A bit of a trick question: If you had $100 to spend, would you be better off devoting that money to doubling the traffic to your site?

Or doubling your conversion rate?

Many marketers get this wrong.

Despite years of front-line, real-world experience to the contrary, more and more online marketing budgets are disproportionately aimed at driving traffic, rather than conversions.

There’s the notion that things like SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing and the like are far more important than increasing shopping cart sizes, decreasing abandonment, upselling and cross selling.

To be sure, driving traffic is a critical mission for any e-commerce site.  After all, no visitors, no sales.

But at the same time, even the most brilliant SEO or affiliate strategies will be for naught if the site itself fails to entice customers to actually buy.

That’s precisely where site testing, optimization, and personalization come in.  Failing to actually sell goods on the site can cost brands the effort, the dollars, and the brand equity that they devoted to attracting all that traffic.

Doubling your conversions can be dramatically more profitable than merely doubling your visitor numbers. And here’s why:

You want insight, not just raw numbers

Slice and dice your site traffic analytics all you want. But at the end of the day, they are still just numbers. What rings the cash register is actionable solutions you can use to improve your customer experience.

The first step is to employ an internal test-and-learn methodology to understand what visitors to your site are engaging with, where they’re dropping off, where their gravitating towards. (Hint: this may even differ by traffic source!)

But only through continuous A/B and multivariate testing, can you actually begin to understand your visitors and place content decisions in their hands. You can fundamentally change how your organization learns about its online traffic. In other words, nobody should be increasing traffic or making a site without a focus on improving conversions.

You want sales, not just visitors.

Yes, going to your boss and detailing how you doubled site traffic in the last quarter is a grand accomplishment! But can you really document how that increased traffic contributed to sales? Do you really know?

If you aren’t tracking conversion rates, or attempting to optimize the site in any way, boosting traffic rates is simply doesn’t matter.

Once visitors land on your site, your goal is to get them to buy (and hopefully become repeat customers). This is where testing and personalization are essential to turning traffic into sales.

Optimizing your site for content, design, offers, and copy is the only way to ensure your are taking full advantage of your site traffic. If the experience is irrelevant, frustrating or cumbersome, you might as well have not ever invited them to your site in the first place.

Better experience, more dollars

Today’s consumers are good at comparison shopping. They research, they sign up for emails, they track down deals.  Which may lead you to believe that the key is to boost your traffic as much as possible.

But the reality is, if you provide a really stellar online experience, they will want to come back, again and again. Which makes the overall job simpler, and clearer.

Thanks in part to more advanced testing methods, it’s a lot easier to listen to what your visitors want (and need).  Customers have become a lot more vocal even if they don’t know it. Through their clicks, page views, bounces, reviews and purchases, your online customers offer real-world feedback about their online experiences, in real-time. So pay attention to them. Make website changes and marketing decisions based on your customers, not on what your gut — or marketing budget — is telling you to.

Personalizing wins

Getting into a traffic war with your competitors is a sure-fire way to waste resources and precious attention.  It’s far more effective step up your game by using testing and conversion optimization to gather data and visitor profiles that can dramatically increase actual sales and repeat visits.  You may even find that segmenting your customers by where they came from can help you convert them into loyal and repeat buyers.

When it comes to their websites, major e-commerce players need to realize that only through a customized combination of multivariate testing, optimization and personalization best practices can they truly begin to tailor experiences in meaningful and profitable ways. It’s an ever-evolving practice that reaches miles beyond SEO, ad targeting and landing page optimization. But the rewards of it means a lot more return traffic, and a lot more improved conversions.

Follow the money

No matter how you define a conversion, at the end of the day, the holy grail for e-commerce marketers is to increase site sales. And the dollars are in the details, not just the volume. Focusing on conversion rates is where you’ll see not only site engagement improve, but revenue as well. Your traffic drivers might bring you more people, but conversion strategies bring you more money. No contest.

When it comes to site optimization and traffic acquisition, the best brands aren’t just surviving — they’re thriving. By focusing on the deep analytics and insights gained from testing with online customers, not just boosting traffic, not only improves the efficiency and effectiveness of their e-commerce site, but several other aspects of their businesses as well. They have a better grasp on who their customers are, how they buy, when they buy and what they buy.

In short, they can offer experiences more suited to customer needs and wants — and that is the true goal of any e-commerce business.

Marketers have been trying to capture that magic moment when a potential consumer is actually looking to interact with your brand. Back in the day, we had to rely on “inferred interests” gathered from demographics, psychographics and other data to estimate what segments might have higher than average propensity to have that interest and then broadcast various messages at them, hoping we just might hit them at the right place and at the right time.

But in the past five years things have dramatically changed. With nearly ubiquitous smartphone coverage, we finally have a way to access consumers’ mindsets at almost any time in a meaningful way. What’s more, not only can we tap into each magic moment but also consumers actually want to participate in it.

Current smartphone technology allows for nearly infinitely granular targeting based on behavior, third party data, contextual data like location, and universal sign-in profiles. All of these allow increasingly relevant interactions to follow a consumer across apps and the mobile web, all while waiting for the right moment. While interesting, however, this is not what I am talking about. This is just a refinement of existing approaches to targeting. It’s nothing new.

What I’m talking about is giving consumers control, a tool that allows them to quickly and easily learn something about a specific product or service. I’m talking using our smartphones to create intuitive gateways that bridge the real world with related digital experiences. Whether you call it Web 3.0 or the “internet of things,” this is what mobile is all about and I believe visual recognition technology will play a key role in making it happen.

Google Glasses are already showing us ways in which visual recognition and augmented reality can be combined to provide a dizzying array of overlays and information. This beta product offers an exciting peek into one vision of what might be in store for marketers and consumers alike.

Other companies like smartsy are showing a more targeted approach to visual recognition, allowing consumers to use devices they already have and apps they already use to interact with the world in specific ways. They allow consumers to snap a picture of whatever they are interested in, be it a can of Coke or a Louis Vuitton bag, with any visual recognition app on their mobile device and interact with the brand in real-time.

Both approaches have their pros and cons but they share the common goal of creating customer engagement. Ideally if you want to tap into what a consumer is doing with your brand and well as when and where they interact with it, you will want to allow them to use visual recognition in different ways. Who’s to say which will work best? Its still early days of visual recognition but I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you think it will play a role in consumers’ lives and marketers’ strategies.

Going green, online—is it worth it? The short answer is yes. Many marketers may not realize that catering specifically to this type of consumer can actually increase conversion rates, while maintaining your image as a green-friendly organization. And when applying some personalization to the mix, can also help keep your green friends very, very loyal.

Whether retail or hospitality, certain brands are continuously striving to maintain relevancy for a certain subset of eco-conscious customers—both offline and off. So, if you want your brand to be top-of-mind with the green-friendly, your website needs to follow a certain aesthetic—just like your products and physical locations.

1. Use your navigation to your advantage.

When green visitors hit your homepage, they should be able to immediate route themselves to a section that meets their eco-friendly requirements. This doesn’t mean that you have to dedicate an entire green banner on the homepage for every visitor to see. Simply highlighting and building in a green section into the navigation will get visitors up and clicking on the products they are interested in.

2. Highlight products and categories with green options.

A recent study published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management found that the level of willingness to pay a premium for green initiatives is significantly different depending on hotel type. Test out highlighting hotels that invest in green initiatives in the search results and hotel details page. By watching the results on conversions and bookings, you’ll be able to nail down who your green travelers are, and what they are looking for most.

On the flip side, retailers can easily highlight products on category pages to effectively call-out environmentally sound products. Using tricks such as a “green dot” or a “green leaf” icon identifies an eco-friendly product in an otherwise crowded page.

3. Be detailed and explanatory.

For those extra-inquisitive customers, explaining why a product or room is green is a necessary step to getting the conversion. Using “rollovers” is a great way to quickly explain what makes the product eco-friendly before the visitor clicks on it. This helps not only keep the visitor engaged on the path to purchase, but instills a level of trust with the site, since you took that extra step to keep consumers on the up and up.

4. Get (environmentally) personal.

It’s been shown when degree of environmental concern and other demographic factors remain constant, luxury and mid-priced hotel customers show, on average, a higher willingness to pay a premium for the green initiatives than economy hotel customers. On the same token, repeat visitors to your retail site who have shown interest in green products in the past, should not have to search around to find their desired products.

So how can you play that up? Personalization.

With personalization, conscious green visitors are immediately acknowledged and other visitors become aware of additional product offering—but aren’t necessary pushed for it. A technique such as behavioral targeting can help automatically syphon off non-green or unknown visitors, and promote green items, options or offers to those who are. By using a predictive, mathematical model, this allows your site to offer the right product, to the right visitor, at the right time. No matter how much merchandise you have, your customers will be targeted appropriately.

It’s important to remember that green consumers are just like everyone else out there—fickle, picky and demanding. As e-commerce marketers, it’s up to us to ensure we’re always catering to all our customers wants and needs—otherwise losing our green-friendly image is the least of our worries. It’s the customer loyalty that will be at stake.

It doesn’t take a record-breaking holiday shopping season to realize that most online shoppers are vulnerable to the advances of competing online retailers. But when it comes to a decline in return customers, blaming a lack of customer loyalty on the competition is the easy way out. Now is the perfect time to commit to tracking the number of first-time shoppers who actually come back in months to come—not to mention, those who don’t. And from there, put a plan in place for increasing customer loyalty.

There are many reasons customers will only buy from a site once. It could be that you offered them something they couldn’t get anywhere else, but didn’t give them a good reason to return when they were there. It could also be the overall usability of your site, a lack of necessary information, a poor checkout process… The list goes on. The bottom line is that they didn’t find the shopping experience memorable—and you may never see them again.

But fear not, there is a proven method for visitor retention. And it’s called personalization—aka using what you know about your online visitors to create highly individualized experiences for them. Personalization can be simple, based on one or two collected insights, or a highly complex interaction of detailed formulas and algorithms. Either way, it’s better than just ignoring tailored content altogether.

Because many marketers aren’t taking advantage of personalization techniques—or they’re doing them wrong—there is a lot of opportunity for those who are. So, instead of blaming a lack of loyalty on the aggressive competition, get ahead of competing sites using testing and personalization to avoid making these three common mistakes:

Misinformed website updates

Companies often invest tons of time and money into a complete website overhaul each year (or even every few months), only to find that the new site fares no better—or even worse—than the old. Instead of being attracted to the sparkly new changes, consumers often feel alienated by the inconsistent and constantly shifting branding. After all, if they don’t recognize you, how will they know you’re, well, you?

Even more, companies often don’t fix the actual problems; instead, they focus on the superficial elements they perceive to be the problems. Solving a problem requires first knowing what it is. Let the actions of your visitors show you what works and what doesn’t using A/B and multivariate testing. Testing your website elements and pages will not only reveal your problem areas, it will reveal where on your site you’re experience positive visitor behavior. All of this information should then go to informing minor (or major) site updates, which can lead to significant lifts in conversions. But our end goal goes beyond initial conversion—we’re focused on retention.

Neglecting mobile and tablet

It’s especially sad when a brand goes all out updating their website, but doesn’t take mobile or tablet responsiveness into consideration. There’s little point in having a gorgeous website that’s impossible to navigate on a smartphone. Consumers now expect the same look and feel across web, mobile and tablet-specific apps or sites, yet each platform has its own unique capabilities—and opportunities to learn more about your customers. This additional knowledge can then be used to personalize user experiences across channels. And vice versa.

Landing page tunnel vision

Landing page optimization is a go-to tactic for many marketers looking for a quick fix, but even the best landing pages can’t sustain customer loyalty on their own. Focusing on single pages distracts from the larger picture, which should be the 360-degree customer experience. Knowing what individual customers do, what they like, and how they prefer to engage with your brand can help accomplish this. This knowledge can come from multiple data sources, online and off.

Behavioral targeting is a form of personalization that relies on using these user actions and preferences to inform custom experiences for individual visitors as they navigate each and every page of the site—including landing pages.

Hashtags have been around for a while. At first it was just a neat way to call out a particular sentiment or be associated with a trending story on Twitter; they’ve now made it into our vernacular and expanded to other platforms including Instagram and Google+. With this evolution, brands are now leveraging the once lowly hashtag as a strategic tool to unify campaigns and connect with customers.

Companies like Volvo have taken steps to use specific branded hashtags like #SwedeSpeak and #MyFirstVolvo to interact with specific consumers about particular topics. By doing so and educating their audience about how to use them and what to expect, they have been successful in transforming these conversations into engagement tools for existing consumers while driving awareness of that usually positive relationship to those consumers’ networks.

In order to be successful with your hashtag strategy, leaders in the space recommend several best practices to follow:

1. Limit the number of hashtags you use and keep it simple. Too many hashtags make it difficult to track and are confusing to consumers.
2. Make them mean something. Figure out what you are going to focus on and then consistently leverage those across numerous campaigns.
3. Avoid open-ended questions. By not limiting the response to a specific type, not only are you losing relevancy, but you are opening a can of worms for a hashtag hijacking.
4. Be realistic. Make sure you have permission from your consumers to claim that hashtag. Blackberry’s #BeBold campaign, complete with super heroes, was a #Fail that opened it up to ridicule that quickly expanded into a chance to mock their slip into irrelevance.
5. Get organized. Use dashboards structured by hashtag or more easily monitor and manage your campaigns.

Innovators, such as American Express, have pushed the envelope even further. Through the newest phase in their partnership with Twitter AMEX has created hashtag-enabled commerce, allowing joint AMEX-Twitter members who connect their accounts the ability to pay for a new Kindle Fire just by sending #BuyKindleFireHD.

Other companies are also creating new ways to leverage this supercharged special character. The mobile marketing platform smartsy, for example, is using their engagement marketing features and visual recognition functionality to help transform products and campaign assets into #objects, which act as focal points for easily creating and distributing user generated content within the platform as well as across channels, including social media.

As you can see hashtags have come a long way since Jack Dorsey launched Twitter six years ago. I’m excited to see what the next six years will bring. #Predictions, anyone?

These days, consumers have more choices, more incentives and more reasons to comparison shop for the best deals out there. But Marketers can use online behavior and web analytics to reveal patterns and warning signs indicative of the type of customer retention issues that lead to “online cheating.” The question is, are they?

If caught early enough, these issues can be easily connected. To do so, marketers must identify which types of data patterns to pay attention to and use that data to inform their next steps.

1. Homepage Bounce Rates of 55% or More
If more than 55% of visitors are turning around as soon as they get to your site, it’s a major red flag that something is terribly wrong. It’s likely that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for. (BTW: you should know that the average industry home page bounce rate is around 50%, and that a well-performing homepage has a bounce rate of between 0% and 25%.)

So what gives when this issue arises? It’s usually due to issues with layout, design, navigation, site elements, functionality, content, or messaging. By A/B and multivariate testing these homepage elements in various combinations, marketers can discern which elements are contributing to a higher conversion rate, and which are contributing to the high bounce rates.

2. High Average Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates
Many online shoppers initiate a purchase, only to leave the items behind in their cart. The Baymard Institute found that the average cart abandonment rate is about 65%. Luckily, there are a number of options you can test to bring this number down. These include estimating shipping costs at an earlier point in the buying process, allowing guest checkouts, highlighting in-stock versus out-of-stock status, providing auto-fill forms based on cookie tags for repeat visitors, and using shipping discounts or specials.

3. Low Search Engagement
The importance of search on visitor engagement and purchases is often overlooked. By encouraging consumers to explore the site and streamlining the shopping process, the chances you’ll turn more visitors into customers, increases. Every single component of the search feature—placement, layout, default search box text and even the color, size and design of the graphic elements—affects engagement with this important tool. Multivariate testing can help marketers discover which combinations work best for their target audience

4. Unsatisfactory Average Order Values
What about those customers that just aren’t buying as much as they could be? Chances are they have a very specific product in mind, and aren’t being persuaded to add more items to their cart.

This is where personalization can really help. By inserting and/or customizing information that’s relevant to a specific user based on implicit behaviors (items purchased, pages viewed) as well as explicit details (location, age, gender) provided by that particular user, you’ll be able to customize their recommended items. Product recommendations and behavioral targeting are two common ways to combat this problem.

5. One-Time Buyers
66% of Amazon.com’s sales are attributed to repeat buyers. Remarkably, only 7% of the entire ecommerce industry can say the same. But it’s going to be tough to match this success without employing automated personalization with behavioral targeting solutions.

Using data such as previous purchases, searches, page views, geography, demographics, type of button click, transactions, etc., is crucial to keeping customers loyal. Behavioral targeting tailors content and offers to individuals based on both their past behaviors and their unique “buyer personas”.

Placing customers at the heart of online content decisions and giving them unique, personalized experiences is an important part of faithful consumer relationships.

The tale of the QR code is a sordid story. The QR (Quick Response) code was originally the trademark name for a two-dimensional barcode system. It was invented in 1994 by Denso Wave, a Toyota subsidiary, as a way to track vehicles as they were assembled, and to scan components at high speeds. While Denso Wave holds the patent on the technology, they granted free license on it, going so far as to publish the specs online, and allowing anyone to use it.

Unfortunately, as we all know, free doesn’t always mean good and I think QR Codes take that assertion to a whole new level. Many brands initially diverted QR Codes from its initial purpose by jumping on the bandwagon as something new and exciting that allowed them to leverage the exploding mobile market to interact with real world products. However they quickly realized many of the technology’s inherent limitations.

It is not that QR Codes are dead or evil or anything hyperbolic like that – they are just horribly misused. There are benefits and useful applications for them, either technical or industrial for the most part. At the marketing level, for example, they already stand for something for a lot of consumers (implicitly telling the user “click here”). Also, they are the perfect tool for very specific actions, namely, initiating a commerce transaction on a specific item or acting as a coupon code and they will be continued to be used in this context for the foreseeable future.

One place, however, that we are seeing increasing aversion to QR Code use is among consumer-oriented brand marketing. What are the reasons behind the demise of such technology? Well here are 9 of them:

1)       QR codes and 2D Tags in general are ugly, generic and mess with a brand’s aesthetic, destroying much of the investment made by brands to develop distinct brand identities.

2)       The codes have limited uses and are only capable of translating into a text string that sends users to a website, phone number or SMS.

3)       Since they can only generate a text string they do not offer the possibility of advanced, connected content (for instance it is very difficult to connect Facebook ID with the end user through a QR Code and therefore track or provide relevant content).

4)       Since a unique 2D code must be displayed on everything they augment, the implementation is difficult to scale and lack the ability to be used retroactively across existing campaigns or inventories without extremely onerous and expensive efforts.

5)       In addition to needing to be placed on everything, ad agencies and Fortune 500 CMOs have found that managing the creative assets needed for implementing anything beyond a very limited QR Code-based campaign is incredibly difficult and inefficient.

6)       Because anyone can make them, the user experience (UX) is incredibly varied and frequently very low engagement.

7)       Consumers (especially women) do not seem inclined to use them resulting in very low click-through rates, unless it is something incredibly compelling to the target, like downloading the latest Lady GaGa song for free.

8)       Because consumers do not click on codes often and UX is generally of low quality, QR Codes have entered a vicious circle where brands expect low response rate and at the same time, most end users expect low quality content. This will continue to drive usage down.

9)       Many alternate technologies like Near Field Communications (NFC) and Visual Recognition (VR) are becoming commercially viable without the above issues faced by QR.

Through the multiple attempts to make QR Codes work in brand marketing, they have demonstrated a real demand for augmenting media assets but, at the same time, that they are not the solution and have faced extreme resistance from numerous segments of the population. Unfortunately, for a long time there were no other options so marketers were forced to try to work with them if they wanted to use mobile to interact with real world objects and images. This has led to abysmal adoption rates despite being on the market for almost two decades. If they were a marketing product instead of a free to use technology QR codes would have been forgotten a long time ago. Instead they have lingered until something better comes along. It takes a while to kill anything that is available for free, but this one has been circling the bowl for a while.

It is said that a technology has been mass market adopted when it becomes synonymous with its use. And while QR Codes have shown their limitations, I believe Visual Recognition has the potential to become that mass-market technology. It is a natural and seamless process, as easy as taking a picture, and now that we are starting to see a proliferation of powerful Visual Recognition solutions I believe Visual Recognition is poised to become a pillar of mobile and Visual Discovery of the objects around us (including Advertising and Product Discovery).

Written with Arnaud Saint-Paul, CEO of smartsy

So, you’re one of the seemingly millions of brands out there using Facebook to lure people over to your website. Chances are you’ve viewed recent reports about Facebook’s surprisingly low activity rates (“Only 1% of people who like a Facebook page ever go back to that page”) as vindication of what you’ve always suspected: marketing on Facebook just doesn’t work.

You’re not alone. The following are the 10 top reasons brands fail to tap into the real potential of Facebook. (Hint: zero of them are Facebook’s fault.)

1.     Failure to make a great first impression

Most fans won’t ever come back to a brand’s page unless they feel they have good reason to. This is not totally different from how they interact with their friends’ pages when you think about it. Unless the new friend has great content to go back to, there’s not much of a reason to go directly to their page very often, if at all.

2.     Poor text and visuals

A successful Facebook page must have concise, engaging text that’s relevant to both the brand and the fans’ interests. Overly long, humdrum copy will fail to capture fans’ attention. Crisp, eye-catching, high-resolution visuals (photos, videos, illustrations) that clearly speak to those things visitors like about the brand in the first place will draw them in for more.

3.     Stagnant page content

If fans stop by more than once only to find the same old Facebook page, they might assume the page is outdated — or worse, abandoned. It’s important for marketers to give fans new ways to connect and advance their relationship with the brand or product being promoted. Keep to a consistent schedule with fresh content and ever-improving offers, and be sure to test what works with your audience.

4.     Inconsistent or lazy branding

If there’s no stylistic connection between a company’s Facebook page and its main website, visitors may not trust that the page is legit. Brands often spend a disproportionate amount of time, money and effort on website branding efforts, in comparison to the relative pittance reserved for complementary Facebook efforts. Keep branding consistent across all channels, so that visitors know exactly where they’re going and whom they’re dealing with.

5.     Confusing calls to action

Once fans arrive at a brand’s Facebook page, they should have a clear idea of what to do and what’s available to them. Offers and calls-to-action should be prominently displayed, and any associated instructions should be easy to follow. Be aware, however, that Facebook has guidelines concerning calls-to-actions, offers and anything else resembling blatant advertising on company pages, so it’s important to make sure you’re current on usage guidelines.

6.     Too many clicks

People are impatient—and want immediate gratification—especially on Facebook. If you have to use forms to give visitors access to the content they want, they’re likely to click away. Make sure the desired destination can be reached in the fewest amount of clicks possible. Also, if you have to use a form to capture data, keep it short and simple.

7.     Mysterious visitors

All fans are not alike – so why treat them all the same? With the right tools, marketers can compile profiles using Facebook data authorized by the user (age, gender, location, name, relationship status, etc.) as well as previous site behaviors, to get a better sense of the type of people they’re reaching on Facebook. Those profiles can then be used to present offers, content and/or experiences that are the most effective in attracting fans, “Likes”, website traffic or any other relevant conversion metrics.

8.     Preconceived notions

As excited as marketers may get about shiny new objects—especially social media objects—they‘re often reluctant to spend the time and money to truly develop new efforts for them. Why not step out of your comfort zone and try to develop specific content based on customer segments? An even crazier idea—consider developing Facebook-specific campaigns rather than repurposing ones created with a different platform in mind.

9.     Ineffective plugin use

If Facebook plugins aren’t integrated into the main company website, a great deal of potential traffic—and revenue—is being lost. Plugin tools turn consumers into brand advocates, making it easy to share site information with Facebook friends. Let visitors like or share website pages back to their Facebook profile with one click. Better yet, provide personalized suggestions to your website visitors, based on what other people are sharing as well as their own click behavior.

10.   Sticking to stand-alone metrics

Getting just one side of the story isn’t enough. Marketing programs need to be set up so that Facebook stats and user profiles are fully integrated with all other online and offline ecommerce channels’ information to create rich, detailed and fully comprehensive user profiles. Profile reports should be updated on a regular basis, so the most recent user information is always available.

With the proper attention to detail and willingness to dedicate the same energy to Facebook efforts as they do to other initiatives, online marketers will no doubt find that their 1% conversion rate is something they can control—and that it’s not Facebook’s fault their customers aren’t more engaged.

Thanks to smarter marketing, better technology and consumers speaking out, 2013 just might be the year we see a real shift in how close customers and companies can really get.

We know the deal—people are spending, and continuing to spend, more and more online. Every year, Cyber Monday will beat out the last. Mobile and tablet revenues will continue to increase. And bricks-and-mortar retailers will scramble to keep pace with a digitally driven world.

The truth is, consumers are demanding optimized and personalized sites to offer them a richer, more relevant online experience. It’s no longer an option for marketers—it’s a must-have. In 2013, expect to see:

1. Testing (Finally) Becomes a Must-Have – Companies big and small have dabbled in this for a decade. But now, everyone has to get serious about it. Companies that don’t test won’t get anywhere near providing the best online experiences for their audience.
2. True, Real-Time Personalization, for Everyone – Now that this complex technology is made easily available to the masses, we’re going to see major industries like finance, travel and media lead the charge—but also expect businesses in other industries, such as gaming and charity, to take advantage of personalization solutions to offer more custom experiences.
3. Consumers Get Over the Privacy Debate – Because consumers are getting on board with personalization, they should expect to see more of the general information they share online used by companies. Everything from age, geography and life stage, incorporating social profiles (e.g., married versus single) will play a part in offering a more relevant, more valuable ecommerce experience.
4. Retailers Start to Love Loyalty Programs – It’s not just for frequent fliers anymore. Now businesses across industries (retail, finance, etc.) are launching loyalty programs—and integrating data into comprehensive customer profiles—to offer the next level of personalization and service.
5. Mobile Gets Personal Too – As consumers adapt to living their lives from their mobile phones and tablets, they’ll expect platform-specific offerings that offer a better shopping experience, geo-specific content, special offers and other elements that complement and enhance life on the go.
6. Responsive Design as the Rule – A site that’s designed for optimal viewing no matter which mobile or tablet device is being used is the new norm. Gone are the days of resizing, scrolling and otherwise struggling to view a site depending on the size of your computer or device screen.
7. The Rise of Cross-Channel Experiences – Consumers don’t think in channels, they think in brands. So a completely seamless ecommerce experience no matter where they are —at their desktops, on their smartphones and tablets, or on social pages and sites—is a must-have.
8. Companies Get a Handle on Big Data – Most businesses have an abundance of useful data, however, very few are using this data to provide targeted individual experiences at the right time to respond to savvy consumers’ needs. In the coming year, expect to see more brands getting a handle on this to offer customers more targeted offers across all channels in real time.
9. Social Media Grows Up – For far too long, marketers have treated social media as an island from the rest of their strategy—and, in turn, have not reaped any benefits of it being a useful sales tool. Going forward, we’ll see more brands using social data to personalize experiences on their websites, as well as applying testing and personalization to their own Facebook pages.
10. B2B Catches Up to B2C  – When it comes to testing and personalization, consumer-facing businesses aren’t the only ones catching on. B2B companies—and their customers—crave a great online experience too.  More and more B2B sites will use testing and personalization to create well-optimized and targeted sites based on user behaviors.

As a consumer and a marketer, I’m looking forward to getting online in 2013.

It’s predicted that shoppers around the world will have purchased about $119 billion worth of goods and services through their mobile phones by 2015. Which means, as a sales channel, it will either supplement or replace other marketing platforms—namely, brick-and-mortar store locations, online stores like Amazon and eBay, and/or standalone ecommerce sites. Either way, mobile will be instrumental in expanding brands’ reach and connecting them to new and existing audiences in a different way. But determining where mobile will fit in is an exercise in correctly gathering and interpreting consumer data.

Because mobile devices are an extension of each consumer’s life—set up and customized to their individual needs and preferences—they potentially offer marketers more personal data about their audiences than ever before. It’s a goldmine of information for the direction of marketers’ mobile strategies and determining where mobile fits in as both a sales channel and marketing medium.

So how can mobile consumer data improve sales and marketing efforts?

1.     Using data for real-time content targeting

Now that marketers have the ability to utilize CRM intelligence to improve consumers’ experience with a brand across all touch points, they can also marry this data with new mobile behavioral data. One particular application of CRM data in the mobile environment is a marketer’s ability to target specific customers with specific content in real time. That’s right, real time.

This approach complements how consumers are using mobile (on the go) and will therefore increase its effectiveness in reaching them in a meaningful and relevant way—improved brand retention, loyalty, and customer lifetime values; increases in revenue per visit, and a truly connected multichannel experience. CRM-based Real-time content targeting is the gateway to connecting with consumers, across any medium, consistently, and at the right time.

2. Provide a Consistent, Optimized Experience… Everywhere

Marketers must accept mobile for what it is: one of many channels to the overall marketplace. And consumers don’t think of mobile as a channel, but rather another means of connecting to a brand, whenever they want—wherever they want. Any personalization you might be achieving on the PC, must be reflected on the mobile site (and on social, email, tablets and so on…).

Aligning all these efforts first requires companies to consider how consumers are using mobile devices to interact with the brand, and how that will differ from the online or in-store interaction. It’s unlikely, for example, that a banking customer will want to complete a loan application on a mobile phone, but probable that she will use the device to check account balances or find the location of the nearest branch. Account balance pages, therefore, should be priority for targeted and optimized content offerings, which are consistent with those offerings among other channels.

Of course, different platforms allow for unique opportunities and shouldn’t be treated as if they are entirely the same—because they’re not.

3. Personalize all access points

With traditional web sites, companies have the luxury of using space to present a great deal of information across different areas on each page. But this luxury is not available in the mobile channel. Given mobile devices’ limited screen sizes, companies must ensure the right content is put in front of the consumer in the right format, the first time–without being able to exploit other test areas on the page.

Marketers can make the mobile experience just as customized and personal as it is on a standard website—and, along the way, draw in and win over customers. Segmentation allows marketers to capture behaviors and attributes about their web and mobile visitors in order to create content tailored to their location, their time of day, type of browser or operating system, or even their brand of mobile device. Another form of personalization, behavioral targeting, gets personal on an individual level: users can be targeted by previous searches, past purchases, the time of their last visits, and even their activities in physical stores, call centers or websites—to predict the next best offer for them in their buying lifecycle.

Any way it’s presented, personalizing the customer experience across all channels is an essential practice for a marketer wanting to be on top of the game.