am not in the same league as Mr. Web Analytics Demystified, Eric Peterson or the double handful of brilliant bloggers that grace his blogroll. Oh, I pay attention to them - close attention. But my expertise is not how to capture a specific bit or tune a page tag. I'm a strategy guy - and I care about customers.

"The customer is always right."
"It's the customer, stupid."
"The customer is king."

I take these truths to be self-evident. So, when I discovered that there was a new way to understand the customer - web analytics - I got all kinds of excited. That excitement boiled over into lots of activity, trying to get people to see the power of this new tool. But something got left behind. While we were so focused on optimizing the sale, we forgot to optimize the customer experience.

There was an interesting debate at one of the WAA board meetings. I was pretty sure that what webmasters really need is a way to understand whether their websites are working - for the customer. You can measure reach and frequency of attention. You can measure clicks and conversion. You can measure sales, revenue per sale and ROI, but if you really want to make a website work, you've got to do right by your customer.

But my fellow board members voted me down - and they were right to do so. The Web Analytics Association has enough on its plate dealing with web analytics. There's not enough bandwidth to take on usability, customer satisfaction, email marketing and - oh yes - the Voice of the Customer.

There are enough devils in the details to keep an entire department busy - and an entire industry association busy - when rolling out and maintaining a web analytics tool. But I see a slightly bigger picture. I see a suite of tools that work together and at the heart of them - the first tool in the kit - is that which captures the voice of the customer.

In my previous life, as a non-e-marketing consultant, I would tell Marketing VP's that it was not their job to know what their customers wanted - it was their job to ask their customers want they wanted. Because as soon as you think you know what they want, as soon as you stop asking them, they change. They go with the flow.

I believe this. It's in my bones. Sure, customers are not going to invent new, breakthrough stuff. They don't know they need an iPod until everybody else has one. But what about the 99.999% of the rest of it? They do know how they like to buy. They do know how they like to shop. They know how they like to compare products and how they like to return products.

Avinash Kaushik is one of the most insightful and intelligent web analysts I've ever met. On his excellent blog, Occams Razor Avinash said it best. "80% of the time you/we are wrong about what a customer wants / expects from our site experience."

Avinash describes his work at Intuit as dealing with website experience, behavior and outcomes. Outcomes are the goals the company sets - selling software. Behavior is all about the clicks. But, says Avinash, if he only had one of the three to work with, it would have to be the customers' direct feedback and customer satisfaction.

This is from his post Overview & Importance of Qualitative Metrics:

But, no matter what tool you use, the best that all this data will help you understand is What happened. It cannot, no matter how much you torture the data, tell you Why something happened. This is the reason qualitative data is so hyper important. It is the difference between 99% of the website analysis that happens that yields very little insights and the 1% that provides a window into the mind of a customer

Ask the customer for their opinion and they'll tell you where it hurts. They'll tell you why they can't find your own products on your own website. They'll tell you what one piece of information kept them from signing up for your newsletter.

When Avinash spoke at the last Emetrics Summit, he said if he can move the needle on customer satisfaction, that's the best gauge of all. Make them happy, and the money will follow. Simple. Brilliant.

Ask and ye shall receive.

That's why Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg's book Waiting For Your Cat to Bark sings to me. Focus your website experience on your customers. Don't figure out how to sell to people - figure out how they like to buy. Simple. Brilliant.

And then those web analytics tools will show you their ROI by telling you if you have fixed the problem and eased your customers' pain.

Lauren Freedman: The Transformation of the Customer

Guest Blogger: Lauren Freedman, President, the e-tailing group

Are merchants listening?

Don’t Kid yourself. The multi-channel customer is savvy and while they used to say buyer beware, the customer in many ways has turned the tables and merchants must pay attention. We recently participated in fielding a survey of 2500 consumers entitled “The Multi-Channel Shopping Transformation Study.” The most interesting aspect of the survey to me was the open-ended question that asked consumers to identify their best and worst multi-channel shopping experiences. The consumer’s passion and zeal for e-commerce indicates how important e-commerce is in their everyday lives. More importantly though is how they have learned the landscape, knowing where and how to find the deals, clip the coupons, strategically scouring the web. Their expectations for the customer experience are high, their demand for consistency among channels universal and their clamor for exceptional customer service a requirement not an option. When all goes well, the web as a channel is unbeatable, but exceptions and errors are not always resolved as they should be to maintain and upgrade current satisfaction levels.

The Customer Speaks

Merchants should be listening to the voice of the consumer, factoring in their words of wisdom and thinking about optimal yet profitable ways to evolve their cross-channel experience. When asked to speak about the best and worst of multi-channel shopping, I find that the words of the consumer offer the best lesson for exemplary cross-channel selling. Whether favorable or frustrating, they come direct from your customers and certainly they’re worth hearing out.

I LOVE THE WEB AND WHY

• “I feel like I get better deals and do not have to deal with pushy salespeople.”
• “I have used the Internet to comparison shop on everything from automobiles to televisions and then I use my knowledge to make an educated purchase at the store of my choice”
• “I love being able to check for store availability-no more running from store to store to check pricing and availability.”
• “I love shopping online-no waiting in line and customer service at the store is mostly
horrible.”
• “I mainly search online for product reviews and information-and then I go to the store to
buy it.”

IT’S ABOUT THE DEAL, STUPID

• “I was able to pit online pricing against the store’s pricing to get the best of both. I got the Internet price match and the convenience of getting the item right then.”
• I end up with choice: higher price + no shipping/handling fees + get it now or lower price + s/h + wait time from the SAME store. I have viewed things online before but didn’t purchase only because shipping was so expensive; other than that shopping online is very convenient and very easy.”
• “Browsed an online catalog, found item I wanted at a third of the price and ordered. Item came in just two days and also had a free unexpected gift enclosed and detailed instructions on how to make returns (which we didn’t do since it was just what we were looking for)”
• “I found several books at a bookstore, wrote down the titles; online I was able to buy 6 books for less than what 2 would have cost me at the mall.”
• “Being able to use a coupon code is great and free shipping is always a bonus.”

CROSS-CHANNEL CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

• “Get email about a great sale only to attempt to make the purchase and find out that they are out of stock the same day as sale.”
• “Ordered online from a mass merchant, returned to the store-they acted like it had never been done before, even the supervisor was confused and had to call their corporate office to figure it out…then it did not take long to get the situation straight.”
• “The salesperson assisted me ordering what I wanted online using a computer in the store-I was able to get the sale price and have the item sent to my home.”
• “I printed out the registry of a friend and went to the store to purchase something but found that the few things I wanted to get were not available at the store.”

Customers are Talking

Today’s customer understands how to manipulate multi-channel shopping to their advantage and as our survey reports online satisfaction rates are high at 87% versus the store channel’s rating of 72%. The convenience afforded by the Internet is well documented where surgical shoppers are typical (90% of those surveyed) and impulse shoppers still looking to be satisfied in the web’s browser-challenged world. The reality of the web is that it’s role as an influencer is growing as when asked, “how frequently do you shop in the following ways?,” 37% of those surveyed indicated that they browsed a website then bought in store, while 60% received a coupon then bought in store. The online newspaper circular sent 34% of folks to the store to make a purchase while the receipt of a catalog led to an online purchase for 36% of individuals and an in-store shopping trip just 25% of the time. This behavior alone indicates the influence of channels and tools for these shoppers where their intertwined natures suggests that merchants take an even more “holistic” approach to the channels, while still leveraging each for the opportunity that it truly affords.

Consumer expectations are high and savvy shoppers see the reality of the searching for deals online desiring free shipping wherever opportunities lie. The web today is used as a price checker, an inventory look up tool, a deal seeker, and a side by side channel comparison vehicle where all roads optimally lead to price and time-savings and ideally both. Products should be in stock and priced smart with channel consistency to meet the needs of these customers. Try to surprise and delight the shopper because it’s still shopping and experiences are remembered long after the price is forgotten.

ARE YOU LISTENING?