Mapping the customer journey more accurately using surveys
In today’s highly competitive market, where product quality is not sufficient to get ahead, customer service becomes a key part of a company’s strategy. Consequently, the organization which successfully maintains the best relationship with its customers manages the best returns in terms of income.
As a result, companies have placed a new focus on understanding their customers in order to better their service, product or image. One of the main tools they use is the customer journey map.
A customer journey map, usually represented in a graphic and visual manner, is an interpretation of the entire experience that an individual has with a company, product or brand over time.
Mapping Out the Journey
Mapping out the interactions and experiences a customer has with a certain brand or product is only half the work that a customer journey map involves. After identifying all of the stages, from the…
6 examples showing the power of parallax-based designs to engage and impress at the same time
Parallax scrolling is undoubtedly one of the most popular recent web design trends that first surfaced several years ago and is still common on certain types of site. Parallax gives a visual effect to add a feeling of depth to the visual presentation of content or projects.
Parallax is the effect that we can come around on a daily basis. Just pay attention to the way everything moves around while driving a car. The clouds in the sky appear to move at a slower pace than the houses and trees in the foreground. That is how the technique is achieved in the natural environment. Have you ever thought about this? Impressive, right? However, that's not the point of this article. Since all of us are involved in online marketing and web design, let's find out how to use the parallax scrolling effect…
How and Why We Have Updated the UX in Our Members' Area
With over 150,000 active Basic, Individual and Business members accessing our resources through our members' area when they are signed in, we take the user experience (UX) of this area extremely seriously.
Since we first launched the members' area in Smart Insights in November 2011 we have updated its look and feel several times through major changes to the features and tests to improve usability and conversion. The new UX, launched this week is one of the biggest changes in look-and-feel for two years. So, in this article, I wanted to detail what the changes are and why we made them. I won't explain how different types of resources can help businesses in different use-cases or scenarios, these are detailed in our Getting Started guide for members. Before I get to the 5 new features I'll also explain a little…
What is a content discovery network and why should digital marketers be using them?
It is not fair to make your users wait. The bottom line is that content marketers are at greater risk if they fail to reach their audience quickly since Google have confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a new way of amplifying the delivery of your content. It is a system that provides faster and safer internet experience. Believe me; it has all the potential to add value to your content marketing objectives.
Why use a CDN?
Content delivery is crucial to marketing success. After hours of time spent thinking on a theme for a good article, you should work on ways to deliver it quickly.
Globaldots indicates the loss in conversion rate as -7%, per one-second delay.
You cannot afford to have a slow loading page. This is where a CDN comes…
Have you thought of these 4 elements for your business website?
The internet has precipitated sweeping changes across cultures and redefined how we socialize, communicate, learn and most importantly, how we do business. With the number of people accessing the internet on a daily basis ever increasing, the need for any business to have an online presence has never been greater. If you are in the process of setting up a website for your business, there are several factors that you should mull over. Here are a few to get you started.
Domain Name
Choosing a domain name may seem straightforward but it can be more complicated than you realize. Millions of domain name have already been registered and there is every chance that the name of your choice name is on that list. If it’s taken, you may have to adjust it to avoid confusion and potential lawsuits. As you do this,…
Chart of the day: Usability testing budgets have increased in 2016 compared with 2015, in an early-2017 study by Usertesting.com
Budgets are either increasing or staying the same for most respondents, budgets are only decreasing for such a small amount of respondents. This shows businesses value usability testing and the benefits user experience research brings. For industries such as market research, who are seeing reductions in budget, it's a pleasure to see user research budgets increase.
Most respondents also indicated that a change in attitude or simply no change/ no reason was leading to the budget change.
The study also found that the majority of respondents have no fixed budget (40%) for usability testing.
Source: UserTesting.com
Sample: 2,238 professionals across a number of industries who are in some way involved in user research
Recommended resource: Digital Experience Mangement Toolkit
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How marketers can capitalise on new AI technology to deliver more effective chatbots
Chatbots are no longer the robotic, clunky machines from the days of old. If you remember bots like AOL Instant Messenger’s SmarterChild, for example, you might be interested to learn that advanced designs are allowing for the creation of more interactive conversational pathways — meaning these days, chatbot conversations look a lot like their fluid human counterparts.
What’s more, companies developing these technologies are increasingly able to iterate upon each chatbot, optimizing specific types of interaction within the messenger conversation. As a result, a new element of artificial intelligence technology is emerging, and it’s called natural language generation.
Generating ‘Natural Language’
NLG is simply the creation of human-like language by a machine representation system. These systems begin with the idea of figuring out what the communication goal is or what the user wants to know. What follows is an analysis of…
Live chat, video and product finders can help you massively boost your conversion rate
If you suddenly discovered you had superpowers, you’d use them, right? Of course you would! (and hopefully in a socially beneficial way). Well, I recently discovered a few user experience (UX) techniques that are proven to significantly lift E-commerce revenues, so I wanted to share these techniques so that you can starting use them yourself soon.
First I’ll describe the revenue ‘leverage factors’ each of these features provide. Then I’ll provide guidance on how to design and implement them for your eCommerce website.
The X factors, please
My recent analysis for a website that sells surveillance products found that the Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) - the top conversion metric for E-commerce websites - was amplified by the following factors:
By 3.9X when visitors used chat
By 1.7X when visitors viewed videos
By 2.2X when visitors used a product finder
In other…
Building Chatbots: Everything you need to know
Chatbots continue to receive a lot of hype in 2017, with companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many others investing heavily in the technology. Smart Insights have covered how Pizza Express have built a chatbot. This brief guide explores some of key things to consider when building and launching your first chatbot.
Understand your audience
Before you start building anything it is essential to fully understand who will be using your chatbot, and what you already know about them. Facebook Insights and other analytical tools may provide some useful information.
Personas are frequently used when building websites to address specific audience groups, and may also be helpful when creating chatbots.
Set the right tone
The conversational nature of chatbots makes getting your tone of voice right critical. Tone of voice will vary according to the nature of…
Use these live chat tools to engage your users at the most critical stage of the buying process
As customer expectations rise and users demand instant responses to questions & complaints, live chat tools are growing rapidly both in usage and in capability. 60% of those in the 18-34 'millennial' age bracket reported in a study for Forrester research that they preferred to have their questions answered via live chat than via phone. 44% of that age group also reported that having the ability to ask questions via live chat was one of the most important features a site could offer.
With the growing importance of live chat to the customer experience and thus your bottom line, you need to review what technology is available to deliver a great live chat experience, at a cost that is right for your business. That's why we've reviewed a wide range of live chat tools…
