MARKETING

Technology and brain science can drive performance

Published

2 years ago

May 26, 2022

As a marketing leader, you’re tasked with turning potential customers into revenue. To drive bottom-line growth, you’re ready to create a strategy for attracting, engaging, and converting prospects across all of your marketing channels. But do you have the right technology to achieve your goals?

As you evaluate your martech stack, you might realize that you need to do more than use the right technology — you need to optimize it. Optimization science is harnessing the full potential of customer-facing technology. It’s both a methodology and a mindset — and it’s about squeezing every ounce of value from your new solution.

To optimize your technology solution’s impact, you need to think beyond features and functionality. Specifically, you need to think about how you want to leverage your new platform to influence customer associations, perceptions, and behaviors to align with your strategy. In other words, you need to take a holistic approach to technology deployment — and that encompasses your customer’s brain.

Getting started with a few simple steps

The martech landscape is dotted with a cornucopia of solutions. According to Scott Brinker, VP of platform ecosystem at HubSpot, there are 9,932 martech solutions on the market — a 24% increase from 2020. With a seemingly overwhelming number of options from which to select, where do you even start? Also, how do you navigate the waters of social psychology within your organization while setting the stage for triggering behaviors among the potential customers who interact with your technology?

To get started, let’s take a look at the following three steps:

Selecting the right technology platform.
Understanding integration constraints.
Configuring for optimization.

1. Selecting the right technology platform

Yes, the first step might seem a little elementary; but such is the nature of initial steps. How many times did legacy thinking affect decisions at your place of work? How many times did existing relationships or power dynamics influence an important decision? Behavioral norms and social psychology often play an outsized role in technology deployment. As you evaluate your options, forget about the relationships and biases of your co-workers (and expunge your own biases to the extent that’s possible) — and select the technology that can deliver optimal results.

Selecting the right technology involves foresight and a laser-like focus on your audience. After all, you’re deploying a system that allows your organization to interact with your customers to achieve tangible benefits. As you attempt to assess your technology options objectively, now is the time to start considering your customer’s brain.

2. Understanding integration constraints

There are more questions to ask before you embark on your journey. Perhaps most obviously, how does the platform fit within your current martech stack? Do you see a sea of messy code over the horizon, or do you see a fluid integration in which data flows easily from one system to the next?

Although you don’t want to be completely beholden to legacy systems, you do need to consider how your new marketing technology integrates with current, and quite possibly, future systems. Failure to look closely at integration at the beginning could end with an Odyssean voyage home, leaving you alone to fend off Scylla and Charybdis as you navigate the seas of cognitive dissonance.

3. Configuring for optimization

A good marketer will create a messaging strategy that focuses on benefits instead of features. Still, you need to harness the full set of features to reap the greatest number of benefits from your marketing technology. As a result, you likely need to configure your new platform to utilize various features. To get the most out of your technology solution, start thinking about the solution’s full capabilities early in the process.

Imagine a scenario where your initial goal was to capture leads via chat online. You’re happy because you implemented a conversational chat platform that accomplishes the initial task perfectly. It even connects to your CRM and your analytics dashboard. Tragically, however, you didn’t dedicate anyone on your team to create automated conversation flows before your go-live date to qualify leads after-hours. That would be a colossal failure — no matter how good the technology.

How does the brain respond to your technology?

You’ve selected the technology solution that works best for your organization. But how does it interact with your customer’s brain? The human brain processes an enormous amount of information—most of which occurs below the level of consciousness. When your customer looks at your system, for example, the eyes dart rapidly across the user interface, triggering a cascade of neurobiological activity that can affect everything from thoughts and emotions to desired behaviors such as downloading white papers and liking your social media posts.

As your customer’s brain re-constructs the visual world in front of your technology, you have an incredible opportunity to shape the associations linked to your brand. And you can do this while influencing the behaviors you find most valuable to your organization. As such, you need to think beyond the framework of traditional deployments and start thinking about how to facilitate behaviors that align with your goals.

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Activating aesthetic appreciation in the brain

Is the user interface aesthetically pleasing? Yes, it’s an odd question for a technology deployment; but your customer’s brain does odd things. If you’re looking to optimize your new system’s effectiveness, you need to think about how you create an aesthetic experience for your customer. This is important because the brain responds favorably to aesthetic experiences, as you can read here.

According to Anjan Chatterjee, MD, a neurology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Oshin Vartanian, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, aesthetic appreciation emerges from an interplay among different systems in the brain, which encompass “sensory-motor, emotion-valuation and knowledge-meaning” areas.

Known as the aesthetic triad, the involvement of large-scale systems underscores the magnitude of an aesthetic experience. And what’s most important for you to know is that your technology interface can trigger an aesthetic experience.

Considering that an aesthetically pleasant experience can activate brain parts associated with perceptions, emotions and behaviors, you need to think about the user interface in terms of aesthetic appreciation. As such, let’s take a look at aesthetic considerations for a couple of marketing solutions, including:

• Conversational chat technology.

• Email marketing software.

Conversational chat technology

Your new chat platform is everything you imagined. But is it everything your customer imagined? You already did the hard work, configuring the system to capture leads online when you’re offline (unlike the scenario discussed earlier). You even created thoughtful conversation workflows that underscore how well you get the nuances of automation and conversational chat. But how does the customer’s brain process the visual appearance of the chat window?

Sure, it matches your brand colors. But does it create an aesthetic experience for your customer? What does your bot avatar look like? How do the shadows and lines affect subconscious associations? If you want to optimize the deployment of your chat platform, you need to think about every little visual cue that your customer’s brain might process — and then optimize accordingly.

Email marketing software

You feel confident that you selected the right email marketing platform. You’ve integrated it seamlessly with your tech stack and configured it to achieve your goals. You’re particularly pleased about how you can connect with your audience with robust automation sequences. But what does the email look like to the user?

When deploying a new email marketing platform, ensure that you’re creating a truly aesthetic experience. Often, this involves using a visually appealing template or creating a custom design that connects your audience to your brand. Whether you need to outsource design work to an agency or leverage your in-house team, you need to go above and beyond to ensure your email looks good.

Triggering dopamine spikes

The brain likes aesthetically pleasing stimuli, but that’s only part of optimizing your solution. When it comes to influencing action, you need behavioral prompts spread strategically across all of your marketing channels — and that starts with dopamine.

Dopamine facilitates goal-directed behavior. As I described in my previous article, the largest dopaminergic spikes occur during moments of anticipation of a reward. With this in mind, let’s take a moment to consider a scenario in which your consideration of the customer’s brain early in the process helped you make the right technology selection and configuration.

Video hosting solution

You plan on launching a series of videos. The good news is that you already know what type of content your audience likes. You also know the behavior you want to trigger. You want each person to provide an email address to watch a video. But did you know that different platforms allow you to gate your content differently?

How do you use optimization science to ensure you capture as many emails as possible? If you’re looking to optimize your conversion rate, you need to trigger a dopamine spike right before asking for an email. How do you do that? You need to provide content that creates anticipation.

Since you want to create anticipation before asking for an email address, you want to avoid gating the video before the user starts watching it (which is the traditional approach). Instead, select a solution that allows you to gate the content right before the moment the user is at the most elevated state of anticipation during the video. If you do this, you can elevate the amount of dopamine in each customer’s brain to exchange email addresses for content at a higher rate than you ever thought possible — while also playing on the concept of loss aversion, which you can read in one of my previous articles.

Conclusion

The above scenarios only represent a few considerations about which to think. After all, you can facilitate a variety of complex behaviors in your customer’s brain that extend far beyond what’s mentioned in this article. The key takeaway is to think about marketing technology adoption in terms of optimal effectiveness. As a marketing leader, you can launch your metrics into the stratosphere when you approach technology adoption with the customer’s mind. And that starts with an understanding of optimization science.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Jade Bunke is the vice president of marketing at National Technical Systems and is a leading authority in marketing science, messaging and demand generation. As a marketing scientist with expertise in buyer behavior, Bunke blends creative marketing with aspects of cognitive neuroscience, social psychology and behavioral economics to yield optimal results.

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Related Topics:Brain Drive Performance Science technology

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MARKETING

How to Increase Survey Completion Rate With 5 Top Tips

Published

10 hours ago

December 1, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

How to Increase Survey Completion Rate With 5 Top Tips

Collecting high-quality data is crucial to making strategic observations about your customers. Researchers have to consider the best ways to design their surveys and then how to increase survey completion, because it makes the data more reliable.

I’m going to explain how survey completion plays into the reliability of data. Then, we’ll get into how to calculate your survey completion rate versus the number of questions you ask. Finally, I’ll offer some tips to help you increase survey completion rates.

My goal is to make your data-driven decisions more accurate and effective. And just for fun, I’ll use cats in the examples because mine won’t stop walking across my keyboard.

Why Measure Survey Completion

Let’s set the scene: We’re inside a laboratory with a group of cat researchers. They’re wearing little white coats and goggles — and they desperately want to know what other cats think of various fish.

They’ve written up a 10-question survey and invited 100 cats from all socioeconomic rungs — rough and hungry alley cats all the way up to the ones that thrice daily enjoy their Fancy Feast from a crystal dish.

Now, survey completion rates are measured with two metrics: response rate and completion rate. Combining those metrics determines what percentage, out of all 100 cats, finished the entire survey. If all 100 give their full report on how delicious fish is, you’d achieve 100% survey completion and know that your information is as accurate as possible.

But the truth is, nobody achieves 100% survey completion, not even golden retrievers.

With this in mind, here’s how it plays out:

Let’s say 10 cats never show up for the survey because they were sleeping.
Of the 90 cats that started the survey, only 25 got through a few questions. Then, they wandered off to knock over drinks.
Thus, 90 cats gave some level of response, and 65 completed the survey (90 – 25 = 65).
Unfortunately, those 25 cats who only partially completed the survey had important opinions — they like salmon way more than any other fish.

The cat researchers achieved 72% survey completion (65 divided by 90), but their survey will not reflect the 25% of cats — a full quarter! — that vastly prefer salmon. (The other 65 cats had no statistically significant preference, by the way. They just wanted to eat whatever fish they saw.)

Now, the Kitty Committee reviews the research and decides, well, if they like any old fish they see, then offer the least expensive ones so they get the highest profit margin.

CatCorp, their competitors, ran the same survey; however, they offered all 100 participants their own glass of water to knock over — with a fish inside, even!

Only 10 of their 100 cats started, but did not finish the survey. And the same 10 lazy cats from the other survey didn’t show up to this one, either.

So, there were 90 respondents and 80 completed surveys. CatCorp achieved an 88% completion rate (80 divided by 90), which recorded that most cats don’t care, but some really want salmon. CatCorp made salmon available and enjoyed higher profits than the Kitty Committee.

So you see, the higher your survey completion rates, the more reliable your data is. From there, you can make solid, data-driven decisions that are more accurate and effective. That’s the goal.

We measure the completion rates to be able to say, “Here’s how sure we can feel that this information is accurate.”

And if there’s a Maine Coon tycoon looking to invest, will they be more likely to do business with a cat food company whose decision-making metrics are 72% accurate or 88%? I suppose it could depend on who’s serving salmon.

What is survey completion rate?

Survey completion rate refers to the number of completed surveys divided by the number of total survey respondents. The result is then multiplied by 100 to get a percentage. Survey respondents include those who completed the survey, and those who started the survey but didn’t complete it.

While math was not my strongest subject in school, I had the great opportunity to take several college-level research and statistics classes, and the software we used did the math for us. That’s why I used 100 cats — to keep the math easy so we could focus on the importance of building reliable data.

Now, we’re going to talk equations and use more realistic numbers. Here’s the formula:

Completion rate equals the # of completed surveys divided by the # of survey respondents.

So, we need to take the number of completed surveys and divide that by the number of people who responded to at least one of your survey questions. Even just one question answered qualifies them as a respondent (versus nonrespondent, i.e., the 10 lazy cats who never show up).

Now, you’re running an email survey for, let’s say, Patton Avenue Pet Company. We’ll guess that the email list has 5,000 unique addresses to contact. You send out your survey to all of them.

Your analytics data reports that 3,000 people responded to one or more of your survey questions. Then, 1,200 of those respondents actually completed the entire survey.

3,000/5000 = 0.6 = 60% — that’s your pool of survey respondents who answered at least one question. That sounds pretty good! But some of them didn’t finish the survey. You need to know the percentage of people who completed the entire survey. So here we go:

Completion rate equals the # of completed surveys divided by the # of survey respondents.

Completion rate = (1,200/3,000) = 0.40 = 40%

Voila, 40% of your respondents did the entire survey.

Response Rate vs. Completion Rate

Okay, so we know why the completion rate matters and how we find the right number. But did you also hear the term response rate? They are completely different figures based on separate equations, and I’ll show them side by side to highlight the differences.

Completion Rate = # of Completed Surveys divided by # of Respondents
Response Rate = # of Respondents divided by Total # of surveys sent out

Here are examples using the same numbers from above:

Completion Rate = (1200/3,000) = 0.40 = 40%

Response Rate = (3,000/5000) = 0.60 = 60%

So, they are different figures that describe different things:

Completion rate: The percentage of your respondents that completed the entire survey. As a result, it indicates how sure we are that the information we have is accurate.
Response rate: The percentage of people who responded in any way to our survey questions.

The follow-up question is: How can we make this number as high as possible in order to be closer to a truer and more complete data set from the population we surveyed?

There’s more to learn about response rates and how to bump them up as high as you can, but we’re going to keep trucking with completion rates!

What’s a good survey completion rate?

That is a heavily loaded question. People in our industry have to say, “It depends,” far more than anybody wants to hear it, but it depends. Sorry about that.

There are lots of factors at play, such as what kind of survey you’re doing, what industry you’re doing it in, if it’s an internal or external survey, the population or sample size, the confidence level you’d like to hit, the margin of error you’re willing to accept, etc.

But you can’t really get a high completion rate unless you increase response rates first.

So instead of focusing on what’s a good completion rate, I think it’s more important to understand what makes a good response rate. Aim high enough, and survey completions should follow.

I checked in with the Qualtrics community and found this discussion about survey response rates:

“Just wondering what are the average response rates we see for online B2B CX surveys? […]

Current response rates: 6%–8%… We are looking at boosting the response rates but would first like to understand what is the average.”

The best answer came from a government service provider that works with businesses. The poster notes that their service is free to use, so they get very high response rates.

“I would say around 30–40% response rates to transactional surveys,” they write. “Our annual pulse survey usually sits closer to 12%. I think the type of survey and how long it has been since you rendered services is a huge factor.”

Since this conversation, “Delighted” (the Qualtrics blog) reported some fresher data:

survey completion rate vs number of questions new data, qualtrics data

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The takeaway here is that response rates vary widely depending on the channel you use to reach respondents. On the upper end, the Qualtrics blog reports that customers had 85% response rates for employee email NPS surveys and 33% for email NPS surveys.

A good response rate, the blog writes, “ranges between 5% and 30%. An excellent response rate is 50% or higher.”

This echoes reports from Customer Thermometer, which marks a response rate of 50% or higher as excellent. Response rates between 5%-30% are much more typical, the report notes. High response rates are driven by a strong motivation to complete the survey or a personal relationship between the brand and the customer.

If your business does little person-to-person contact, you’re out of luck. Customer Thermometer says you should expect responses on the lower end of the scale. The same goes for surveys distributed from unknown senders, which typically yield the lowest level of responses.

According to SurveyMonkey, surveys where the sender has no prior relationship have response rates of 20% to 30% on the high end.

Whatever numbers you do get, keep making those efforts to bring response rates up. That way, you have a better chance of increasing your survey completion rate. How, you ask?

Tips to Increase Survey Completion

If you want to boost survey completions among your customers, try the following tips.

1. Keep your survey brief.

We shouldn’t cram lots of questions into one survey, even if it’s tempting. Sure, it’d be nice to have more data points, but random people will probably not hunker down for 100 questions when we catch them during their half-hour lunch break.

Keep it short. Pare it down in any way you can.

Survey completion rate versus number of questions is a correlative relationship — the more questions you ask, the fewer people will answer them all. If you have the budget to pay the respondents, it’s a different story — to a degree.

“If you’re paying for survey responses, you’re more likely to get completions of a decently-sized survey. You’ll just want to avoid survey lengths that might tire, confuse, or frustrate the user. You’ll want to aim for quality over quantity,” says Pamela Bump, Head of Content Growth at HubSpot.

2. Give your customers an incentive.

For instance, if they’re cats, you could give them a glass of water with a fish inside.

Offer incentives that make sense for your target audience. If they feel like they are being rewarded for giving their time, they will have more motivation to complete the survey.

This can even accomplish two things at once — if you offer promo codes, discounts on products, or free shipping, it encourages them to shop with you again.

3. Keep it smooth and easy.

Keep your survey easy to read. Simplifying your questions has at least two benefits: People will understand the question better and give you the information you need, and people won’t get confused or frustrated and just leave the survey.

4. Know your customers and how to meet them where they are.

Here’s an anecdote about understanding your customers and learning how best to meet them where they are.

Early on in her role, Pamela Bump, HubSpot’s Head of Content Growth, conducted a survey of HubSpot Blog readers to learn more about their expertise levels, interests, challenges, and opportunities. Once published, she shared the survey with the blog’s email subscribers and a top reader list she had developed, aiming to receive 150+ responses.

“When the 20-question survey was getting a low response rate, I realized that blog readers were on the blog to read — not to give feedback. I removed questions that wouldn’t serve actionable insights. When I reshared a shorter, 10-question survey, it passed 200 responses in one week,” Bump shares.

Tip 5. Gamify your survey.

Make it fun! Brands have started turning surveys into eye candy with entertaining interfaces so they’re enjoyable to interact with.

Your respondents could unlock micro incentives as they answer more questions. You can word your questions in a fun and exciting way so it feels more like a BuzzFeed quiz. Someone saw the opportunity to make surveys into entertainment, and your imagination — well, and your budget — is the limit!

Your Turn to Boost Survey Completion Rates

Now, it’s time to start surveying. Remember to keep your user at the heart of the experience. Value your respondents’ time, and they’re more likely to give you compelling information. Creating short, fun-to-take surveys can also boost your completion rates.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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MARKETING

Take back your ROI by owning your data

Published

1 day ago

November 30, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Other brands can copy your style, tone and strategy — but they can’t copy your data.

Your data is your competitive advantage in an environment where enterprises are working to grab market share by designing can’t-miss, always-on customer experiences. Your marketing tech stack enables those experiences.

Join ActionIQ and Snowplow to learn the value of composing your stack – decoupling the data collection and activation layers to drive more intelligent targeting.

Register and attend “Maximizing Marketing ROI With a Composable Stack: Separating Reality from Fallacy,” presented by Snowplow and ActionIQ.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

Add MarTech to your Google News feed.

About the author

Cynthia Ramsaran is director of custom content at Third Door Media, publishers of Search Engine Land and MarTech. A multi-channel storyteller with over two decades of editorial/content marketing experience, Cynthia’s expertise spans the marketing, technology, finance, manufacturing and gaming industries. She was a writer/producer for CNBC.com and produced thought leadership for KPMG. Cynthia hails from Queens, NY and earned her Bachelor’s and MBA from St. John’s University.

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MARKETING

Revolutionizing Auto Retail: The Game-Changing Partnership Between Amazon and Hyundai

Published

2 days ago

November 29, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Revolutionizing Auto Retail: The Game-Changing Partnership Between Amazon and Hyundai

In a groundbreaking alliance, Amazon and Hyundai have joined forces to reshape the automotive landscape, promising a revolutionary shift in how we buy, drive, and experience cars.

Imagine browsing for your dream car on Amazon, with the option to seamlessly purchase, pick up, or have it delivered—all within the familiar confines of the world’s largest online marketplace. Buckle up as we explore the potential impact of this monumental partnership and the transformation it heralds for the future of auto retail.

Driving Change Through Amazon’s Auto Revolution

Consider “Josh”, a tech-savvy professional with an affinity for efficiency. Faced with the tedious process of purchasing a new car, he stumbled upon Amazon’s automotive section. Intrigued by the prospect of a one-stop shopping experience, Josh decided to explore the Amazon-Hyundai collaboration.

The result?

A hassle-free online car purchase, personalized to his preferences, and delivered to his doorstep. Josh’s story is just a glimpse into the real-world impact of this game-changing partnership.

Bridging the Gap Between Convenience and Complexity

Traditional car buying is often marred by complexities, from navigating dealership lots to negotiating prices. The disconnect between the convenience consumers seek and the cumbersome process they endure has long been a pain point in the automotive industry. The need for a streamlined, customer-centric solution has never been more pressing.

1701235578 44 Revolutionizing Auto Retail The Game Changing Partnership Between Amazon and Hyundai

Ecommerce Partnership Reshaping Auto Retail Dynamics

Enter Amazon and Hyundai’s new strategic partnership coming in 2024—an innovative solution poised to redefine the car-buying experience. The trio of key developments—Amazon becoming a virtual showroom, Hyundai embracing AWS for a digital makeover, and the integration of Alexa into next-gen vehicles—addresses the pain points with a holistic approach.

In 2024, auto dealers for the first time will be able to sell vehicles in Amazon’s U.S. store, and Hyundai will be the first brand available for customers to purchase.

Amazon and Hyundai launch a broad, strategic partnership—including vehicle sales on Amazon.com in 2024 – Amazon Staff

This collaboration promises not just a transaction but a transformation in the way customers interact with, purchase, and engage with their vehicles.

Pedal to the Metal

Seamless Online Purchase:

Complete the entire transaction within the trusted Amazon platform.
Utilize familiar payment and financing options.
Opt for convenient pick-up or doorstep delivery.

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Hyundai’s Cloud-First Transformation:

Experience a data-driven organization powered by AWS.
Benefit from enhanced production optimization, cost reduction, and improved security.

Alexa Integration in Next-Gen Vehicles:

Enjoy a hands-free, voice-controlled experience in Hyundai vehicles.
Access music, podcasts, reminders, and smart home controls effortlessly.
Stay connected with up-to-date traffic and weather information.

Driving into the Future

The Amazon-Hyundai collaboration is not just a partnership; it’s a revolution in motion. As we witness the fusion of e-commerce giant Amazon with automotive prowess of Hyundai, the potential impact on customer behavior is staggering.

The age-old challenges of car buying are met with a forward-thinking, customer-centric solution, paving the way for a new era in auto retail. From the comfort of your home to the driver’s seat, this partnership is set to redefine every step of the journey, promising a future where buying a car is as easy as ordering a package online.

Embrace the change, and witness the evolution of auto retail unfold before your eyes.