Optimization is all about listening – and doing it successfully means that you are deriving meaningful insights from what your customers are telling you (explicitly or implicitly). Every time I talk about on-site optimization I find myself talking about the measurable outcomes – better conversion rates mostly. But it’s more than this – creating an excellent, relevant experience for visitors to your site will have longer lasting effects, Lester Wunderman the father of Direct Marketing called this “building brands while driving sales”. One of the smarter guys I know in the site-side optimization field, Jonathan Mendez sums it up well:
“The benefits can be profound when you deliver a higher degree of relevance to people based upon what you know. What you're doing is creating a better experience. This has all kinds of quantitative value in improving media performance, conversion rate improvements, page views, etc. It also has amazing qualitative benefits that result from the positive emotions created when someone is having a good experience with your brand and business. We're trying hard to quantify these brand metrics for our clients -- and though challenging, they're real and tremendously undervalued.”
