Unmasking Marketing A Customer Experience Optimization Glossary June 6,2014

A/B testing is one of the most effective ways to make measurable (and scientific) improvements to your website. This practice creates two (or more) versions of a page, and shows each version to a different, yet similarly-sized audience to discover which has a higher rate of conversion. A/B/n testing is a great way to collect statistically-significant data to show your clients that one design approach is more effective than another in persuading website visitors to take the desired action to show interest in a product or service.

This website design term is a legacy from printed newspaper days. “Above the fold” describes the part of a web page that the visitor can see without scrolling, and is usually considered the most important real estate on your page. These days, mobile phones have taken a hatchet to the concept of above and below the fold. It doesn’t matter anymore since you cannot control who is viewing your content on which kind of device. Generally, it’s far more important to understand your content sequence and hierarchy and the story that you’re telling your customer.

Acquisition, from an analytics perspective, is all about how you get traffic to your website, how you attract and interest prospective customers, and how you transform the curious visitors into qualified leads. Acquisition analytics measures things like referral traffic from other websites, effectiveness of communications channels such as a Facebook page, and paid search traffic, to name a few.

When your customers become your advocates, they publicly evangelize your brand and products/services.

The bounce rate of a page is the percentage of visitors who left your website after viewing that page. A page with a high bounce rate is performing poorly.

A call-to-action is a text link, button, image, or some other type of web link that encourages a visitor to take an action on that website, such as downloading a piece of content or registering for an event.

From an analytics and digital marketing perspective, channels refer to the different ways that visitors find your site. Channels are defined differently for each business, but typical channels include: search, paid ads, email, social, blogs, referral sites and direct. From an experience design perspective, channels refer to the communication mechanisms used by your prospects and customers to interact with your brand and products and services. Channels include voice, email, chat, sms, video, web forms, fax, in-store, call centers, and so on.

A conversion happens when your visitor completes a goal of your website, such as making a purchase or filling out a lead form. Business and strategic goals help inform desired customer behaviors and the related actions that will then qualify as a conversion.

The conversion path is the step-by-step series of clicks that a visitor goes through on your website, from their first interaction with you to whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish on your site. Here's one example of a conversion path from our client Knowledge Universe, though your site conversion path could branch in a variety of ways depending on your business model (e.g. you might add a shopping cart and thank you page).

The subjective and emotional response your customer has to the interaction with your brand and business. A customer experience is comprised of individual customer touchpoints. Customer Experience programs are often focused on product and service improvements to create customer delight and advocacy, and customer experience is one of the most important drivers of brand value.

Customer experience optimization is a business strategy that maximizes long-term profitability through increasing the “lifetime value” of its customers. The goal is not to maximize customer satisfaction or customer loyalty, but rather to optimize customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. It is a process by which a company achieves a balance of customer satisfaction, advocacy, and profitability so that all parties achieve a win-win.

The sum of all the experiences a customer has with a company over the lifecycle of their relationship is called a customer journey. A customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints and key interactions, including messaging, employees, processes, products or services. Single or multiple interactions can be considered a customer journey and are part of a holistic customer experience lifecycle. Experience management is concerned with optimizing the journey to create delight and deliver success

Delight is a feeling of great pleasure. From a customer experience perspective, delight happens after an (oftentimes) unexpected and pleasurable interaction with a business. The creation of delight is a functional objective of customer experience programs, and is achieved by anticipating and meeting high-value customer wants and needs.

Dynamic content has two meanings in the marketing and design world. The first is from the perspective of the developer and the content management system. In this case, dynamic content means that the CMS pulls the content automatically onto the page. The editor/author doesn’t need to do anything else. A common example of this type of dynamic content is a news feed, calendar of events, or a blog roll. The second definition relates to content personalization. In this situation, dynamic content (also called as "smart content" or "adaptive content") describes the components of a website, ad, or email body that change based on the behavior of the visitor. It creates an experience that's customized specifically for the visitor or reader at that moment. An example of this kind of dynamic content is Amazon's recommendation engine.

Engagement is both a goal and a metric. Brands want to establish an ongoing relationship with their customers for the purpose of mutual success. Customers love the product and the business reaps the revenue and increased brand equity. The stronger the engagement, the better the health of the relationship (in general). Also, t it’s an indication of the importance and value of the customer relationship to the business. As a metric, engagement is synonymous with interaction. This metric is used to find which visitors to a site are interested in the product or service being offered, but have not converted yet.

Friction is any element of your website or application that is confusing, distracting, or strenuous for visitors, causing them to leave your page or abandon your app. Examples of friction-causing elements include dissonant colors, excessive text, distracting navigation menus, or landing page forms with too many fields.

Iterative testing is a process for testing your marketing campaigns or your designs where each lesson builds on previous ones to provide more insight into your customer base. While conducting one-off tests on different marketing components is possible (e.g. a single product page or new CTA button), it is far more effective to map out this kind of formal, long-term testing strategy.

A landing page is literally the page where your visitors “land” on your website. Any page of your website can be a landing page. Search engines typically bypass the Home Page and jump your visitors deep into your website. That first experience is a landing page experience.

Landing Page Optimization is the process by which companies work to improve the performance and conversion of their landing pages using design techniques, key optimization principles, and testing. This is an important aspect of conversion rate optimization.

A latent conversion is a type of conversion that takes place after your visitor’s initial visit. For example, someone may look for a price matrix, leave your page to think about it, come back to your website two days later, and then make a purchase.

A lead is a person who has in some way, shape, or form indicated interest in your company's product or service.

Lifecycle stage refers to your leads' current point in their buyer decision-making process. Is this their first visit? Are they ready to buy? Are they still evaluating options? Depending on the business, there may be multiple phases and the names may be unique to the industry segment. A common set of phases are awareness, consideration, selection, purchase, and support.

Lifetime value refers to a customer’s predicted total financial contribution to the business throughout their relationship lifecycle. The term leverages the concept of “the future profitability of a customer.” In this Age of the Customer, lifetime value has moved from a simple average used for revenue prediction and company valuation to a more complex operational metric. Lifetime value can vary substantially by segment based on a customer’s lifecycle stage, engagement, and advocacy.

A moment of truth is any key touchpoint within the customer journey where a business has the opportunity to create or modify a customer’s opinion of the brand. Each and every time a prospect or customer makes contact with an organization or its representatives there is a moment of truth.

This type of optimization test creates new versions of a page by varying multiple on-page elements independently of each other. Like an A/B/n test, this can show which versions of the page are most effective. The advantage of multivariate testing over an A/B/n test is that it will also show which element on the page has the largest impact on customer behavior.

This type of optimization test creates new versions of a page by varying multiple on-page elements independently of each other. Like an A/B/n test, this can show which versions of the page are most effective. The advantage of multivariate testing over an A/B/n test is that it will also show which element on the page has the largest impact on customer behavior.

Optimization testing is the practice of using actual visitor behavior to uphold or disprove beliefs about them. A/B/n testing is the simplest form of optimization testing.

Personalization is a way of tailoring content to your visitors so that each web page or email message appears to have been created specifically for a single person. There are two broad categories of personalization: implicit and explicit. Implicit is implied, and is denoted by current behaviors on a website and some analytics techniques such as reverse IP lookup (a software tool looks to see your computer’s unique IP address and determines the business you work for) or geolocation based on IP address. Explicit personalization techniques include all those that are dependent on knowing explicitly who the visitor is. Examples of explicit personalization include adding a name to an email subject line, showing products based on the visitor’s past purchase history, or showing an order/account history.

Relationship marketing is a long-term approach to customer experience that seeks to maximize the lifetime value of a customer rather than an incremental-revenue or transaction-focused approach. The idea behind relationship marketing is that by investing in relationships, businesses and customers can and will ignore some of the commoditization and competition forces in the general marketplace in favor of trust, accountability and expectation fulfillment.

Responsive web design is an approach to designing and building websites in which the site recognizes the device that your visitor is using and automatically generates a page that is responsive to the device the content is being viewed on, making websites always appear optimized for screens of any dimension. There are two broad variants of responsive design; full responsive, which means that 100% of your content is available no matter what device your customer uses. The second is adaptive responsive. Adaptive responsive means that while 100% of your content is available, you’ve tailored it somewhat to optimize it for the device. For example, a headline might exist in two forms, long and short in an adaptive responsive website. The short headline is used for phone and tablet devices, and the long headline for desktop.

A touchpoint is any interaction between a customer and a business. Touchpoints can be digital and include websites, forms, emails, banner ads, and so on. Touchpoints can also be analog, such as brochures, letters, cup holders, etc. Touchpoints are also other people, as when a sales associate greets you in a store, or when the phone is answered at the doctor’s office. The accumulated experience with a company’s touchpoints build the customer experience.

Voice of the customer research seeks to identify and, where possible, quantify customer wants, needs, and expectations, often expressed relative to their experience with a brand’s products or services. The substance of VOC may be found in many places, such as on social networks, in phone call transcripts, within support tickets, on survey forms, in ratings and reviews, and so on. The data is collected and analyzed for the purpose of improving the customer experience or improving a product or functionality.

Wow factor is related to delight. It is the presence of an element in a customer experience responsible for driving exceptional satisfaction.