Here’s a true story: A couple of years ago I used to borrow DVDs from a local DVD machine, after borrowing about a dozen or so I got a phone call from the local Block-Buster store that owns the machine, they said they come me I’ve been borrowing a movie a week and was offered a 35 movie membership ticket that would save me 50%. Do you want to guess what happened next? Was he offended? Was he angry because someone saw what he was doing?
NO, I was quite happy and bought the membership card. Now that it’s a conversion, your offer was relevant, focused, and on time!
One of the main changes that the online channel has brought about is the change of pace. Everything is at our fingertips, we jump from one topic to another in an instant, from one website to another in a click: our ability to concentrate is reduced. Heck… I’ll probably be checking my email 14 times and surfing 2-3 sites as I write this article.
This short period of concentration and our fast pace of life require immediate responses: when we browse a site looking for information, services, products or whatever, we expect to be served immediately. If you (the site owner) have something special to tell me or sell me, something relevant to ME (based on my behavior or history), you better have it ready and serve yourself hot. I won’t be here in 2 minutes and I probably won’t remember what I wanted. You have to hit the iron while it’s still hot. By the way, this is what inbound marketing is all about: it’s what you do when the customer is at the door.
Today, companies usually have some historical data, user-specific or more general, that helps them decide what to offer the customer or how important it is to provide a VIP service. The big problem is: how to take advantage of this information in time?
How do you make efficient use of what you know about me and what I’m doing now? The best way to improve conversion rates is to understand what your customer wants. You can usually see that in the way he carries himself: Are you looking for a new product? Are you trying to find a specific service for the third time? (Obviously he’s in trouble) You’d better offer him the best low-price proposition before he gets tired of looking for it. Looking at cash-out estimates for your life insurance? Better offer him a quick loan.
The answer is in the reactions in real time. If you can react in real time to who I am + my history with your company + my current behavior, then you have a much better chance of selling me your product, improving the service I receive, etc.
If you take a moment and think about it, this idea of real-time reactions isn’t that innovative, we’re pretty used to it in the offline world. When you walk into a shoe store, the salesperson will detect your entry followed by your behavior in the store. He will react with the relevant offer when it is relevant (hopefully :-). If he sees that you’re interested in running shoes and targets the current New-Balance sale, he increases his chances of closing a deal. The “real” salesperson can also detect which customers are behaving most potentially and react to them. In this way you maximize your resources.
But our friend, the shoe salesman, usually doesn’t have the privilege of a database of high-potential customer histories or behavior patterns. Websites, however, can be connected to CRM and BI systems, so the potential is there. The question is, can they use this information in time? And can you correlate it with what the user is doing right now?
There are many applications that take care of the history of the clients and define what they should be offered and how they should be treated. Several BI and campaign management systems offer features such as Next Best Offer and Next Best Action. What they typically lack are two critical skills to leverage those skills in the online world: detecting that a customer is on our website to deliver the offer to them, and detecting their current pattern of behavior to see if that behavior aligns with what we knew /we think or maybe it shows that the offer should be different. what websites need are real-time, value-based reactions to online behavior.
Just think about yourself and your own customer experience: how often do you receive irrelevant offers via SMS, email or phone? How often do you receive relevant offers too late? And what impact does it have when you receive a relevant offer on time…