More visitors or more customers?

While most businesses, may be facing a host of operational, logistical challenges; there is a key area that everybody is either consciously ignoring or not giving a serious thought to is about conversions.

The facts and trends today seem to be going in the wrong directions.

• Conversion rates of Digitally enabled marketing processes is less than 5 %
• Over 90% of visitors on a website are anonymous
• Focus on social and Mobile is not necessarily yielding conversions
• Customer acquisition costs are mostly on an increasing trend
• Customer loyalty through digital mediums is not even worth mentioning
• ROI’s on digital spends are not necessarily as positive as previous quarters

The above facts may point to a direction that the digital trends are bound to get broken or effect stagnation. Needless to say that most ecommerce and online marketing businesses are facing the profitability challenges.

While most of the digital marketing efforts today are focused at driving visitors to the site or carefully orchestrated inbound marketing efforts, which increases the traffic on the site, but every website today suffers from a congenial paralysis of what to do or how to lead a visitor or customer when they are to their site.

Radical thinking or technologies of engaging visitors – (Yes even though many might be anonymous) is an idea that not many are experimenting or involving themselves with currently.

One way to look at the problem is to flip the problem upside down, which would mean broadening the bottom end of the conversion funnel rather the top end   

Customer Centric Digital Marketing

In today’s new age economy, more and more businesses are driven by digital commerce, as traditional and new businesses are leveraging the web as a channel to sell their products & services. Most businesses, small or big, whether they like it or not, has witnessed the rise of the new digital consumer, especially the ones that have tried to harness technology and leverage on the power of digital consumer web or e commerce.

Online marketing still seems to be largely disconnected from the customer, in spite of the fact that social web, mobile web and other web apps have become an ever-bigger part of the online experience. However, many have not recognized its importance or are still trying to figure it out or just trying to avoid or bypass them altogether in the context of their short term priorities.

The Invisible Customer

The Invisible Customer

The invisible Customer on your website:

The conversion funnel has been the holy grail of many Digital marketers till date, wherein usually about 3- 7% of the total visitors to the site actually convert, leading to the question what happens to the remaining 90+ %?

The reasons for the drop outs attributed are either as bounces, dropouts, casual window shoppers, price checkers or just about anybody else who was never interested in your product. It is in somewhere in this 90+ % visitors that brings to light the concept of “invisible customers”.

What Online Customer Wants?

Online shopping is the only phenomenon that has bucked the trend of recession and weak economic outlook in many countries. This phenomenon might have started in late 90’s, after a few and brief anxious moments, its been on a roll; because nearly a trillion dollars were spent by online shoppers just last year; Surprisingly that’s just about 30% of the potential – wonder what’s more to come. E-commerce has no doubt evolved tremendously over the last decade or so; it has transcended through most of the product, services and commodities categories, so much so that today there are more choices available to user than a traditional super market or hyper market.
While it is clear that the basic fundamentals of product variety and brand experience stay at the heart of buying and selling online, But its the evolution of the new era of customer experience that has increased the online shoppers funnel from just $ 50 Mn to $1Tn Dollars in the last 10 years. Online shoppers have no doubt adapted themselves over the years, and while a lot of things might have changed in the e-commerce context, but a lot of things that remain unsaid in every customer experience survey and research. Being an online shopper myself, I would like to put the context of customer experience in three stages viz:

Making Sense of Online Marketing in Real Time

There are about 2.5 bn people online, less than one fifth of them shop online regularly but they account for nearly $1 Trillion of sales a year, that’s up by almost 21.9% compared to last year (2011). According to one estimate 70% of the retail sales are influenced online, and this is also applicable to people who don’t buy online. That’s a phenomenal raise, in spite of the weak economic outlook in many countries. US itself accounted for about $226 Bn of online sales followed by countries like china.

Needless to say consumers today are spending more time online. They are not just buying, but are also comparing prices and researching about products and brands. Marketers are not unaware of these facts, and are going all out to woo the customers. And while digital marketers, are trying to increase their effectiveness and reach with their data driven processes, techniques and tools; But many of them are still struggling and because they are unable to converting leads to sales or reduce the shopping cart abandons (Typical shopping cart abandons range from 65% to 80% –abandonment rate)