In recent conversations with leading marketing and sales experts in the technology marketplace, there were many thoughts being exchanged on how the growing use and impact of marketing technology is meant to enhance the end user experience and not negatively impact it (in many cases, it still seems that the wrong use of martech is affecting the overall end user experience!). With the implementation of too many technologies, or, with disjointed workflows and lack of streamlining within teams (more so a concern in today’s times as organizations expand their workforce keeping in mind the benefits of having a remote workforce that boasts of the right talent and specialization irrespective of their physical location), it can be more common to notice broken links on sites or disturbing front end experiences that affect how users interact with a brand.

Changes to today’s workplace cultures, the increased growth and importance of inculcating better remote and hybrid workplace norms also drills down to how marketing and sales teams have to not only choose the right marketing technologies that help enhance the customer experience but also choose how they use it without affecting overall creativity or impacting a smooth online interaction.

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Here are Three Key Factors that every Marketing team should keep in mind, to make the most of their Marketing Technologies and Website experience:

Enhancing the Website Pop-up Experience

Pop-ups can’t be ignored, it’s why marketing leaders (in most cases today!) choose to implement them on their website. A pop-up is typically meant to display informational or promotional content, or it can be used to create a more interactive experience for your online visitor (by asking a question, for instance) and then, collecting their lead information (business email, etc). Marketing teams the world over employ pop-ups on their website to boost signups and conversions. In fact, online stores with a good pop-up experience have been known to turn an average of 35% of leaving visitors into buying customers! 

But while the use of pop-ups is now turning out to be a common marketing gimmick, here are a few factors that marketing leaders and marketing  teams should keep in mind to ensure their pop-up experience is as seamless as possible, without disturbing the user’s attention or focus:

• The duration/time of the pop-up: if your pop-up keeps flashing on the page every few seconds, it can be very disturbing to the end user
• The design/text: Users come to a website to read about something, if a pop-up has too much information on it or sports a design that is disturbing to the eye, it can create a negative end user experience
• Create a marketing message with value, that resonates with your audience: In today’s data-driven marketing environment, most marketing leaders know what kind of visitors they want on their websites and they know what information they want to collect or track with their pop-ups, crafting a marketing message that resonates with this target audience base adds value to the whole online experience and will boost retention and return value

Planning a Chatbot Workflow with Intelligent Conversations

Marketing technology and sales automation is great for enterprise teams, for different purposes and its beneficial to lean teams for a range of other reasons. One of the reasons larger enterprise teams may benefit from an intelligent online assistant and chatbot on their website is because the online conversations captured by the chatbot will be saved in a central platform for the whole team (no matter how distributed they are) to access and understand: this helps boost their lead nurturing tactics with stronger sales messaging at a later stage and also helps define which team or sales rep will go after which account or lead, thereby reducing friction. 

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While implementing intelligent assistants or chatbots on your website, it is important to understand what conversation flow you want your bot to have with the visitor by programming the workflow and script in the back end to:

• Allow for human intervention when the user asks for it, even if it’s in the middle of an automated script
• Allow the user to capture direct contact information of an actual customer support or sales rep as needed (keeping in mind that some of the primary reasons they are talking to the bot is either to find out more about one of your products/services, or because they actually want to speak to someone in the company). 

By only automating your bot to respond to queries as programmed in the back end, you may lose out on important lead data and information because disgruntled users will fall off the page and go looking for what they need, somewhere else. Chatbots are meant to simulate a human conversation, but that does not mean that they should be used to automate every part of it. 

Using a little bit of creativity to enhance the chatbot experience, with a planned conversation flow that keeps the user on the page and keeps them interested in the conversation is the onus of the marketing leader. A well thought out chatbot flow and conversation can easily boost the customer and prospect experience while enhancing the overall customer service, marketing and sales outcome for the company. Today’s marketing technologies and intelligent virtual assistants can help make chatbots smarter and more responsive. For first-timers who are implementing chatbots, taking a cue from some innovative websites that sport great chatbot experiences could be a good learning and starting point. 

Where are the Form-fills on your Contact Pages Going?

Marketing teams, like every other team in an organization will have new entrants and exits, it is therefore that much more crucial for the person(s) in charge of marketing operations to ensure that the flow of the form-fills on every contact form on the website is always verified, checked, updated and that the information captured is being delivered to the right leaders within the company. 

With changes on the team and constant changes to the marketing tech stack, it is easy to have things fall through the cracks and companies may suffer a loss of information because of various reasons, failure to integrate newly adopted marketing tools into the lead capture process, failure to update existing tools and systems, could be some.

There is no end to what your marketing technology can do for your website experience today. But in order to draw the best benefits from it, it is crucial for marketing leaders to understand what capabilities every marketing tech has and how they can optimize it to suit today’s online user’s expectation while boosting their overall experience.  

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