Quickly find and take action with customers who abandon the purchase lifecycle
October 27, 2014
In a series of blog posts, I want to share details with you about exciting enhancements now available with our lifecycle analytics solutions, IBM Digital Analytics Lifecycle and IBM Tealeaf cxLifecycle.
For those new to lifecycle analytics, IBM offers two types of customer lifecycle products designed to provide a greater understanding of the customer journey. IBM Digital Analytics Lifecycle is designed for our IBM Digital Analytics customers and IBM Tealeaf cxLifecycle is available for IBM Tealeaf customers.
IBM’s lifecycle analytics allow you to set up and monitor key events, called milestones, on the journey to purchase or abandonment.
The new lifecycle features will allow you to:
Identify and take action on potential customers who do not make the move from shopping to purchasing.
Build milestones and segment users based on mobile device type, including tablets.
Quickly export and import data segments between cxLifecycle and Tealeaf, with one click, to gain quick and powerful customer experience insight.
Today, I’ll introduce a new feature that will allow you to quickly find and interact with those who do not progress from one milestone event to the next on the way to purchase.
It’s not too late to get your dropouts back on the path to purchase
Clients using IBM Digital Analytics Lifecycle or IBM Tealeaf cxLifecycle know the power of tracking long-term customer conversion lifecycles all the way to purchase or abandonment. A customer conversion lifecycle is characterized by milestones (conversion events) ranging from a first-time visit to your site to advanced engagements with your brand, such as repeat purchases or visits, newsletter subscriptions, or social media engagement. IBM customer analytics solutions allow marketers to look beyond the single-session and single-device metrics common to other web analytics tools to identify points in the lifecycle where customers may struggle or, conversely, become more engaged.
By carefully monitoring the customer journey milestone-by-milestone, across sessions and devices, marketers can measure the time and sessions required for customers to progress through these milestones. This allows online marketers to set goals to reduce the time it takes to reach milestones and to analyze the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.
But, what if you could also engage prospects who don’t move from a particular milestone to another? We call these potential customers non-migrators. Understanding where the non-migrators abandon, and why, can be extremely important to the success of your marketing initiative.
The latest versions of IBM Digital Analytics Lifecycle and IBM Tealeaf cxLifecycle make this type of analysis possible. You can now identify, automatically segment, target and interact with customers who do not move from one milestone to the next.
For example, you could define viewing a particular product on your digital property as one milestone and the next milestone could be placing that product in your site’s digital shopping cart. Now, you can automatically make special offers to those who completed the first milestone, but not the second.
Automatically segment and interact with non-migrators.
Automatically take action with those who abandon at any point in the lifecycle
Both IBM Digital Analytics Lifecycle and IBM Tealeaf cxLifecycle automatically segment migrators and non-migrators for each milestone. In addition, targeting marketing messages or capturing these groups for further analysis is only a couple of clicks away. For example, you may want to trigger an automated email campaign, display ads or on-site recommendations around all the customers who did not take advantage of a special offer. Or, with the click of a button, you can export a segment of non-migrators to Tealeaf to view a replay of exactly what actions your customers took.
This analysis can shed light on exactly why a potential customer did not complete the purchase. Since you are tracking customers as they migrate through lifecycle phases over time, these solutions are uniquely suited for targeting individuals who fall below the averages for the time and the number of sessions it takes to progress to the next milestone.
Make smarter decisions by knowing what your customers do next
If a potential customer experiences struggle on your website using her desktop computer and abandons the purchase process, that doesn’t necessarily mean she is not interested in your product. Maybe, after some thought and additional research, she finished her purchase on her smartphone, her tablet or even in-person at your store. Because IBM’s solutions track the customer lifecycle across sessions and devices, you can easily check to make sure the purchase was not made on a different device at a different time, before making a special offer. This enables you to avoid making offers for products already purchased and allows you to build timely, accurate, more thoughtful communications with your customers.
That’s not all
The ability to quickly uncover and interact with those who do not make it to a particular lifecycle milestone event can be extremely powerful in the hands of creative marketers. Check back soon to learn how you can gain even more insight and return from lifecycle milestones with the use of enhanced mobile device support.