New York, NY—March 20, 2024— Retailers have a key opportunity as they face soaring costs on ecommerce’s most critical acquisition channels, Meta and Google, which have driven up costs per visit by 12.4%–above average by 3%-according to Contentsquare’s new 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report. The report highlights influential data and actionable insights retailers can take to meet their customers where they are. Although retailers are hit the hardest, they also have a massive opportunity when considering traffic and revenue trends, especially on mobile, which has become the leading source for ecommerce traffic globally (77%) and accounting for 56% of revenues. With investments in digital customer experience, data shows retailers can experience massive gains in customer retention, conversion, and loyalty.   

“Consumers are strongly voicing their preferences, but data shows brands still have room to meet their expectations. How does that translate to business impact? What brands are losing by not improving customer experience is material, and business leaders need to ask themselves how they can capitalize on understanding customer preferences in order to deliver value,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “The data demonstrates a missed opportunity for brands on mobile. It’s clear that they need to evolve the way they think about mobile and optimize the entire mobile journey, not simply the pages or formatting, so it’s imperative to create more seamless experiences.”

Key Data and Takeaways for Brands:

• Despite the growth in mobile traffic share, conversion rates fell 5.8% as shoppers tend to make shorter, micro-visits while using mobile devices, and spend 60% less time per session viewing fewer pages than on desktop.
• Easy-to-remedy frustrations, including slow page loads and poor visitor responses, reduced revenue by $0.56 per visit.
  • Retailers can combat frustration by combining audience insights with proactive monitoring to consistently deliver experiences that delight their customers.
• “Growth at all costs” is outdated.
  • Instead of focusing simply on driving traffic, retailers need to shift their focus to improving the overall customer experience in order to drive profitability.  
• Conversions are 77% higher on desktop than on mobile
• Retail traffic is increasingly dependent on paid, as opposed to organic, sources, with paid driving 42.6% of visits and nearly half (47.8%) of all new visits to ecommerce sites.
  • Instead of chasing higher traffic volume, retailers’ best acquisition strategy may be a retention strategy. Knowing what constitutes an engaging, satisfying experience which encourages customers to stay, convert, and return is key.
• Apps provide a unique opportunity for retailers and they provide a critical role in delivering the returning customer experience, attracting nearly 4X the share of returning visitors compared with mobile web, according to Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report.
  • Although apps are typically positioned as a means to foster strong relationships with existing customers, brands were able to expand the breadth of their audience using apps last year – new visitors accounted for 15% of all app visits, up from 10% the prior year.

Download the full report here. 

# # #

Methodology

The Retail Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights of digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, in order to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk.

To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case October 2022 through December 2023. Frustration analyses are calculated for October 2023. All year-over-year analyses are Q4 2023 / Q4 2022. All other analyses represent Q4 2023. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.

This edition of the Retail Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 25 billion sessions and 130 billion page views across 1,673 websites. 

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare delivers the power to make the digital world more human. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. The global leader in digital experience analytics, Contentsquare helps brands everywhere transform the way they do business, allowing them to take action at enterprise scale and build customer trust with security, privacy, and accessibility. More than 1,000 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights power the customer experience on over 1 million websites worldwide. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com

Media Contact:

Erica Ashner

Erica.Ashner@Contentsquare.com

The post Retail Sees Shift to Mobile Driving More than Half of Revenue and Nearly 80% of Traffic, According to New Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

New York, NY—February 14, 2024 —Digital ad spend is set to surpass $740 billion in 2024, yet website traffic, consumption and conversion were all down last year, according to the Contentsquare 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report. In fact, 55% of all sites saw lower traffic, 58% saw session consumption fall, and conversion decreased by 5.5% according to the report. Contentsquare, a global leader in digital experience analytics, also found that 40% of all online visits included avoidable friction, including technical website errors, slow page loads and rage clicks. 

“With a dip in global web traffic this year and the cost per visit rising almost 10%, making every visit count is business critical,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “We know from our previous consumer research that shoppers are leaving sites as a result of frustrations that could be easily resolved, such as slow page loads and rage clicks.”

While fixing frustration remains an utmost priority across industries, efforts to optimize mobile app performance are paying off, with apps recording steady customer engagement in 2023 (14 pages viewed per online visit up from 13.8 the previous year) and a conversion rate of 5.6% — 3x the conversion rate of mobile web traffic. Furthermore, app users spend 64% more time in-app than visitors spend on mobile sites.

Mobile, in particular, is the new competitive battlefield. We’ve seen gains in terms of engagement for apps this year, but mobile optimization as a whole is not as mature as it could be given the intelligence we have today on customer behaviors and preferences.

Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare

Contentsquare’s latest Benchmark Report further revealed:

Mobile Visits Are Micro-Visits 

Despite mobile driving 70% of website traffic in Q4 2023, browsing time on mobile web is 60% shorter than on desktop. These “micro-visits” contribute to a decline in conversion rates, highlighting the gap between consumer expectations and current mobile web optimization practices.

A Shift to Paid Sources, With Search Driving 4x Conversion of Paid Social

Paid sources drove one-third of all traffic to websites this year, and 36% of new visits. For mobile web, paid sources account for 40% of traffic — twice as much as for desktop. While overall traffic is down, paid social is one of the few channels that saw traffic growth in 2023. However, social traffic struggles to convert compared to paid search, which still drives 4x the conversion rate of paid social. The report indicated that visits from social are less intentional, with a 41% higher bounce rate than paid search. Visitors from social may have inadvertently tapped through to a website because of a compelling story or influencer without the intention embodied by visitors coming from paid search.

The High Cost of Frustration

Frustrating visitors is a surefire way to waste visits. Sites that are slow to load (those taking more than three seconds) and perform poorly in responding to visitor interactions combine to reduce the engagement by 15%.

Rage clicks (clicking at least three times in less than two seconds) continue to frustrate visitors, and were found in 5.5% of all online visits. 

To learn more, download the full Benchmark report here.

# # #

Methodology

This edition of the Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 43 billion sessions and 200 billion page views across 3,590 websites.

The 10 industries analyzed include: 

• Consumer Packaged goods
• Energy, Utilities, & Construction
• Financial Services
• Manufacturing
• Media
• Retail
• Services
• Software
• Travel & Hospitality
• Telecommunications

The Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights into digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk. 

To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case, October 2022 through December 2023. For current period analysis, the analysis period is Q4 2023. Additional hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare is a leading digital experience analytics platform that empowers businesses to understand and optimize the user experience across web, mobile, and app platforms. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. More than 1,300 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights are used to optimize the experience on over 1.3 million websites worldwide. Founded in Paris and with offices around the world, Contentsquare is backed by leading high quality investors, including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Bpifrance, Canaan, Eurazeo, Highland Europe, KKR, LionTree, Sixth Street and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com.

Media Contact:

Contentsquare

Erica Ashner

erica.ashner@contentsquare.com 

The post Nearly Sixty Percent of Brands See Drop in Online Traffic and Consumption in 2023, According to New Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

We sat down with Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare, to learn more about DEM, why it’s important for businesses and what makes Contentsquare’s CS Find & Fix different from other experience monitoring solutions.

A bit about Andrew

As VP of Product Success, Andrew is responsible for CS Find & Fix, a digital experience monitoring solution that enables business and technical teams to spot issues and slowdowns impacting their customer experience.

He’s been at Contentsquare for over five years, first heading up pre-sales for Northern Europe before moving over to product success.

What is digital experience monitoring?

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) combines behavioral and technical data to provide real-time insights into your visitor experience.

“Digital experience monitoring is all about mixing two data sets (behavioral data and technical data) to see how they correlate,” says Andrew. “For example, you could monitor a correlation between high bounce rate on a landing page and a technical metric like Google’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) value.”

Learn more about what LCP is and other Web Core Vitals in our blog.

Why is combining behavioral data with technical data important?

DEM is crucial for understanding your visitors and creating an experience that delights them. It helps you understand what’s impacting their experience negatively and why you are losing potential customers.

Andrew shares an example of how it can be used for making creative changes to a landing page. “If you’re only monitoring behavioral data like bounce rate and it goes up after a creative change, you might immediately believe the new creative doesn’t work and needs to be changed.”

However, technical data like website performance or errors might reveal the creative changes impacted the performance of that page. “The actual root cause of high bounce rates could be a high LCP score due to a heavy or oversized image which is slowing down the loading of the page. That’s why you need to have both data sets to fully understand what’s causing customer friction, ” explains Andrew.

What are the key benefits of digital experience monitoring?

According to Andrew, the main benefits of DEM are time and cost savings. By monitoring both the technical and behavioral aspects of the customer experience, you can allocate resources more efficiently and make the right decisions quickly.

“Without the supporting technical data, you’re missing a 360 view of what’s actually happening, making it impossible to understand why visitors are bouncing,” says Andrew. “You might start redesigning new assets, spending time and money on changes even though the high bounce rate was actually due to your site’s performance—not the creative.”

Who is digital experience monitoring for?

Digital experience monitoring helps unite different teams, which is key to democratizing data across organizations. “Anybody can use DEM. It provides a single data source that aligns business functions, creative and technical teams with the same insights and understanding,” says Andrew.

Andrew believes this alignment enables organizations to make more data-driven decisions while reducing internal disagreements. “There’s a human impact to DEM; having a more holistic view enables teams to align and reduces conflict.” says Andrew.

How does digital experience monitoring go beyond RUM?

Real user monitoring (RUM) tracks performance data on real site visitors. It’s a part of digital experience monitoring and conveys metrics, like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), for every visitor experience. “RUM allows us to look at averages based on what users experience on a site,” shares Andrew.

On the other hand, digital experience monitoring is the synthesis of both technical data and behavioral. “With DEM you might look at bounce rate versus page performance or repeated clicks and the correlation with JavaScript errors,” explains Andrew. “It’s the combination of those two data sets that adds value.”

“We’re the leaders in the digital experience analytics space—we’ve got extremely rich, granular behavioral data that we’re combining with technical data sets, like performance metrics and page errors.” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

How is Contentsquare’s digital experience monitoring capability different?

Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution incorporates behavioral and technical data straight out of the box with no upfront configuration required.

Users can seamlessly correlate behavioral metrics with Core Web Vital metrics that impact Google search performance, website errors and API failures on a page. “You could view performance metrics alongside your conversion rate and bounce rate metrics, for example,” says Andrew. “Our solution also allows you to set up automated alerts highlighting when an error is linked to an abnormal click, speeding up your time to resolution.”

Contentsquare’s solution conveys data in a visual, easy-to-understand way. “You can look at your performance metrics and Customer Journey Analysis to compare how people with good and bad performance behave,” explains Andrew.

“We’ve taken technical data that’s often a very complex subject, and combined that with visual data from Zone-Based Heatmaps and Customer Journey Analysis making it easy to digest. That’s what makes Find & Fix so unique” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

In addition to real user monitoring, Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution also uses synthetic monitoring. “Synthetic monitoring isn’t based on real user data but produces its own Lab data—it’s a bot,” explains Andrew. “It allows for better control of parameters such as specific device and network connection speed, which gives a solid baseline.”  As a result, it enables testing new experiences before even launching them to avoid performance blunders once they’re in production.

The challenge with only using real user data is user variability. “If a visitor on your page is starting to head down to the tube, their connection is going to get shaky, having a sudden negative impact on your performance metrics,” shares Andrew.

“RUM gives you a true picture of what’s happening in the field, but using synthetic monitoring gives you a solid baseline to check whether your changes have made an improvement or a degradation.” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

Find & Fix Product Demo

Watch our 6-minute product demo to learn how Contentsquare’s Find & Fix offer can help your business.

Take a tour

What’s next for Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution?

“Up next for us is to expand our capabilities for mobile app monitoring,” shares Andrew. “Our App Find & Fix solution combines behavioral data and technical data, like crash reporting with API errors and Impact Quantification.”

The post Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): What is it and why do you need it appeared first on Contentsquare.

My morning routine

My day kicks off with a good cup of Earl Grey tea and some healthy biscuits — it’s my secret recipe for starting the day on a positive note. Following this, I spend some time reading the latest Reddit posts, which are mainly about Android development and photography. Yes, I am a photographer in my free time, and I enjoy keeping my creativity active!

Arriving at work

My preferred mode of transportation? Well, these days, it’s from my kitchen to my home office, thanks to remote work. No crowded metros or traffic jams — just me, my laptop and a cozy workspace. I begin my day by checking my emails, reviewing the JIRA board to set daily goals and taking a look at GitHub for any ready pull requests. Next, it’s time to attend our quick standup to catch up on tasks, sync with the team and address any blockers.

My job responsibilities

The mission at hand is significant — it’s all about processing app frames in real time without affecting performances. Prioritising performance is crucial, given that Session Replay works in real-time and continuously processes a substantial amount of data in a limited timeframe. For this reason, optimizing battery and data consumption is also essential. Working on the Session Replay is challenging, but it’s the kind of challenge that keeps the neurons firing and never leaves you bored!

Collaboration and teamwork

Despite being fully remote, collaboration is at the heart of our team. We keep things streamlined with minimal meetings, except for our morning standup and a few scrum-related gatherings during the week. Due to the project’s complexity, constant communication is essential. Brainstorming and collaborating between teammates is where the real magic happens. Pair programming is the key to success for me: I believe two brains are better than one, especially when tackling complex tasks. PR reviews are crucial, too – they not only track changes and ensure code quality but also offer fresh perspectives, pushing me to up my coding game.

Lunch break

Lunchtime is a pause to recharge both body and mind. I prioritize cooking healthy meals, emphasizing the belief that a well-fed body equals a well-fueled brain. Contentsquare’s flexible work arrangements allow me to squeeze in a home workout or a stroll outside, breathing in some fresh air to keep my mind active. As a firm believer in the importance of a healthy work-life balance, these habits set the right tone for a productive afternoon.

Afternoon activities

Post-lunch, it’s back to the grind! The afternoon involves diving into support tickets, fixing bugs and making improvements. If there are no support tickets, it’s time for feature implementation. Continuous improvement is key, and the challenges we face in optimizing performance, battery and data consumption keep things exciting.

End of the day

As the day winds down, I take another stroll, stopping by a local grocery store before heading back home. Evenings are reserved for cooking a delicious dinner, reading IT books, exploring new technologies and catching up with family and friends.

The key to keeping a healthy equilibrium

Contentsquare’s culture is unique. The company values work-life balance, allowing for self-organization. A manageable workload, coupled with an environment that encourages personal growth, makes Contentsquare an ideal workplace. Also, working on the SDK keeps me on my toes, expanding my software engineering knowledge through dedicated learning time and attendance at Android-related conferences. The key to my productivity is the remarkable work-life balance promoted by Contentsquare. Organizing my day, taking breaks and having the freedom to step away when needed contribute to a healthy mental state. This balance is crucial, especially when working on challenging projects like the Session Replay.

That wraps up a day in my life as an Android Software Engineer at Contentsquare. The challenges of the Session Replay team keep me engaged, and the supportive team spirit ensures that each day is both fulfilling and enjoyable. If you are looking for a workplace that values growth, collaboration and work-life balance, Contentsquare might just be your ideal destination.

The post Day in the Life: Riccardo Porcu, Android Software Engineer at Contentsquare appeared first on Contentsquare.

The right metrics help you find improvement opportunities and create a standout digital customer experience. They’re also essential to measure the impact of individual product features and help with product performance analysis. 

But wait, which product metrics matter most? And how can digital teams use these metrics to encourage user engagement and drive business growth? 

We’ll go over five essential product analytics metrics to track and why engaging digital experiences are built on analytics that go beyond metrics. 

1. Daily Active Users (DAUs)

DAUs measure the number of unique users interacting with your product (i.e., performing an action or accessing your app‌.) This user engagement metric clearly shows how many customers actively use your product. 

To calculate DAUs, count the number of unique users who interact with your product‌. Use web analytics tools like Google Analytics, product analytics platforms like Heap and digital experience analytics platforms like Contentsquare to track this metric. 

2. Monthly Active Users (MAUs)

If DAUs measure daily interactions, MAUs give you insights into user engagement in the last 30 days. It’s the perfect metric to measure how your product keeps users over time and how regularly they come back to use it. 

Calculate MAUs by counting the unique users interacting with your product in a month. Similarly, platforms like Google Analytics, Heap and Contentsquare can help track MAUs. 

3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

How much are you spending to bring new users to your product? 

That’s what CAC helps answer – a chief concern of anyone reviewing budgets, product strategy or the efficiency of your sales and marketing funnel. 

Calculate CAC by adding up the sales and marketing costs associated with attracting new leads and customer acquisition. Divide this number by the number of new customers gained in that period.

4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

As per the name, CLV describes how much a customer spends during their relationship with your business.

You’ll know how much you can afford to spend to gain a new customer. More importantly, you’ll know how valuable your product is to customers. 

CLV formula: Average customer revenue/month  average customer lifetime in month 

5. Customer Churn Rate (CCR)

How do you fix a leaky bucket? 

You can either pour more water to make up for the lost water, or fix the hole. 

In product analytics, customer churn rate measures how much water you’re ‘leaking’ – or the percentage of customers who stop using your product. High churn rates show user dissatisfaction or low engagement –  something you want to address as soon as possible. 

Calculate the monthly churn rate by dividing the number of customers you lost over the month by the number of customers you had at the beginning. Multiply the result by 100.

How to use product analytics metrics to improve product engagement 

Making decisions based on assumptions isn’t proactive or efficient. Thankfully, having the right data on hand can help you avoid this sticky situation. 

We’ve outlined two situations where referring to product metrics can help you make intentional decisions to improve your product and grow your business.

Situation 1: A high DAU but a low MAU. 

This situation suggests users are using your product frequently but irregularly. 

You could try to improve this by adding new features or content to your product that addresses your customer’s needs, or by identifying user friction in your digital customer journey to make it easier for users to return regularly.

Situation 2: A high CAC but a low CLV 

When your metrics trend in this direction, it suggests you’re spending too much money to acquire new customers.

It’s not an ideal situation to be in. 

But don’t fret, there’s a way out. 

To reduce CAC, focus on more efficient marketing and sales channels, or improve customer retention by investing time to understand their digital needs and expectations. 

Track your product analytics metrics with Contentsquare 

Contentsquare is a digital experience analytics platform that helps you track and analyze user behavior across all of your digital channels, including your website, mobile app, and email.

With Contentsquare, you can track all the critical product analytics metrics along with other metrics to get a full picture of your customer journey from acquisition to conversion to retention.

Contentsquare tracks behavioral metrics like: 

• Session length
• Page views
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Product feature usage

Any of these burning questions seem familiar to you? 

• What features are users using the most?
• Where are users getting stuck or dropping off?
• What are users searching for?

Contentsquare’s insights help you answer these questions, and more. 

In a world where customer acquisition costs are on the rise and competition is fierce, you’ll need ready answers to these questions. 

By monitoring these product analytics metrics, product teams can understand how they’re meeting customer needs and identify opportunities for improvement. 

The result? With the right insights, you’ll know how to retain existing customers, build lasting relationships and give them more value – a win-win for your customers and business bottom line.

Take a product tour

Get to grips with Contentsquare fundamentals with this 6 minute product tour.

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The post How to use product analytics to increase customer engagement appeared first on Contentsquare.

88% of consumers say a company’s customer experience is as important as its products or services (Salesforce). With businesses competing on experience, it’s those that embrace emerging innovations and digital marketing trends that will stay ahead of their competitors in 2024. We asked leading brands such as Nasdaq, Snowflake and American Express to share their predictions on what digital trends they think will dominate the landscape next year…

From generative AI to community commerce, here are their predictions for next year…

2024 Digital CX Trends

Discover ten trends and what you can do to prepare your business for 2024—and beyond.

Get my copy!

1. Generative AI will be everyone’s best friend

“I don’t think Gen AI is going anywhere. I think we’re going to get smarter about how we’re going to use it, how we adopt it across all levels, what prompts to ask it, and how to think about what the follow-ons from those are. Generative AI is all the rage—it’s going to be everyone’s best friend, but only if we figure out how to use it.”

– Sehr Thadhani, Chief Digital Officer at Nasdaq

2. Brands will focus on hyper-personalization

“Hyper-personalization is going to be the big trend for brands. It’s all about delivering the right content at the right time to the right people, which has always been the challenge in marketing—it’s always about relevance and timing. Before the days of data, personalization wasn’t possible. But now, we have more data than we’ve ever had before. We also have tools like Contentsquare that will help us with personalization.”

– Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake

3. It’s all about mapping out the full digital experience

“Long gone are the days where you’re just trying to figure out what happened on a page. It’s now all about user pathways (which can jump from one experience to another across different devices), mapping out the full digital experience and connecting it with your offline experiences. We can talk about AI and many other tools, but you have to get the basics right. Do you have the right data quality to have all the right processes in place? And do you have a culture of experimentation to fuel the innovation on the right experiences for your customers?

– Ayuna Tckachenko, VP of Digital Analytics and Experimentation at American Express

4. Social commerce will move towards community commerce

“The future of CX is social commerce. But I don’t mean seeing something great on Instagram and clicking the link to buy it. It’ll be more about bringing your friends into purchase decisions and planning things in groups. Our customers travel together, so we’re looking at how we can bring them together in a space where they can talk and connect. And also, how we can actually engage with that group from a brand perspective, either through a digital experience or with a live human being.”

– Kellay Buckelew, VP of Digital Experience at Norwegian Cruise Line

5. Prioritizing data protection will be key

“In the realm of digitalization, 2024 will see a shift towards hyper-personalization, with AI-driven algorithms tailoring user experiences at an unprecedented level of granularity, while also prioritizing user consent and data protection in compliance with evolving privacy regulations.”

– Veronika Morozová, CRO Manager at IU International University of Applied Sciences

2024 Digital CX Trends

Discover ten trends and what you can do to prepare your business for 2024—and beyond.

Get my copy!

6. Understanding mobile app behavior

“We’ve been saying mobile-first for quite some time now, but it’s important to understand what your app is actually used for and why your customers are using your app mobile versus desktop, especially in a hybrid world. And then you should build for that in mind because it might not be a one-size-fits-all solution and your customers might be using your app for different aspects.”

– Alexandra London, Head of Digital at Zoom

Get more insights into the latest trends in digital marketing and CX

Download our What’s Next in CX? 2024 Digital Customer Experience Trends Report to dive into ten digital customer experience trends set to dominate the landscape next year, as identified by a survey of 2700+ business professionals in marketing, UX and product roles from retail, B2B, financial services, telco and many more.

Get the report to find out:

• Which digital trends digital professionals think will matter most
• How digital professionals think about these trends (and how to adapt to them)
• What you can do to prepare your business for 2024—and beyond

Plus, find out how our digital experience analytics platform is already putting these future trends into practice to help brands increase customer happiness and drive growth.

Solutions for Digital Marketing Teams

The post 6 trends in digital marketing to look out for in 2024 appeared first on Contentsquare.

Can you tell us about your journey to Contentsquare and your role here?

I graduated from the University of Liverpool in 2017, not really knowing where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do, so I did some traveling abroad. I landed my first job in Australia as a Coordinator. From there, I worked in this function, but I always had this itch to work in-house, to fully understand the business I recruited for, and to feel fulfilled by bringing people into a company that was exciting to work for. 

In early 2022, Contentsquare reached out to me. I was super excited about it, and it’s been a great place to be. We have the resources, structure, and established teams to do our work, but we still have that startup mentality – things move fast, and you have a lot of autonomy in your role. It’s not so structured that you can’t make an impact.

In my role, I partner with different business units, including Sales Development. It’s a constant learning experience. I tackle new challenges with every role I recruit for, and I do my best to provide the best candidate experience to each person I engage with about opportunities here. A career switch is a big deal, so I do my best to partner with them and be honest and open in communications. Once I hire someone, it’s exciting to interact with them at work. 

Could you give us an overview of Contentsquare’s Sales Development team, its importance within the company, and what they do on a daily basis?

The Sales Development team plays an integral part of our pipeline generation for potential Contentsquare clients. I work closely with our EMEA Sales Development team. Within EMEA, we have different teams in Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, London, and Madrid. Each team is dedicated to different markets in the region. These teams are crucial in shaping our business and determining our growth strategies. Each region has its unique approach to market evangelism. For instance, we have strong brand recognition in France, whereas newer markets require more extensive evangelism efforts.

The day-to-day of an SDR includes lead generation by prospecting – making outbound calls, and building email campaigns. They are researching enterprise prospects in their market and building targeted strategies to engage with CSuites. They qualify these leads and work closely with their Account Executive to set up meetings or demos. Sales Development requires patience, persistence, and a desire to go beyond and be better. They may also take additional training or focus on self-improvement on product knowledge and sales skills. 

In your opinion, why is Contentsquare’s Sales Development Program a great place to kick off a career in tech sales?

If you’re eyeing a career in tech sales, you can’t go wrong at Contentsquare. In addition to being in the B2B enterprise space as a market leader, the sales team has a strong training program, and Contentsquare as a whole prioritizes growth and development. 

Our sales team receives a strong foundation of the DXA industry, client profiles, our product, and SaaS sales in general. We have a dedicated Sales Enablement team to ensure that our new SDRs receive comprehensive onboarding and all the tools and tactics for success in their first three months, and following onboarding, they continue to support the ongoing development of our teams. In addition to formal training, SDRs also collaborate closely with their Account Executives weekly, which not only helps with day-to-day tasks but also provides an invaluable opportunity to learn from some of the best professionals in the DXA space.

In terms of growth and development, as long as you’re dedicated to your work, proactive in your role, and committed to learning, you’ll find opportunities to advance. While the traditional path from SDR leads to becoming Account Executives, all employees engage in professional development discussions alongside their quarterly performance reviews. As a result, we’ve witnessed SDRs transition to various other areas of our business, including Customer Success, Sales Enablement, SDR Management, and more.

What makes an ideal candidate for the Sales Development team at Contentsquare? 

This can change from region to region, but the focus is massively on soft skills. As long as you give your all, you want to learn, are proactive, and take on everything you can, they aren’t opposed to those without sales experience.

In terms of soft skills, curiosity takes the lead– SDRs do a lot of talking in the role but also need to have a genuine thirst for knowledge. In their day-to-day, they ask probing questions, actively listen to responses, grasp pain points, and respond. Additionally, it involves having a deep-seated curiosity to grow your skills and a genuine desire to learn and be the best. 

We also want to see a determination for a career in sales. Resilience is key, both during the interview process and when you’re in the role itself. Being an SDR offers great satisfaction but also can have its challenges, and those who understand these and are realistic about what to expect tend to excel. 

We also seek individuals who are driven by targets whilst also thriving in a team environment. The Sales Development team fosters an environment of open communication and transparency, and they lean on each other, so collaboration is crucial in this role with a preference for a healthy sense of competition. Not necessarily competition with your team members, but a competition with oneself to continuously improve – one that encourages personal excellence but doesn’t involve sacrificing the needs of the team.

Lastly, a desire to genuinely understand our mission and our values at Contentsquare. When you’re interviewing here, we want to see what you’ve done to research us, what you’ve found, and how that relates to your personal motivations or aspirations for a company. We want to have an understanding of what makes us unique to you, how you resonate with Contentsquare’s vision, and why we’re a preferred choice. 

If you show these during the interview process, you will stand out. 

If someone were to apply, do you have any resume or application tips? 

As a recruiter, we often have to fill multiple roles at a time, which means we have roughly hundreds of resumes to look through each week. 

If you’re applying to the role, always answer the application questions in detail, and make sure we can get the most out of your resume in the least amount of time. Here are some tips:

• Write your role type (intern, full-time employee, contractor, etc.)
• Write a blurb about what industry you were in and what your previous companies did. 
• If you don’t have experience in sales, write a paragraph about why you’re looking to break into this field
• Highlight any achievements that show that you challenge yourself and/or are research-driven, such as sports, clubs, projects, etc. 

As an aspiring SDR, you may also reach out to recruiters via LinkedIn. This can be a great way to make yourself stand out, but it’s important to focus on your messaging and note that every recruiter has different preferences. In my opinion, when you do reach out, simply let us know that you have applied and express your interest in the role. We will review your application and get back to you as soon as possible. 

Could you provide insight into the interview process and tips for success? 

The interview process varies from region to region and team to team, however, there will always be a phone screen, a manager interview, a team interview, and a possible assignment presentation or role-play pitch within one of those steps.  Your recruiter, if not myself, will always communicate the steps with you at the beginning of the process. 

In terms of preparation for the interview, I always send a prep email to candidates, letting them know what to expect during the interview and tips for success. If you have not received this from your recruiter, don’t hesitate to ask them, and they will share it with you. It’s also important to have an elevator pitch for phone screens and interviews. Be sure to be clear and concise and communicate with impact. It’s important to avoid sounding too rehearsed and instead focus on building a relationship through two-way conversation. In order to effectively communicate, understanding social cues and active listening is also essential. 

Lastly, following each stage of the interview process, you’ll get feedback – positive and/or constructive. Show resilience and determination for your career and breaking into the role, and don’t hesitate to reapply in the future.

Do you have any final words for those considering a Sales Development role at Contentsquare? 

Contentsquare’s Sales Development team offers an exciting and supportive environment for those looking to start a career in tech sales. With Rebecca’s valuable insights and advice, aspiring SDRs have a clear roadmap to success within this dynamic and growing company. If you’re considering a career in tech sales, Contentsquare is certainly a place where your aspirations can take flight.

______________

Do you want to join Contentsquare in a global, values-driven, dynamic, and collaborative work environment? To view our careers site, please visit Contentsquare Careers.

We pride ourselves on our mission to make the digital world more human, and the experience we give our candidates and employees is just the same – a more human experience.

The post Navigating Your Sales Development Career Search: Tips from a Contentsquare Recruiter appeared first on Contentsquare.

Here’s a slightly concerning stat for you: Bounce rates rose to 49% in 2022., compared to 47% in 2021.

This might sound like an insignificant increase, but it actually means there are 4% fewer visitors progressing forward towards a possible conversion.

That’s far from ideal.

With nearly half of all traffic consisting of one-and-done visits, understanding your users’ needs and optimizing their experiences with your brand is pretty important.

But how can you create a truly holistic view of your customer experience and ensure their journey from A to B (via C, D, E and F, etc.) is seamless?

The answer: customer journey mapping.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool that helps you understand your customers’ needs, pain points and experiences while identifying areas of improvement.

The process involves mapping out all your touchpoints and visualizing the entire customer journey, from awareness to purchase to post-purchase support.

This comprehensive view is key to optimizing your business KPIs—whether conversions or revenue—and making better, more informed decisions when it comes to your products, services and marketing strategy.

“A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination.” —Adam Richardson, Harvard Business Review

Intuitive visualizations of your customers journey.

I want this product!

4 easy steps to creating a journey map

We’ve outlined four simple steps you can take to start your customer journey mapping process. 

To drive results, follow these four steps:

1. Start by identifying your target customer. Who are you trying to reach with your product or service? Once you know your target customer, you can start to understand their needs and motivations.
2. Define key touchpoints. Where do customers interact with your brand? What steps do customers take to interact with your brand? This could include visiting your website, reading reviews, talking to customer support, and making a purchase on your app.
3. Map out your customer needs. For each touchpoint, identify your customer’s goals, needs, and pain points. What are they trying to achieve? What information do they need? What challenges are they facing?
4. Identify areas for improvement. Once you have a good understanding of the customer journey, you can identify areas for improvement. This could be as simple as making it easier for customers to find the information they need, streamlining the checkout process, or providing better customer support.

Once you’ve finished mapping your journey—depending on what industry you’re in—it could look something like this: 

Image source: Zapier

Things to think about during the process

Don’t forget this process takes time, effort and research—you can’t (and shouldn’t) do it alone. Here are a few key things to keep in mind:

• Use data throughout the process to inform your journey map. It’s important to use customer data and insights from website analytics (like Contentsquare), customer surveys, and social media to make informed decisions.
• Get input from your teams across your organization. Your journey map should be a collaborative effort. Get input from your sales, marketing, customer support and product development teams.
• Review and update your journey map regularly. Your customers are constantly evolving, so your journey map should be too. Ensure it’s accurate and up-to-date by reviewing it on a regular basis. 

In retail banking? Read this blog for our 7 steps to creating a retail banking customer journey map. 

The benefits of creating a journey map

Don’t get us wrong, breaking down your customer journey phase by phase is a laborious task but it’s crucial to ensuring the experience you provide is relevant and—most importantly—frictionless. 

If you’re still on the fence about journey mapping, here are three benefits to convince you to get started now:

You will (almost) instantly improve your customer experience

Journey mapping is an eye-opening process. Once you start digging into your customer journeys, you’re likely to identify areas of frustration pretty quickly. 

For retailers, for example, journey mapping is beneficial for pinpointing areas where they might be losing customers or where cart abandonment is high. 

And knowing where customers struggle will help you prioritize the right optimizations, improve your customers’ experience and even fuel ideas for your experimentation strategy. 

You can optimize your marketing campaigns

Marketers can use the insights from the journey mapping process to create targeted campaigns that promote products to the right audience, at the right time, and in the right way. 

Journey mapping can help you level-up your marketing strategy by helping you:

• Identify different customer segments 
• Coordinate efforts across multiple channels 
• Set specific objectives aligned with customer goals
• Improve campaign measurement

You can use it to develop new products and services

Journey mapping isn’t just for marketing teams. It can play a key role in identifying new product and service opportunities that meet the needs of your customers.

Product owners and dev teams that closely align product development to their customer journeys can reduce the risk of product failure and increase the likelihood of successful adoption. 

It’s also a great way to gather customer feedback, which can be invaluable in shaping new product development and identifying unmet needs or areas for improvement.

Create a journey map that drives results with Contentsquare

Qualitative surveys and interviews are extremely powerful tools for gathering insights for your journey map. 

But combine that with quantitative data and you’ll hit the sweet spot. 

Contentsquare’s Digital Experience Analytics platform provides qualitative and quantitative insights into your customers’ online behavior in real-time—and provides you with a range of tools to help you build a killer customer journey map, including:

• Customer Journey Analysis: See how users progress through your site and app, page by page, from entry to exit.
• Session Replay:  By watching real-time recordings of how your customers interact with your website you can instantly see where your customers struggle the most. 
• Zone-Based Heatmaps: Heatmaps allow you to see exactly where customers are clicking, scrolling and hovering on your website to understand what content is most engaging and where you might need to make improvements.
• Form Analytics: Discover how customers interact with your website’s forms and identify what’s working and where customers get stuck or abandon your forms.

Remember, journey mapping is not a one-time process. With Contentsquare you can create a comprehensive journey map and continuously improve on it—helping you stay agile and responsive to ever-changing customer needs.

Intuitive visualizations of your customers journey.

I want this product!

The post How to create a customer journey map that drives results appeared first on Contentsquare.

According to Doychin Sakutov, Director of Experimentation and Optimization at Virgin Media O2, it’s because most marketers are not going far enough when they run experiments. Too many within the industry talk the talk of experimentation while staying within clear arbitrary boundaries that make their brand look too similar to the competition. 

The result? No real differences. No real innovation or forward momentum. The fear of standing out–and of potential failure–results in no real experimentation at all.

This was Doychin’s argument at a recent Contentsquare Champagne Breakfast event. 

The title of his talk was “Dare to push the boundaries”, in which he set out some key learnings–with practical examples–from recent successful experimentation at Virgin Media O2. The thought process and results were eye-opening, and so we want to share them here. 

Hopefully, these tips and examples will help you run more effective experiments as you level up your own strategy. 

Disrupting the digital experience

Watch every single session from a morning of insights from leading DX experts at ASOS, Vitality and Virgin Media O2.

Watch now

Tip 1: Don’t (just) look at your competitors

An effective experimentation strategy starts with trying things that you’re not sure will work, Doychin believes. This is inherently frightening because most of us have been trained in life to fear looking incompetent or to be caught out looking like we don’t know the answer to a question. But really, this is the only way forward.

“Don’t look at your competitors, because they’re looking at you too, and you stay on the same level,” Doychin said in his talk. “There is no growth. There is no innovation. There are no advantages that you can explore.”

He went on to give the examples of two different companies, both Virgin Media O2 resellers, who copied each other and came up with almost identical web cards for their services:

No innovation–no difference. “Your customers will get bored and you will gain nothing,” Doychin said.

So what’s the answer?

“You need to lose sight of the shore and completely forget about your competitors when you’re deciding what experiments to do,” he added, before going on to give a great example of where Virgin Media O2 had taken inspiration from the travel industry.

TUI Group is a well-known German travel and tourism company that offers a wide range of holidays, flights and resorts. He pointed to an example web page where TUI created urgency by offering social proof–pointing out how popular a resort is by showing how many people had booked it.

Not only does this show that the resort is good because plenty of other customers have booked. It also gives a sense of urgency by implying that the resort might sell out, which encourages users to make a purchase.

This is all well and good, but how did Virgin Media O2 adapt this idea? How could a telco create a sense of urgency? As Doychin said: “It’s not like we’re going to run out of broadband if you don’t buy it now!”

It turned out that just testing the idea on a Virgin Media O2 page was enough to trigger a sense of urgency in users. Even though logically it makes no sense.

The point is that they tried it because it worked in a different industry and the company was curious. Would it work for them? They didn’t know. Which, for Doychin, was exactly what made the experiment worthwhile.

Adding the message to say how many people had added the product to their basket in the previous 24 hours resulted in a statistically significant increase in order conversion rate. All from testing an idea that looked unlikely to work. But the experiments didn’t stop there, as Doychin went on to talk about his second rule.

Tip 2: Browse the internet

This means you need to look around at where your customers are and the sites they tend to visit.

“See what’s out there. See the familiar patterns. Think about all the times that you didn’t have to think,” Doychin said, expanding on his theory that our online behavior that feels so intuitive and easy is actually learned.

The biggest tech companies and the biggest websites have trained us to use the internet in ways that benefit them. This is why it’s so important to look at popular websites outside your niche for inspiration.
Take the example of Instagram. “We all love spending time on Instagram, even during meetings,” Doychin said, adding that Instagram users are now well-used to Instagram stories.

“Everybody started using stories after Instagram invented them because it soon became a familiar pattern,” Doychin said. “It’s a really easy and quick way of absorbing lots of information.”

So Virgin Media O2 wondered if they could use this same idea to communicate customers’ final bills to them in a way that avoided them having to read through endless PDF documents of fine print and complex jargon. So the company tried it. They put together their own form of Instagram-style stories for this:

The result?

Increased retention and increased digital containment, meaning customers didn’t feel the need to call in and have their bill explained, which also resulted in significant customer support savings. Or, as Doychin summarized it: “It worked magic!”

Tip 3: The more obscure, the better

While browsing the internet and looking for ideas, the more obscure those ideas are for your industry, the better. Obscure ideas will force you further out of your comfort zone to try things that are genuinely new and different.

Of course, the obvious next question is how you can know if something that’s working in another industry is going to work in yours. But this is precisely Doychin’s point: “That’s the hidden gem. You don’t know, and you have to embrace that.”

The point is to try out new patterns constantly. As an example, Doychin cited digital bank Monzo’s Split the Bill feature, which allows friends to split their bills digitally:

At first glance, it’s not obvious how to apply this to telco. But Virgin Media O2 found a way, primarily by offering a “Split the Cost” function on broadband for students living in shared accommodation:

As a result of this experiment, Virgin Media O2 increased conversion rates and next step progression. “It was a success because what we’d adopted was something that was very familiar for our customers,” Doychin said.

High velocity is key to experimentation strategy success

Experimenting in this way is not neat. “We are lucky enough to be given the platform to push the boundaries to discover these different examples. But it’s never easy and requires A LOT of testing,” Doychin warned.

This is where key velocity becomes the key to success.

The more experiments you try over time, the better at it you’ll get. In fact, he described it in terms of a classic learning curve, where you start by experimenting with every idea you can think of, many of which are unlikely to succeed. Then, as you go on, you come up with more interesting experiments:

With this model, you could get through the initial experimentation phase in just a few months, forcing you to go further, find more patterns and embrace more obscure ideas. This in turn could result in more creative experiments by month five. But remember this timeline is different for everyone and it could take longer than 6 months.

A Doychin explains: “You push yourself. You go out there. You search for familiar patterns. You’re trying to be creative. You’re trying to be innovative for your own industry. Innovation doesn’t need to be something that you just come up and create and invent. You need to be innovative within your industry.”

Disrupting the digital experience

Watch every single session from a morning of insights from leading DX experts at ASOS, Vitality and Virgin Media O2.

Watch now

Why “I don’t know” are the three most important words for your experimentation strategy

This is how brands can use experimentation strategy to get great results—by pushing themselves to go further, to dare to try things where they can’t be sure of the outcome.

Virgin Media O2 has tested over 600 variants year-to-date, Doychin added in his talk, making them 165% better than the industry standard. And that’s by following the three rules to move beyond being a telco, A/B testing the most obscure ideas, and always pushing forward.

Or, as Doychin concluded:

“Digital disruption starts with the power of pattern, broadening your horizon, and embracing the I don’t know. You have to have experimentation on steroids for that which is backed up by a really high velocity.”

The post 3 tips for your experimentation strategy (plus ideas you’ll want to copy) appeared first on Contentsquare.

Liberating? Not quite.

What came next was more than what I could have ever imagined. When my husband and I welcomed our daughter and our world changed immediately, work was understandably one of the last things on my mind. At that moment, it became physical and mental, and mental and physical, and continued to fluctuate between the two over the course of my maternity leave. My mind and body were challenged in ways I had not yet experienced in my life. My patience levels were tested. Taking care of another human – literally – is the real deal. The daily skills I needed were extremely different from the ones I had been used to throughout my career – answering emails, drafting press releases, crafting spokespeople quotes, running meetings, and being a team player. Now, I was leading the team of “mother” with a new member in tow – my baby. Core skills included changing diapers, feeding my baby, watching her cues to make sure she napped or ate when needed, quickly cleaning toys that dropped on the floor, and of course, losing sleep. Yet while I lost countless hours of sleep in the early days (just like they tell you), it did get better as the days and weeks went on (also, just like they tell you). 

When I returned to work this past summer, it was definitely bittersweet. Brushing the figurative dust off my computer and re-logging into Gmail and Slack was familiar but different. I knew my line of work, my role, my team members and my colleagues, but I felt a little bit like I had been walking on a path and wasn’t quite sure what else had appeared on that path in the months that I had been away.

One of the key skills that’s clear about working in PR is quickly acclimating to new situations, and that’s exactly what I did and am continuing to do. It’s a new adjustment, with things like factoring in time for daycare dropoff after being a remote WFH employee for many months and eagerly waiting to receive daily photo updates of my daughter on the play mat while I work through my afternoon at my computer. Preparing bottles when I have a free moment to get ahead of the early evening dinner and bedtime rush, which I hear only gets more complicated once we enter toddlerhood and beyond! And more.

As my daughter gets older and will grow out of the baby stage, into a toddler, little kid and eventually a big kid, I hope that she learns firsthand by watching me and others, that any woman can work while also being a mother. I hope that she will see that you can juggle it all.

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Do you want to join Erica at Contentsquare in a global, values-driven, dynamic, and collaborative work environment? View our careers site here.

The post PR Superhero Unleashed: Global PR Manager Takes on the Dual Role of Working Professional and New Mom appeared first on Contentsquare.