Hard to believe another year is almost in the rearview. Time to reflect and come up with those nagging, but potentially life changing resolutions. To help get you in the spirit, we’d like to share some optimization wisdom disguised as five popular personal resolutions. We hope this list inspires you to set some goals for optimizing your digital experiences (and perhaps even your personal life) in 2018.

Exercise more frequently

Increase test velocity

Velocity Hurdles

The more you experiment, the more optimization opportunities you’ll uncover, and the more you’ll learn about what makes your customers happy. The happier your customers are, the more likely they’ll be to convert. So don’t be afraid to jump in. Start small and test frequently. You’ll be surprised what you learn, and how quickly it will become part of your routine. Before you know it, you’ll see really incredible results. Keep building on those learnings and make those iterative but meaningful improvements. Frequently adjust your goals to reach new heights and continue to increase your conversion rate.

Learn more about what the power of rapid iterative testing can do. Check out our case study with The Clymb and the impact an iterative approach had on improving customer value.

 

Make smart investments

Reduce your Ad spend

Optimize your ad spend

A popular (but misguided) method frequently deployed to boost conversions, is simply driving more eyes to a website or landing pages by increasing advertising spend. While you might acquire more customers this way, a far more cost effective method is to improve the experience to get a higher percentage of visitors happily converting.

A wonderful side effect of providing a better experience is that you ultimately end up with happier customers, which increases customer retention, lifetime customer value and the likelihood they will recommend you to a friend.

Check out our case study on how we helped Universal Technical Institute reduce its ad budget, increase leads and improve lead quality.

 

Get a physical

Let the data lead the way

Let data leads the way

These days, getting access to piles and piles of customer data and analytics is easy. It’s how you interpret that data and decode the story it’s telling, that is the hard part. However, if you are not frequently checking your analytics to ensure the entire customer journey is performing as expected, you could be leaving a considerable amount of revenue behind.

It is important to not just consult your customer data when making decisions, but to let it drive strategy to ensure happy customers and goal-smashing results.

Find out how we let data drive a site redesign for Benchmade knives that lead to happy customers and a 320% increase in online sales.

 

Learn a new skill or hobby

Start Personalizing

Smart personalization

Digital marketers have recognized the power of personalization and have held the vision of one-to-one marketing up high for years. However, unlocking the full potential of personalization requires a significant commitment to both technologies and resources. But, if you can make it a priority, it’s all worth it. 81% of consumers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them and when not to. Like experimentation and A/B testing, you should start small and build your program on successes and learnings. Iterate slowly and methodically, and don’t be afraid to try new things. Regardless of whether or not you hit it out of the park on the first swing, you will learn something extremely valuable about your customers that you can build on and hone in over time. It won’t take long and you will see a strong ROI.

Learn more about how roboboogie harnessed personalization and target marketing to help Specialized Bikes sell through BOGO tires in less than a week.

 

Spend more time with family and friends

Don’t forget to listen to your customers

Listen to your customers

As data-lead marketers, it’s really easy to get heads down in the data and forget that there are humans behind all those numbers. Don’t forget to come up for air, get out in the real world and talk to your customers. Conversations with even a small sample will reveal a lot about their needs and what makes them happy. Combine this with some usability testing and you’ll likely have no shortage of ideas for optimization and personalization.

Find out how harnessed qualitative user feedback alongside experimentation to drive over 46% ecommerce sales growth for Wacom.