DISCUSSION
Retailers are ‘satisfied’ with their online customer journey optimization efforts
Written by Guest contributor
Photo: @TatianaMara via Twenty20
Retail Touchpoints staff
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website.
According to a survey from Yieldify of 207 U.K. and U.S. e-commerce marketers who work in retail and travel, 88 percent are satisfied with how they optimize the online customer journey, well ahead of the 62 percent who said so in 2018.
These marketers also are thrilled with the progression of their website conversion rates, with satisfaction growing from 61 percent in 2018 to 88 percent this year.
This confidence boost largely comes from education on the terms they use and the metrics they aim to achieve. Marketers now have a much greater level of confidence in defining “customer journey optimization (CJO)” as distinct from “conversion rate optimization (CRO)” or personalization — 95 percent were confident in doing so, compared to just 65 percent in 2018.
Overall, the perception of challenges continues to shift among marketers: while 49 percent of survey respondents cited having enough time and resources as a top challenge in 2018, and 46 percent had issues with having the right data, these numbers dropped drastically, to 27 percent and 36 percent respectively.
Additionally, marketers feel like they are gaining a better grasp of the technologies they use. In 2018, having the right tools was ranked as a top-three challenge facing all marketers, but this year that has dropped to fifth place for retailers.
The top challenge to delivering an optimized customer journey in 2019 is having the right skills, identified by 39 percent, up from 34 percent in 2018. As a result, 50 percent of marketers are planning to invest in training to fill the skills gap, with 36 percent saying they would hire more specialists.
Other areas cited more as a challenge in 2019 versus 2018 include working across multiple internal silos, 32 percent versus 22 percent in 2018; new privacy regulations, such as GDPR, 31 percent versus 16 percent; and shorter-term projects take priority, 26 percent, up from 18 percent