It can be easy to forget how dramatically our digital experiences have changed, even just in the past couple of decades. For example, if you're a millennial like me, you might remember using a search engine to find articles for your middle-school reports, only to be barraged with ads for products and services you didn't want or need.
These days, I have an entirely different experience. I see ads, posts and recommendations that are relevant to me, such as when my running app recommends a route for me, or when my favorite apparel brand shares "Looks You'll Love” when I hop onto its website.
But there's an important conversation happening right now about how these personalized moments are made possible. People want to know—and have a right to know—how their data is being used to fuel these tailored experiences. And tech companies and policy makers are responding to those questions by introducing new regulations about how data is collected and used by businesses.
From the businesses' point of view, customer data is crucial to delivering the personalized experiences that customers have come to expect. As a result of the changes to privacy rules and regulations there are changes to what data is available. This means that advertising platforms and marketers must be agile and innovative to continue creating meaningful connections and helping drive performance.
Taking control of the customer journey
As businesses begin to navigate this new world, it's even more critical to remember that connections with customers shouldn't stop after an ad is delivered. While you may have less control over some of the areas you look to optimize on the ad management side, there are areas that you do have control over that can dramatically help impact performance. That includes creating frictionless experiences on your mobile site.
Based on our learnings from working with advertisers, the following recommendations are more ways to incorporate this mindset and take control of your performance across the entire customer journey, from discovery to consideration and on to conversion:
Discovery: "Help find the right product for me"
Improving the customer experience can start right from the beginning, during the time when they're looking for the perfect product. Think about all of the web-based elements that a customer may encounter during this stage—including landing pages, category pages, ads and navigation menus—and consider how you can optimize them. With mobile commerce projected to comprise 53.9% of e-commerce in 2021,¹ it’s become clear that optimizing mobile page elements is vital to streamlining your customer experience.
Ensuring that your site is optimized for mobile includes creating an intuitive layout and visuals, reducing site load times to 3 seconds or less and maintaining continuity between your ads and your website. When design elements such as imagery, featured products, pricing, promotions and messaging don’t align, it can cause distraction or confusion that disrupts a potential conversion. Your landing page should feel like the next page in a storybook, with the cover being your ad.
By implementing mobile experience improvements like these, the eco-friendly home essentials retailer Grove Collaborative improved its site speed by 30% to 40% and reported a 56% lower bounce rate, 12% lower cost per page view and 5% lower cost per purchase.²
Consideration: "Make it easy for me to learn more"
To help your customers easily find what they're looking for, ensure that your landing page includes key product information and the benefits that are most popular or meaningful. This includes pricing information, color varieties, sizing details, technical benefits and more. Make it easy and intuitive for customers to search, filter for and compare the products they're looking for. For example, clothing retailers should include a number of filters relevant to a specific product type. If they’re selling dresses they might consider size, color, material, length, occasion and price.
The sock and apparel retailer Bombas reported a 3% increase in conversion rates on mobile by incorporating a sticky filter on its landing pages that allowed customers to quickly and easily narrow down the products that were most relevant to them.³
Conversion: “Make me feel confident in my decision”
If your customers have gone this far in the journey, you can be sure they’re interested in the product and are looking for you to usher them through checkout. To help reduce friction at this stage, have a prominently displayed guest checkout button and a simple sign-in option at the beginning of the checkout process. Include multiple payment options, and combine and reduce form fields, such as a customer’s first and last name, where possible.
According to the Baymard Institute, $260 billion in costs are recoverable through checkout optimizations alone.⁴ This is just one example of how frictionless experiences can help improve conversion rates.
Keep in mind that before implementing any changes, it’s important to identify opportunities for improvement on your website that are unique to your brand. Conduct tests and collect data on where your customers may be dropping off in your site experience. You can also gather a team of colleagues to walk through the customer journey on mobile and identify areas of friction. Try A/B testing the changes you implement so you know what works. The data from your tests will arm you with the information you need to make the best data-driven decision for your business.
Navigating a privacy-focused ads ecosystem will require marketers to change and adapt. But as the last three decades of digital transformation have shown, the digital marketing industry is no stranger to innovation. And with great challenge comes great opportunity. We believe marketers who are agile and innovative will be able to meet their customers’ expectations—not just through ads but through the entire experience—and balance performance, personalization and privacy in the new digital ecosystem.
Sources:
¹ "Mobile retail commerce sales as a percentage of retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2016-2021,” Statista, Nov. 2020.
² Case study, Grove Collaborative 2020.
³ Case study, Bombas 2020.
⁴ "Cart Abandonment Rates”, Baymard Institute, Dec. 2020.
