The traditional sales funnel describes the pathway buyers take from awareness to purchase and (hopefully) to advocacy. Many marketers believe this pathway involves advertising and search, a website, some re-marketing and a fair amount of hope. Those more attuned to customer needs understand that the pathway extends to activations, point-of-sale, even word of mouth communications.
The power of customer-focused user experience (UX) fuelled by great pathway-to-purchase (P2P) communications can’t be over-estimated in increasing the effectiveness of your investment in advertising.
This difference is caused by the leverage effect of investments in UX and P2P communications. A B2C marketer may spend $5m in media alone, then watch the majority of the resulting leads bounce off to competitors. A $200,000 investment in delivering brilliantly integrated customer experience may well result in a 20% uplift in performance, in turn delivering an ROI impact extending into the millions of dollars.
Our experience in this area is unequivocal. For one of our clients, we increased customer pull through by over 30 percent. Importantly, we also reduced client churn by a similar amount. The result was a campaign return on investment of 1800% on lifetime customer value.
Further evidence in support of investment in UX and P2P communications exists at a macro level. An experiment conducted by Facebook’s Geoff Teehan saw the establishment of an investment fund that bought stock in only those companies focused on delivering great user experiences. Over the ensuing decade to 2016 (including the period of the GFC) this fund returned 450% versus the Nasdaq’s 93.2% return – a 45% annual return over ten years (The True ROI of UX: B2B Redesign Case Studies, Miklos Philips, Toptal).
Ready to drive a better result from your investment in brand or retail communications? Talk to us about your CX/P2P communications.