Metrics should quantify what you really need to know and Facebook comments or Instagram likes should not be you top priority. I will come straight to the point, stop lying to yourself.
I have seen a lot of ads in amazon, sometimes I click them if they are attractive enough. Yes, you made me click the ad.
This is what happens next,
- I reach the product page
- I go straight to the review section
- Read few reviews, mostly I start with the negative ones and then move to the positive ones, if any
- And 90% of the time I don’t buy that product, because 90% of the reviews were negative
So what is companies should do before running ads? What is real User Experience?
Fix your product quality before your run ads. You are simply wasting money here without getting your basics right. That is the cost of bad design, here the design of your product itself is not sorted. And by design I never mean aesthetics of it, design is how it works.
If you are counting your clicks and making reports saying we are getting clicks, you are just in your imaginary world. If you fail to convert that click into a paying customer you lost it already.
In website design pop ups can be beautifully designed and it was be badly designed. Again I am not just talking about the look of the pop up. Pop up design is really an art, with a bit of science.
Sean Bestor from Sumo shares eight bulletproof elements that increase or decrease your pop-up conversion rates.
- Pop-ups With More Context Have Higher Conversion Rates
- The Highest-Converting Pop-ups Don’t Appear Immediately
- Being Unclear With Your Headline And Offer Will Sink Your Conversion Rates
- Personality Creates Interest
- The Best Pop-ups Offer Something of Value
- Pop-ups Shouldn’t Appear Immediately After A Visitor Closes Out
- Calls To Action Need To Match The Offer
- Exit Pop-ups Need An Overwhelmingly Valuable Offer
So a website designer who have no clue about any of these can design you a beautifully done pop up. But if you are not doing it well the close button click metrics will be more than submit button click metrics.
Let’s admit it, pop ups are annoying, but statics shows that pop ups are not dead yet.
These days getting data of anything is the easiest part. Did analytics also became easy? No.
As data is easily available companies simply measure the wrong things. You follow the wrong metrics, finally you end up making poor decisions.
Measure metrics what you should, not metrics what you could.
Cost per impression or cost per action, which is better? What is the point of impression if nobody is clicking your ad? What is the point of clicking if you are not able to convert them?
Is average talk time is the best way to measure customer service? If so Zappos would have been just another e-commerce company.
Zappos got the market share just by providing the best customer service possible. Yes you read that write, very silly it sounds, but that one thing most firms preach, but fail to implement. Zappos made it very easy for people to call their customer care. The agents who picked the call had to script to read out from. They had no pressure to complete the call in the shortest period. They had no instructions to up-sell products. No stupid metrics to follow, they were just there to serve the people and they won the people and thus the market.
Zappos invested time, money, and resources in three key areas: customer service, company culture, and employee training and development. Results are evident. A call went with a customer went for 10 hours. Imagine our typical calls, they just want to get rid of us.
Bad customer service is costing you customers.
I hate when customer service agents read out a script without understanding what I am looking for. Few months back I got a call from my insurance company. I was going through some difficult time and from the report she knew what was I going through, still she didn’t give a fuck. She just read that script to me, zero fucks given, no empathy, zero. Given an option I will change the company right away. See the cost of bad design, bad customer care design. That one call might have costed them a customer and see today I am writing about it. The company is none other than Star Insurance.
What is user experience?
Imagine if she was trained to do that job. She could have made me a loyal customer forever. I would have told my great experience to at least ten people. That is the metrics companies should be targeting. Free word of mouth marketing is never going to die and that is the best marketing tool ever, your happy customers. That is end result of giving real user experience.
As far I know Amazon is doing a great job in that. I am a loyal customer of Amazon for the past 9 years, never even looked at a competitor for pricing comparison.
Metrics are only approximations of desired behavior and output.
They are often imperfect, and sometimes dangerous. Google analytics might be showing you good results, but if it is not backed up with real sales figures you are doing something wrong. Google search results are not perfect. There will be a lot of good content in the internet, but if the person who published that piece of content did not know SEO and related things his/her content will go buried into the 10 the page.
Too often, measurements of metrics emphasize activity that just doesn’t add value. Measuring sales performance can be especially tricky. Revenue per sales rep, a common metric, is easily inflated by marketing spending and price discounts, but just as problematic is the fact that not all revenue is of equal value. I became a customer of ICICI bank in 2011 through a sales representative with a simple savings account. Now I am using many products and services of ICICI. Did the sales representative get enough credit for her job, I doubt it. I became valuable to the bank in long term, that is something many firms fail to measure.
Some metrics are simply poor quality.
Businesses have moved from assessing customers’ satisfaction to assessing their willingness to recommend, as measured by the Net Promoter Score. I just promoted Zappos, Amazon and ICICI here, but not Star Insurance. If you are saying an insurance company sustain by making it easy for people, I would say you wait until the competitor cracks the market.
It is time companies realised what matters to their business and how best to measure that.
- Retailers should move from transaction-level economic assessment to assessing the lifetime value of a customer relationship
- Sales metrics should move from gross measures of selling effectiveness to appraising step-by-step conversion
- Website visitor analytic metrics should move from just clicks to understanding what they are doing while they are on the website.
- Social media metrics should move from clicks to real engagement.
