Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers' Hearts - Hardcover

Hoyne, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593420659 ISBN 13: 9780593420652

Verlag: Portfolio, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

When the world’s biggest brands want to sharpen their digital marketing strategy, they call Neil Hoyne – Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Senior Fellow at the Wharton School. In his first book, he offers a simple, research-backed playbook that anyone can use to find their best customers and develop relationships that last.

Under pressure for quick results and facing fierce marketplace competition, too many marketers are boxed into spaghetti-to-the-wall forms of digital marketing that limit the potential of their long hours, countless experiments, and warehouses of data. And in the end, they watch their competition sprint ahead.
 
But what if you built a business around long-term relationships with customers, using data to understand who they are, what they need, and where to find more customers just like them? You can. And you’ll leave your competitors, with all of their data and their short-term thinking, to poke around in the scraps. In Converted, you will learn how to:
 
  •  Understand the full value of each relationship
  •  Engage in an ongoing conversation with your best customers
  •  Ask the right questions so you can anticipate your customers’ needs
  •  Find more great customers
 
A real person is always on the other end of the transaction. Converted shows you how to win their hearts.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Neil has served as an analyst, researcher, inventor, lecturer and, in his words, the father of many forgettable slides of glossy funnels and Venn diagrams. A witness to and participant in billion-dollar successes, and instructive failures, all in the pursuit of building indestructible customer relationships through digital media. A key player in the executive rallying cry to be more “data driven.”

As Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist, Neil has had the privilege to lead more than 2,500 engagements with the world’s biggest advertisers. His efforts have helped these companies acquire millions of customers, improve conversion rates by more than 400 percent and generate billions in incremental revenue. Immensely proud of the degrees he’s earned from Purdue University and UCLA, Neil returned to academia in 2018 as a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. This is his first book. He hopes you like it.

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Chapter 1: Let's Talk

It's a Saturday afternoon and a woman walks into a boutique shoe store, eyeing a pair of heels. Inevitably, she's approached by a salesperson. "Do you need any help?" The woman ignores the employee, lingers a moment longer on the high heels, and then exits the store.

Perhaps it's the style, the exorbitant price, or simply the inevitable pain of actually wearing them, but whatever her reason, she isn't interested in making the purchase. Or is she?

The woman returns later in the day and the same scene unfolds. The greeting, the fleeting interest, the quick exit. A third time, a fourth, a fifth, and then the next day, the same thing happens, and again the day after that. The staff keep adjusting their approach. A smile this time. A compliment the next. Anything to get her to buy the shoes she's been eyeing this whole time.

And then it happens. Nearly two weeks after her initial visit.

Those $450 worth of three-inch heels. Sold!

What happened differently this time? Most important, what lessons did the store take away to repeat this winning result? Not a thing. In reality, this woman never left home. Each of her-wait for it-262 visits occurred on the store's website. And nobody noticed. Nobody intervened. Nobody learned. Her experiences were lost in a spreadsheet filled with countless others-mothers, husbands, lifelong friends, and consummate professionals reduced to "conversions."

The store was able to track each of her visits. That was trivial. But they welcomed her with the same experience each time. Every visit was interpreted as interest, driving up their investment as they chased her with more online ads. Sure, they sold the shoes in the end. But even with their 40 percent margins, they ended up in the red.

And they never knew it.

The fact is digital marketers-myself included-are better at making statements than conversation. It's not hard to picture us at a bar, approaching strangers with the strongest possible thirty-second call to action and an almost painful sense of urgency. "You should marry me right now. Only one of me left!" God help you if you reply. We might even follow you around to other bars for the next two weeks. You know, just in case.

The first product sold through Google was a lobster. Someone sat at their computer in California, clicked on a search ad for a fresh Maine lobster, and bought a two-pounder. The next day, a live lobster was delivered in a box to their door, confused as hell about the past twenty-four hours.

It was a conversation that worked for that time.

But now that same person has dozens of devices and no shortage of options for their next purchase. Lobster-comparison sites. Lobster coupon codes. Lobster reviews. There are more than 4.8 million posts on Instagram hoping to inspire you with different ways to prepare your lobster. One lobster even became a social media influencer, which makes a telling statement about the influencer industry as a whole.

Today's conversations aren't so simple. They're bursting with nuance and opportunity. And most businesses haven't kept up, locked in the legacy that measuring the value of single interactions-"Marry me, now!"-must be more important than reaping the returns of a broader relationship over time.

Does it have to be this way? Absolutely not. We have conversations all the time in daily life. It's how human beings work. We read, we listen, we engage. Our ancestors were brought together by campfires, eliciting understanding, trust, and sympathy. We have dinner with somebody, we get to know them; we spend time with family. We do it in business too; all the keynotes, Zoom video conferences, and trade shows with vendors handing out cheap plastic pens.

People think of brands and websites the same way. They talk about them almost as if they were people. I love this company! I hate that company. I love this website!

But does the company reciprocate that love? Probably not.

If any of this reminds you of your company's marketing, it's not your fault. I get it. Marketing has the decades-long pressure to prove its results, in order to justify its growth in good times and defend budgets in the bad. And, in between, to fend off the misplaced belief that marketing is merely a cost center.

It only works until it doesn't. If customers see the same short messages and are pursued by the same relentless tracking everywhere they go, it's easier to be apathetic toward it all. But marketers are starting to see the value of conversation-not only because of the wealth of customer information it provides but also because it separates them from the competition. They stand out, and they triumph.

That makes a larger shift all but inevitable. Interactions between the best companies and their customers are changing from quick messages demanding an immediate response to deeper, more lasting conversations. "Buy now" behavior that would flop in a bar will get you left behind online too. You just won't survive as a marketing leader if you can't learn and respond to the signals customers are giving you.

At the end of the day, this is about looking at marketing through a different lens: the very human lens of conversation. We know how to do it already. We only need to learn how to do it in a different context.

 

Chapter 2: Starting Simple

Isat at a noisy vegetarian bistro with a handful of retail marketing execs who had been trying to turn around their stale but promising brand. The CMO and his team had teased some rather lofty ambitions. They brought me in to offer feedback on their journey to a better place.

"We're excited about the opportunity here," they said. "We're going to digitally transform our business."

Usually, this is where I get concerned. Digital transformation is quickly earning its place in the upper echelons of bullshit business-speak, right next to innovation, acceleration, and amplification. Too often these kinds of grandiose ambitions end merely with a refreshed app icon and launching curbside pickup.

What this team unveiled was arguably worse: a $70 million software engagement to build out the most comprehensive data-management program the company had ever seen, uniting all their customer data, every touch point, everything imaginable.

It would be ready in only two and a half years.

I was appalled. What's going on here? These were skillful marketers, after all.

"Well!" they said. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to do anything until we get all of the data in place. Once we do, we'll be able to hire hundreds of data scientists to streamline all of our decision making."

They were really proud of this. Like it was a legitimate plan.

I couldn't help myself. "So you have a multimillion-dollar project, you got the board to make this huge capital investment, you're not going to show any returns for three years-and you think this makes sense?"

"Well, yes, because the data has to be perfect first!"

I sat there thinking, But what about your retail stores, which don't share any customer data back with you? Where is that coming from? Where does your brand value fit in? Or word of mouth? You'll still be missing large pieces of the conversation. What about the value of the data you have on customers today? Are you happy to give that opportunity up?

The company's ambitions never played out. It took too long just to set up all the pieces. The board grew tired of waiting for results. The CMO is gone, and the brand shuffled between a few more private equity groups. But the legacy remains. Nobody will touch a similar project again.

Why You Need to Start Simple

When people feel they've lost control of circumstances, they tend to turn to high-involvement products that require hard work to fix things. It's that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593420659
• ISBN 13: 9780593420652
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland