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Tools You Can Use From Peppers & Rogers Group TOPIC: Website Engagement Ten Tips for Making Websites Stickier ustomers typically have priorities when they visit a com- pany’s website. In some cases their intention is to evaluate product characteristics or to compare prices. Other times they’re interested in identifying store locations or company information. Regardless of their mission, customers all too frequently drop off before making a purchase or finding the information they origi- nally set out to find. The reasons online customers abandon are fairly consistent, says Lane Cochrane, Vice President, Insight, iPerceptions. “In some cases people are going to abandon no matter what, either because they’re not ready to move to the next logical task on a website or they haven’t finished conduct- ing product or pricing research,” Cochrane says. Other times, visitors abandon because of frustrations related to the website experience. These might include technical problems, such as if a website is having trouble processing an address that’s entered. The types of websites people visit and the reasons they visit also dramatically influence the causes for desertion, says Duff Anderson, Co-Founder and Vice President, Research, iPercep- tions. According to a Q2 2010 survey of 160,000-plus visitors to hospitality sites conducted by iPerceptions, 32% of visitors were on site intending to make reservations, however a third of this group abandoned their reservation. The top reason for abandon- ing their reservation was price. By comparison, a similar iPercep- tions study of 400,000-plus visitors to more than 200 retail and e-commerce sites revealed that 22% of visitors intended to buy, but 36% of this group were unsuccessful. The main obstacle ex- pressed by 39% of those who abandoned was that they couldn’t find the products they were looking for. What Can Be Fixed While there’s not much that companies can do to address personal motivations for website abandonment, other snags such as content and navigational issues, can be addressed, says Onder Oguzhan, a Partner at Peppers & Rogers Group. For instance, when websites are difficult to navigate, visitors can get “stuck” on a task thus preventing them from moving on to the next activity, prompting most of them to give up and leave, says Oguzhan. Another common roadblock is simply a lack of information. For example, when consumers visit a retail apparel website, they might want to know deep into the transaction whether a pair of shoes comes in half sizes. If they can’t find that information and it’s important enough to them, visitors will become discouraged and abandon their shopping carts, notes Cochrane. The key to keeping customers on your website and helping them to complete their tasks begins with understanding what caused them to abandon and then taking actionable steps to improve the customer experience. While it’s fairly easy for most companies to identify at which point during an online interaction a customer has abandoned, it’s historically been more challenging to determine why they’ve abandoned. “The reasons online customers abandon are fairly consistent.” Lane Cochrane, Vice President, Insight, iPerceptions C Understand the reasons customers abandon websites and develop effective responses to keep them engaged. ? Navigation The visitor is unable to find what they’re looking for due to a poor site design. Visitor comments regarding problems with the search function are a symptom of poor site layout or navigation capabilities. Technical Issues A frequent cause of site abandonment, many of these problems are common but difficult to detect without monitoring day-to-day visitor feedback. Typical glitches in- clude processing errors and an inability to load pages. Lack of Information Both transactional and non-transactional sites require ample information to achieve visitor satisfaction. Non-transactional sites typically rely on infor- mation to drive traffic to demand more money from advertisers while transactional sites re- quire it as means to sell products or services. Triggers for Online Customer Abandonment There are myriad reasons that online visitors abandon websites. Here are three of the most common issues that can be addressed:

Ten Tips to Make Websites Stickier

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Page 1: Ten Tips to Make Websites Stickier

Tools You Can UseFrom Peppers & Rogers Group

TopiC: Website Engagement

Ten Tips for Making Websites Stickier

ustomers typically have priorities when they visit a com-pany’s website. in some cases their intention is to evaluate

product characteristics or to compare prices. other times they’re interested in identifying store locations or company information.

Regardless of their mission, customers all too frequently drop off before making a purchase or finding the information they origi-nally set out to find.

The reasons online customers abandon are fairly consistent, says Lane Cochrane, Vice president, insight, iperceptions.

“in some cases people are going to abandon no matter what, either because they’re not ready to move to the next logical task on a website or they haven’t finished conduct-ing product or pricing research,” Cochrane says. other times, visitors abandon because of frustrations related to the website experience. These might include technical problems, such as if a website is having trouble processing an address that’s entered.

The types of websites people visit and the reasons they visit also dramatically influence the causes for desertion, says Duff Anderson, Co-Founder and Vice president, Research, ipercep-tions. According to a Q2 2010 survey of 160,000-plus visitors to hospitality sites conducted by iperceptions, 32% of visitors were on site intending to make reservations, however a third of this group abandoned their reservation. The top reason for abandon-ing their reservation was price. By comparison, a similar ipercep-tions study of 400,000-plus visitors to more than 200 retail and e-commerce sites revealed that 22% of visitors intended to buy,

but 36% of this group were unsuccessful. The main obstacle ex-pressed by 39% of those who abandoned was that they couldn’t find the products they were looking for.

What Can Be FixedWhile there’s not much that companies can do to address personal motivations for website abandonment, other snags such as content and navigational issues, can be addressed, says onder oguzhan,

a partner at peppers & Rogers Group. For instance, when websites are difficult to navigate, visitors can get “stuck” on a task thus preventing them from moving on to the next activity, prompting most of them to give up and leave, says oguzhan.

Another common roadblock is simply a lack of information. For example, when consumers visit a retail apparel website, they might want to know

deep into the transaction whether a pair of shoes comes in half sizes. if they can’t find that information and it’s important enough to them, visitors will become discouraged and abandon their shopping carts, notes Cochrane.

The key to keeping customers on your website and helping them to complete their tasks begins with understanding what caused them to abandon and then taking actionable steps to improve the customer experience. While it’s fairly easy for most companies to identify at which point during an online interaction a customer has abandoned, it’s historically been more challenging to determine why they’ve abandoned.

“ The reasons online customers abandon are fairly consistent.”

— Lane Cochrane, Vice President, Insight, iPerceptions

C

Understand the reasons customers abandon websites and develop effective responses to keep them engaged.

?

Navigation The visitor is unable to find what they’re looking for due to a poor site design. Visitor comments regarding problems with the search function are a symptom of poor site layout or navigation capabilities.

Technical Issues A frequent cause of site abandonment, many of these problems are common but difficult to detect without monitoring day-to-day visitor feedback. Typical glitches in-clude processing errors and an inability to load pages.

Lack of Information Both transactional and non-transactional sites require ample information to achieve visitor satisfaction. Non-transactional sites typically rely on infor-mation to drive traffic to demand more money from advertisers while transactional sites re-quire it as means to sell products or services.

Triggers for online Customer Abandonment

There are myriad reasons that online visitors abandon websites. Here are three of the most common issues that can be addressed:

Page 2: Ten Tips to Make Websites Stickier

Ten Ways to Keep Customers Glued to Your WebsiteDetermining how to make a website more engaging and satisfactory for customers begins with under-standing their motivations for visiting in the first place, says Anderson. This type of information can be gath-ered by conducting online surveys with customers and through other feedback mechanisms, such as Voice of

the Customer programs and focus groups. Behavioral information, like a high percentage of visitor drop-offs at the same point in a particular task, can also help de-cision-makers determine which functions or processes need to be examined.

Understanding when customers are switching from one channel to another and learning what the break points appear to be between channel interactions can also help to expose problem areas that need to be ad-dressed, explains Dietrich Chen, a Director at peppers & Rogers Group.

Companies can use analytics to gain a deeper un-derstanding of customer breakpoints by segmenting (high value customers, business versus leisure cus-tomers). By doing so, decision-makers can determine which areas of the customer experience are affecting a company’s most valuable customers and prioritize which actions to address first, asserts oguzhan.

Below is a compilation of recommendations from ip-erceptions and peppers & Rogers Group on the most effective ways to make websites stickier.

1. Identify and respond to online visitor needs when developing websites and online functionality. Find out what customers expect from their online experiences.

2. Make website navigation as simple as possible for all types of users. if your grandmother can surf it, any-one can.

3. Create an engaging experience. Consider the top websites you visit and how the mix of photos, graph-ics, and other content helps you to feel connected with that brand through your online experience. Con-sider adding a “Comments” feature that allows users to post their feedback and read what other custom-ers are saying.

4. Evaluate human behavioral patterns, including ways that people surf websites, how they tend to read from left to right, how their eyes gravitate to graphics posi-tioned in the top left-hand corner of the page, etc. Ex-amine the characteristics and tendencies of your target audience.

5. Solicit and act on visitor feedback. Give people an opportunity to rate your website and web services. if your company hosts an informational site, use surveys, social media feedback, referrals and other means to determine what information matters most to customers and how they want it presented.

6. Create personalized, responsive online experienc-es. Like any other channel, websites should treat each customer differently. This includes the ability for sites to identify visitors from previous transactions and provide the type of information and service they’ve sought from previous interactions.

7. Avoid drastic website changes. Radical changes made to a site will often confuse visitors and make them reluctant to return.

8. Infuse ongoing testing and continuous improve-ment. Customer behaviors continually change; so does the competitive landscape. Make sure all types of users feel confident using your site and web services, and en-sure your organization has rigorous processes in place to foster and apply continuous learning.

9. Promote social media connection points. Create a continuous loop for visitors to come to your site through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media associations.

10. Regularly refresh content/promotions. if your site appears stale, users won’t be motivated to return frequently. Make your home page current and edgy, but strike the right balance between updating content often and giving visitors a chance to absorb current materials.

“ Determining how to make a website more engaging and satisfactory begins with under-standing customer motivations.”

— Duff Anderson, Co-Founder and Vice President, Research, iPerceptions.

TopiC: Website Engagement

From Peppers & Rogers Group

From Peppers & Rogers Group

FROM PEPPERS & ROGERS GROUP

A Retail/E-Commerce Traffic Report

A look at the top reasons why consumers visit websites, their satisfaction with tasks evaluated, and the percentage of tasks completed

Source: iPerceptions “Q2 2010 Retail/E-Commerce Industry Report,” based on immediate post-experience feedback from more than 400,000 visitors to 200-plus retail and e-commerce sites between April 1 and June 30, 2010.

Percent Share Overall Satisfaction Task Completion

Q2 2010 Q1 2010 Q2 2010 Q1 2010 Q2 2010 Q1 2010

Learn 39% 49% 76 75 85% 85%

Buy 22% 20% 72 75 73% 61%

Shop 22% 14% 75 74 63% 74%

Support 4% 6% 69 70 69% 72%

Account 1% 1% 70 72 77% 77%

Speak <1% <1% 46 50 49% 57%

Other 11% 9% 68 66 61% 60%

75

75

74

70

Q1 2010

72

50

66

Q1 2010

85%

61%

74%

72%

77%

57%

60%

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Page 3: Ten Tips to Make Websites Stickier

When online visitors are actively engaged with a trans-actional website and they intend to purchase, it’s im-portant to make sure that their shopping and checkout experiences are made as simple as possible, Chen adds. “What separates e-tailers like eBay and Amazon is that they make it easy for people who return and repurchase,” he says. For instance, Amazon recogniz-es the preferences of its repeat customers, including products they’ve viewed. in addition, Amazon offers customers the option of adding items to a wish list if they’re not interested in including certain products in their shopping carts at a particular time.

Trust is also a critical component in conversion. To help gain customers’ trust during transaction stages, Cochrane recommends streamlining the checkout pro-cess: The more work that customers have to do on the back-end to complete a transaction, the more their

trust will erode. “You want to build a customer’s trust as they go through the stages of completing a transac-tion,” says Cochrane.

eBay has earned its customers’ trust, in part, based on the ratings system it has created and the confi-dence that customers place in it. Visitors to eBay may not know who they’re buying from, but they trust that a highly rated vendor will deliver the product they’ve bid on and purchased. Sites like eBay “do a great job in optimizing the value of customer trust,” Chen says.

Another key component to earning customers’ trust online is making it clear that a company’s website uses accepted security practices to protect customer infor-mation, including credit card and financial information. “Trust and privacy are very important concepts online because there’s no face-to-face interaction,” says oguzhan.

Boosting Conversion Rates

• An online travel site for a popular

U.S. city discovered that visitors

wanted more information about

events, so the site improved its

event calendar when it redesigned

the site, and the result was more

positive, open-ended feedback.

• A rewards site for a major hotel

chain discovered that visitors

wanted their points displayed

in a different way, and when the

site made this change, satisfac-

tion scores improved almost

immediately.

• An online hospitality points col-

lection site found that there were

a number of companies that they

had not partnered with yet that

their visitors were requesting, and

when they added these partners,

their traffic increased significantly.

The following are a few examples of iperceptions’ customers that have improved their website experiences by applying visitors’ feedback:

“ Trust and privacy are very important concepts online because there’s no face-to-face interaction.”— Onder Oguzhan,

Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

TopiC: Website Engagement

From Peppers & Rogers Group

From Peppers & Rogers Group

FROM PEPPERS & ROGERS GROUP

27%

25%

24%

Shipping and handling costs were too high

I was not ready to purchase the product

I wanted to compare prices on other sites

Product price was higher than I was willing to pay

Just wanted to save products in my cart for later consideration

Shipping and handling costs were too high 44%

I was not ready to purchase the product 41%

Applying Feedback to Improve the Online Experience

Source: Forrester Research

The Top 5 Causes of online Shopping Cart Abandonment

More than 7 out of every 10 customers who start to fill a shopping cart fail to complete the process.(See box on page 4 from a separate paypal study for other “Barriers to Checkout”.)

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Page 4: Ten Tips to Make Websites Stickier

once decision-makers know what online cus-tomers want from their website experiences, they can begin to use that information to re-spond to customers’ needs and preferences and prioritize improvements. This includes form-ing the right team and the proper roadmap for implementing enhancements and by repeatedly gathering and acting on customer feedback.

“it’s a circular approach where you identify problems, implement improvements, and con-tinually improve your processes,” says oguzhan of peppers & Rogers Group.

After companies have accumulated customer experiences and feedback to act on, it be-comes easier to identify signs that customers are about to leave. Having this type of knowl-edge enables decision-makers to proactively manage those issues before they arise, in part

through the use of predictive analytics.Another way to generate feedback on the

strengths and weaknesses of a website is to provide customers with a forum to post re-views and ratings. Supplying customers with opportunities to engage will help them to feel more connected with your organization’s brand and potentially strengthen their loyalty, says iperceptions’ Anderson. But don’t stop there: Share the results with visitors, he says. it’s a way of reinforcing to customers that you value their feedback.

“You want to provide people with a lot of information on a website, but you don’t want to make it overwhelming,” says iperceptions Cochrane. in the end, it comes down to sim-plicity and responding to what customers are asking for.

Barriers to Checkout

The following were listed as the top factors that prevented consumers from completing online purchases

• The shipping charges were more than i wanted to pay (35.1 percent)

• i wanted to look at other websites before i made a purchase (27.6 percent)

• i didn’t have the money to complete the transaction (22.4 percent)

• i wanted to look at offline stores before i made a purchase (17.3 percent)

• The payment option i wanted was not available (17.1 percent)

Source: PayPal survey of 753 U.S. and Canadian online shoppers who had abandoned online shopping cart transactions. See chart on page 3 from a Forrester Research study on the top causes of online shopping cart abandonment.

Getting Started: Know What Customers Want

peppers & Rogers Group is dedicated to helping its clients improve business performance by acquiring, retaining, and growing profitable customers. As products become commodities and globalization picks up speed, customers have become the scarcest resource in business. They hold the keys to higher profit today and stronger enterprise value tomorrow. peppers & Rogers Group helps clients achieve these goals by building the right relationships with the right customers over the right channels.

peppers & Rogers Group solves the business problems of our clients by delivering a superior 1to1 Strategy that removes the operational and organizational barriers that stand in the way of profitable customer relationships. Clients learn where to focus customer-facing resources to improve the perfor-mance of their marketing, sales, and service initiatives.

For more information, visit www.peppersandrogersgroup.com

iperceptions is a leading web-focused Voice of Customer analytics provider. its webValidator Con-tinuous Listening solution, 4Q Suite solution, Web Analytics Solution profiler (WASp) and proprietary iperceptions Satisfaction index (ipSi) turn millions of data points into easy-to-understand strategic and tactical decision support for website marketers. iperceptions’ clients include such well-known brands as interContinental Hotels, Mazda, Dell, Harvard Business Review, and Monster Worldwide.

For more information, please visit www.iperceptions.com.

TopiC: Website Engagement

From Peppers & Rogers Group

From Peppers & Rogers Group

FROM PEPPERS & ROGERS GROUP

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