I think the biggest concern for brands this year is to focus on being the ‘first-to-market’ and ‘first-to-convert.’ And, that is very dependent on a solid mobile-enabled experience.
–Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL Software
Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica at HCL Software, explains how customer feedback and active customer beta teams drive their product roadmap. A solution for the CRM space, Unica, was designed to deliver precision marketing at scale. Since its acquisition in 2019, Arnold and his team made significant UI/UX updates, integrated various modules across the platform, and released four new modules including Journey, Deliver, Discover, and Link.
In this edition of MarTalk Buzz, Arnold discusses why it’s important more than ever now for e-retailers to go after a mobile-first strategy. He shares the 3 dos for ecommerce brands to improve the site’s UX. Arnold also highlights catalysts for an optimized web and mobile web experience and the features of robust digital experience analytics platforms.
Key Takeaways on WhyOpens a new window Cloud-Native Platforms with Open Integration Are Crucial for Ecommerce Brands:Â
- Porting a cloud-hosted solution is a great first step, and that should deliver scalability.
- Giving customers the ability to open, click, and convert all with a mobile-first strategy will pay huge dividends.
- Get an implementation partner who also has specific expertise in your key systems, data, and applications.
Here’s the edited transcript from our exclusive interview with Tony Arnold:
1. Performance plays a significant role in the success of any website. In your opinion, which are the 3 dos for ecommerce brands to improve the site’s UX, this season?
I really look at problems and solutions from a very pragmatic practical perspective and what is the shortest patch to drive revenue.
- The ability to scale is critical. It should be obvious but if the site is down, there is no UX. Scaling will be a huge issue this season. There has been a big push over the last few years to get commerce solution ported to scalable cloud-based solutions. Porting a cloud-hosted solution is a great first step, and that should deliver scalability. However, a true cloud native solution adds a lot more flexibility. With that noted, we will see a historic number of ecommerce brands continually go offline from traffic loads. An important “do†for customers is to prepare for historically epic ecommerce solution capacity and traffic. Hopefully, customers have a scalable cloud-based solution that can accommodate the demand.
- Most companies are only using about 20% of the capabilities of their owned martech, CX and commerce solutions and a lot of those unused product functionalities. There is still time to talk to the vendors and understand what high impact capabilities could be implemented quickly and tested to improve CX, UX, and conversion. Most vendors will be able to point out that despite potential code freezes, some additional functionality can be added and tested to help improve the UX and in turn conversion.
- The next do would be around UX messaging. For a while, you could not visit a site without some type of COVID-19 related pop-up messaging. Customer sentiment is starting to have a negative PR backswing effect on the “COVID-19 Delay†messaging. Customers expect that after nearly a year, companies should have worked out solutions to overcome COVID-19 based challenges. Brands need to just clearly state delivery and fulfillment times and skip the continual COVID-19 slow down messaging, which just creates perceived purchase barriers for shoppers this holiday season.
2. Ecommerce has steadily grown, even accelerated during the pandemic. Why it’s important more than ever now for e-retailers to go after a mobile-first strategy?
We have become a mobile consuming economy. With all the expected ecommerce traffic this season, mobile will get hit harder than ever. If customers are planning a mobile-first strategy, there are some considerations.
There are a few primary routes to get to a mobile-friendly solution that include porting an existing site to an app, or to a separate mobile-optimized site. Another option is to look at a more comprehensive full site redesign around responsive or there may be some type of a hybrid design.
There are different advantages and disadvantages to each approach that businesses must consider. Porting an existing site to a dedicated mobile apps or dedicated mobile optimized site has the big advantages of speed-to-market. Many companies offer packages or add-on solutions to help e-tailers get to market fast. The potential downside to a dedicated app or optimized site usually is scaling, so there must be extra attention paid to the scaling requirements.
-Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL Software
Another path is purchasing a solution that is based on responsive web design. This allows the site to scale the content and experience to any size and format of device from laptop to mobile. There are scaling advantages and disadvantages to not support separate code bases. A disadvantage is that some research indicates that responsive sites convert lower than dedicated apps, so businesses need to test this to see how their customers respond.
Regardless of the strategy, I think the biggest concern for brands this year is to focus on being the ‘first-to- market’ and ‘first-to-convert.’ And that is very dependent on a solid mobile-enabled experience. Giving customers the ability to open, click, and convert all without leaving their couch with a mobile-first strategy will pay huge dividends immediately for businesses.
3. In what ways, are shifts in consumer behavior acting as catalysts for an optimized web and mobile web experience? What are your observations for this trend?
The change in  speed of the conversion funnel is one of the biggest consumer behavior changes we have seen over the last five years. Regardless of your early adopter, event triggered shoppers, deal shoppers, and low engaged lagger buyers’ segments are moving to purchase funnel exponentially fast.
Now more than ever with better martech, commerce, and analytics, there is more push for the early adopters with optimized offer and channel personalization that keep them in the buying cycle of the next best thing. Event shoppers are getting automated promotions triggered before, during, and after triggered events, and the deal shoppers now have a variety of tools to deal hunt.
–Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL Software
 What has changed is that marketers need to make changes to the customer journey in-flight and tune all aspects of offer, channel, personalization, and triggering in real-time to meet the marketing goals.
4. What are the top features of robust digital experience analytics platforms that ecommerce and retailers should look for?
With digital experience (DX) analytics, the key is complete integration across the customer journey and a maturity over what companies had with a CMS or web experience management platform.
- Open-friendly integration: Integration is a big pain point for most companies with DX analytics, so I think the no. 1 feature really should be looking for a platform with open-friendly integration model that allows to expand instead of being static.
- Customer struggle detection: Detection of the customer struggle is key before triggering marketing and IT interventions to address various customer and site performance issues.
- UX insight: With this feature, the actual on-page customer experience that drives action will deliver much better conversion. With typical click analytics, you can only see the click-path. Unica Discover will show both the mouse hover areas and click navigation.
- Session capture: It gives commerce UX merchandisers hard datapoints to improve the UX navigation, promotion, and product merchandising. It also allows them to optimize conversion and reduce UX stress points. The capture feature also provides a path to satisfying compliance and tracking fraud during interactions.
- Analytics: The last point is that many companies are only using analytics as historical insight into what happened. Top companies are leveraging a combination of insight driven segmentation and click analytics to trigger real-time offers and/or event messaging for even better personalization and targeting.
5. Optimizing the customers’ online shopping experience is critical to ecommerce. Which top features in DXPs should retailers focus on to improve the user experience during online shopping?
The DX across all the channels has become so complex and that complexity does not stop at the channels. There is a myriad of applications, data, systems all feeding DX, commerce, martech, support, and fulfillment systems.
Based on our customer feedback, beyond a mandate of having to integrate with Google Analytics, the big four are:
- Open integration
- Cloud native architecture
- Easier deployment tools
- Simple content creation solutions
6. Selecting the right implementation partner is a critical step in the journey to deploy DXPs. How can CMOs and retailers be strategic about the selection process? What are the critical factors to consider in this process?
I know of no single customer that has a single source DX solution; everyone has a diverse stack of best-of- breed commerce, DX, analytics, DAM, and martech products. If you look at the number of solutions that make up the average enterprise’s digital experience of just the martech stack alone, it is mind boggling. This drives the need to assure whichever platform you select can be easily integrated.
First is selecting a platform that is open, scalable, and cloud native for integration and scalability. This will drastically reduce the total cost of ownership and increase the deployment speed.Â
-Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL Software
Second, select an implementation partner who has specific expertise in your chosen solution. The key is to get an implementation partner who also has specific expertise in your key systems, data, and applications.
I have seen, so many times customers choose a partner with no expertise in the specific platform or customer systems, simply because they already do business with them.
7. What trends does 2021 have in store for the digital experience industry?
With COVID-19 disrupting every market, and so many shifts to ecommerce even on the B2B side, we are going to see a shift to companies looking at the technology behind the martech, analytics, customer experience management, and commerce. Everyone has a best-of-breed solution to some degree that drives an open integration requirement.
The biggest trend will be cloud-native based solutions that have open integration and are not tied to any cloud provider. In many organizations, IT and marketing are the only areas beyond staffing where big cost cuts can be made quickly and both departments will have to work together to get infrastructure, integration, and management costs down with growing DX capabilities.
About Tony ArnoldOpens a new window :
Tony Arnold is the CMO for Unica & Head of Strategy for HCL Software with over 20 years of brand & marketing strategy experience working with global Fortune level enterprises and operating revenue lines as large as $10B. Over his career, Tony was an Inc Magazine Web Strategy Award Winner, launched the second e-commerce site in history, developed the largest retail CRM system processing 25B customer contacts yearly, and has developed, created, and managed technical marketing systems which have generated approximately $70B over his career. Tony has hands on expertise with creating the budgets, martech solutions and customer data best practices to drive more powerful branding, revenue, and customer loyalty.
About HCL TechnologiesOpens a new window :
HCL Technologies (HCL) empowers global enterprises with technology for the next decade today. HCL’s Mode 1-2-3 strategy, through its deep-domain industry expertise, customer-centricity, and entrepreneurial culture of ideapreneurshipâ„¢ enables businesses to transform into next-gen enterprises.
HCL offers its services and products through three business units – IT and Business Services (ITBS), Engineering and R&D Services (ERS) and Products & Platforms (P&P). ITBS enables global enterprises to transform their businesses through offerings in areas of Applications, Infrastructure, Digital Process Operations, and next generational digital transformation solutions. HCL delivers holistic services in various industry verticals, categorized under Financial Services, Manufacturing, Technology & Services, Telecom & Media, Retail & CPG, Life Sciences & Healthcare and Public Services.
About MarTalk Buzz:
MarTalk Buzz is an interview series where marketing leaders and marketing technology companies that are making a difference, connect with us and share their stories. Join us as we talk to them about their product journeys, insights on the categories they serve, what works for them, and some bonus pro-tips.
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