The Transcript

How Adaptive Websites Deliver an Exceptional Experience While Accelerating Profit

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

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Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur, everybody. I am Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and I am joined on this episode by Rainmaker Digital founder and CEO Brian Clark. Brian, welcome.

Brian Clark: Thank you, Jerod. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, which we do every day, day in and day out, but sometimes we record it.

Jerod Morris: That’s right. I feel like we should have been recording for the last half hour.

Brian Clark: Could have been good. Could have been bad. Who knows.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Last week on The Digital Entrepreneur we talked about email and were going through the five elements of the modern marketing website. In today’s episode, we’re going to hit the second one. We’re going to talk about adaptive content and how websites that can adapt their content are able to deliver an exceptional experience for an audience while also having a big impact on revenue and on profit as well.

‘Adaptive Content’ Defined

Jerod Morris: It’s probably useful to begin just by making sure everyone is on the same page with ‘adaptive content,’ what the term means, what it is. I think most people are, but just to be sure. It is the right piece of content at the right time for the right person.

One thing that you and I have discussed and debated a little bit is where the idea of responsive design fits into this idea of adaptive content. Obviously, there are differing opinions on this. When we talk about adaptive content, where do you see responsive design fitting into it?

Why Responsive Design Is the Bare Minimum

Brian Clark: So we led with email because email is still the transaction engine, the profit engine, for online marketing–specifically for digital entrepreneurs, but also across the board. Then, now, we’re coming to, what are you doing with email? What is its function?

When we talk about adaptive content, people may think, in one way, that we’re using that terminology, but you and I had a discussion where I was originally separating responsive design from other forms of serving up the right content at the right time. Ultimately, you had the better way of thinking about it, but maybe it helps to talk about an adaptive website.

What is a website, really? It’s delivering up information that people want. The adaptive aspect of it is those people need to get that information when, where, and how they want it. ‘Responsive design,’ in case anyone is not familiar with the term, means that the design–the layout of your site, of a page, of a post, whatever the case may be–adapts to the device that it is being viewed with.

The example that I always like here’s a great one because it was so ironic. I was invited to be on a radio show that’s about online marketing. I originally got the invitation on my phone, by email, clicked on the link, and it’s a disaster. I can’t read anything. Everyone has experienced this.

Everyone out there is probably using your smartphone. You’ve gone to a site, and it’s either a disaster or the print is just so tiny you have to use your fingers to stretch out a little bit of one area so you can read that part. That’s a lot of work. It has to be the beginning with the design, the wrapper, that your pages, posts, and other content is wrapped in.

If people can’t even show up for the first time on the device of their choice and have that site design, that website be smart enough to know, “Oh, you’re on an iPad,” “Oh, you’re on an Android phone,” and then adapt itself accordingly so that that content can be consumed, that desire, that intent that person had when they clicked–whether it be in search, social, email, whatever the case may be.

So you’re right. It really is the beginning of what we’re talking about with adaptive websites or adaptive content. Often, you don’t get past the first step if your design is not responsive.

Jerod Morris: Right. Again, this bare minimum, it ensures that whoever comes to your website will get it in a format that they can consume. If it was the same person coming to your website every single time or the same type of person with the same needs, you could have the same content for every person–but we know that’s not true.

There are different people, different buyers, different personas, that come to your website that need to be taken on a different journey–if you want to truly engage them. The issue, though, and where this idea of adaptive content on an adaptive website comes into play, is that too many folks make the mistake of treating everybody the same when we know that the buyer journey–every buyer journey-is unique.

How Every Buyer Journey Is Unique (Yet We Often Treat It As the Same)

Brian Clark: That’s absolutely the truth, and you broke it down into different personas. But we know from usability data and observation that even similar personas will take different steps on the pathway. It’s not even uniform in that way, so we often talk about personas, archetypes, or avatars in order to craft the right words–yet we’re still eliminating behavioral dynamics from the whole equation.

We have the technology to do this, and that’s why we are stressing that what looks cutting edge now is just going to flat-out be the norm. This is a huge shift in websites. Just like I’m telling you, responsive design is the bare minimum, and we still have people who aren’t doing that.

I’m saying that your competition who is employing these principles is going to kick your butt. I’m sorry. There’s no other way to put it. The experience will be so personalized, and this isn’t a treat. It shouldn’t be a treat. As you said, every buyer’s journey is unique, yet historically, and a lot of people presently, are treating it like it’s all the same path.

Jerod Morris: I think most people get that idea, and of course, an idea is nothing without the execution of it. That’s where actually being able to go in, map these journeys, start to plot it out, and put it together with content becomes so important. Let’s talk about some different aspects of journey mapping, the first one being conditional pathways.

The Three Aspects of Journey Mapping

Brian Clark: Yeah. Just to back up a second there, there is a discipline called ‘customer experience mapping,’ which really maps things from problem and desire, to prospect, to customer, to repeat customer or recurring customer, all of these things. It’s a broad discipline, but at the very base level what you’re trying to do is strategically map out the steps that are involved–as opposed to one linear step-by-step progression.

For example, marketing automation, old school, is just an autoresponder. We’d set up a sequence. People enter it. They all get the same message. It converts at X. But it does not take into account behavior whatsoever, and that’s fine. But it’s no longer going to be even minimally acceptable as far as what we’re doing.

There are really three aspects when we’re talking about adaptive content from a journey-mapping standpoint. Like you said, the first one is conditional pathways. You have a sequence of messages, links to content, or whatever the case may be with the hopes that, at the point when you make an offer, more people than not are going to accept it.

Yet like I said, the path is not linear. What do you do if you get someone involved in some sort of access opt-in that we’ve talked about–and we’ll talk about in more detail in the next episode–yet you find that only 50 percent of those people take the first step?

That’s a different journey right there for half of your people, yet you’re treating them as if they’re all on the same path. Well, the people who didn’t do anything at first are on a different path. That’s a different conditional dynamic that you need to think, “Okay, what kind of message does this person need?” We’ll talk in more detail with an example in a little bit, but you get what I’m saying here, right?

There’s not one path. There’s all sorts of paths that they can go by and still become your customer, yet you have to address okay, this is a good time for one of our favorite metaphors: the content marketer as mentor. They’re on a journey. They’re the hero. We’re the mentor. We’re the guide–and this, yes indeed, ties right back to the more mythical hero’s journey.

You’re not being a good guide if you give everyone the same directions even though some people are off in the woods. There’s a condition where you need to go hunt them down, pull them out by the hand with the right message, the right content, whatever the case may be, and bring them back in line with the destination you’re trying to get them to.

Jerod Morris: Right, so it meets what they need at that time. You can’t do that if you’re just giving the same thing to everybody. To get this right requires the leg work of just sitting down at a desk and charting out, “The person goes here. They make Choice A. They make Choice B. You’ve got a fork in the road, and they’re going in different directions now,” and then creating content that will meet them at the step where they need it.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It really is a choose-your-own-adventure-type exercise. It can feel a little daunting until you get into it. Then it’s cool, really cool, because you get really excited about the experience you’re able to create for people.

So first of all, you have to understand that there are conditional pathways. Then you have to do what we’ll call ‘dynamic mentoring,’ which is what I mentioned as far as steering them in the right way based on their actual behavior. Where do you get the ammunition to do this strategic exercise? Well, it’s good old-fashioned research. The thing we harp on over and over again.

Know your audience. Know your prospect better than they know themselves. You have access to a whole diverse group of people who go on these journeys. You probably do know them a little better than they know themselves–which some people can find spooky–but if you’re enhancing their journey, you’re enhancing their experience to help them meet their objectives. That also helps you meet your business objectives. That’s a win-win.

That’s the spirit in which we need to think about these elements because the third aspect of journey mapping is just recognizing that these are individuals, and this is an individual experience. Just about every one of them should be unique in the sense that the way they actually behave dictated the experience. Things worked out just like they needed them to based on reality and not your ‘funnel sequence’–which is some sort of static pathway that doesn’t exist as reality in any place other than in an optimistic marketer’s mind.

Putting the Pieces Together and Doing the Work

Jerod Morris: The other thing to keep in mind, too–because you mentioned this whole process can sound a little bit daunting, and it’s not like we want to sugarcoat it and say that it’s not–it’s going to require work. You’ve got to really get in there, do the research, do the work.

But the thing you find–and that I’m finding, certainly, doing it–is that, if you’ve been serving this audience for a while, then a lot of times–when we talk about this fork in the road where the person can either accept your offer or they don’t–the reason why they don’t accept your offer, you may have content already in your archive that you can use. That may be what that person needs right now. Them not taking that offer almost identifies, “Okay, which content that I’ve already created can I now get to this person?”

It’s not like each of these decision points and each of these moments where the content needs to adapt you have to create something new. You may have done a lot of that work. Now, it’s just putting together the pieces of this journey and figuring out what goes where. You’ll have to create some new stuff, but a lot of it you may already have.

Brian Clark: Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt. The interesting thing that you mentioned there is directly on point–if someone’s not engaging, you either re-engage or you lose them. You don’t just plow through to your offer with a disengaged prospect. That makes no sense whatsoever. Not only does it kill your conversion rate, it annoys the person.

Why not send them on a path of realizing that they need a little bit more know, like, and trust? We talk about that all the time, but being able to actually know based on their behavior what their temperature is with our concentric circles that go from cold to warm to hot–literally, taking that person’s temperature based on their behavior and then warming them appropriately instead of just saying, “Ah, you’re all getting the same offer,” hammer-over-the-head-type situation.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, so let’s run through a few examples of this, then. Let’s talk about how this works in practice.

How You Start the Process with a Free Course

Brian Clark: Yeah. The variables and the possibilities are as only limited by your own creativity and your knowledge of your audience, as you said. Now, the great thing about this is, the technology is not the hard part.

To do this stuff in the past was very, very, very expensive, and most marketing automation software is still at the enterprise level, costing thousands and thousands of dollars a month. That’s a big problem that we’re trying to solve with the Rainmaker Platform–same power, less hassle, way less expense–so don’t let that part of it intimidate you.

Here’s a very, very simple scenario that I know you’ll appreciate. We’re going to talk later in this series about why free courses are the best access-type opt-in or registration generator. Briefly, that’s because it gives you a very systematic and strategic way to concisely educate people into what they need to know to make their first purchase with you. Now, of course, it could be a subsequent purchase, too, but let’s use that scenario.

Person is a prospect. They’re qualified, but they’ve never done business with you before. You put them in your sequence–and, of course, with Rainmaker, you can drip out lessons with the LMS, tie that to email to make this a very carefully spaced out and delivered course–but what happens if they don’t take the first lesson? You’ll be able to see that.

What if they don’t take the second lesson? Should you just go ahead and plow through and keep delivering lessons and then make an offer? No, because you can tell that person went off path. They did not receive the education that they need to do business with you, yet you’re treating them like you did.

If you know that someone didn’t take the first lesson–again, you’re on a different conditional pathway–you need to bring them back, if at all...