Understanding Context And Intent Is Key To Nailing CX

Personas have long been a trusted tool for digital teams seeking to build meaningful, revenue-generating connections with consumers. They help brands make sense of a wide audience, define their messaging for specific groups, and get up close and personal with their ideal buyer types.

Personas have long been a trusted tool for digital teams seeking to build meaningful, revenue-generating connections with consumers. They help brands make sense of a wide audience, define their messaging for specific groups, and get up close and personal with their ideal buyer types.

But how helpful are personas when it comes to building satisfying and converting customer experiences? Well, they certainly can tell you a lot about the preferences and needs of a brand’s most profitable segments. But this knowledge is limited by the fact that one persona does not equate to one locked set of browsing behaviors.

Anyone who has ever shopped for something online understands that the level of patience, enthusiasm, concentration, and dedication you bring to the task varies depending on your immediate circumstances and what it is you’re trying to achieve. That’s certainly true for me.

If I’m placing a repeat order on my phone before I rush out the door for the morning school run, I’m looking for speed and efficiency. When I’m browsing on my laptop at night, with the kids in bed, the time I have to devote to page-hopping is much greater and my navigation is more relaxed.

Brands that can understand the expectations and browsing patterns of consumers as influenced by variables such as context and intent have a much greater chance of delivering a customer experience that will keep users smiling all the way to conversion.

With The Right Data, Everyone’s A ‘Mindset Reader’

To better measure and optimize their digital experience, some brands today are looking into the emotional side of analytics. Adding layers of intent and context to traditional persona segmentation, for example, can lead to a deeper, keener understanding of consumer mindset—a barometer that sets the tone for each digital journey.

Here at ContentSquare we recently analyzed the behavioral patterns associated with some of the most common consumer mindsets. We were able to extract two distinct mindsets marketers need to pay attention to: confident and cautious.

Confident mindsets are:

• Much more product-oriented than cautious mindsets.
• 50% more likely to reach a product or category page than cautious visitors.
• Associated with a longer navigation time, spending on average 5 minutes and 40 seconds longer on a site than their cautious counterparts.

Cautious users are:

• More focused on familiarizing themselves with the brand
• Viewing fewer products per visit and reaching the homepage more than twice as much as confident users.
• Spending 19 seconds less on the homepage than confident shoppers, they also interact with it 80% more.
• Not hesitating to click. In fact, they are quicker to click on informational content by 8 seconds.
• Spending 32 seconds longer on product pages, scrolling 16% more than confident users, and clicking on pictures 10% more.
• Consuming much more product info, clicking on this type of content 70% more than confident users.

All in all, cautious mindsets respond well to reassurance elements, and analysis of their navigation indicates these should appear throughout the customer journey. And since cautious users are 2.5 times more likely to be first-time visitors, it’s best to introduce these early on in their browsing.

For example, ensuring your paths to product are intuitive enough to guide even the most tentative visitors should result in an uptick of product page views and fewer back-and-forths between the homepage and product pages. With cautious users, you could say it’s all about finding the right balance — a mix of astute merchandising, easy access to brand and store information, and enough product info to captivate your audience and assist their journey deeper down the funnel.

Why Think Beyond Digital Personas

Mindset-focused analytics can help brands unlock a much deeper level of understanding of their persona-based segments. This understanding can in turn guide astute optimizations that will ensure the digital experience withstands those circumstantial frustrations (poor connection, slow desktop, etc.) that your digital team cannot control, and that your consumers meet their goals—whatever those goals may be.