Responsive design brings a variety of benefits – both for brand marketers and the consumers interacting with content across multiple devices. According to data from a December 2012 study conducted by eConsultancy, nearly 70 percent of client-side marketers described their experience level with responsive design as “average” or better, and more than half of that group described their companies as “ahead of the curve” or “state of the art” when it came to the design technique.

As advanced as some brands and in-house digital marketers may believe they are in responsive design, there are still quite a few challenges that optimization experts and digital marketers must heed. Here are some lessons CMOs can use to get strategic in their approach while driving real, impact-filled growth to the bottom line.

Rule #1: Don’t Become Complacent

Since the mobile marketplace is extremely dynamic and the mobile consumer is ever changing, don’t become complacent just because you launched a responsive-design site.  At the beginning of 2013, tablet users were already showing a higher conversion rate than desktop shoppers. Moreover, 20 percent of mobile users use it as their primary device. This means consumers are evolving more quickly than you may think, so closely monitor your analytics. In fact, companies like Gilt have seen a 100 percent increase in mobile users in a single year.

Rule #2: Always Be Refining

Continually develop and refine new design iterations that work seamlessly across multiple screen sizes and functionalities (e.g., touch, swipe). Being immersive is just as important as being intuitive. Pinch, swipe and zoom are features that smartphone and tablet users know and love. In the early days of responsive design, it was said that these were features that couldn’t be tapped into. With today’s more common blend of adaptive and responsive design, we know that this is not the case. Developers have touch-screen-specific controls at their disposal, and customization can be achieved through injection of JavaScript, for example. It’s important to strike the right balance between optimal performance (page-load time) and customization, as the two are interrelated.

Rule #3: Never Stop Testing and Learning

Always be testing and learning with your responsive-design site so that key information and functions are visible, prioritized and accessible to people regardless of what device they are using. Getting shoppers to move through the entire funnel – starting on the home page and moving to key product and landing pages all the way through the checkout process – is no easy feat. Each consumer, be it a first-time visitor or a longtime brand advocate, wants something different and unique from the checkout process. For a big-box apparel retailer, for example, free shipping can prove effective in rewarding high-value customers and cultivating loyalty among a brand’s average customers. This is where testing and learning play an integral role in pinpointing the optimal threshold for free shipping to boost online sales and grow the brand’s market share amid competitors. The data and insights delivered from a test-and-learn strategy could very well disprove brand assumptions and, in turn, generate the type of ROI brands seek such as higher average order value, as well as an increase in purchase conversions and overall revenue. 

Rule #4: Leverage All Data

Even the most basic site analytics can reveal huge potential opportunities.  Incorporating analytics early in the development of a responsive-design site is important. Set your responsive breakpoints you seek to track within your analytics solution and run a report for traffic to specific pages by device type. You’ll be able to glean a wealth of information about which areas of your site are seeing the heaviest tablet traffic, compared to areas with significant upticks in smartphone-only traffic.  You’ll also be able to see which areas produce low traffic or poor conversions. This tactic can help you optimize the customer experience to drive customer engagement, loyalty, conversions and revenue consistently for the long haul.

Back in 2001, when Google AdWords was just launched, I remember the day that my first pay-per-click (PPC) campaign yielded the first batch of leads for the company I was working for. In all, this tactic generated 42 leads, and a significant portion was even qualified. Better yet, the price was just right, ranging between 15 to 25 cents per click. It seemed like a great tool to grow our website traffic, as well as an effective means for generating unique leads. There was no doubt in my mind we were going to scale this campaign.

Since then, a lot has changed in the PPC world. Now there is a great deal more available in terms of competitive products from other search engines like Bing. You don’t just have an array of search ads; now there are native ads on Google that replicate the search experience, remarketing display ads, mobile ads, Facebook-sponsored ads, sponsored tweets via Twitter and LinkedIn ads. The CMO has fallen in love with performance-based ads like these PPC ad vehicles, mainly because they work (to some extent) and it’s easy to justify a budget for it when a return can be clearly shown to the CFO.

But like any ad, the efficacy of a single ad deteriorates over time because people become numb to repeated exposure to the ad. So the typical reaction is to change the ad around and run it again. But what happens when the efficacy of the ad network declines? The usual approach from marketers is to simply run more ads and spread them out in different places — all in the hopes that they will stick somewhere. But hope and guesswork do not make an effective strategy.

It’s amazing to me that so many enterprise-level CMOs focus on increasing their digital advertising budgets as the first option to increase online engagement. That’s only going to lead to a flawed strategy and less-than-stellar results. Why would you spend a lot of money, resources and staff hours on mobile ads if the online or mobile experience itself frustrates, irks and turns away customers?

What CMOs need to do is focus on creating seamless, easy-to-use-and-navigate, relevant and meaningful experiences for customers, regardless of their device or channel. And that doesn’t mean launching a full redesign of your website with fancy UX architecture, nor does it mean you should put all your mobile eggs into the responsive design basket. It means taking the slow and steady approach to test and tweak every single experience across the entire engagement funnel and using real-time data to power more personalized experiences that meet the individual needs, habits and behaviors of customers.

But before CMOs raise their hands in the air in praise of online testing and personalization, they need to make sure that they’re measuring the right metrics (that really matter for their business). For instance, analyze bounce rates and your average number of page views. These types of insights can tell you a story about your visitors — who they are, what they’re doing, where they’re going within your website or mobile site and what types of actions they’re taking. What if you have a high double-digit bounce rate of 30%, 40% or even 50%? This is what’s commonly known as the “show up and throw up” approach in the Web business. Most likely, you have a low single-digit page view of 1.xx or 2.xx, which is not uncommon. This is where the money is literally falling out of your budget. And that’s not something CMOs can or should take lightly.

Consider taking a piece of your PPC ad budget and instead, put it to good use by testing and optimizing your online experience. I’m not talking about search engine optimization (SEO). What I’m talking about is making every single page a funnel within a website or mobile site optimized and personalized for the actual traffic you are driving to it. For example, if Facebook is driving a certain portion of traffic to your website, are you using all of the data you have about those visitors and combining it with Facebook data to create the most intuitive, relevant and engaging on-site experience to convert “lookers” into purchasers? If a mobile ad is directing smartphone users to your mobile site, have you tested the specific page they’re landing on and optimizing it to drive higher engagement, conversions and cross-channel revenue? If your answer is no, then you have a serious problem.

The reality is that in a world where the consumer reigns supreme, there is an abundance of opportunities for brands to connect, interact with, speak to, engage and convert casual browsers into loyal brand advocates. So it’s high time brands stop running themselves ragged with PPC ads and start putting their attention toward creating a unified customer experience across every single device and channel.

As more and more marketers are discovering, it’s impossible to think about any digital or e-commerce strategy without acknowledging the critical importance of the overall Hispanic population on today’s electronic marketplace. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 17 percent of the U.S. population identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino, comprising more than 53.4 million, or nearly one in six Americans. What’s more, the Hispanic sector is the fastest-growing ethnic segment in the U.S., accounting for more than half the growth in U.S. population between 2000 and 2010, rising from 35.3 million in 2000 to 50.5 million in 2010. By some estimates, Hispanics will outnumber all other cultural groups in the U.S. by 2050. In fact, there are more Hispanics in the U.S. than in any other country in the world, save for Mexico.

Just as brick-and-mortar retailers have recognized the growing purchasing power, shopping preferences and influence of this vigorous and fast-growing demographic, online marketers too are beginning to see the value of personalizing and customizing every customer experience to better serve their individual needs. So then I ask myself a simple but very important question: Are CMOS acting like mobile and social “agents” for Hispanic shoppers and giving them exactly what they want (i.e., online content, messaging, images, offers) in the right way on the right channels at the right times and places? It comes down to a CMO’s willingness and ability to listen to and observe what customers are doing online, what types of sites they are visiting, what types of keywords they are searching for online, their purchasing behaviors and the like. The failure to listen can have the most negative consequences on brand engagement, loyalty and most important, online and mobile sales.

Think in experiences, not channels.

According to the Terra Third Hispanic Digital Consumer Study by comScore, Hispanics have actually outpaced non-Hispanics in the adoption of smartphones, increasing from 43 percent in 2010 to 57 percent in 2012. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), 46 percent of online Hispanics over the age of 18 regularly shop online, compared to just 43 percent of general market online users.

Even more interesting is that Hispanics tend to use their smartphones to research and make purchases more than non-Hispanic consumers in every category. In fact, Hispanics are highly likely to leverage social, mobile and other online resources in their buying decisions, and in fact, are even bypassing the traditional PC-online route in exchange for the convenience of “always on, always connected” smartphones and tablets. As Walgreens CMO Graham Atkinson stated so profoundly at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum East in New York City last month: “Omni-channel is an experience strategy, not a fulfillment strategy.” To put that in simple terms, customers don’t think in channels; they think about the experience as a whole. Does the mobile site look like a duplicate, yet shrunken, version of a brand’s online site? Do the images and pages on a brand’s mobile site take more than 7 seconds to load? Is the brand’s Checkout button large and easy to find? Does the home page feel cluttered and make it difficult to find and use the search bar? All of these questions need to be asked when a brand is looking to optimize their site to be as informative, relevant and easy to use on mobile devices. If it isn’t, you can bet consumers won’t think twice about visiting a competitor’s site or even clicking away forever from all of your digital channels.

To be sure, Hispanics are not a monolithic and homogenous market. The group actually embraces dozens of different nationalities, cultures and identities, including about three out of every five Hispanics who were actually born in the U.S. As a result, buying habits and patterns may vary significantly depending on their country of origin and local community.

Oddly enough, relatively few mainstream e-commerce marketers make specialized efforts to personalize and tailor their presence across multiple channels to better serve the needs of this hyper-connected and demanding market. Some major sites, such as insurer Progressive, are setting the bar high in terms of creating customer experiences that are authentic, engaging, relevant and useful for mobile buyers.

While your site may be well designed for full-screen viewing on a PC, it may be difficult and impractical to view on a smartphone or tablet. Is the navigation practical? Are the products and options presented meaningfully on a small screen? Should you parse and meter the content differently?

Depending on the nature of your site, it may pay to invest in a so-called “responsive design” that automatically adjusts to the viewing device, allowing for a coherent experience on anything from a 4-inch smartphone to tablet, to PC—or deploy a separate, specially built layout designed strictly for mobile devices.

In addition, it would be smart to thoroughly test and experiment with your mobile presentation to discover possible obstacles, sticking points and other issues that may affect the mobile users’ experience. In the constrained space of a mobile device, you may need different tactics and approaches to ensure a seamless and frictionless experience. What works on the PC may fail on a smartphone.

People don’t engage with brands; they engage with a purpose.

Earlier this year, Gustavo Razzetti, EVP and managing director of Lapiz, the Latino unit of digital agency Leo Burnett, wrote in Clickz: “Social media has become so big that sometimes we forget to approach it as part of the overall marketing strategy. Successful brands have a holistic approach rather than approaching social media as a stand-alone tactic. We know that Latinos show a higher engagement with brand pages versus non-Hispanics. But that doesn’t mean that they will follow any brand. People don’t engage with brands. People engage with a purpose. And the most successful case studies are precisely those that embrace this approach.”

Now consider the fact that the Pew Hispanic Center found that 68 percent of Latino Internet users say they regularly use Facebook, Twitter and other social media, compared to just 58 percent of all U.S. Internet users. Perhaps even more relevant for online marketers is that Hispanics are actually more likely to seek advice and opinion before making a purchase, including both face-to-face and mobile and social channels. This means brands need to take ownership of what social channels they are embracing, how they are communicating and interacting with these tech-savvy consumers, and what purpose they fulfill. Otherwise, counting the millions of likes a brand gets on Facebook is just an empty metric if brands don’t, in one way or another, drive consumers to click more, read more and essentially spend more across multiple channels—be it in-store, online or mobile.

With more advanced personalization and optimization strategies, it’s now possible for brands to modify and customize the customer experience across multiple channels—in terms of messaging, tone and content—based on where the visitor is coming from, be it Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or another referring site. The result can make for a smoother transition between social and commerce, a low-friction journey toward purchase.

Never stop testing and learning.

Depending on a brand’s particular offer and target market, including a Spanish-language path for customers, may be worth testing and refining. However, you might discover that a simple language translation of your site may not be optimal; messages and elements that perform well in English may not work as well when simply recast in Spanish. It may indeed call for separate optimization and refinement. Should your buttons, calls to action and checkout processes be tweaked and adjusted for different language or cultural sensibilities? Only real-world testing can provide definitive answers.

UPDATE:  here is a page that provides citizens with guidance on getting the most of the Census website. Enjoy!

What does personalization really mean? You’ll be forgiven if you have absolutely no idea. As trendy catchwords go, “personalization” has become a go-to term for websites and online marketers, laden with all the possibilities of connecting with individual consumers and a departure from the limitations of a one-size-fits-all approach.

Nearly every online marketing vendor touts some form of personalization as the secret sauce for helping to target customers.

It makes sense. The potential of personalized online marketing, when done well, is enormous—and for that reason, it’s a compelling sell. The problem is, it hasn’t been done successfully thus far. And thanks to vendor hype and overpromise, just mention the word “personalization,” and most have learned to greet it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

But personalization isn’t just marketing hype. It’s a complex concept that really can live up to its billing. However, retailers, in tandem with their marketing vendors, must first identify what personalization really means—and what it means to their business and target customers.

Furthermore, when it comes to their websites, mobile sites, apps and CRM platforms, 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 reach consumers with personalization that is effective and full of impact. There are no easy answers or instant solutions for creating personalization that works. It’s about evolution rather than revolution.

Defining Personalization

A truly personalized customer experience—what amounts to a custom website for every consumer—has been the Holy Grail of marketing for over a decade. Yet the very concept is conflicted, fragmented and confusing. Ask 10 marketers to define personalization and you’ll get 10 answers. You’ll also find that despite all the hype, the bar has been set low; most of these same marketers are hoping for nothing more than a few product recommendations or more effective targeting.

Even the experts don’t give us a whole lot of direction on personalization. According to Forrester, Web personalization is “creating experiences on websites or through interactive media that are unique to individuals or segments of consumers.” Just about as vague as every other definition.

In reality, every specific piece of information you can gain about your customer—from search information to online behavior and purchases—can be used to create a personalized experience. That means that your approach to personalization can be as simple (using one or two collected insights) or complex (a detailed formula based on multiple insights) as you want it to be.

With the right combination of technology, research and testing, e-commerce businesses can now deliver a personalized online experience that far exceeds anything that can be delivered in store—short of hiring a dedicated personal shopper. With the right personalization strategy and tools, companies can create an online equivalent of a brick-and-mortar store, where anything a consumer might want is located in a single aisle.

Technology Is So Personal

It goes without saying that your marketing team is comprised of geniuses, but a lack of imagination—and technology—may be limiting their vision when it comes to personalization.

Yes, they’ve thought about segmentation, recommendations and retargeting, but these techniques are only a fraction of what technology now allows. New sophisticated real-time automated SaaS solutions empower marketers to create personalized experiences that far exceed what was previously possible. With SaaS solutions working in tandem with strategy and implementation, companies can begin to move toward complex forms of personalization—and achieve online what is already being done offline with propensity modeling and other business analytics.

Really, knowing about low-cost SaaS solutions—and how to use them to take advantage of opportunity—might just be the most significant indicator of marketing genius.

Getting Started with Personalization

Once the right technology is in place, one of the best ways to employ personalization is with a set of “rules” that define parameters. These rules establish conditions for a specific visitor experience; for every insight gleaned, you create a more and more personalized experience.

Of course, rules don’t exist in a vacuum. When defining them, you must take into account known consumer behaviors, including the various stages that shoppers go through when making any kind of purchase and the fact that they may visit your site several times before actually pulling the “buy now” trigger. While this knowledge might seem to complicate your rules in the immediate term, it can be used to your advantage.

Sure, go ahead and create rules for first-time visitors, but you can and should also devise more complicated formulas that incorporate insights and data from previous visits and apply them to future visits. So, for example, retarget repeat visitors based on the last product they searched for during their last visit. This rule path can then be enhanced with complementary content or offerings, whether for discount on the searched product or an up-sell on similar items. It’s personalization that gives customers what they want and shows them that you value them—a must for creating relationships and loyalty online.

Keep in mind, however, that while targeting with rules is effective and often a great place to start, it does have its limitations.

Marketers will find it nearly impossible to manually define rules for expansive websites that have vast and diverse daily traffic. In this case, technology needs to be partnered with sophisticated behavioral targeting through mathematical models that enable you to predict the most compelling content and offers based on known insights and data points about each visitor. This type of model learns and adjusts dynamically over time to optimize visitor experiences with content that yields the highest conversion rate. This approach is also better for the broader range of content (product types, specific brands or destinations) that each individual receives based on unique predictive attributes.

Using Product Recommendations the Right Way

Want to see great personalization in action? Amazon continues to set the gold standard for best practices in personalization. The site has an unparalleled ability to recognize and deftly exploit consumers’ online browsing and buying habits. (Of course, it also has the advantage of customer interactions living entirely online, while most retailers have offline presences that dilute their ability to gather insights.)

Because of Amazon’s clear success, almost every major e-commerce site has taken steps to mimic Amazon’s highly successful interactions with returning customers. (“You were interested in XYZ, so you may enjoy ABC,” etc.)

But that doesn’t mean they’re getting it right. Everything from competing recommendations (you want shoppers to buy more, not different) or recommendations for products that are out of stock to a lack of testing and product reviews means that many recommendation programs are falling flat or, even worse, are counterproductive.

To offer successful personalization through recommendation, focus on the essential elements.  Product recommendations should be placed on category pages, product pages and the shopping cart or basket page, with each page type getting its own recommendation formula and approach. This approach allows for more targeted recommendations and for segmented testing and optimization of recommendations. Recommendation content, placement on the page and the design of a promotion all play a role in the success of recommendations. Segmenting and measuring the conversion impact of every detail (e.g., images, fonts, colors, the number of recommended products, the placement on pages, and the recommendation model used) can help you identify the approach that yields the highest conversion rates for your visitors.

With a program for monitoring and improving recommendations, you improve the shopping experience for each customer—and potentially increase revenue and cart sizes.

Maximizing the Opportunity  

Companies that have already successfully leveraged new SaaS solutions along with optimization and personalization strategies have achieved, on average, a double-digit increase in conversions. And with these programs becoming more common, consumers are going to be expecting a sophisticated level of personalization.

The good news is that with the SaaS-based model, companies can have personalization programs up and running immediately. Add in multichannel data from call centers and stores or branches, and they can create an organization-wide, cross-channel approach to personalization within a quarter.

There is no doubt that, after years of hype and hyperbole, we’ve finally found the holy grail of online marketing: Personalization.

We’re all human. We all make mistakes. However, when your mistake involves social media, it’s not that easy to make amends. Take, for example, the case of the (now) infamous KitchenAid tweet about President Obama’s dead grandmother.

If you somehow missed it, it went a little something like this: During the first presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, Obama credited his tenacious grandmother who helped raise him and passed away three days before he was elected president.

Moments later, @KitchenAidUSA, the company’s official Twitter account, sent this:

“Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! She died 3 days b4 he became president.” The insensitive tweet not only went to the company’s 25,000 followers, but also included a hashtag to make it a part of NBC News’ social debate conversation. KitchenAid hastily deleted the tweet, but the damage was done. Even after the head of the KitchenAid brand, Cynthia Soledad, offered an apology, many still expressed outrage and announced boycotts of the brand.

Of course, KitchenAid isn’t the only company who has fallen victim to social media gone bad. There is a plethora of marketing campaigns to choose from that all ended with disastrous results. Here are a couple listed below along with the lessons we can learn from each of them.

Toyota Camry

During last football season’s Superbowl, Toyota launched a major Twitter campaign meant to promote the Camry. Creating a number of Twitter accounts labeled @CamryEffect1 through @CamryEffect9, Toyota intended to engage users by directly tweeting them. However, this had the opposite effect: users accused Toyota of bombarding and spamming them with unsolicited messages. To their credit, Toyota quickly suspended the accounts and issued an apology, but by then it was too late.

Lesson learned: Not only is mass-spamming your social media audience an awful campaign plan, but in order to truly engage your community, tweets should be interesting and engaging. In the case of the Camry, it came across as nothing more than self-serving spam.

Qantas Airlines

Last year, Qantas faced huge backlash over a very poorly timed Twitter competition, inviting followers to win a pair of first class pajamas by tweeting their idea of a luxury experience. The promotion was arguably already in poor taste given the global economic downturn, but was also acutely insensitive given that at the time of the contest, the airline’s labor relations was at a standoff with the unions representing its pilots, engineers, baggage handlers and caterers. Qantas had grounded their entire domestic and international fleet, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. The competition turned into an opportunity for angry customers to share their gripes and jokes at the company’s expense.

Lesson Learned: Timing is everything.

Durex South Africa

Durex caused quite a controversy when they sent out this terrible tweet in South Africa: “Why did God give men penises? So they’d have at least one way to shut a woman up. #DurexJoke” The tweet certainly made an impression with tweeters, bloggers, and mainstream media picking up the story with the sole intent of trashing the brand. Durex later issued an apology of the offensive, misogynist tweet which was apparently sent out by their PR company.

Lesson Learned: Just because you have a hashtag joke does not mean anything goes, and sex does NOT always sell.

Now, for a couple examples of social media done right:

Canlis

A couple years ago, Canlis, a restaurant in Seattle widely regarded as the best in the city, celebrated its 60th birthday, and to mark the occasion, it ran a Facebook and Twitter contest where the winners were able to dine at 1950’s prices. From a restaurant where the average entree can set you back over $60, that’s a pretty good deal. Brothers (and founders) Mark and Brian Canlis personally signed 50 restaurant menus from 1950 and hid them around the Greater Seattle area daily for the 50 days leading up the Canlis’ 60th birthday. The “scavenger hunt” started anew every day, as the restaurant posts a clue to the menu’s whereabouts, via their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The first person to unravel the clue and find the hidden menu won the dinner.

This was a genius social media marketing campaign and I love the creativity that went into it. The contest duration was long enough to give it lasting interest and participation, it encouraged repeat visitors to their social media sites, the prize was worth playing for, and there were MANY winners.

Proctor & Gamble

We all know the infamous ‘Old Spice’ viral video campaign by now (which earned itself over 43 million views on YouTube), but what you may not have heard of is the follow up to the video. Proctor and Gamble’s brand agency, Wieden + Kennedy, put Isaiah Mustafa on the Web and invited fans to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets to pose questions that he quickly answered. The questions poured in–even celebrities asked a few–and Mustafa responded in more than 180 Web videos shot quickly over a few days. The real-time effort was the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.

QuestionPro

Lastly, let’s take a look at a social media campaign going on right now that you can take part in: QuestionPro, a provider of online survey software, is currently running a contest on their Facebook page, asking users to ‘burn their comment cards’. The idea behind the contest is that the era of paper feedback is dead, and that hospitality needs to move to a more digital solution, such as QR codes, digital feedback surveys, and iPad and tablet based research tools.

This campaign works for a few reasons — it’s funny without being offensive, it relates to their product strongly enough to send a message but without going overboard, and most importantly, it’s easy to enter. Yes, there are lots of examples of super-innovative contests that attract plenty of attention, but there are even more examples of innovative contests that flop because they are too complicated for the user.

Head over to the contest page to check it out.