REO is a customer experience agency. We are an eclectic mix of bright and creative thinkers, embracing the best of research, strategy, design and experimentation to solve our clients’ toughest challenges. We work across a variety of sectors, with companies such as Amazon, M&S, Tesco and Samsung.
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After everything that has happened over the last two or three years, many of the world’s leading economic pundits are now predicting a worldwide dip in the economy. For many decision makers, these developments mark a need to cut costs, find efficiencies, and batten down the hatches. This is unsurprising, really. We humans are often highly risk-averse creatures. When faced with uncertainty – as we are now – damage limitation is our go-to. During a recession, consumer behaviour – and, by extension, online behaviour – tends to change in unforeseeable ways. This might mean that the messaging and imagery on your website that was once highly effective stops appealing to your core users. Likewise, it might mean these elements that were once unappealing become highly effective. For example, people may be more price sensitive. But this extends far beyond the price of the product you are selling. What would it cost customers to use the product? Can they return it from their home rather than having to drive? This may all sound very hypothetical, but we have seen this exact thing happen recently. Many websites that were well-optimised before the COVID-19 pandemic saw a big dip in performance soon after the first lockdowns were announced.
These performance dips did not go away with time – in many cases, the pandemic completely changed the way consumers were behaving online. What is more, to diagnose the performance issues, many optimisation teams opted to re-run past winning experiments. What they found was that many experiments that had been strong winners in 2019 had become losers in 2020. This illustrates the effect that changes in economic, social, and environmental conditions can have on online behaviour – and it highlights the real need for constant adaptation. But when it comes to the potentiality of being faced with an economic crisis, cutting down on the marketing budget and restructuring the marketing budget judiciously to adjust to the evolving economic uncertainties are two different approaches – with different outcomes. When you go ahead with the latter, it ensures the long-term sustainability of your business. Then why do businesses decide to compromise on CRO? And how should they strategize instead?
During an impeding economic crisis, other expenses take priority, pushing marketing investments to the backseat. Paying employees’ salaries, running operations, adopting new tech stacks, and maintaining important contracts are considered more crucial for business survival. Also, companies fear that promotions and advertisements around this time can displease customers who are now more likely to control their spending and are watchful of how brands position themselves during economic turbulence. However, McGraw-Hill research showed that B2B organisations that maintained or increased their marketing budget during the 1981-1982 recession had significantly higher sales during, and for the next three years following, the recession.
Bringing down the average customer acquisition costs becomes a key objective for all businesses during times of economic slowdowns. Marketers must accept the fact that business enquiries and lead-counts will be lower than usual – and maximum effort should go in towards converting the leads that are coming in. In other words, conversion rate optimisation (CRO) needs to take centre stage. This can be done by something as simple as improving the business website, analysing user-behaviour and interactions on site, and doing the necessary website revamps/element changes. When CRO is done right, cost of acquisition falls and the revenue-per-visitor figure goes up.
A global recession invariably leaves a lasting impact on economies – altering buyer behaviours and preferences. By investing in digital marketing, businesses can gradually be less apprehensive and fearful of the market situation – and be successful in understanding what their target audiences are looking for.
Brand positioning and business activities can be modified accordingly. Recessionary trends need not necessarily be all doom-and-gloom – by being proactive and leveraging digital marketing opportunities, companies can still survive, thrive, and stay ahead of competitors.
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