MM: It would seem to me that the examples you’ve used so far have really been transaction-intensive.

BK: Only because they’re familiar I think to every one of us.

MM: Sure. Then there’s the adjacent, which is getting someone to consider buying something. So what articles, what Blog posts, most induced someone to step forward and opt into the newsletter or download the white paper or whatever. There’s all that kind of presale activity that for the most part goes on unmonitored. This gets into the larger area of what I’ll call content analysis as opposed to transaction analysis. Right?

BK: That’s a great transition to the other half. I said a minute ago that this break-fix analysis of problems is half of what CEM is about. The other half is behavioral analysis. It’s proactively analyzing what brought visitors to your site; what they wanted to do; what they did; and, how you can make your site better at serving visitor needs.

Web analytic solutions collect a huge amount of data defining what campaign, keyword or affiliate directed a visitor to your site. Further this data can show you click-path and conversion funnel analysis allowing web marketers to understand past behavior.

In conjunction with web analytics companies are using A/B and multivariate testing solutions to serve, test and evaluate the effectiveness of various content on driving desired behavior. As well, many companies are using voice-of-the-customer systems to garner direct feedback from their on-line visitors.

All these solutions feed into a CEM model for those organizations that want to improve the experience their customers have with them as a company. As you know this leads to great brand loyalty and even affinity where our customers lead others to us for service.

MM: Right. In fact, I report in our Blog of Your Google Strategy — how one particular marketing executive tested almost 1,025 unique combinations of, “Did it have a picture, did it have a quote, and did the quote come from a customer or an analyst?”

He was able to deduce over the course of 4 or 5 weeks the optimum configuration of content, price, quotations, pictures and so on. He got almost a 10% lift as a function of just optimizing the presentation of the content with real customers.

BK: That’s fantastic feedback!