“A lot of people are hitting a glass ceiling in trying to improve their conversion rates with A/B testing and web analytics,” FutureNow co-founder Bryan Eisenberg tells Internet Retailer. But conversion today takes a different formula than it did a few years ago, Eisenberg says; namely; “a lot more hard work and understanding and paying attention to your customer – not just to your business, but to what they care about.”
Eisenberg contrasts the efforts that had an impact on conversions in the past with what has an impact on conversion today. Then, “making the site more usable, making the colors jump out more, moving things around on the page – those things had a huge impact,” he says. But since 2003, he notes, there has been a shift in the way online customers respond. “A lot of the old direct marketing, or efforts at manipulation -- doesn’t work anymore,” he says. That’s in part because of the new interconnectedness of consumers and the rise of trends that reflect that, such as consumer-generated media.
“That broke up mass marketing and today we are dealing with marketing to a lot of little niches,” says Eisenberg. “The only way to do that is to understand who those niches are.” At FutureNow, that effort to understand takes the form of persuasion architecture, a methodology with software to support it. Persuasion architectures looks to direct the customer experience on a site based on what the site operators have learned about what motivates individual customers. Those different types of motivations are developed as personas, whose wants or needs on the site are factored into different clickstream paths designed for different personas.
“You could have two different visitors hitting the exact same page with each coming from a different angle of approach, and so that page means one thing to one person and another thing to the other person," Eisenberg says. “People don’t read pages, they experience a web site link to link. So you need to plan it that way, from the persona’s point of view, not your point of view.”
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