This is the third part in a 10-part series by Coalition Technologies on replatforming.
A customer experience and marketing audit is an essential component of the replatforming process. 73% of consumers report that a positive customer experience has a crucial influence on their brand loyalty, so you can’t afford to miss any opportunity to improve your CX. Including an audit in replatforming allows a third party to identify any potential drawbacks to your current approach, and they can suggest strategies to improve it.
Learn why you should consider running an audit and how to conduct a successful audit to bring the best results to your company.
Table of Contents
What Is a User Experience Audit?
As new users land on your site they are often presented with several options to click through, read, and engage with your content. The pages that are most often visited, the amount of time a user engages with your content, and the actions taken on your site are important pieces of data that are collected to get a better understanding of your website’s user experience.
By looking at the data you’ve collected, you can get a better understanding and then make data-informed decisions to improve areas that are underperforming and create a better customer experience.
Performing a customer experience audit will involve analyzing your current data, making rational inferences of the data, identifying your next action steps, and then implementing those actions on your site.
How To Conduct a User Experience Audit
Before starting, you want to make sure that you are having an unbiased view of your current platform. Reading statistics from Google Analytics or another reputable platform can give you unbiased insights into the ways your customers are behaving. If possible, try to include more than one person running a user experience audit to get as many different points of view as possible and make a quantitative decision on how to proceed.
While looking over the data, have a few questions in mind that can help direct your thought process. Ask yourself what experiences are customers enjoying when they are on your site. You can look at Google Analytics data that represent the users’ time on page or bounce rate. These will help you understand if your customers are spending more time on specific pages than others or if they are leaving the page right away before going to other pages on your site.
You can also use this information to decide if users are having a bad experience on your site. Anytime a user doesn’t spend much time on a page you want to ask yourself why. Look at which pages on your site are getting the most views and which pages aren’t getting any views at all. From this data, you can understand if there is a technical problem on your site keeping people from reaching important web pages.
What Is a Marketing Audit?
A complete marketing audit means going through your current situation and identifying different stacks you need to implement that can effectively handle what you’re looking for. This means having good background knowledge about current platforms available and what these platforms can do for a business.
If you don’t have this type of background, you can spend money on a marketing professional who can consult you after completing the marketing audit. Or, you could spend some personal time doing some research on the next steps you should take. You’ll want to ask yourself a series of questions about all of your online marketing needs to run a comprehensive marketing audit and find what tech stacks you’ll want to start implementing.
How To Conduct a Marketing Audit
When looking to promote various aspects of your business, you should keep a couple of questions in mind for each section of your marketing audit. For example:
SEO – Analyze what your current onsite-SEO features are and what is currently missing from your existing platforms. From here, you can make decisions about if you need to improve these existing features or your priority will be adding on new features. SEO drives 1000%+ traffic than social media.
PPC Management – See if your current campaigns are providing the level of traffic and brand awareness that you desire, or if they need an update. You also want to make sure that your tracking pixels and tools are properly incorporated.
Social Media – Are you implementing the latest features of social media that will allow users to purchase directly from the platform? Also, check to see how your current practices are performing and if they need an evaluation or if they are bringing the attention you need.
Email Marketing – How much does your current email CRM system integrate into your site? Are you able to set up automatic email campaigns through the integration or are there problems you need to address to get a more efficient system running?
Discounting – Does your current system allow you to set up and manage your discounts effectively? If you aren’t able to run discounts for technical reasons you may want to get a consultant to help determine how you can set up an automatic system.
On-Site Merchandising – The ability to create upsells and downsells for your products or services can bring in significant revenue. Make sure you have the integrations or platforms in place to implement these features. You also want to consider how relevant the recommendations are to your audience.
Shopping Cart Abandonment – Don’t lose valuable sales from one of the easiest features to implement. Set up reminder emails for abandoned carts and make sure your team can easily set up and manage the process.
Email Capture – If you aren’t growing your email list you are missing out on a huge opportunity to retarget the same individuals at virtually no extra cost. Get your entire email capture process automated on your site.
Personalization – Find out how much personalization you are able to offer on your current stack and see what you can do to improve it. As more competition enters the online space, personalization will be key to providing top-notch customer service and product recommendations.
Product Reviews – Your entire review process should be looked over to see if you can improve automation or your ability to display your online reviews. It’s one thing to be able to get them and a whole other to use them effectively to bring in more qualified leads.
Mobile Usability – More and more people are using mobile devices to browse the internet. Check your website’s design, website speed, conversion rates, and bounce rates to see how you can optimize their experience. About 50% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices.
Rewards and Loyalty Programs – Are you able to offer high-quality rewards for your most loyal customers to increase the retention rate? The more you develop this in your marketing audit, the better long-term success you are setting up for your company.
Content Marketing – Content is king as they say, and you want to make sure yours rises above the competition. Understand if your current content is relevant to getting users more interested in your company and how you can continue to integrate it with the rest of your platforms. 70% of marketers already actively invest in content marketing for their clients.
Running UX and Marketing Audits
By completing a customer experience and marketing audit you are giving your business multiple opportunities to make data-based and unbiased decisions in the future. Giving your team the data and information they need to make better choices will ultimately increase your momentum and growth for your brand.
