Contentsquare, the French unicorn specializing in online experience analysis solutions, announces its predictions and recommendations. In the actual context, caution is required, but the marketing departments, who face strategic choices with unprecedented challenges, can make customer experience a competitive advantage and differentiator for their business.
Crises are the new normal
The profound upheaval, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, was only a prelude. Between war in Ukraine, inflation and recession, energy crisis, climate change, crises do not follow one another, they accumulate. We have to deal with an increasingly unstable situation, where brands are unable to predict everything accurately. Fin 2021, many brands were unable to anticipate and counter the impact of economic and geopolitical crises on the supply chain, which slowed down many deliveries. But these periods of crisis offer opportunities to better meet customer expectations and priorities, especially for the most agile companies, who seize the emergence of new practices to evolve their value proposition. This means that when it comes to digital experience, those who will stand out are those who have invested, not only to change the visuals of their email campaigns, their homepage banner or app home screen, but indeed to change the routes and the contents themselves.
Brands must review their strategy
Brands must become more agile, more, at the same time, it will be common to see marketing budgets decrease. Yet ultimately, these budgets should still be transferred from acquisition to conversion and loyalty. Indeed, the KING (return on investment) of spending on conversion rate optimization is six to one (internal Contentsquare study). This means increased sales and margin versus investments in digital tools and conversion-enhancing teams (performance, content, UX, course, etc.) is six times higher than the expenditure. The conversion rate of returning users being 1,4 times higher than new customers, this investment allows us to refocus on a better ROI. An area in which France can do better, because it is still far behind the United Kingdom and the United States.
An imperative : create value
Being able to say that customer experience never dies is not guaranteed for 2023. Many CX programs are estimated to disappear, because too many professionals still do not know how to measure the benefits of customer experience on growth and savings made. Or, this creates a major opportunity for the rare companies that will actively take up the subject. These will be best suited to quickly resolve performance issues (especially the excessively high loading time), which harm the SEO of sites and increase the bounce rate. Without forgetting that, on sites loading in less than a second, visitors view 2,4 times more pages per session (source Contentsquare). All these strengths help limit customer frustration. Companies must be able to evolve their digital interfaces quickly, without having to mobilize a significant part of their technical capacity. This is what will allow them to get the most out of the traffic on their site.. In fine, the brands that drive their decisions through data will be those that best rationalize decision-making and will benefit from an advantage over their competitors in terms of efficiency, speed and quick wins.
An overhaul of the martech landscape
While the landscape, currently still fragmented, marketing technology solutions (martech) will consolidate, a large part of specialized solutions will be purchased by platforms and the costs of martech solutions will increase by 20% (Forrester Research*). The need to understand online behavior, and in particular what happens between clicks, increases and coincides with the growing requirement for security and confidentiality. Hence the growth potential of the tag allowing the analysis of behavioral data and its deployment across all digital interfaces (websites as mobile applications). With the professionalization of tools and professions, the analytics experience should not escape this massive consolidation. This new martech landscape will continue to give pride of place to security and confidentiality issues, cornerstones of the trust placed by consumers and users in brands, as well as performance. Platforms that succeed in strengthening these three areas of expertise and offering ultra-specific support to their clients will stand out the most..
Customer experience : competitive advantage
This trend is rapidly accelerating. The least efficient brands will remain confined to correcting basic display errors, of content, while the most advanced will create an experience integrating the dimensions of inclusive design, design thinking, mapping, route analysis and management, accelerators that enable innovation to achieve a higher level of customer experience quality. Small teams who will benefit from less budget allocated to their activity will nevertheless be able to capitalize on their mastery of these subjects., that they must develop to reduce the gap with the teams with the most resources. As customers increasingly demand experience and brands lack in-house skills, this gap will erode on its own. Pour Forrester Research, while 25% of more novice brands improve, moderately advanced brands will stay the course and 50% of the most advanced will stagnate or regress. If companies do not focus on innovating to create a differentiating experience, we will witness a homogenization, which will frustrate Internet and mobile users. Brands giving themselves the means to have a complete vision of the customer experience will therefore have an undeniable competitive advantage..
Equip yourself with the right tools and partners
If it is not new, to emphasize that the future of businesses relies on customer experience and data, investments favored by companies will make the difference more than ever. Choice of solutions, team training, budget allocation to UX and loyalty campaigns, business prioritization strategies can make or break brands, both the gap between the level of maturity and requirements of visitors on the one hand, and the customer experience offer proposed by companies on the other hand, risk of increasing. Equipping yourself with the right tools and partners has never been so strategic to minimize loss of time and budget, and devote every second to improving the conversion rate, prioritizing UX actions to be carried out and optimizing the use of resources. Brands adopting a strategy favoring ROI, loyalty, understanding the customer throughout their journey and an innovative and differentiating experience will have a head start over their competitors, who may not even survive this online experience war.
* Forrester Research : American consulting and market research company measuring the impact of technologies on economic activity.
