Table of Contents

• What are customer engagement platforms?
• Importance of customer engagement platforms
• What are the 5 stages of customer engagement? How do customer engagement tools help in each of them?
  • 1. Awareness
  • 2. Interest
  • 3. Consideration
  • 4. Purchase
  • 5. Retention and advocacy
• Top 10 customer engagement tools to try
• Measuring customer engagement using a customer engagement platform
• The synergy of customer engagement software and marketing
• Final thoughts
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are customer engagement platforms?

A customer engagement solution consists of a suite of tools and technologies designed to facilitate interactions between businesses and their customers across various touchpoints. These platforms streamline and enhance the customer journey by providing personalized, relevant, and consistent experiences. Whether it’s through social media, email, in-app messaging, or other channels, these customer communications platforms enable businesses to connect with their audience in a meaningful way and increase customer engagement.

These platforms offer a range of functionalities, including:

• Personalized communication: Effective customer engagement tools empower businesses to tailor their interactions based on user preferences, behavior, and demographics.
• Multichannel reach: Whether it’s through social media, email, web chat, or SMS, customer engagement software enables brands to connect with customers through their preferred channels.
• Data-driven insights: These tools provide valuable analytics that help companies understand customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns.
• Automated campaigns: Automation features allow businesses to schedule and deploy targeted campaigns, saving time and ensuring timely interactions.

Importance of customer engagement platforms

Why is customer engagement software essential in today’s business landscape? Let’s explore a few key reasons:

• Enhanced customer experience: Customer engagement software enables businesses to deliver personalized experiences, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Data-driven decisions: By collecting and analyzing customer data, these platforms empower companies to make informed decisions and create more effective marketing strategies.
• Brand loyalty: Regular interactions foster a sense of loyalty among customers, making them more likely to stick with your brand in the long run.
• Increased conversions: Personalized and relevant interactions can lead to higher conversion rates as customers feel understood and valued.
• Improved customer feedback: These platforms facilitate the collection of feedback, enabling businesses to address concerns and continuously improve their offerings.

What are the 5 stages of customer engagement? How do customer engagement tools help in each of them?

To improve customer satisfaction, you need a process. This process involves several stages, each representing a different level of interaction and relationship-building between a brand and its customers. Customer engagement tools play a crucial role in facilitating and enhancing these stages. Here are the five stages of customer engagement and how customer engagement tools help in each of them:

1. Awareness

This is the initial stage of customer conversations where potential customers become aware of your brand’s existence. Customer engagement tools contribute to awareness by:

• Social media management: Tools like Hootsuite or Buffer help schedule and manage social media posts across multiple platforms, increasing brand visibility.
• Content creation: Tools like Canva or Adobe Spark assist in creating visually appealing content that grabs attention and communicates your brand’s message effectively.

2. Interest

 At this stage, customers show an interest in your brand and begin exploring your products or services. Customer engagement tools help by:

• Email marketing: Tools like Mailchimp or Sendinblue allow you to send targeted emails to your leads, providing them with valuable information and updates.
• Web analytics: Tools like Google Analytics help you track user behavior on your website, providing insights into what interests them the most.

3. Consideration

During the consideration stage, customers evaluate whether your offerings meet their needs. Customer engagement tools assist by:

• Live chat: Tools like Intercom or LiveChat enable real-time conversations with potential customers, addressing their questions and concerns.
• Personalization: CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce offer personalized content recommendations based on customer preferences and behavior.

4. Purchase

This is when customers make a purchase or decide to avail of your services. Customer engagement tools support customer success at this stage by:

• eCommerce solutions: Tools like Shopify or WooCommerce provide a seamless purchasing experience, from cart management to secure transactions.
• Retargeting: Tools like AdRoll or Facebook Pixel help you show targeted ads to customers who have shown interest but haven’t completed a purchase.

5. Retention and advocacy

After the purchase, the goal is to retain loyal customers and turn them into advocates for your brand. Customer engagement tools contribute by:

• Customer support platforms: Tools like Zendesk or Freshdesk enable efficient handling of customer inquiries and complaints, enhancing post-purchase experience.
• Surveys and feedback: Tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform help gather feedback, allowing you to make improvements based on customer suggestions.
• Loyalty programs: Tools like Smile.io or LoyaltyLion help you set up and manage loyalty programs to reward and retain existing customers and boost customer loyalty.
• Social media listening: Tools like Mention or Brandwatch monitor social media for mentions of your brand, allowing you to engage with customers and address their feedback.

In each stage, customer engagement tools play a role in nurturing the relationship between the brand and the customer. They enable personalized interactions, streamline communication, gather valuable insights, and enhance the overall customer experience. By leveraging these tools strategically at each stage, businesses can effectively guide customers through the engagement process, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty, advocacy, and business growth.

Top 10 customer engagement tools to try

Here are 10 customer engagement tools that deserve a spot in your arsenal:

• VWO: VWO offers A/B testing and personalization capabilities, allowing you to optimize website experiences for different customer segments.
• Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services): AWS provides a scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure that can power your customer engagement applications and services.
• Netcore: Netcore offers a comprehensive customer engagement suite, including email marketing, AI-driven personalization, and multi-channel communication.
• Moengage: Moengage specializes in mobile engagement, providing personalized messaging, push notifications, and in-app messaging to engage users.
• Twilio: Twilio’s communication APIs enable businesses to integrate messaging, voice, and video capabilities into their customer engagement strategies.
• Zendesk: Zendesk offers customer support solutions that enhance engagement through ticketing systems, live chat, and self-service portals.
• Intercom: Intercom focuses on real-time customer communication, offering solutions for chat, email, and customer feedback management.
• HubSpot: HubSpot provides a holistic platform for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service, facilitating seamless engagement across the customer journey.
• Salesforce Service Cloud: Salesforce’s Service Cloud offers tools for customer support, case management, and omnichannel engagement.
• Freshdesk: Freshdesk is a user-friendly helpdesk software that streamlines customer support, enabling efficient issue resolution and engagement.

Measuring customer engagement using a customer engagement platform

To ensure the effectiveness of your customer engagement strategies, it’s essential to measure and analyze their impact. Here are some key metrics to consider:

• Click-through rates (CTR): Measure the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your communication.
• Conversion rates: Track the percentage of engaged customers who completed a desired action, such as making a purchase.
• Customer feedback: Gather qualitative insights through surveys and feedback forms to understand customer sentiment.
• Time spent on site/app: Monitor the duration customers spend interacting with your website or app.
• Social media engagement: Analyze likes, shares, comments, and overall engagement on social media platforms.

By regularly monitoring these metrics, you can refine your strategies, gauge customer satisfaction, and optimize your customer engagement efforts for better results.

The synergy of customer engagement software and marketing

Customer engagement and marketing are inseparable partners in today’s business landscape. Marketing efforts are driven by customer engagement, and effective marketing strategies contribute to enhanced customer engagement solutions well. This symbiotic relationship creates a cycle of value creation, where engaged customers become brand advocates, further driving business growth.

Final thoughts

In the digital age, customer engagement is more critical than ever before. It’s not just about selling a product; it’s about building lasting relationships and providing memorable experiences. Customer engagement software offers the tools you need to connect with your audience, understand their needs, and tailor your interactions accordingly. By exploring options like VWO, Amazon AWS, Netcore, Moengage, and Twilio, you can take your customer engagement strategies to new heights, fostering brand loyalty and driving business success. Remember, the key lies in personalized interactions and meaningful connections.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Table of Contents

• Understanding customer engagement
• The power of customer engagement metrics
  • 1. Customer retention rate
  • 2. Customer churn rate
  • 3. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
  • 4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • 5. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
  • 6. Time spent on the platform
  • 7. Click-through rate (CTR)
  • 8. Social media engagement
• Customer engagement analytics: Measure customer engagement with the power of data
  • 1. Identifying customer segments
  • 2. Personalization
  • 3. Predictive analytics
  • 4. Optimize marketing efforts
  • 5. Measure customer journey
• FAQs

Customer engagement metrics and analytics play a pivotal role in measuring and optimizing the effectiveness of marketing strategies. A range of consumer engagement metrics, such as customer engagement success metrics and brand engagement metrics, help businesses gauge the level of interaction and interest their customers have with their brand across various touchpoints. 

To leverage these insights effectively, companies rely on customer engagement analytics to analyze vast amounts of data. Understanding customer engagement analytics and how to analyze engagement data allows businesses to uncover patterns, preferences, and pain points within the customer journey. Armed with such knowledge, marketers can fine-tune their campaigns to create personalized experiences that resonate with customers, resulting in higher brand loyalty, increased retention rates, and improved overall business performance.

In this article, we will explore the significance of customer engagement, delve into the key metrics used to measure it and understand how analytics can unveil valuable insights to drive growth and improve customer engagement.

Understanding customer engagement

Customer engagement refers to a customer’s emotional connection with a brand, product, or service. It goes beyond just purchases and involves interactions across various touchpoints of online business, such as social media, email, website, and customer support. Engaged customers tend to be more often loyal customers, spend more, and are more likely to recommend the brand to others. It is, therefore, essential for businesses to quantify and measure customer engagement effectively with the right KPIs.

The power of customer engagement metrics

Client engagement metrics are quantifiable data points that indicate the level of involvement and interactions between customers and a brand. These metrics provide a comprehensive view of how customers interact with a brand and help in evaluating the success of customer engagement analysis strategies. Let’s delve into some of the key consumer engagement metrics with examples.

1. Customer retention rate

This metric calculates the percentage of customers who continue to do business with a company over a specific period. A high retention rate implies that existing customers still find value in the brand, products, or services, and are likely to remain loyal.

Let’s consider a fictional online streaming platform that offers video-on-demand services through monthly subscriptions. To calculate the customer retention rate and to measure customer loyalty and engagement, we’ll look at a specific time period (e.g., one year) and compare the number of customers at the beginning and end of that period.

Example data:

• At the beginning of the year (January 1st), the company had 10,000 subscribers.
• During the year, it acquired 5,000 new subscribers.
• At the end of the year (December 31st), it had 12,000 subscribers.

Calculating customer retention rate:

Step 1: Find the total number of customers at the beginning of the year. Initial customers (January 1st) = 10,000

Step 2: Find the number of customers at the end of the year. Final customers (December 31st) = 12,000

Step 3: Calculate the number of customers gained during the year. Customers gained = Final Customers – Initial Customers Customers Gained = 12,000 – 10,000 = 2,000

Step 4: Calculate the customer retention rate. Customer retention rate = (Customers gained / Initial customers) * 100 

Customer retention rate = (2,000 / 10,000) * 100 = 20%

Interpreting customer retention rate: In this example, the streaming platform’s customer retention rate is 20%. This means that, over the course of the year, the company was able to retain 20% of its initial customers, while 80% of its original customers did not continue their subscriptions.

Significance of customer retention rate in measuring customer loyalty and engagement: The retention rate is a customer engagement tracker for measuring customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty because it indicates how well a company can retain its existing customer base over time. A higher retention rate signifies a more engaged and satisfied customer base, while a lower rate may indicate issues with customer experience or dissatisfaction.

Actionable insights from customer retention rate: A high customer retention rate (e.g., 70% or above) suggests that the platform is doing an excellent job of engaging its customers, providing compelling content, and offering a seamless user experience. In contrast, a low retention rate (e.g., below 50%) may raise concerns about the quality of service, user engagement, or content, leading to customers seeking alternatives elsewhere.

2. Customer churn rate

The churn rate is the opposite of the retention rate. It measures the percentage of customers who stop engaging with the brand or cancel their subscriptions over a given period. A high churn rate signifies a lack of engagement from the monthly active users.

Let’s consider a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that offers a subscription-based project management tool. At the beginning of the month, the company had 1,000 active subscribers. By the end of the month, 100 of these subscribers canceled their subscriptions or stopped using the service.

In this example, the churn rate for the project management tool is 10% for the month. This means that 10% of the customers who were either daily active users at the beginning of the month discontinued their subscriptions or stopped engaging with the service.

A high churn rate can be a red flag for the business as it suggests that customers are not finding enough value in the product or service, leading them to leave. To address this issue, the company needs to focus on improving brand engagement, providing better customer support, and enhancing the product to retain existing customers and attract new ones. Lowering the churn rate is vital for sustained business growth and profitability.

3. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

CLV is the projected revenue a customer is expected to generate over their lifetime as a customer. It takes into account factors such as average purchase value, purchase frequency, and customer retention. A high CLV indicates a strong customer engagement strategy and profitability.

Let’s illustrate this concept with an example:

Imagine a subscription-based meal kit delivery service. For simplicity, let’s assume the average customer pays $100 per month for their subscription, and the average customer remains subscribed for 12 months.

CLV = Average Purchase Value x Purchase Frequency x Customer Lifespan

CLV = $100 (average purchase value) x 12 (purchase frequency) x 1 (customer lifespan)

CLV = $1,200

In this example, the CLV of a customer for this meal kit delivery service is $1,200. This means that, on average, each customer is expected to generate $1,200 in revenue over the course of their subscription.

A high CLV suggests that the company has a strong customer engagement strategy and is doing well in terms of customer retention. This indicates that customers are satisfied with the service, making repeat purchases, and staying loyal over an extended period. It also implies that the company is likely to be profitable since the revenue generated from each customer exceeds the cost of acquiring and serving them.

Businesses can use CLV as a crucial metric to guide their marketing efforts and increase customer loyalty through relationship management. By focusing on increasing CLV through better engagement, customer satisfaction, and retention strategies, companies can enhance their long-term profitability and build a loyal customer base.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is a popular metric that measures customer feedback, brand loyalty, and advocacy. It involves asking customers how likely they are to recommend the brand to others on a scale of 0 to 10. Customers are categorized as promoters, passives, or detractors based on their responses. A higher NPS indicates better customer engagement and satisfaction.

Let’s consider an example of a software company that provides project management tools. They conducted an NPS survey and received responses from 500 customers.

• Number of Promoters (score 9-10): 300
• Number of Passives (score 7-8): 100
• Number of Detractors (score 0-6): 100

To calculate the Net Promoter Score, use the following formula:

NPS = (% Promoters – % Detractors)

In this example: NPS = (300/500*100) – (100/500*100) = 60 – 20 = 40

The higher the NPS, the more engaged and satisfied customers are, which bodes well for the company’s growth and excellent customer service success too.

Once the Net Promoter Score is calculated, the next crucial step is to analyze the results and take appropriate actions. Here’s how the software company can interpret and act on the NPS results:

• Identify areas of improvement: The company should pay attention to the feedback provided by detractors and passives to identify pain points and areas that need improvement. This feedback can help the company address issues, enhance the customer experience, and boost engagement.
• Nurture promoters: Promoters are the company’s most valuable assets. The company should engage with them, leverage their positive sentiments, and encourage them to spread positive word-of-mouth. Building a community of brand advocates can significantly impact customer acquisition and retention.
• Follow-up surveys: Following up with customers who provided low NPS scores can help the company understand their concerns better. A well-handled follow-up can turn a detractor into a promoter, showcasing the company’s commitment to customer satisfaction.
• Benchmarking and tracking: The company should regularly track NPS over time to monitor changes in customer sentiment. This allows it to assess the effectiveness of improvement initiatives and measure the impact of engagement strategies.
• Aligning NPS with business goals: Integrating NPS into the company’s overall business goals ensures that customer engagement is given due importance in decision-making and resource allocation.

5. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

CSAT gauges the satisfaction level of customers engaged with a specific product, service, or interaction. It typically involves a post-purchase survey where customers rate their experience on a scale. High CSAT scores imply positive engagement experiences.

6. Time spent on the platform

This metric measures the average session duration of time customers spend on a website, app, or other platforms. Usually, it is assumed that the longer the time spent, the more engaged and interested the customers are in the brand’s offerings.

Let’s consider an online news website. By analyzing user behavior, the website tracks the time users spend on the site during their visits. If the average session duration is found to be 5 minutes, it suggests that, on average, visitors spend 5 minutes browsing through articles and content on the website during each visit.

A longer average session duration in this case indicates that users are actively engaging with the news articles, reading in-depth content, and potentially exploring multiple pages on the site. This suggests a higher level of interest and engagement with the website’s news content.

On the other hand, a lower average session duration may indicate that visitors are not finding the content compelling enough to stay on the site for an extended period. This could be a sign that the website needs to improve its content quality, user experience, or navigation to keep visitors engaged for longer durations.

By monitoring and analyzing the average session duration of active users, businesses can gain insights into how engaging their website or app is for users. They can then use this information to optimize the user experience, improve content relevance, and enhance engagement, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

7. Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR measures the percentage of customers who click on a specific link or call-to-action in an email, advertisement, or website. A higher CTR indicates higher engagement with the content.

Let’s say a company runs an email marketing campaign to promote a new product. It sends the email to 1,000 subscribers, and within that email, there is a link to the product page. After analyzing the campaign, it was found that 100 subscribers clicked on the link.

CTR = (Number of Clicks / Number of Impressions) x 100 CTR = (100 / 1,000) x 100 = 10%

In this example, the CTR for the email campaign is 10%. This means that 10% of the recipients who received the email clicked on the link to visit the product page.

A higher CTR is generally considered a positive sign, as it indicates that the content or offer resonates well with the audience and encourages engagement. A lower CTR, on the other hand, may suggest that the content needs improvement or that the target audience is not finding the content relevant or compelling.

By tracking customer engagement via CTR, businesses can assess the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize their campaigns for a better conversion rate.

ArchiveSocial is a SaaS-based social media archiving solution, headquartered in the USA. The company more than doubled its CTR and streamlined user experience on its website using VWO’s testing capabilities. You can read more about this here. 

8. Social media engagement

This metric measures the level of interaction (likes, shares, comments) that a brand’s social media posts receive. It reflects how well the content resonates with the target audience.

Let’s consider a fashion brand that posts a picture of a newly launched dress on Instagram. After 24 hours, the post received 500 likes, 200 shares, and 50 comments. In this case, the engagement rate can be calculated by adding up all the interactions (likes, shares, comments) and dividing that by the number of followers.

Total Interactions = 500 (likes) + 200 (shares) + 50 (comments) = 750

Assuming the brand has 10,000 followers on Instagram:

Engagement Rate = (Total Interactions / Number of Followers) x 100 Engagement Rate = (750 / 10,000) x 100 ≈ 7.5%

In this example, the engagement rate for the fashion brand’s post is approximately 7.5%. This metric provides insights into how well the dress resonates with the brand’s audience. Higher engagement rates indicate that the content is compelling and captures the audience’s interest, potentially leading to increased brand awareness and customer loyalty.

Customer engagement analytics: Measure customer engagement with the power of data

While customer engagement metrics provide valuable insights into customer interactions, customer engagement analytics takes this further by leveraging data to uncover trends, patterns, and predictive insights into customer health. Here’s how customer engagement analytics can enhance the understanding of customer engagement:

1. Identifying customer segments

Analytics can help businesses identify different customer segments based on their engagement behavior. This customer segmentation also allows companies to tailor their marketing efforts to meet the specific needs and preferences of each group.

For example, let’s consider an eCommerce company that sells various products online. Through analytics, it discovers that it has two main customer segments: tech-savvy millennials who prefer trendy gadgets and accessories, and budget-conscious families who primarily shop for home essentials and discounted items.

With this customer segmentation insight, the company can now tailor their marketing efforts accordingly. It might create personalized email campaigns for tech-savvy millennials featuring the latest gadgets and promotional offers. Simultaneously, it can run social media advertisements and discounts targeting the family segment for home essentials.

By customizing marketing strategies for each customer segment, the company can effectively reach the right audience with the most relevant messaging, increasing the chances of higher customer engagement scores, conversion rates, and overall, customer satisfaction scores.

2. Personalization

By analyzing customer data, businesses can gain insights into individual preferences, purchase and feature usage history user behavior, and interactions. Armed with this information, companies can offer personalized recommendations and experiences that enhance engagement.

Say an online streaming platform collects customer data, including the genres of movies and TV shows users watch, their viewing history, and favorite actors. By analyzing this data, the platform identifies that a particular user enjoys action and comedy genres, frequently watches movies on weekends, and follows a specific actor.

Armed with these insights, the streaming platform can offer personalized recommendations to this user. For instance, the platform may suggest newly released action-comedy movies starring the user’s favorite actor, or curate a playlist of weekend binge-worthy content in these genres. As a result, the user is more likely to find content that aligns with their interests, enhancing their overall engagement with the platform.

By leveraging customer data to deliver tailored experiences, businesses can build stronger connections with their customers, increase customer satisfaction scores, and foster loyalty. Personalization can lead to higher retention rates, increased conversion rates, and ultimately, improved business performance.

3. Predictive analytics

Customer engagement analytics can predict future customer behavior based on historical data. For instance, it can help identify customers who are at risk of churning or those likely to become high-value customers, enabling proactive measures.

Let’s continue our previous example of the streaming platform. By analyzing customer engagement data, the company identifies a group of customers who have shown a decline in their usage patterns, have stopped engaging with new content, and have not renewed their subscriptions in the past. Based on this data, the analytics model predicts that these customers are at risk of churning.

With this insight, the streaming service can take proactive measures to retain these customers. It might send targeted email offers with personalized recommendations, inviting them to explore new content that aligns with their previous interests. It could also offer active users a special discount or extend their subscription for a limited time to entice them back.

Similarly, customer engagement analytics can also identify customers who exhibit vital engagement behaviors, such as high usage frequency, active participation in loyalty programs, and positive feedback. The analytics model predicts that these customers are likely to become high-value customers who are more likely to upgrade their subscriptions, make repeat purchases, or refer others.

Recognizing the potential of these customers, the streaming service may choose to offer them exclusive rewards, early access to new content, or premium features to further enhance their loyalty and encourage them to continue their engagement.

In both cases, customer engagement analytics provides valuable insights that enable the business to take targeted and proactive actions to reduce churn and maximize the value of customer loyalty, ultimately leading to improved customer retention and increased revenue.

4. Optimize marketing efforts

Analyzing online engagement metrics can reveal the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, allowing businesses to optimize their marketing strategies, for better engagement and higher returns on investment.

For example, let’s consider an eCommerce company running a digital marketing campaign to promote a new product line. By analyzing user engagement metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and time spent on the campaign landing pages, it can gauge how well the campaign resonates with the target audience.

If the CTR is low and users are not spending much time on the landing pages, it indicates that the marketing message might not be compelling enough or that the targeting is off. In response, the company can make adjustments to the campaign, such as refining the ad copy or targeting a different audience segment. They can A/B test these changes to validate their effectiveness.

On the other hand, if the conversion rates are high, indicating that many users who clicked on the ad actually made a purchase, the company can deduce that the campaign is effective in driving sales. In this case, they might consider increasing the budget for the campaign or extending its duration to capitalize on its success.

Furthermore, user engagement metrics can help identify which marketing channels or platforms are performing well and which ones need improvement. For instance, if the company finds that its social media ads are driving significant engagement and sales compared to its email marketing efforts, it might allocate more resources to social media advertising.

By continuously analyzing user engagement metrics and making data-driven decisions, the eCommerce company can fine-tune its marketing strategies over time, leading to better engagement rates, increased customer acquisition, gaining more loyal customers, and ultimately, a higher ROI on their marketing investments.

5. Measure customer journey

Analytics can provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. Understanding this journey helps identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Let’s consider an online electronics retailer. By utilizing analytics, the retailer tracks customer interactions at various stages of the journey. It monitors website visits, product views, cart additions, and completed purchases. Additionally, it analyzes customer service interactions after the purchase, such as inquiries and support requests.

Through analytics, the retailer discovers that many customers abandon their shopping carts just before making a purchase due to unexpected shipping costs. This is a pain point in the customer journey as it hinders conversions.

Armed with this insight, the retailer decides to offer free shipping on orders above a certain value. As a result, cart abandonment rates decrease, and more customers complete their purchases.

Furthermore, the analytics reveal that customers who engage with the retailer’s post-purchase support team are more likely to become repeat customers. Recognizing this opportunity, the retailer invests in enhancing its customer support services, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Contorion improved the product detailed pages on its website based on insights from VWO’s session recordings. It ran A/B tests which led to an increase in the add-to-cart click rate. You can read the full story here.

Customer engagement is a vital aspect of any successful business, and understanding its impact is crucial for growth and sustainability. By leveraging customer engagement metrics and customer engagement analytics, businesses can track customer engagement and gain valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and sentiments. 

Armed with this data, companies can make informed decisions, optimize marketing efforts, create personalized marketing messages, and deliver personalized experiences, ultimately fostering stronger relationships with customers and driving long-term success. Remember, the key to thriving in a competitive market lies in listening to your customers; you can get the most valuable customer engagement indicators from these conversations to improve customer experiences.

FAQs

Table of Contents

• Why is customer engagement important?
• 8 major benefits of customer engagement
  • 1. Strong customer relationships and increased customer loyalty
  • 2. Increased customer retention and reduced churn
  • 3. Cross-selling and upselling opportunities
  • 4. Increased subscribers and enhanced audience reach
  • 5. Shorter purchase cycles and improved conversion rates
  • 6. Brand evangelists and word-of-mouth marketing
  • 7. Establishing a distinguishable brand identity
  • 8. Enhanced customer service and satisfaction
• What is an effective customer engagement strategy?
  • 1. Personalization
  • 2. Omnichannel approach
  • 3. Interactive content
• Conclusion
• FAQs

This article explores the various benefits and importance of customer engagement, backed by examples and key points, to demonstrate how it can be a game-changer for businesses.

Why is customer engagement important?

Let’s understand with an example.

Imagine a coffee shop that focuses on personalized customer experiences and engagement. They make an effort to remember their regular customers’ names and preferences and engage in genuine conversations. This personalized experience and customer engagement approach creates a strong emotional bond with the customers, making them feel valued and appreciated.

One day, the coffee shop introduces a new menu item based on customer feedback collected through surveys, social media, and customer interactions. They actively involve their customers in the decision-making process, making them feel like they are part of the coffee shop’s growth and success.

As a result of this effective customer engagement strategy, the coffee shop sees a significant increase in customer loyalty. Regular patrons are more likely to bring their friends and family, share positive experiences on their social media channels, and become brand advocates. This word-of-mouth promotion attracts new customers, contributes to building strong customer relationships, and ultimately drives up sales and revenue.

In contrast, a coffee shop that does not have a customer engagement strategy in place may not understand its customers’ preferences, leading to a stagnant menu and an indifferent atmosphere. This could result in a poor customer experience with many customers feeling disconnected and turning to competitors who make them feel more valued.

Through systemized customer information and relationship management, the first coffee shop in the example enjoys continuous growth, a strong community of loyal customers, and a thriving reputation in the local market. Needless to say, customer retention becomes easier for them.

8 major benefits of customer engagement

1. Strong customer relationships and increased customer loyalty

Customer engagement plays a pivotal role in fostering stronger relationships and improving customer loyalty. By going beyond mere transactions and actively engaging customers across multiple channels and touchpoints, businesses can build a deep connection with their audience. 

For example, a clothing retailer could engage customers through personalized recommendations based on their preferences and shopping history, creating a sense of exclusivity. This personal touch can enhance customer satisfaction, leading to increased loyalty and repeat purchases.

2. Increased customer retention and reduced churn

A significant advantage of customer engagement is that engaged customers are more likely to stay loyal to a brand, resulting in reduced churn rates. By consistently nurturing customer relationships and addressing pain points, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

For instance, a software company can provide proactive customer support, offering assistance and resolving issues promptly for better customer engagement. This entire customer experience contributes to customers feeling valued, leading to higher retention rates and reduced customer churn.

3. Cross-selling and upselling opportunities

Another benefit of engaging with customers includes the uncovering of valuable customer insights including their preferences, behaviors, and buying patterns. By analyzing customer engagement data, businesses can personalize their recommendations and accurately target cross-selling and upselling offers. 

For example, an eCommerce platform can suggest complementary products or offer exclusive deals based on the customer’s browsing history and past purchases. This approach of using customer data not only increases the average customer lifetime value but also delivers relevant recommendations that resonate with customers, resulting in higher conversion rates. Many successful brands use VWO’s personalization capabilities to optimize and increase customer engagement on their website. This free trial lets you explore this important capability.

4. Increased subscribers and enhanced audience reach

Customer engagement can significantly contribute to expanding a business’s subscriber base and reaching a wider audience. By consistently delivering valuable and relevant content through various channels, businesses can attract and retain subscribers. 

For marketing campaigns, for instance, a fitness brand could offer a monthly newsletter with workout tips, healthy recipes, and exclusive discounts. By delighting the audience with engaging content, businesses can establish themselves as industry experts and build a loyal subscriber base, increasing their brand reach and influence.

Take travel operator Thomas Cook, for instance. As per an article in MarketingWeek, Thomas Cook implemented a targeted lead generation campaign and travel survey to establish direct relationships with its target audience. The customer engagement campaign captured information on customer requirements and buying intentions to better understand their purchase lifecycle. A nurture program delivered personalized messaging and increased user engagement by leveraging customer data.

The improved customer engagement as a result of this campaign collected over 15,000 leads, resulting in increased email engagement rates and open rates. Click rates were significantly higher than the national average, achieving an ROI of 7.5:1 within three months post-registration. The data collected was incorporated into Thomas Cook’s newsletter program and overall CRM strategy.

5. Shorter purchase cycles and improved conversion rates

Customer engagement is not limited to existing customers; it is equally effective in shortening the sales cycle and converting prospects into customers. Well-planned and executed engagement strategies can inform, educate, and address prospects’ needs, positively impacting their purchase decisions. 

For example, sales teams of SaaS companies could offer free webinars and demo sessions to educate potential customers about their product’s features and benefits. By engaging prospects throughout their buying journey, sales teams can establish trust, overcome objections, and accelerate the decision-making process, resulting in shorter purchase cycles and improved conversion rates. Thus, the byproducts of a successful customer engagement strategy are many.

Medienreich Training hypothesized that displaying their best-selling training topics would reduce the effort that their website visitors had to put in to search for these and offer a better experience to them. They A/B tested this hypothesis using VWO and found it to be true. It led to a 40% increase in visitor engagement on their homepage. 

This was the control:

This was the variation:

You can read all the details of this case study here. 

6. Brand evangelists and word-of-mouth marketing

Customer engagement benefits extend to turning customers into brand evangelists, actively promoting and recommending a business to others. By consistently engaging customers and providing exceptional experiences, businesses can create a community of highly satisfied loyal customers who willingly advocate for the brand. Brand loyalty is a huge deal when you are surrounded by cut-throat competition.

For example, a hospitality chain that engages guests through personalized services and memorable experiences (like a surprise cake on the customer’s birthday!) can generate positive word-of-mouth referrals, attracting new customers and enhancing brand reputation. These brand evangelists become a valuable marketing asset, driving organic growth and expanding the loyal customer base.

7. Establishing a distinguishable brand identity

Customer engagement also matters because it plays a crucial role in establishing and perpetuating a distinguishable brand identity. A well-thought-out engagement strategy that aligns with customer needs and preferences enables businesses to communicate their unique value proposition effectively. 

For instance, a skincare brand that consistently engages with customers through educational blog articles, social media content, and personalized skincare consultations can create a distinct brand identity as a trusted skincare expert. This helps customers differentiate the brand from competitors and fosters a sense of identification, leading to increased brand loyalty and recognition.

8. Enhanced customer service and satisfaction

Why is engagement in customer service important? Why does customer engagement matter so much now? If you are ticking all the boxes of a basic customer support checklist, that should be it, right? Wrong. 

A Zendesk report mentions that 81% of customers say a positive customer service experience increases the chances of them making another purchase. This is because effective customer engagement enables businesses to proactively interact with customers, anticipate their needs, and offer support beyond traditional channels. 

For example, a telecommunications company that engages customers through social media platforms and live chat support ensures quick and convenient access to assistance, increasing customer satisfaction. By providing excellent customer service and maintaining ongoing engagement, businesses can build trust and boost engagement, customer comments, loyalty, and positive customer experiences.

We hope the above points have answered why customer engagement, with its numerous advantages, has emerged as a powerful strategy for businesses. You can leverage these benefits by putting in place strategic efforts in the direction of engaging customers continuously and consistently.

What is an effective customer engagement strategy?

The most effective customer engagement strategy varies depending on the nature of the business and its target audience. However, a combination of the following strategies tends to be highly effective:

1. Personalization

Tailor experiences to individual customers’ preferences, purchase history, and behavior. Use data analytics to understand customer needs and offer personalized recommendations, content, and promotions.

2. Omnichannel approach

Provide a seamless experience across various channels like website, social media, mobile app, email, and in-store. Allow customers to interact with your brand through their preferred channels for improved customer engagement.

3. Interactive content

Create content such as quizzes, polls, and customer surveys. When customers interact with this content, it not only helps gather valuable insights into the customer journey but also makes the engagement experience more enjoyable. Customer questions can come as a goldmine of insights into your brand experience.

Conclusion

Remember, a positive customer engagement strategy can be pivotal in helping brands connect with their customers in a way that makes them want to continue to be their customers. If you put in the effort to engage customers across various channels and touchpoints above and beyond what’s necessary to get them to make a purchase, you are likely to form stronger relationships with them. If you interact with them regularly about what’s relevant to them, keeping in mind their needs, priorities, motivations, and aspirations, you constantly remind them that you care. 

Once you start offering more to engage your customers than just your product or service and adding value to their lives (or business), your customers are convinced to automatically turn to you whenever they think of making a purchase. This is why customer engagement is so important.

FAQs

Now let’s say Netflix is running a country-specific discount campaign. If you are part of this experiment campaign run by Netflix, how do they ensure that you are part of the same campaign every time you log in irrespective of the device and profile you’re using, and see the same promotion everywhere? How do they ensure that your experience with the variation you’re being served is seamless each time and that how you engage with the variation is tracked consistently?

The answer lies in omnichannel experimentation, which is a typical use case of server-side testing. 

Should you prefer server-side testing over client-side?

The Netflix example stated above would be extremely complicated to carry out on the client-side and could hamper the user experience. On the server side, it is relatively easy to run and ensures a consistent experience for users. It also ensures minimal impact on page performance. Besides this, it eradicates any privacy-related issues because there is no activity on the browser as such. 

There are other use-cases where server-side testing is recommended for its robustness and flexibility. We will talk about these in this article. But first, what exactly is server-side testing, and more importantly, who is it for?

In server-side testing, the test variations are processed on the web server. When a visitor lands on a page being tested, a variation is fetched directly from the server and delivered to the visitor’s browser. No subsequent modifications then take place on the front end or the browser. Contrary to this, in client-side testing, the original page loads first in the visitor’s browser and your experimentation platform creates the variation on the front-end itself using JavaScript. Let’s understand the scope of these two forms of testing with an example. 

Imagine Mike and Bob are two friends who are trying to experiment with the workings of a new car. Mike is at the wheel and has access to brakes, accelerator, dashboard, and the like. Bob has a view of the internal components like the engine, radiator, battery, etc. Both can influence the car in different ways. What Bob does with his access to the car components can reflect on the outside to Mike. The changes that Mike tests are based on his visibility of the car. From the car buyer’s perspective, the outcome of experiments run by both Bob and Mike can serve equally important, but different purposes. 

Therefore, you don’t have to choose one form of testing over the other. The use-cases are different and the teams using the tools are different. Server-side testing is an experimentation avenue for developers and product managers, just like client-side testing is used more often by marketers. 

Which problems can be addressed with server-side testing?

Server-side tests run by product teams solve problems concerning a myriad of industries from eCommerce and SaaS to banking and media. Some important use-cases where server-side testing is recommended over client-side testing in different industries are described below: 

Product recommendation

Which set of recommended products entices your visitors to purchase more? Server-side testing allows you to test multiple product recommendation algorithms to determine the selection that leads to an increase in sales and revenue. For instance, you can test whether a layout that promotes similar products works better than a layout that promotes the most popular ones. You can also decide whether to upsell or cross-sell based on your server-side experiment findings. 

Shipping fee

What is the ideal cart value that should qualify orders for free shipping? You can test out various thresholds to determine the one that positively influences customers’ purchase decisions. 

Search algorithms

Experimenting with your search algorithm requires modification to your existing code and the flexibility to test deep. You want your visitors to be able to quickly find what they are looking for and you can test your search algorithm on the server-side to achieve this. 

Form length

Free trial and demo request forms are crucial to SaaS businesses. But what is the ideal form length that ensures lesser drop-offs while also capturing all the required information? You can test out the non-mandatory fields via client-side testing. If your field is obligatory, just hiding the field using JavaScript will not work as form validation using server-side logic will fail. Hence server-side testing is recommended to experiment with mandatory fields to optimize your form length and complexity. 

Deals and discounts

While the style, look and feel, and placement of deals on your home page can be tested easily on the client-side, there are other important factors like the value of the discount, its duration, or eligibility criteria to consider. You can test on the server-side to determine the optimal value and ensure that they are consistent across channels for a particular visitor. 

Sales incentives

Testing dynamic incentives like limited-period offers or stock clearances require the flexibility of server-side testing because of the granularity involved.  

Subscription flows

How many steps should ideally be involved in a subscription process? Should social logins be provided? Experimenting with the subscription flow can help answer these questions.

Paywalls

Server-side testing allows you to test various paywall configurations in a fool-proof manner. As a publisher, you can run server-side tests to experiment with your gated content and monetize it. Running the same test on the client side is not recommended, because visitors can make their way around a paywall by deleting or opting out of cookies. 

Mobile banking

Multiple elements can be optimized within the sign-up process for a loan or a credit card. But when it comes to mobile banking, data security becomes paramount. With client-side testing, sensitive data collected by banks or financial institutions could be at a vulnerability risk. To avoid this risk, server-side experiments are usually recommended for banking applications. 

Let us now understand how you can run Feature tests on the server side and the advantages of doing so with VWO. 

How VWO makes server-side tests easier

For the server-side use-cases described above, VWO gives you the flexibility to structure your campaign either as A/B tests or Feature tests. Feature tests are used to validate values of feature parameters and give you the control to quickly configure a feature, without writing code. In some use-cases like testing which search algorithm is better, it is possible to structure the campaign both as an A/B test or Feature test. 

For instance, say you want to evaluate three vendors for the search algorithm they have built for your website.

Feature testing enables a product manager like you to quickly test and conclude with minimum dependency on engineering and maximum control of the configuration. With VWO’s Feature testing capabilities, you get a set framework where you need to write less code because the platform does most of the heavy lifting for you. In Feature testing, the algorithm can be defined as a feature variable and be configured in control and variation of an experiment from the platform setup flow itself to test which search algorithm is more efficient.

This experiment can be done via server-side A/B testing also. VWO facilitates the traffic distribution and experimentation statistics model capability via its server-side SDKs. Engineering teams can use the same to insert the code of the search algorithms and test which is more impactful.

Here are some other scenarios where Feature testing comes in handy. Say that a third-party vendor handling mobile recharges wants to charge a nominal amount to users per recharge. They want to test the appropriate amount for the same. Or a company like Airbnb, where the property charges are handled by the owner, wants to add in a cleaning fee and see if that impacts the number of bookings. This is a typical experimentation use-case for various companies to find the sweet spot where a service charge can be inserted without impacting the north star metric. It could be in the form of a convenience fee, facility fee, covid fee, packaging fee, or something similar. 

Complex use-cases like the one described above are super easy to test in VWO. Here’s an explainer video that shows you how you can quickly create a convenience fee feature and assign a value to it (in this case the amount of the fee). You can link your hypothesis of identifying the fee that adds to revenue without impacting the number of bookings, choose the environment you’re running the test on, and enable your variations. Once you do that, you’re provided with a campaign code that goes on your server. All that remains is for you to define the goals you want to track and segment your audiences if you wish to – that’s it, your campaign is ready.

If you are a product manager and you see on the dashboard that variation 3 is not working for the users; it is negatively impacting revenue, you can kill it right there by simply disabling the variation in VWO. As shown in the screenshot below, this does not impact the code and doesn’t require your engineering team to make any changes. You need to turn it off, click ‘save’, and the variation stops receiving traffic.

Essentially, the code needs to be implemented only once per campaign.

Should you build or buy a platform to run server-side tests?

Let’s put an end to the build vs. buy debate. VWO is not just a random number generator that shows different variations to different audiences and captures conversion events. VWO is a complete experimentation platform with a robust statistical model. To weigh in on whether to build a server-side testing mechanism in-house or invest in a platform like VWO, you need to consider three primary factors:

1. Cost of ownership 

Even when companies manage to build the required infrastructure in-house, they still need to manage and scale it. Paying your development teams to build and maintain an experimentation engine like VWO instead of focusing on their core jobs is likely to end up being more time-consuming and costly for you than investing in VWO.

2. Ease of use

You could build a solution that shows a certain variation to a certain audience – but would you have an easy-to-use interface that can be controlled not only by the engineering teams but also by product managers? If not, that’s another blocker for you to run server-side tests. 

3. Intuitive reporting

Typically an in-house solution would give you basic things like the number of visitors and the conversions that are coming from a particular variation. But what you need is a statistically significant result. You need your reports to be powered by a Bayesian statistics engine like VWO SmartStats. That’s where the gap lies – you can build a basic solution that’s hard to maintain and you can spend time and resources on deciphering the p-values. Or you can choose a solution like VWO where there’s a team dedicated to maintaining and scaling it and has spent years on the Bayesian algorithm to give you easily interpretable results. The in-app dashboard in VWO enables even your non-technical team members to understand results; they don’t need to rely on the Analytics team to keep track of experiments or create result dashboards – thus saving time and reducing the cost of experimentation.

4. Error-free mechanism

Building a server-side testing solution in-house can be prone to errors, and on that scale, the errors might not be easily discoverable. Compare that to the quality of a platform that is used by global brands and you’re ensured that the chances of errors creeping in are minuscule. Any errors, if at all, are flagged and rectified at the earliest by a capable support team available to you. 

Besides, when you invest in a managed platform like VWO, important best practices are built into the product. You don’t have to worry about removing the outliers from your results, visualizing your data, or about issues arising due to version updates.

Must-have capabilities to run complex server-side tests with integrity

Running server-side experiments can be very fruitful when executed correctly. To do so, you need to have the right set of feature capabilities. Some of these are laid out below:

1. Randomization of visitors in each test – In testing, when you’re bucketing your audience into campaigns, the randomization of visitors needs to be truly random and not pseudo-random.
2. Consistent omnichannel experience – While the bucketing of users needs to be random, you also need to ensure that one user experiences the same variation each time they log in, irrespective of the device they are using. The experiment should carry forward without any glitches. 
3. Mutually exclusive campaigns – Let’s say you have three factors to consider while determining whether a user should be part of your test. These could be usage regularity, low likelihood of churn, and timezone. Apart from taking into consideration these variables, you also need to determine exclusivity – so how many tests can the user fulfilling these conditions be a part of? This needs to be determined in a way that doesn’t lead to skewed data and enables you to attribute the improvement in conversion rate to the right campaign without bias. 
4. Standardized naming convention – Whether you’re setting up a new feature to test or a feature flag, you need to follow a standard naming convention to avoid mix-ups and cases of initializing the wrong features or tests. 
5. Unique and hassle-free campaign identifiers – You should use an alphanumeric key to uniquely identify the test in your code and avoid any hassles at a later stage. 
6. Choosing the right environment – You should specify the environment in which you’re running your test – for instance, you can deploy the test in the staging or QA environment for your QA team to validate the experiment. A sanity check of your test is crucial to its success and you should have the option to choose the right environment for it. 
7. Logical traffic allocation – When you’re running multiple campaigns or when you have an important event announcement like a Black Week Sale, for instance, you need not include the entire set of visitors landing on your page in your test. You should choose the percentage of traffic that you want to include in your test campaign and also how you want to distribute this traffic among the variations. 
8. Calculation of the time to reach statistical significance – Your estimated time for your test to reach statistical significance should be determined by the present conversion rate of your primary goal and the minimum improvement that you wish to achieve through your variations. It should also consider a 95% probability to beat the baseline conversion rate. 

These are some of the best practices and must-have features of server-side testing – the actual list is much longer. As mentioned earlier, you could either build these capabilities in-house, or you could use VWO where we do the job for you. 

In conclusion

Whether you’re a developer or a product manager, you don’t need to limit your test ideas. You can run complex tests without fearing performance or privacy issues with server-side testing and solve real issues faced by your customers. You can optimize every digital touchpoint so that your customers experience only the best.  

If you’re using a platform like VWO, the complexity of the test will not overwhelm you – because every input of yours in the campaign is intuitive and a good practice that powers your test. To understand more about how you can run server-side tests with ease using VWO, request a demo with our product experts. 

What does privacy mean for an Experimentation Platform?

As data powers experiments, upholding the confidentiality and security of this data becomes essential. If you’re a company that runs experiments, you are governed by data privacy, security, and compliance laws applicable in your region. Therefore, it becomes essential for you to choose a privacy-first experimentation tool.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

The question then arises – How do you know if you can trust an experimentation platform to meet the necessary privacy-related criteria? To ascertain this, you need to evaluate what kind of data is collected by the platform, where it is stored, how it is used, and if there are any security, privacy, and compliance risks. 

In this article, we’ve answered these crucial questions in the purview of VWO. 

At VWO, we believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. We are committed to providing you with products, information, controls, and transparency that allow you to choose how your information, and that of your users, visitors, and customers, is processed. We owe our growth to our customers, and winning their trust is our top priority. Therefore, keeping customer data confidential and compliant is paramount to us. 

Security is at the heart of how we build our products, policies, and processes to provide high resiliency. We follow security-by-design principles to protect information systems and customer information so that you can experiment and build the best customer experience using the platform you truly trust.

Which data is collected by VWO?

The entirety of the data gathered by VWO is classified into the following two categories:

• Customer Account Data: This is the customer’s data of VWO, associated with their purchase and use of the VWO Experimentation platform and services. This data includes customers’ login and contact information, campaign configurations, account configurations, billing configurations, and other similar data necessary to use and run the VWO application.
• User Data: This is the data of the visitors or end-users (who arrive at the customers’ websites/applications) collected as part of the campaigns executed via VWO. This data powers all the features in the VWO application viz session recordings, heatmaps, surveys, A/B tests, MVTs, etc.

VWO servers collect and store UUID (Unique User Identifier) information in the pseudonymized format. A UUID is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems. As VWO pseudonymizes the UUID before storing it using a one-way hashing function, the information that can point to the identity of a visitor is replaced by “pseudonyms,” and the identity is protected.  

VWO servers store user agent data, including the following information for customers using the report segmentation in VWO’s Experimentation Platform:

• IP Address of the visitor in an anonymized format.
• Referring URL to know from where the visitor came to your website.
• Type of visitor – new or returning.
• A location such as country, city, and region. You can select what level of location information you want to store here.
• Information on the device used to access the website, including the OS, user agent, mobile/tablet/desktop, and browser.
• Time of the visitor action or goals data includes clicks, scrolls, revenue, etc.

This data is collected as the end-user or visitor interacts with your website.

For one of our products – ‘VWO Insights’, VWO servers process additional data types for heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and other features that provide visitor behavior insights:

• Recordings of visitors’ actions on the website to analyze visitor behavior in a video format. 
• Scroll data to understand the depth of user interaction on your website content.
• Mouse movements to analyze visitor behavior on a page.
• Mutations.
• Device orientation and change behavior for mobile devices.
• HTML content of the webpage.

For lawful grounds for the processing of data, data subject rights, and purposes of processing of personal data, please refer to our privacy policy. 

Where does VWO store data?

VWO has always been fully compliant with GDPR. Both VWO customers’ and their users’ data has historically been stored and processed in the US-based data center, complying with GDPR law. This data center serves over 2500 satisfied customers globally, with more than a thousand in the European Union.

We took the next natural step with a continued commitment to privacy and security. We recently launched a European Union(EU) data center to ensure that user data doesn’t leave the international EU borders. Hosted in Belgium (Europe-west1 of GCP), this data center caters to those who prefer to store and manage their end-user data within the EU. The data of the visitors as processed by VWO is as per the Data Protection Agreement (DPA) for the entities that choose to configure their accounts with this data center.

How safe is your data with VWO? Can it be leaked, distributed, or accessed?

VWO’s enterprise-grade platform has been designed keeping in mind the high level of security expected by world-class businesses. With VWO, you can rest assured that any data stored by us remains safe, confidential, and accessible. By ‘safe,’ we mean that the data will be protected against any type of loss or corruption.  ‘Confidential’ means access to the data is granted only to authorized personnel, and by ‘accessible,’ we mean that the data is available only to authorized users whenever required.

This data protection guarantee comes from a combination of physical and code security, configurable application access, regular vulnerability scans, and consistent data availability. You can read more about this in our knowledge base article. 

How does VWO manage data deletion and access?

By default, VWO identifies and anonymizes any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or users’ sensitive data before storing it on its servers. PII includes passwords, social security numbers, phone, card information, and other personal data. 

For deleted or expired accounts, the data is deleted within 45 to 90 days from the date of expiry. As a VWO customer, you can write to VWO support requesting immediate deletion of accounts or specific user data if you want to prioritize this. 
VWO has established policies and procedures to dispose of electronic and physical media containing PII, account data, and sensitive and confidential information to ensure its servers’ data security. You can read more about it in our knowledge base article.

How is VWO’s product strategy aligned to our privacy-first approach?

At VWO, we back ourselves up with robust data security and privacy practices that form an integral part of our product engineering and development. These principles have a robust framework for building secure systems that address all threat vectors by default and by design.

Keeping in line with this, the below settings are a part of our product suite:

1. You can opt your visitors out of VWO tracking without hampering their experience on your website.

Even though VWO never tracks the end user’s personal data, your visitors have the choice to opt out of getting tracked by VWO. 

As a website owner, you can make your visitors opt out of VWO by either generating an opt-out link and sharing it with your website visitors or using VWO’s opt-out API. 

The opt-out API has two versions. When you fire this API in the first version, all VWO cookies are deleted, and VWO stops visitor tracking immediately. If the visitor in question returns to the page, they will still not be considered for VWO tracking. Therefore, they won’t see any campaign changes on return visits.

In the second version, you can opt a visitor out of VWO tracking but still show the experience (campaign changes) that they have seen earlier. For example, say a visitor has seen variation A of a specific campaign, and you now want to opt them out of VWO tracking while showing the same variation to the visitor on his return visits. When you fire this API, VWO stops visitor tracking immediately. However, the visitors continue to see the same variation they were previously a part of.

2. You can easily seek consent before collecting visitor data, and you can do so more responsibly than before.

In view of applicable data protection laws, it is necessary to display a cookie banner informing visitors about cookies or obtain consent before tracking their data. This ensures that you can only do so with their permission if you use tools/scripts on your website to identify individuals and their personal information.

VWO gives you the option to configure triggers for VWO Insights so that you can track visitor data more carefully, responsibly, and with consent. Any visitor action can be used to trigger the collection of Insights data. You can write custom JavaScript code that can listen for visitor actions, and decide based on the kind of pages visited or any scenario you want to validate before collecting Insights data. This knowledge base article describes the process of setting up a custom trigger in VWO.

How do we ensure cookie compliance?

VWO uses cookies and local storage to understand visitors’ behavior and track visitor journeys on your website to deliver the best experiences. The cookies identify the variation in an experiment that the visitor views and help serve the same variation to the visitor consistently. These cookies also track visitor actions, determine whether they are part of a campaign, etc. However, the only information that VWO collects about a cookie is a visitor ID, i.e., a UUID explained previously above that does not contain any personal data. This UUID helps distinguish one visitor from another, but no individual or consumer can be tracked or identified by VWO. 

As part of compliance requirements under applicable data protection laws and regulations like GDPR, PECR, CCPA, etc., it is necessary to obtain informed consent from visitors before deploying any cookies or trackers to process their data. VWO does not collect any sensitive information. However, as a user, the decision to implement VWO with cookie consent or not is entirely up to you. Always consult your legal counsel to determine which implementation is appropriate for you. They can help you make an informed decision considering the data privacy rules of the countries you operate.

The VWO SmartCode is an automatically generated code snippet that you must add to enable VWO on your website. You can choose to execute the SmartCode without the visitor’s consent, i.e., you do not require any permission before deploying cookies or trackers to process visitors’ data. You can also choose to execute the SmartCode after obtaining the visitors’ consent (this is for VWO Insights and Engage; the Testing campaigns execute without the visitors’ permission). You can also go for conditional execution – here, the SmartCode is executed only after visitors’ consent is obtained, irrespective of the product you’re using. Furthermore, VWO communicates with cookie consent managers via callback when the visitor accepts or rejects the cookie, allowing you to run the SmartCode based on valid consent.

Depending on the data privacy rules in the countries you operate, you can make an informed decision. This knowledge base article discusses choosing the correct method for implementing the SmartCode.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

How does VWO ensure security?

More than 2500+ customers trust the VWO Experience Optimization Platform with their data, and this responsibility is something we take very seriously. All data reaching VWO servers from recordings, survey responses, or the custom dimension is encrypted using the industry-standard AES-256 encryption algorithm. You can read this knowledge base article for details.

We’ve also incorporated security fundamentals into the following aspects of our daily operations:

Organizational structure and governance

Wingify (makers of VWO) has established a Corporate Security and Compliance Team (CSC) consisting of key personnel whose responsibility is to identify security and compliance concerns across the company.  This team acts as the first line of defense in enhancing the appropriate security and compliance posture. This team reports to the CEO.

Risk management – ISO

ISO/IEC 27701:2019 (ISO 27701) is internationally recognized and a global privacy standard that focuses on the collection and processing of personally identifiable information (PII). Any ISO/IEC 27701 audit requires the organization to declare applicable laws/regulations in its criteria for the audit. This means that the standard can be mapped to many of the requirements under GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other laws. Once mapped, privacy professionals implement the ISO/IEC 27701 operational controls and audited by internal or third-party auditors, resulting in certification and comprehensive evidence of conformity.

VWO has received an accredited ISO/IEC 27701:2019 certification as a PII processor and controller after undergoing an audit by an independent third party.

ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (ISO 27001) is an internationally-recognized framework that specifies the requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and improving information security management within an organization. VWO has received the ISO 27001:2013 certification from British Standards Institution (BSI), the international standards company. The ISO 27001:2013 certification demonstrates our commitment to information security at every level. Compliance with this internationally-recognized standard validated by an independent third-party audit confirms that our security management program is comprehensive and follows industry-leading practices.

Access management

All users in a VWO account are assigned an access level that determines the actions users can perform in the VWO account. If you are an account owner or administrator, you can change the access level at any point in time.

Authentication and password management

To ensure the sanctity of your VWO account, we have added an extra layer of security in the form of two-factor authentication (2FA) that prevents bad actors from accessing your data, even if they know your password.

Two-factor authentication(2FA) relies on two security measures to prevent intruders from gaining access to your VWO account. Once 2FA is enabled, to sign in to your account, you’ll need to provide something you know, i.e., your password, and something you have, i.e., a six-digit one-time code sent to your email at the login time (or by using popular TOTP based apps to generate the code).

With 2FA, you can ensure that your account is not compromised even if a malicious virus exposes your password or hackers gain access to your password by brute force.

Session management

Every time a VWO user signs in to the VWO account, the system assigns a new session identifier for the user. The session identifier is a 64-byte random generated value to protect the account against brute force attacks. After seven days, all sessions time out, requiring the users to sign in to their account again. Also, all the active sessions are set to time out after 4 hours of inactivity.

Network and transmission security

VWO is hosted on secure servers managed by GCP. Any physical access to the GCP data centers is restricted to everyone. Firewalls are configured using industry best practices, and all unnecessary ports are blocked.

As a VWO user, you are always connected to the VWO web app via HTTPS using Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.2 and higher, a cryptographic protocol designed to protect against eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery.

Access control

You can assign roles and permissions to each user you add to your account to ensure an appropriate level of access to your VWO account. You can restrict access to your VWO account to specific IP addresses. You can also enable alerts to email you whenever particular activities occur in your account.

Internal access to data

The data stored on VWO’s production servers are accessible only to the SVP of Engineering and lead engineers. No other member of VWO has access to customer data unless specific access permission is granted by the Chief Executive Officer and SVP-Engineering for resolving technical issues.

Security in engineering as part of product development

Thorough quality checks are an integral part of our development process. No code goes live unless reviewed and approved by the QA team. The staging or test environment is fully separated from production and does not use any production data. Any new feature goes through a security review before being deployed to production. Also, external VAPT (Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing) audits are carried out at the system level to assess for potential vulnerabilities. 

Data breach

In the event of a breach in data security, we notify our customers within forty-eight hours of the incident’s detection. We have incident management policies and procedures to handle such events or emergencies.

What does all this mean for the customers of VWO?

As a customer of VWO, what this means for you in a nutshell, is as below:

• VWO collects only such data necessary for security and for the purposes of product enhancement, marketing, and analytics – and with your visitors’ consent. Any personal information, if collected, is anonymized. 
• This data is stored securely and as per applicable data protection laws including GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA, POPIA, DPDPA, etc.
• This data remains safe, confidential, and accessible to you at all times. 
• Robust and safe processes govern data deletion if your account with us is deleted or expired. 
• Privacy forms an integral part of our product strategy, and any product enhancements are designed on privacy-first principles.
• We ensure cookie compliance as part of data protection policies like GDPR.
• We ensure the security of your data with the help of our Corporate Security and Compliance Team by procuring and maintaining information security certification through robust access, password and session management, and relevant disaster management policies. 

Our Corporate Security and Compliance Team, along with members of our senior leadership, have taken the following measures:

• We have raised awareness across the organization through frequent discussions in our internal channels and trained employees to handle data appropriately.
• We have assessed all our products individually against the requirements of the GDPR. We have implemented new features that will give you more control over your data and ease your burden of achieving GDPR compliance.
• We have appointed internal privacy trust champions for all our teams. We have also established a Data Protection Officer (DPO).
• Our application teams have embraced the concept of privacy by design and have provided you with more control over the data you store in our systems. We constantly endeavor to provide you with more enhancements, rolled out in phases. We have implemented appropriate organizational, technical, administrative, and physical safeguards to protect our organization’s security, confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of Personal Information and customer data.

With these measures in place, as a customer of VWO, you are compliant with privacy laws, your data is safe with us, and the privacy of your website visitors is respected and protected at all times. 

As an experiment owner not using VWO, it is not sufficient if you’re simply privacy-conscious. You will need to prioritize data privacy and integrate it within your experimentation stack as well as your roadmap. You can get in touch with our product experts if you wish to understand more about how VWO can help you do so.

Many websites are built as Single Page Applications (SPAs) as they have few key advantages over traditional static websites: Dynamic websites are fast, compact and responsive. Such websites enable you to optimize the content that your visitor sees to create engaging and unique experiences. If you hear from your development team that your website is built using React, Vue, AngularJS, Ember, or Backbone, you are probably working with a SPA, and this article is relevant to you.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

In this article, we talk about how we, at VWO, make experimentation on dynamic websites effective and easy with in-built support for SPA testing so that you focus only on your website experience optimization efforts and nothing else.  

But first, let’s talk about the problem that brought you here in the first place.

Challenges of running experiments on dynamic websites

You are probably here because when you are running experiments on a SPA, the changes you make to your landing page are not visible to the end-users. As a result, you cannot test and validate your ideas as quickly as you want and this leaves you frustrated.

Firstly, let’s understand that SPAs are different from traditional websites. The entire web page loads each time someone visits a conventional website. In SPA, however, only some sections of the page are updated. This is because, in SPAs, resources like HTML, CSS, Scripts, etc., which build the look and feel of your webpage, are only loaded once.

Based on how the visitor interacts with different parts of the web page, what you see on a specific section of the page dynamically changes in response to the visitor’s action. Say, if a visitor clicks a button, a pop-up opens. This pop-up is the dynamic change made by the framework as per the visitor interaction without impacting performance. Some more examples where there is dynamic change on a SPA are as below:

• Items on a search result list that can be expanded to view its details.
• In a form, some fields appear on the page only when a visitor selects a predefined value from a dropdown.
• The website uses some components like a calendar, color picker, etc. which get re-loaded every time the user needs to use them.

While this is good for user experience, running a test campaign with changes made to any of these dynamic elements (like search result lists, dropdowns, widgets, pop-ups, banners, etc.) on your web pages becomes difficult. This is because the modifications made to a component need to get applied every time something dynamically changes on the website. 

Think of it this way – you are running a test on a webpage. Every time the webpage loads when a visitor visits the page or the page creates a dynamic element as described above, the SPA framework shows the original state (different from the variation you want to show as part of your test).

What you need is an experimentation platform that ensures that your test variation replaces the original view so that the visitors see the variation you want them to see. So, while setting a test on a SPA, (say you’re testing the content within a pop-up box), you will expect the test control and variation to look like this:

But, in absence of SPA-support, the changes made on the variation will revert to control, making both look identical. Quite like this:

This is just a simplified version of what is happening. If you are interested in understanding technically what happens behind the screen, keep reading ahead, else you can skip to the next section of the article.

Some website frameworks like GatsbyJS, Next.js, ReactJS, etc., use server-side rendering and store a snapshot of your original webpage as it should load. So, when you modify an element on the page for testing purposes, the framework detects the change as an ‘issue’ and reverts the page to its original state as it appears in the stored snapshot. This, in turn, hinders your A/B test.

Secondly, the latest frameworks like React, Gatsby, Next.js, Vue.js, Angular, etc., use the concept of state-based rendering. For example, in React, whenever a change is implemented in one of the states due to the A/B test variation, the website’s interface automatically reloads itself to its original form, so visitors never see the variation. This creates a sub-optimal experience for website visitors.

How VWO makes experimentation on Single Page Applications effortless

Now that we have discussed the problem, let’s talk about the solution. VWO’s advanced native SPA support in its Visual Editor, which is part of VWO Testing, ensures that modifications made in an experiment get applied in SPAs to ensure the campaigns’ reliability and give a frictionless experience to your visitors. 

1. Testing dynamic elements on your website

While dynamic elements have been defined in the previous section, let’s look at them closely with a specific example. Consider that you have an eCommerce website. Upon clicking the ‘X’ (Close) button on the ‘Cart page’, an alert appears as a pop-up. Now, you would like to test copy changes on the action box to see if actionable messaging and Call to Action could keep people from closing the Cart page. The alert box is not initially present on the website code but gets added upon by the SPA framework when the visitor clicks on the ‘X’ (Close) button. Here, the button that opens the pop-up you are running the test on is called the target element.

VWO ensures that the change you want to test is applied to the pop-up as soon as it loads. All you have to do is enable a setting with the click of a button. You can read more about this setting in our knowledge base article.

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

How does VWO ensure that the changes are applied correctly?

Easy. 

VWO watches the page elements (videos, images, tables, sections, etc.) for changes made to them at any point in time. Therefore, when the target element (the Close ‘X’ button in the example above) loads, VWO detects it and applies the modification you made in the Variation. This happens even if the web page is not reloaded, but the visitor just interacts with a section on the website.

Let’s get a little technical and explore it further. You can comfortably skip this and move to the next point if technical details are not for you.

In a dynamic website, based on user behavior, elements are added, removed, or modified. A DOM tree is like a repository of all website components (buttons, banners, pop-ups, widgets, etc.) and keeps a snapshot of the current state of the website.

VWO’s library uses Mutation Observer – a browser interface that allows VWO to observe changes in the DOM tree of a SPA. This helps detect any new element added, removed, or modified on the page. In such an event, VWO applies the changes on the elements automatically. So whenever elements dynamically load, changes are applied before they are shown to the visitor. This improves the reliability of campaigns, ensuring that the changes in the variations are applied completely.

How does VWO manage changes hindered by framework rendering?

VWO keeps the CTA button hidden until the framework rendering is complete. VWO repeatedly checks if the rendering is done. Once the framework rendering is complete, the VWO campaign starts executing.

You can read more about these settings in our knowledge base article.

2. Testing any other page element on your website

When a page loads, modern SPA frameworks revert modified elements to their original state every time the website loads. So, if you are testing the page, all your modifications will be reverted to the original. Not just the dynamic elements, but for all elements on the page, VWO keeps track of the changes you have made to tackle the challenge of testing with the SPA framework. While applying these changes to your webpage, VWO detects all changes made on the page (insertion, deletion, and modification of DOM nodes) by the test and re-applies them to ensure regularity in user experience. 

No explicit actions are required to enable this improvement on VWO. This is an in-built feature available for all VWO campaigns built with the Visual Editor, irrespective of the framework on which your website is built.

Let’s look at some use-case examples of changes that the VWO Visual Editor handles.

1. Say you’ve removed a secondary CTA button ( say “Add to wishlist”) from your eCommerce website to test if this change affects the number of clicks on the primary CTA (say “Add to cart”). This is a testing use case where you delete an element on the website. Even though you have deleted the button, it persists in the virtual DOM created by frameworks like React and will throw an error when the website loads.

2. Now imagine that your eCommerce website has a registration flow that shows a text input box to capture visitors’ email addresses besides the ‘Submit now’ button. When you make changes to the look and feel of the text input box, the styled-components of the website associated with it change. VWO’s Visual Editor ensures that the latest applied changes are what the visitors see. Watch how you can make changes to a form field in a SPA and make sure that the visitors sampled for the variation see those changes instead of seeing control.

How to use VWO for your Single Page Application?

To use VWO for your SPA, you simply need to add the VWO SmartCode in the head section of your website and enjoy the default support for SPA websites.

With integration as simple as this, you can get started right away. Sign up for a free trial, explore VWO’s capabilities, or request a demo with our product experts. You can also learn more about our latest, exciting product updates.

With an increasing number of companies choosing to opt for the right conversion rate optimization (CRO) solutions, this partnership is positioned to elevate the CRO and experimentation arena in the Japanese market. 

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

VWO’s robust experimentation platform and award-winning customer support combined with Gaprise’s expertise in digital marketing technology and ever-widening global network of technology vendors will help fast-growing companies in Japan expand their CRO avenues through experimentation. 

With this partnership, Gaprise takes a giant leap forward towards its vision to scour the best technology solutions from around the world and in turn offer greater value to its customers. The company aims to uplift the digital marketing environment in Japan by helping clients get the most out of their experimentation roadmap through VWO, and in the process, grow their business.  

“We’ve partnered with VWO considering their flexible pricing structure that Japanese customers can choose from, and also as the platform supports native Japanese – again something that hugely benefits the market. As a solution partner offering consultancy services, we are sure this partnership will help our clients strengthen their CRO activities and accelerate their digital growth.”, says Keiji Doi, Chief Operating Officer, Gaprise.  

With over a decade of experience, Gaprise has a unique foothold in Japan through its strong alliances with hyper-growth startups like Monday.com, Yotpo, and ContentSquare, among others. 

For VWO, this partnership strengthens its position as a leading A/B testing solutions provider in the Asia-Pacific region. With a product suite that caters to every requirement of effective experimentation – from visitor behavior insights to validating the CRO roadmap through testing – the company is strategically placed to add further impetus to the growing CRO market in Japan. 

“We’re very excited to have Gaprise join our growing partner network. This partnership strengthens our commitment to enable Japanese brands to build delightful digital experiences. We’re optimistic that our easy and intuitive experimentation platform combined with Gaprise’s consulting expertise will go a long way in creating a significant impact on clients’ businesses through well-suited optimization strategies.”, says Sparsh Gupta, Co-founder & CEO, Wingify (makers of VWO).

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

About Gaprise

Gaprise is a company that supports digital business, with a focus on digital marketing. We search the world, and especially Israel, for ground-breaking and valuable technology solutions, and present our discoveries to markets and our client companies. Many of the technologies we handle have functions that enable deeper analysis than is possible with the technologies of our Japanese competitors or have functions that are unique and already becoming the global world standard but have yet to gain major recognition in Japan. With our eye on the markets of the future, we commenced sales activities in 2012.
As a result of many growing companies incorporating these technologies into their businesses, we have also contributed – albeit in a modest way – to the conception and creation of new markets. Furthermore, with partners that are publicly listed companies – such as monday.com and Riskified – or that have grown into mega-businesses by successfully procuring capital in the order of several hundred million dollars – such as Contentsquare and Yotpo – Gaprise is demonstrating increasingly stronger leadership in a diverse range of markets.

About VWO

VWO helps more than 2500 brands like Domino’s, HBO, eBay, and Disney create and deliver digital experiences loved by their customers. It is a connected platform that offers insights into visitor behavior, planning, and A/B testing capabilities, and easy deployment of changes – all within the same environment – to empower businesses to improve conversions across the entire customer journey. Conversion rate optimization experts in more than 90 countries trust VWO to perform data-driven A/B testing on their products and apps. 

Customer buying behavior is continuously evolving. This is why converting website visitors to paid customers is becoming increasingly difficult. If your goal is conversion optimization, I am confident you will resonate with the fact that ‘just’ having customer data is not sufficient to build relevant experiences.

Download Free: Landing Page Optimization Guide

You could be sitting on a pile of data containing customer interactions, behaviors, preferences, and buying journeys across various customer data platforms, ABM tools, marketing automation systems, and other similar data repositories. But is that enough? How you leverage all this data is central to optimizing experiences, and it’s what changes the game in your favor. What you need is the ability to test your ideas and target an experiment based on patterns found in such data repositories.

Now, we make this simple for you with the VWO Experimentation Platform. We have rule-based personalization where you can target an A/B test to a specific segment of visitors based on the data you have on them. Not just this, you can also personalize the experience, i.e. make one landing page and show a different copy to different visitors using individual data via dynamic text.

VWO gives you the flexibility to perform advanced tests like multivariate, multi-device, multi-page(the funnel), and mutually exclusive tests and also enables you to formulate a hypothesis by looking at real-time behavioral insights of your website visitors. The advanced targeting and dynamic text capabilities help you further personalize your experiences and target specific customer cohorts important to your business.

This article will help you dive into how VWO’s advanced customer targeting can validate your personalization ideas, create relevant experiences, and boost ROI.

Let’s dive into how you can run testing campaigns using advanced targeting

Firstly, let’s discuss what capabilities advanced targeting brings to the table. With advanced targeting, you can target audiences in your tests in three ways – using

• Pre-defined Audiences 
• Attribute-based Uploaded Audiences
• Third-Party Data Audiences

Pre-defined Audiences are different behavior-based visitor segments on your website created on the basis of actions like clicks on an element, time spent on a page, page scrolls, and exit intent. Attributes List helps you target VWO campaigns to a specific audience using visitor attributes. You need to create a list with visitor attributes such as Cookie values, JavaScript Variables, or any other identifier and upload it to VWO. Third-Party Audiences are custom segments you create by connecting VWO to your tech stack so that you can use data specific to your customer cohorts.

Depending on the third-party integration, this can be a behavioral segment like anonymous users, repeat users, users inactive for 90 days, or ABM metrics like revenue range, industry, etc. You can also build complex segments by combining the three using logic conditions and saving them for reuse later.

Now, let’s see how you use this capability to validate your testing ideas.

Imagine that you have customers across Europe and North America, and data tell you that 10% of your European customers have been inactive in the last six months (which says you are tracking by Lytics). As part of your digital strategy, you would like to test whether a promotional offer communicated to this particular set of customers would motivate them to reactivate their accounts. With Advanced Targeting capability, you can run an experiment to target a variation with the promotional offer to only the traffic originating from Europe and fulfilling the inactive condition. Our client-side experimentation interface makes this easy to do for even non-developers.

Watch how easily you can set conditions and pull third-party customer data (which in this case is behavioral data from Lytics) to create said customer cohorts, and run personalized A/B Test campaigns from within the VWO platform.

Our robust, easy-to-understand reporting will help you determine if your hypothesis is true. Suppose your variation is giving an uplift from your baseline conversion which is also statistically significant, don’t worry, the VWO Bayesian-powered Stats engine takes care of recommending the next steps. In that case, you can confidently and quickly deploy the winning variation to your customer segment and convert your testing idea into an excellent experience for your customers. 

Use cases for Advanced Targeting

Experimentation with advanced targeting capability opens up a whole set of new use cases that were (almost) impossible earlier using the conventional targeting methods that focus on demographics – device, browser, location, etc. Some examples of value-based use cases are:

• Campaign to make anonymous visitors convert by showing them a specific promotion while running a different promotion for highly engaged visitors. 
• Delivering customized content using visitors’ company or industry type. 
• Experiment to deliver personalized, relevant content using visitors’ company revenue range and employee range.

Let’s expand a use case in detail to see how it evolves into a personalization idea. Say you want to create a variation in an experiment for a visitor who has displayed the following attributes.

You can create a custom segment with the above attributes from within VWO. Watch how easily you can add conditions to segment your audience and target them with a personalized variation.

Let’s assume your data confirms that visitors with these attributes come with the specific intent of understanding your product in more detail and exploring the pricing options available. You can then personalize the sales message you want to display on the home page specifically for these visitors. Finally, your A/B testing tool targets this specific set of visitors by showing them the variation with the personalized sales message and gives you results on whether the messaging is a hit or a miss.

Download Free: Landing Page Optimization Guide

Where can the data come from? Almost anywhere.

Third-party Integrations

Ideally, you should integrate your experimentation platform with your data tools to run A/B tests at scale with the unique customer cohorts from your data repositories. 

For example, if you’re managing an eCommerce store on Mixpanel, you want to run an experiment on the checkout page only for visitors who are part of your store’s loyalty program. Our native integration with Mixpanel will allow you to select this cohort as the audience for your experiment on the checkout page. 

Similarly, if you use DemandBase for your personalization needs, you can deliver personalized content to any user from a specific company’s IP address and test its impact, or run A/B tests only for targeted companies meeting certain criteria, for example, all fortune 100 companies located in the US.

The comprehensive ecosystem of integrations that VWO offers, and is constantly building upon, empowers your experimentation program. You can leverage the data from customer data platforms, ABM tools, and marketing data repositories by seamlessly importing rich data cohorts defined outside of VWO in third-party tools like Demandbase, Triblio, Clearbit, 6sense, and Lytics. You can then run campaigns on them without re-configuring the audience within VWO again.

With the integrations supported by VWO, you can:

• Quickly build B2B audiences using the attributes imported from the integrations.
• Use the imported audiences as targeting conditions in VWO for A/B testing campaigns.
• Test and optimize the experience for a specific set of audiences with targeted messaging to validate your personalization ideas.
• Create a view for capturing recordings of this specific set of audiences. This will get insights into how your key audience segments interact with your website differently.

Uploaded audiences

Let’s say you wish to target a particular campaign to all the premium users of VWO. Let’s assume there were 100K visitors; all of those would have a unique cookie value in the user_id cookie. One way is to get in touch with the engineering team to get the list of every user ID that qualifies as a premium user. It is achieved by generating a cookie for people who match the user id in the list, which VWO then uses for targeting. 

You can then upload this list of user ids to VWO. The Attributes List feature requires you to create a list (.csv or.txt) with the 100k user ids, upload it to VWO, and use it as a campaign targeting condition. All this, without the support from the engineering team. It’s that simple.

The final word

When it comes to conversion optimization, the ability to target an experiment based on user behavior or account-level attributes is a powerful lever in the hands of a marketer like you. But instead of shooting in the dark, you need to make data-backed decisions and validate your personalization efforts before rolling out new experiences for your audiences. Your experimentation platform, therefore, needs to possess two crucial capabilities:

1. Advanced customer targeting allows you to run experiments on customer cohorts built on complex conditions easily.
2. Easy integration with customer data portals without the need to import the data into your A/B testing tool to run experiments.

With VWO, you can start right away. Sign up for a free trial and explore the advanced targeting capabilities. You can also request a demo with our product experts or learn more about customer segmentation and the latest, most exciting product updates.

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

What is a good page experience?

You deliver a good page experience to visitors when your page is built keeping in mind their expectations. It can be tempting to talk about what you want visitors to know about your product and build a page that persuades them to take the action you’d like them to take. But a website with great UX enables visitors to perform the tasks they wish to perform. 

Page experience is also about ensuring that your web pages load quickly, serve relevant information as clearly as possible without distractions, and are a safe browsing environment for visitors. 

The importance of UX here cannot be stressed enough. 

A PWC survey reveals that 32% users walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience. 

In the same survey, 54% of US consumers say that customer experience on digital mediums of most companies needs improvement. 

This means a high number of websites are not optimized for page experience. This is likely to change with Google’s new algorithm – Page Experience, which is set to launch in June 2021. With this update, Google is aiming to prioritize websites that serve good page experience to their users over others. 

A win-win situation for brands and customers alike

Brand queries have always impacted rankings, but most brands that rank are not as big as the Nikes or American Expresses of the world. With this update, there’s even more opportunity for smaller brands to rank high if they have the right kind of content and deliver a delightful browsing experience. 

So if it was previously tough for you to fetch website visitors organically, this is your chance to rank higher. Even if you’re not well-known so far, you can perform better on the search engine results page if you show content that is relevant and useful to users. In the process of focusing on UX, you’re also serving your visitors better and paving the way for higher conversions on your website. 

There’s quite a bit of information available on Google’s algorithm, and you’re sure to have gone through the factors that constitute page experience: 

1. Core Web Vitals – The loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of your website.
2. Mobile Friendliness – The experience delivered to users who’re accessing your website through mobile devices.
3. Safe Browsing – To check whether your website contains malicious or deceptive content.
4. HTTPS – To check if your website’s connection is secure and the pages are served over HTTPS.
5. No Intrusive Interstitial  – The accessibility of the content on your website. 

We won’t repeat what you already know. Things like AMP, load speed optimization, security, malware control, are straightforward optimizations to help you get ready for this update. 

According to us, the bigger challenge is identifying the user experience that wins you the delight of users and improves conversions. This is where brands need to put in work. There is some input provided by Google to define the core metrics within the web vitals – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

But in order to get these metrics right, you need to improve upon what successful brands have been doing for a long time now – 

1. Listen to your customers
2. Understand what your customers want 
3. Give customers what they’re looking for
4. Constantly experiment and evolve

If you’ve incorporated the above steps in your optimization strategy, and have ensured that your online presence is technically viable in terms of speed and security, you’re potentially ready for this update. 

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

Framework for improving website UX and performance

If you’re a marketer in today’s impact era, it is necessary for you to see the value in having a single customer view and analyzing entire user journeys. You need to – 

• Uncover what your audience really wants
• Plan your growth roadmap and prioritize based on your goals 
• Learn what drives growth by testing various experiences 
• Delight your audience by implementing the learnings at various touchpoints
• Build a process where the above activities run in a continuous loop 

At a micro level, this framework incorporates the below process of experimentation – 

• Research and identify which parts of your conversion funnel need fixing. Use a combination of web analytics, heatmaps, session recordings, funnel analysis, on-page surveys, customer interviews, and other methods for valuable insights into visitor behavior. 
• Build a structured hypothesis. This should be based on observations that reveal a problem that needs fixing, include a solution for a defined audience, and the expected impact/uplift on the goal. 
• Prioritize your test ideas using the ICE model.
  • Importance: How valuable is the audience for whom you’re making this change?
  • Confidence: How confident are you of achieving a better experience for users from this change?
  • Ease: How easy is it to implement this change? 
• Choose the right kind of test based on your hypothesis – A/B test, Split URL test, Multivariate test
• Measure to learn whether your UX improvement efforts are working. 

Other high impact changes that you can make

Content optimization

• Remember that content will remain king and play the most critical role in determining page rankings. Audit your content to ensure it is easy to understand, solves a problem for visitors or addresses their needs, and is unique. Figure out which kind of content fetches the attention of visitors, and what persuades them to take action by A/B testing. 
• Look at the content quality on your competitions’ websites, and find out how their content is different from yours – then aim to make yours better.

Speed optimization

• Optimize your website for speed and reduce 4xx errors (minimize HTTP requests, use asynchronous loading files, check JS loading and server response times, use compression and caching, and check image file sizes). 
• Ensure that you have lazy loading correctly set up. 
• Get rid of any broken links.  

A quick note here on how VWO impacts your website loading performance –
VWO delays the non-critical payload until all resources of your website have been loaded so that the visitor is able to interact with your website without any blocking time or delays in interactions. It reduces the Blocking Time to a negligible minimum ensuring little to no impact on your core web vitals. 

UX optimization

• Revisit your popular pages regularly and study the heatmaps of these pages. You will be able to identify the friction points and fix them to deliver a better UX.
• Optimize for mobile search. Get your website mobile-ready by leveraging browser caching, reducing code, and reducing redirects. Also ensure that the design is responsive to smaller screens and the site structure is optimized for mobile.
• Make sure that your CTAs are contextual based on specific points in the user journey on your website. Ideally they should convey some benefit to the user, apart from being well-designed and correctly positioned.

SEO optimization

Use alt text descriptions that are short, contextual, and ideally have a keyword because they are used by search engine crawlers for indexing.

Security optimization

• Check your pages for malware or any deceptive content. Make sure it is safe for browsing and any personal information that the user enters is not at risk.
• Use a secure HTTPS connection for your web pages.

Conclusion

Once the update is rolled out in mid-June 2021, user experience will become a direct ranking factor on Google. So if you haven’t already assessed your optimizing strategy and prioritized user experience, you’re pushing it to the wire. 

Start making use of heatmaps and A/B tests to analyze your website’s interactivity and its responsiveness to visitors. Run more experiments and figure out the design, functionality, and interactivity, to which your audience responds positively. Then make sure that you adapt to their preferences as swiftly as possible. This is the most logical way to achieve customer delight, improve your rankings, and achieve higher conversions.