Digital Sales Funnel - options for better health

This digital channel’s contribution to overall sale is a concern and an opportunity for every organization for its overall growth. Organization’s business growth does not consider digital acquisition as another channel rather an overall driver. Some of the key factors in this driver are conversion rate optimization programs and how it compliments the cutaneous optimization, strategic digital initiatives and ‘always-on’ paid media strategy driven campaigns initiatives.

The challenges, in realizing this goal and reaching its holy grail, lies in fundamentals - many touchpoints and interactions with customers across the organizations and how do they work with each other to have a single view of customer and provide a true experience of “I know my customer”.

The data sets are, usually, in siloed repositories and different touchpoints have different systems to interact with customers and thus there are reparations of information that customers might have to provide and the one channel / team are unaware of customers’ interaction in another channel and thus interaction is not personalized and repeated.?

It results in?

• increasing customer churn,?
• lower satisfaction and?
• lesser growth (cross sell / upsell opportunities.?

New customer acquisition is equally impacted due to inefficient retargeting in paid media channels and having a coordinated effort to drive digital acquisition.

Customer Data Platform (CDP) promises to solve many of the aforesaid to eventually provide the SINGLE VIEW of the customer across sales and services journeys - noting growth is equally to reduce churn.

Let's take a look at a journey of reaching the CDP based solution instead of jumping to this silver bullet - shall we?

While a strategic initiative - say Loyalty program or reimagined digital channel capabilities, would be a definitive candidate to use CDP’s capabilities, following options, listed below in comparative table, usually stack-up to decide how fit the CDP would be in your digital ecosystem in a BAU environment. This comparison is made assuming there is no strategic initiative in the pipeline and thus in true sense of BAU, how would CDP stack-up:

Lets define the problem statement beyond improving digital sales funnel health:

What do our customers want?

Customers want an easy and personalized experience while searching for and buying insurance products. Insurance being a complex subject, the parts “easy” and “personalized” are quite significant to glue the bond.

What are the usual pains of customers?

Customers spend a lot of time searching for suitable insurance? products and then either leave or switch to a call center as they dont find a smooth experience of product discovery and buying experience matching their needs.

What is the opportunity for organizations?

As the health of the digital sales funnel improves,? it shows customers’ buying experience in digital channels have improved and an effective reduction in cost of acquisition due to lesser transfer to assisted channels (i.e. call center or brick - mortar stores).Additionally, more qualified traffics come to sales funnel from paid media channels showing customers relate to advertising campaign positively and find it contextualized to navigate the website.

With aforesaid, challenges and opportunities, the following table attempts to define the comparative view of CDP and potential non-CDP based solution to improve sales funnel. For examples, we have considered following:

Reach:?

Average website unique visits are 900,000 per month. Thus this entire population is considered to be the potential REACH for all the options (I,II & III)

Impact (out of 5):

• Option I - CDP? covers the entire requirement i.e. digital acquisition in which sales funnel is improved through personalization and tests & learn and Retargeting in Paid Media Channel ?which streamlines the lead generations’ quality and quantity to the sales funnel.Thus confidence value is considered 5.

• Option - II - Efficient CRO? proposes the use of existing ecosystems to perform a higher number of tests to improve the sales funnel. While this does not incur in product licenses cost, this option at best only covers part of the problem state i.e. digital acquisition. Retargeting in paid media channels and its efficiency remains same and does not improve qualified lead against each advertising dollar. Thus confidence value is considered 3.

• Option - III - CRO w/ AI tool for test & learn (Scaled up testing)?

This option is very similar to option - II however it proposes to use AI driven tools in the CRO process to generate more ideas for tests. Generation of ideas is manual currently and thus scaling the number of tests per quarter will be solved and knowing what works and doesn’t faster will improve sales funnel sooner. Though this option also does not cover Retargeting in paid media channels and thus the Confidence value is considered 4.

Confidence:

• Option I - CDP?

This is an industry proven solution and provides forward looking solution capability beyond MVP scope and thus Confidence is considered 100% for MVP scope.

• Option - II - Efficient CRO?

As this is monitor tweaking and capacity enhancements in the existing landscape, the confidence level is considered as 70%. However it covers only a part of the problem statement i.e. digital acquisition without omni-channel view.

• Option - III - CRO w/ AI tool for test & learn (Scaled up testing)?

This does increase some capability in existing CRO by introduction of AI driven journeys however, this option also covers digital acquisition journey, leaving behind Retargeting in Paid Media Channel and thus marked as 80% i.e. a touch higher than option-II.

In conclusion, as a CDP based solution provides the actual single view of customer and an omni-channel experience, is certainly the way to go and a forward looking digital landscape. This solution can improve from lead generation to acqusitions and servicing across all channels and thus have immense potential to uplift the growth trajectory as well as customer services. CDP best delivers its value when its used in an optimum operating model to leverage the best advantage of the platform - in BAU / always on as well as in projects.