27 of the Best Website Designs to Inspire You in 2019

Every once in a while, I'll come across a website that really draws me in. So, I found 27 of them to show you.

These sites push the boundaries of what is known to be possible on the web. Whether it's the design aesthetic, usability, interactivity, sound design, or value that the site provides, each one is a masterpiece in its respective industry, and something to be inspired by.

Not surprisingly, many organizations exist to highlight these sites and the contributions they make to the web. To help surface some of the most inspirational designs, I gathered 21 award-winners that have made their way through several key awards organizations -- including Awwwards, UX Awards, The Webby Awards, SiteInspire, Best Website Gallery, and FWA.

Click the links below to jump to a group of website designs that crushed it in the last several years:

• Best Website Designs from 2014 – 2015
• Best Website Designs from 2016
• Best Website Designs from 2017
• Best Website Designs from 2018

Below this list, I also found six more websites whose homepage designs are just plain cool and worth learning from.

As you browse through the list, know that each site excels in its own way and seeks to serve a unique purpose. While one site may be an excellent example of visual design, another may be an excellent example of interactivity. This means that not all of these sites may be "conversion machines" or blueprint ideas that you can easily copy over to your site.

Rather, they're great ways to gain some website design inspiration and see the cutting-edge marketing that's happening in the different corners of the web.

Best Website Designs

1. Virgin America
2. Feed
3. ETQ
4. Mikiya Kobayashi
5. The History of Climate Change
6. Beagle
7. Woven Magazine
8. JOHO’s Bean
9. World of SWISS
10. Rainforest Guardians
11. Protest Sportswear
12. The Teacher’s Guild
13. Inside Abbey Road
14. Simply Chocolate
15. NOWNESS
16. Citrix: The New Mobile Workforce
17. crypton.trading
18. Southwest: Heart of Travel
19. Reductress
20. Overflow
21. Frans Hals Museum
22. Minimums
23. MovieMark
24. Guillaume Tomasi
25. The District
26. Tej Chauhan
27. Amanda Martocchio Architecture

Beautiful Award-Winning Websites

And the awards go to ...

Best Website Designs from 2014 – 2015

1. Virgin America

Award: Most Significant Industry Evolution, 2014 UX Awards

In a world where airline websites are known to be riddled with major usability issues, Virgin America has one of the best websites that pushes usability, accessibility, and responsive design forward. In fact, it's been named as the first truly responsive airline website, a new precedent in the industry.

Featured by UX Awards

2. Feed

Award: Site of the Day (6/6/2015), Awwwards

Not only is Feed an interesting concept, but it also has a stunning execution that challenges our understanding of what is possible on the web. Through a creative blend of animation and video, the site immerses the user into a very engaging experience. As an atypical site, it contains several unique usability elements as well, including a navigation that doubles as a scroll progress bar.

Featured by Awwwards

3. ETQ

Award: Site of the Day (5/19/2015), Awwwards

ETQ takes a very minimalistic approach to ecommerce with their stripped-down site with big, compelling visuals of their product. Simple, flat, color-based backgrounds accompanied by strong typography help to keep the focus on exactly what the user came there to see: shoes.

Featured by Awwwards

4. Mikiya Kobayashi

Award: Site of the Day (7/4/2015), Awwwards

Mikiya is a Product Designer with a minimalistic portfolio that showcases his work through strong photography and subtle animations. His full site was originally created in Japanese and then translated into English, helping demonstrate the international scalability of his design.

Featured by Awwwards

5. The History of Climate Change

Award: Site of the Day (6/23/2015), Awwwards

Follow the footsteps of Luc Jacquet as Wild-Touch takes you along this visual and educational journey about the history of global climate change. A mixture of historical media and unique animations help tell the story.

Featured by Awwwards

6. Beagle

Award: Site of the Day (4/19/2015), Best Website Gallery

Beagle does an exceptional job of visually and progressively telling the story of their product in a simple and easy-to-digest way. This is a major challenge for many startups, especially when they're introducing new concepts to existing markets. People want to know, "What is your product? How does it work? Why do I care?" Beagle answers all those questions while simultaneously showing off their product and compelling the user to purchase. Plus, they're one of few sites that actually implemented "scroll hijacking" correctly.

Featured by Best Website Gallery

7. Woven Magazine

Award: Site of the Day (4/4/2015), Best Website Gallery

Woven is an online publication that celebrates artists, craftsmen, and makers alike. To me, they represent a confirmation that publications can (and should) have beautiful, engaging sites with easy-to-read content. Free of distractions like pop-ups and obtrusive ads, this site all about the experience of the content itself.

Featured by Best Website Gallery

8. JOHO's Bean

Award: FWA of the Day (8/7/2015), Favorite Website Awards

The website for JOHO's Bean has incredible imagery, interactivity, story telling, visual design, and most of all, sound engineering. These all come together to create a compelling, emotional, and engaging site that tells the story of a coffee bean's journey.

Featured by FWA

9. World of SWISS

Award: Best User Interface, 2015 Webby Awards

Another airline?! What is happening?! Yep, SWISS airlines built an incredibly immersive site that tells their story and describes what it's like to fly with them -- and they simply did too great of a job to be ignored. Strong visuals and animations introduce the user to different sections of the site that are packed with information beyond the usual sales and marketing pitch that is so common today.

Featured by The Webby Awards

Best Website Designs from 2016

10. Rainforest Guardians

Award: Best Activism Website, 2016 Webby Awards

Rainforest Guardians became one of the most immersive nonprofit websites of 2016. Seeking to build awareness around deforestation, the site allows users to "visit" the various villages, natives, and waterways that make up the Amazon Rainforest. The site puts interactivity at the center of its user experience -- a wise choice if your goal is to get people to connect with your cause and convert into volunteers.

Featured by The Webby Awards

11. Protest Sportswear

Award: Site of the Year (2016), Awwwards

The Awwwards calls Protest Sportswear a "shoppable look book," and that's exactly what this site is. As a clothing outfitter, this website has reinvented the way they market their product: Rather than promoting garments of clothing, Protest Sportswear promotes "looks." This makes the company's product the most appealing part of the website itself, using a collage of styles to design a homepage that changes as often as its customer's styles do.

Featured by Awwwards

12. The Teacher's Guild

Award: Best Association Website, 2016 Webby Awards

The Teacher's Guild is a professional community of educators whose website publishes content that addresses today's most critical challenges in education. What makes this website award-winning is how it balances diverse content types -- programs, solutions, approaches, and collaborations -- without overwhelming its visitors. Not only are its background visuals prominently placed, but they also use white space to emphasize the written calls to action at the center, as shown in the screenshot below.

Featured by The Webby Awards

13. Inside Abbey Road

Award: Best Music Website, 2016 Webby Awards

Google knocked it out of the park with this highly interactive site, which allows users to step into the Abbey Road Studios. Brilliant sound design, navigation mechanics, and visuals mixed with the usual "Google flair" all help draw visitors in to this well-made web property.

Featured by The Webby Awards

Best Website Designs from 2017

14. Simply Chocolate

Award: Site of the Year (2017), Awwwards

You'll get a craving for chocolate just looking at this website -- and in a way, that's Simply Chocolate's website working as designed.

This appetizing website is that of a Denmark chocolate maker named Simply Chocolate. Its website uses a variety of colors (and creative product names) to promote each chocolate bar. And as you scroll from one product to the next, they all seem to remain consistent in brand. The three-dimensional appearance of each chocolate bar makes you feel like you can grab it off of your computer screen, while the "Add to Box" CTA to the top-left is ideally placed for users to select the products they want while browsing.

Featured by Awwwards

15. NOWNESS

Award: Best Cultural Blog/Website, 2017 Webby Awards

Nowness is perhaps the coolest crowdsourced video blog on the internet today. That was a mouthful ... what does all that mean?

NOWNESS's "crowdsourced" nature is part of what makes it an award-winner. This means most of its content comes from independent creatives -- an increasingly popular way for businesses to publish content. NOWNESS is also a video blog, meaning all of its blog content is in video format. Together, these qualities help make Nowness a captivating hub for the stories that brands everywhere strive to tell.

Featured by The Webby Awards

16. Citrix: The New Mobile Workforce

Award: Site of the Day (11/23/2017), Best Website Gallery

This website -- dedicated to Red Bull's partnership with Citrix, a cloud-based software company -- is amazing.

The New Mobile Workforce, a site owned by Citrix, uses panoramic photography to show visitors how Citrix is supporting Red Bull Racing's new race car. Even if you're not a car-racing enthusiast, the website's clever animations to explain a complicated automotive technology are hard to ignore.

Featured by Best Website Gallery

Best Website Designs from 2018

17. crypton.trading

Award: Site of the Day (4/3/2018), Awwwards

Meet crypton.trading, your robot accountant.

Crypton.trading is a trading hub for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, using artificial intelligence to predict changes in a currency's value and identify key buying and selling opportunities. The website was rated high for its development and design, as it gradually explains more of the developer's methods the further down visitors scroll.

This award-winning website makes tech-savvy visitors feel right at home the moment Crypton's greeting appears across the homepage, one letter at a time.

Featured by Awwwards

18. Southwest: Heart of Travel

Award: Best Visual Design - Aesthetic, 2018 Webby Awards

When Southwest Airlines wanted to prove its customers were "more than just a dollar sign," the company created a website whose design was assembled using the shapes of their customers' flightpaths.

The website, called Heart of Travel, even allows visitors to create their own artwork out of a trip they might plan on taking. In this way, Southwest's website is a product of their most loyal passengers.

Featured by The Webby Awards

19. Reductress

Award: Best Humor Website, 2018 Webby Awards

It's not that hard to make someone laugh on the internet; so much of what we read and consume online is meant to be entertaining. But it is hard to do it consistently for a large audience. Reductress is a satirical magazine whose headlines and general reading experience are top-tier in the humor department -- making the website itself a quality property.

Featured by The Webby Awards

20. Overflow

Award: Site of the Day (3/20/2018), Best Website Gallery

Overflow is a design tool that allows people and businesses to create story-like flow diagrams of their ideas so they're easier for others to understand. Aside from this being just a good service, the Overflow website practices what it preaches: Along with vibrant red call-to-action buttons for downloading the tool, this website promotes its product the best way it knows how -- using a flow diagram.

The website delivers this flow diagram in the form of a video. And while embedded videos can look rather clunky sitting in the middle of a website's other design elements, Overflow's is perfectly placed and exactly what you'd want to see when landing on the site for the first time.

Featured by Best Website Gallery

21. Frans Hals Museum

Award: Site of the Year (2018), Awwwards

It can be tough for a museum, whose brand is predicated on a variety of incredible artwork, to bring it all together on a cohesive website. That's what makes the website of the Frans Hals Museum so impressive.

Located in the Netherlands, this museum has created a website that uses a combination of digital design elements and its own exhibits. This mixture helps visitors understand what they'll see, when they can see it, and where else they can get a taste of what this museum has to offer. Speaking of the latter, the museum promotes its Instagram account directly on its homepage -- a brilliant move for a museum looking to expand its audience across its online channels.

Featured by Awwwards

Other Cool Website Designs

22. Minimums

Minimums takes a very bold approach to the way that they display their content, leveraging a grid-based website design, big typography, and full-width, high-quality images. Their site serves as a really nice example for how to properly execute a grid structure while still maintaining a nice visual hierarchy in the design.

23. MovieMark

MovieMark is a growth marketing agency and HubSpot Partner, whose website is covered head to toe in the service it offers: digital storytelling. Located in Colombia, the agency makes video a core focus of its brand, so it's only fitting that MovieMark's website follows this theme. And oh, how visually pleasing the videos on its website are ...

24. Guillaume Tomasi

As a Photographer in Montreal, Guillaume Tomasi has built a portfolio that's truly fit to house his unique and awe-inspiring photography. His surreal photo style is juxtaposed by his simple, flat, empty, and minimalistic portfolio design that places all of the focus on the work itself.

His unique series navigation coupled with art-gallery-inspired work introductions and perfect scrolling interactions yield an experience reminiscent of that of a real gallery.

25. The District

This branding agency takes its imagery seriously, and it should -- it handles all channels of media for their clients. The District's website, alone, is a journey through some of the most beautiful artwork and photography you've ever seen.

These provocative tiles change rapidly as you explore the website, and the wackier they seem, the more interested you become in learning about their past work.

26. Tej Chauhan

Tej Chauhan has turned impressionist artwork into a business model with this intriguing website. Each image on this product developer's homepage slides out to cover the previous image, offering little context around the object you now see in front of you.

But isn't that lack of context exactly what makes you want to learn more? The tagline, "Souvenirs of The Near Future," suggests these objects are a part of their product line -- and an opportunity for you to get these innovative objects into your life.

27. Amanda Martocchio Architecture

An architecture firm might not specialize in web development, but its website should still demonstrate its commitment to visually pleasing design. Amanda Martocchio took that to heart with this gorgeous website.

It's no secret that Amanda Martocchio Architecture loves its work -- each picture on the homepage of its website is an enchanting shot of the houses the company designs. The website labels every house you scroll through with the type of design that was intended, along with numerous angles to each building.

Want more website design examples? Check out these amazing product pages you'll want to copy immediately.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-website-designs-list

An Introduction to Brand Dilution, Extensions, and Cannibalization

You might know Cadbury for their high-end chocolate and candy, but did you know they sold instant mashed potatoes from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s?

Image Credit: Geek Goes Vintage

Smash, their instant mashed potato brand, surprisingly reached mainstream success. But, unfortunately, it was at the expense of lowering their flagship product’s perceived quality.

Cadbury is a premium confectionery company, so when they started producing low-end food products, like instant mashed potatoes, it’s not shocking to learn that their association with the finest chocolates weakened. Eventually, in 1986, Cadbury sold Smash, only 20 years after they introduced their instant mashed potatoes to the world.

Cadbury’s expansion into instant mashed potatoes created a new revenue stream and even generated more sales for them, but it damaged their brand as a whole. This phenomena is called brand dilution, and, below, we’ll dive into it, as well as other related concepts called brand extensions and brand cannibalization.

Brand Dilution

Brand dilution is when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in, like Reese’s Puff Cereal or Gerber’s baby clothes.

Brand Extension

Companies leverage their existing brand awareness and equity to develop brand extensions that create new revenue streams. However, an unsuccessful brand extension, like Zippo’s perfume for women or Samsonite’s outerwear, can attach undesirable associations to their brand, weaken its existing associations, and hurt its established products’ perceived quality, which can all lead to brand dilution.

When does brand dilution occur?

According to two marketing professors from Dartmouth College and UCLA, brand dilution usually occurs when a company’s failed brand extension is closely related to their flagship product -- consumers will start questioning the company’s expertise and dedication to quality within their main product category.

On the other hand, when a company develops a brand extension that’s unrelated to their flagship product, consumers will expect differences in the extension and distance it from the brand’s main product category, leading to significantly less brand dilution if the extension fails.

Amongst a company’s most loyal customers, however, an unrelated brand extension can lead to brand dilution because they have a deeper understanding of the company’s brand identity. So even if the unrelated brand extension is successful and attracts new customers, the company’s most loyal customers may feel like the unrelated extension is inauthentic, causing them to think less of the brand.

Brand Dilution Examples

Pillsbury's Frozen Microwave Popcorn (Closely Related Brand Extension)

Image Credit: YouTube

Even though Pillsbury is known for producing foodstuffs, their frozen microwave popcorn couldn’t compete with Orville Redenbacher or General Mills’ Pop Secret because their product positioning of being “frozen for freshness” didn’t offer enough value. Sure, sticking your popcorn in the freezer is convenient (I guess), but that benefit pales in comparison to enjoying a better-tasting popcorn, and it diluted Pillsbury's brand equity. 

Levi’s Tailored Classics (Unrelated Brand Extension)

Image Credit: Pinterest

When Levi’s introduced their Tailored Classics in the early 1980s, they already owned a large share of their target market, so they wanted to enter some new markets to sustain their high growth rate.

One of these markets was men’s suits, but since their brand was heavily associated with a casual, rugged, and outdoorsy lifestyle, Levi’s new product line conflicted with their core identity and failed to catch on.

Consumers trusted Levi’s to produce durable clothing that could endure the wrath of mother nature, but, for that very reason, they didn't trust them to produce high-end tailored suits, leading to a loss of trust in their brand as a whole. 

Brand Cannibalization

Brand cannibalization is when a company develops a brand extension that competes with one of its established products and takes a portion of its market share. Even though brand cannibalization sounds like a counter-intuitive business strategy, companies do it because they think their new product’s sales will be greater than their older product’s loss in sales, leading to a boost in total revenue.

For instance, when Apple released the iPad, the original Macintosh’s sales decreased, but the iPad’s sales were greater than the Macintosh’s loss in sales, so Apple actually grew their total revenue. However, brand cannibalization can also backfire, prompting customers to purchase the new product instead of the older product, leading to a stagnation or decrease in the company’s total revenue.

Extending your brand can be a double-edged sword.

Every business wants to capture as much market share as possible. But before you start developing a brand extension, make sure you truly understand your brand’s core identity and, more importantly, make sure you stick to it. Because if you don’t, you could release a brand extension worse than Eva Longoria’s Steakhouse for Women and wreak havoc on your brand as a whole and diminish your total revenue.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/brand-dilution

3 Strategies to Kick-Start your ABM Efforts

Account-based marketing (ABM) is neither a product nor a point solution. Rather, it’s a strategy, a mindset, and ultimately a cultural movement. Done correctly, this culture shift leads to better sales and marketing partnership, and eventually the ability to maximize revenue potential together with sales. On the marketing side, ABM forces them to think like salespeople, which means going from a lead-based to an account-based mentality. Instead of reacting to leads that are interested in products, marketing needs to catch up and align with sales by proactively selling into accounts that are a great fit for the brand. Additionally, they are catering messaging and personalization towards buying groups and personas, instead of individuals. Sales must also undergo a mentality shift because ABM forces them to trust technology and software to help scale their traditional strategic selling efforts. It requires them to trust marketing and really work together across the aisle.

While the idea of strategic selling has been around for a while, the technology has not. As the world of marketing and selling gets more complicated, ABM becomes more of a need than a want. Indeed, Sirius Decisions finds that 93% of B2B companies consider ABM to be extremely important for their success in driving more revenue.

Common Challenges

For the past few years, I’ve been reminded by customers and prospects about how difficult ABM execution is, especially getting started and obtaining early buy-in from sales. On average, it takes six to nine months to get ABM up and running, a lengthy process in part because of the challenge of aligning mentalities to create a shared strategy between marketing and sales. Alignment is required throughout the entire workflow in order to maximize the potential of ABM and maximize revenue together for the brand. Without this step, it’s impossible to define target account lists and prioritize accounts.

Another roadblock is building the right target account list to support the strategy. This is difficult because sales and marketing are forced to work with limited account level data, and don’t have the manpower or tech to scale their processes, especially the brands that have thousands of accounts in their database already. Often, the best fit accounts your looking for are buried deep in the databases or across different marketing and sales tools and data sources. As a result, sales and marketing are forced to spend months building target account lists that nobody agrees on and are often based on opinion, intuition, and gut feel instead of data.

Recommended Solution

The combination of clean data and artificial intelligence helps solve the challenges above. Successful ABM’ers use the combination of both to remove the guesswork out of creating a shared strategy and building the right predictive target account list.  Data refers to clean first-party customer data that contains firmographic, technographic, and behavioral activity data. AI refers to algorithms and machine learning to create an ideal customer profile (ICP) based on your first party customer data and then using the ICP to quickly scan and predict which accounts in your database should be considered target accounts. The AI prediction and recommendation is based on the first party data that you trained the ICP model with. As a result, successful ABM’ers can ensure they have a list justified by data, instead of opinions. Remember, your AI is only as accurate as the first-party data you train it with.

Kickstarter Strategies & Predictive Target Account Lists

1.     Land & Expand: Predictive Up-sell/Cross-sell List

The first key strategy is getting more from your existing customers. This is about landing and expanding across your customer base, selling them additional products, or up-selling the current products you have. For this scenario, you would train your AI-based ICP model with customers that just recently purchases up-sell/cross-sell products. You would then tell the model to scan your existing customer base that has not yet purchased certain up-sell/cross-sell products. The result would be considered a predictive up-sell/cross-sell list.

2.     More New Business: Predictive Best-fit List

The second strategy is to win more new business. This is about net new business coming into your ABM funnel and increasing the number of quality opportunities. This scenario REALLY requires collaboration and coordination with the sales team. No longer can you have a lead hand-off with clear marketing and sales demarcations. It’s about having one team executing together in a coordinated fashion. In this case, you would train your AI-based ICP model on your recent closed-won customers in the past 3-6 months. You would then tell the model to scan your known account database to see which accounts are best-fit accounts. The result would be considered a predictive best-fit list.

3.     Get Back on Track: Predictive Quick-win List

The third strategy requires focusing in on what accounts you can close fastest. This is a great strategy to have when you feel you are not on track to hit your quarterly ABM goals.  This involves looking at your average sales cycle and velocity for previous closed-won deals. In this case, you would train your AI-based ICP model on your previous high-velocity closed-won opportunities. You would then tell the model to scan your know account database to see which accounts are more likely to close the fastest.  This is a great tactic for marketing if they need to get back on track to hit their quarterly goals.

For more on how to kick start your ABM efforts, check out our webinar on the same topic.

The post 3 Strategies to Kick-Start your ABM Efforts appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from Marketo Marketing Blog https://blog.marketo.com/2019/03/3-strategies-to-kick-start-your-abm-efforts.html

What Is Semi-Structured Data?

To consider what semi-structured data is, let's start with an analogy -- interviewing.

Let's say you're conducting a semi-structured interview. This, as the name implies, falls somewhere in-between a structured and unstructured interview.

For context, a structured interview is one in which the questions being asked, as well as the order in which they are asked, is pre-determined by your HR team and consistent for each candidate. An unstructured interview, on the other hand, is one in which the questions, and the order in which they are asked, is up to the discretion of the interviewer -- and could be entirely different for each candidate.

When you consider these two extremes, you can begin to see the benefits of semi-structured interviews, which are fairly consistent and quantitative (like a structured interview), but still provide the interviewer with a window for building rapport, and asking follow-up questions.

Semi-structured data is similar in nature to a semi-structured interview -- it's not as messy and uncontrolled as unstructured data, but not as rigid and readily quantifiable as structured data.

What Is Semi Structured Data

Semi-structured data is information that does not reside in a relational database or any other data table, but nonetheless has some organizational properties to make it easier to analyze, such as semantic tags. A good example of semi-structured data is HTML code, which doesn't restrict the amount of information you want to collect in a document, but still enforces hierarchy via semantic elements.

Here, we're going to explore the difference between structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data to ensure you have a good understanding of the terms.

Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured Data

Structured data is known as quantitative data, and is objective facts and numbers that analytics software can collect -- this type of data is easy to export, store, and organize in a database such as Excel or SQL. Structured data is valuable because you can gain insights into overarching trends by running the data through data analysis methods, such as regression analysis and pivot tables.

Here's an example of structured data in an excel sheet:

Alternatively, semi-structured data does not conform to relational databases such as Excel or SQL, but nonetheless contains some level of organization through semantic elements like tags. For instance, consider HTML, which does not restrict the amount of information you can collect in a document, but enforces a certain hierarchy:

This is a good example of semi-structured data. As you can see, HTML is organized through code, but it's not easily extractable into a database, and you can't use traditional data analytics methods to gain insights.

Finally, unstructured data -- otherwise known as qualitative data. When it comes to marketing, unstructured data is any opinion or comment you might collect about your brand. While what your consumers are saying is undeniably important, you can't easily extract meaningful analytical data from those messages.

An example of unstructured data includes email responses, like this one:

Take a look at Unstructured Data Vs. Structured Data: A 3-Minute Rundown for more clarification on structured vs. unstructured data.

Semi Structured Data Examples

1. Email
2. CSV, XML and JSON documents
3. NoSQL databases
4. HTML
5. Electronic data interchange (EDI)
6. RDF

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/semi-structured-data

Millennials Have Higher Expectations for CX than Older Generations

The younger the consumer, the higher their expectations for the companies they engage with.

That’s the overall takeaway from Adobe’s 2019 “CXM Index” report, based on a survey of 1,500 U.S. adults regarding preferences and expectations for digital experiences in the retail, travel and hospitality, media and entertainment, and financial services industries.

“Younger consumers have higher expectations for innovation,” said Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights. “The 18- to 34-year-old cohort, specifically, has grown up with digital and mobile, and they not only value innovation in customer experiences that address their needs, they demand it.”

Retail CX Insights

Consumers of all ages have come to expect certain types of communications from brands when they transact online. For example, more than half of online shoppers across age groups said they expect to receive an emailed receipt following a purchase. More than 40% expect to receive a text message when an order has shipped. However, brands might want to think twice before sending text messages that ask for feedback about a purchase; one in four consumers said they don’t want them.
Consumers do want to move fluidly between multiple channels of communication with retailers. One in three consumers surveyed expressed frustration with having to re-input their information when engaging with that retailer on a second platform (e.g., website to app or smart speaker to phone).

Additionally, younger consumers were more likely than their older counterparts to have had a bad experience with an online retailer. They were 173% more likely to have received a faulty product and 68% more likely to have to re-input information when re-engaging with a retailer on a second platform. Those 35 years or older, on the other hand, were more likely (40%) to abandon their cart as a result of a bad experience.

“The checkout is one of the most crucial aspects of the commerce experience,” Schreiner said. “Retailers need to ensure that they have implemented, and are optimizing, for a seamless and easy checkout process because it is the ultimate bellwether for sales and customer satisfaction.”

Travel and Hospitality

Consumers across the board said they have high expectations for their travel experiences both online and off. For example, four in 10 said they expected to receive a text message from an airline if their flights were delayed.
The report also found a travel brand’s mobile app is a key customer touch point—one that can either make or break the travel experience. Many respondents said they were impressed with the ability to check into their hotels via a mobile app instead of visiting the front desk. They also appreciated entering their hotel room to find it is set up for them based on the preferences indicated in the mobile app, such as their alarm clock already being set, or the temperature set to their preferred setting.

“When it comes to their travel experiences, consumers want to be surprised and delighted,” Schreiner told CMO.com. “Anything that can save them time and effort, and make their stay more pleasant, is going to be key, as are personalized and customizable services that enhance the travel experience.”

According to the report, people found that the following services help create noteworthy travel experiences: the automatic rescheduling/rebooking of a delayed flight; a travel booking site using a person’s travel history to send alerts about the lowest prices for a flight, hotel, or car rental; and an immediate response from a hotel when contacted via social media.

On the flip side, undisclosed trip cancellation policies that were not highlighted during the purchase process was the most negatively ranked experience across all industries.

Financial Services

Three in four consumers were satisfied with the experience they received when accessing financial information on a website (75%) or mobile app (76%). Sixty-eight percent were satisfied with customer service via chat or phone, which was higher than in any other category. Where financial services could use improvement is anticipating consumer’s needs on both websites and in mobile apps: Only half of respondents said they were satisfied with how much travel apps and websites anticipated their needs.
In fact, one of the experiences that was rated the lowest across categories was: “When I log into my bank’s website, I am taken to my most visited page right after I log in.”

Media and Entertainment

In the past two years, younger consumers were more likely to note improvements in their overall media and entertainment (M&E) experiences on websites, mobile sites, mobile apps, and smart speakers. Mobile apps have seen the largest improvement among the 18- to 34-year-old cohort.

The top most delightful entertainment experiences were all location-based. Visiting a museum and using a mobile augmented reality app to get more information on an artifact was ranked No. 1.

Ranked No. 2 was being able to order food at a stadium from a mobile phone and having the order delivered directly to the user’s seat. The third most delightful experience was using a wearable device at a theme park to gain access to shows, attractions, and more.

The most negative experience: paying to rent a movie online, and then not being able to watch it because of an unexpectedly slow internet connection.

How People React to Poor Customer Experience

The study shows that nine in 10 people ages 18 to 34 said they will take an action after having a bad online customer experience, such as telling friends, stopping purchases from the company, and posting reviews on a review site or social media. People over the age of 35 were only slightly less likely to take action (eight in 10) but are more likely to complain directly to the company after a bad experience.

Among those who posted on social media about their experience, two in three heard back from the company.

“Being responsive to customers is fundamental to meeting their customer experience expectations,” Schreiner said. “Responsiveness could easily remedy a person’s frustration, whereas the feeling that you are not being heard could add to that annoyance.”

This post originally appeared on CMO.com March 26, 2019. 

The post Millennials Have Higher Expectations for CX than Older Generations appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from Marketo Marketing Blog https://blog.marketo.com/2019/03/millennials-have-higher-expectations-for-cx-than-older-generations.html

The New Way Forward In B2B: Account-Based Experience

Steve Lucas, SVP of Marketo, an Adobe company, on Thursday challenged the thousands of attendees at Adobe Summit—The Digital Experience Conference to make every experience count.

“Experience,” he said, “is the line between epic and epic failure.”

With that, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen came on stage to discuss with Lucas Adobe’s 2018 acquisition of Marketo. Narayen provided some insight for other companies that may be considering their own M&As. To ensure a perfect union, an alignment in business mission, people, and culture is required, he said.

Narayen also talked about the experience mandate, which is spreading to organizations across B2C and B2B. His advice: “Digital is either a headwind or tailwind, and it is up to you to decide. The tailwind [mentality] lets you service your customers better.”

Lucas asked the audience of marketers to think about the experiences that engage them every day, as well as how much they’ve changed in just the past 10 years. Uber, without the great experience that is associated with it, is simply getting into a stranger’s car, he said. And Airbnb, without experience, is sleeping in a stranger’s home.

“It’s clear that experience is the true differentiator,” Lucas said. “It comes down to this: Experience makes or breaks a business. Case in point: Coachella vs. Fyre Festival. Coachella, time and time again, delivers amazing experiences to festival attendees. Fyre Festival, in contrast, is a pile of hot garbage.”

Helping B2B Meet the Experience Mandate

For B2B marketers, making experience their business means thinking beyond CRM. “The future of how we engage companies is not based on what people say, but what they do,” Lucas said.
CRM, he said, is inherently flawed as a marketing solution because it is built for salespeople. It relies heavily on salesperson input and perceptions about customers, and is based on what customers have said. But, Lucas said, building a selling strategy based on what people say instead of what they do isn’t the right strategy going forward.

B2B marketers need different data. “We care about people and campaigns—who [customers] are, what they read, how often they visit,” Lucas said. “We want to know which campaigns are moving them through the journey.”

The solution? Account-based experience, an entirely new way to identify, engage with, and deliver new experiences to account-based buying teams. That’s why Lucas said he is excited about this week’s announcement about a strategic partnership involving Adobe, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, which will help marketers gain a deeper, real-time understanding of targeted accounts and audiences more effectively through rich account profiles.

For his part, Lucas announced an industry-first partnership with conversational marketing platform Drift to power customer experiences with “conversational account-based marketing” (ABM) via live chat, one of the fastest-growing channels for B2B marketers. The partnership will allow marketers to personalize every website visit from a target account with a personalized conversation in real-time, as well as track all ABM conversations and attribute them back to revenue.

Jessica Kao, director of client services at consultancy Digital Pi, came on stage to discuss the challenges and opportunities that B2B marketers face with ABM.

“There are three main challenges that I see over and over,” Kao said. “First is the data challenges. We all want to jump right to creating that target list of accounts. But let’s face it: We all have bad data, and a lot of it is incomplete. Second, there’s not enough holistic coordination across all the various touch points.”

The third challenge, she said, is organizational alignment. Interactions with sales are separate from what’s going on in marketing. “It’s like the right hand isn’t talking to the left hand,” she said. In addition, most marketing teams don’t know what sales teams are saying or sending to target accounts, she said.

When ABM goes wrong, Kao said, customer experiences can suffer.

3 Ways Nvidia Is Moving the Needle

Alix Hart, global head of digital marketing at Nvidia, an AI computing platform for leading researchers, developers, and data scientists, talked about her B2B company’s digital transformation and how important ABM has been to that transformation.
“[Our customers are] the Einsteins and Da Vincis of our time, solving what was impossible only a few years ago, enabled and accelerated by the computing systems from Nvidia,” Hart told attendees. “They win Nobel prizes in physics and Oscars for technical effects, design self-driving cars, and find new methods to detect tumors early. They are changing the world.”

To successfully engage these individuals and the corporations they work for, Nvidia saw it needed to approach them with purpose and inspire them to better understand how its technology and systems could be used to accelerate their work and help train their teams.

“In a word, we have to be intelligent, listening and responding with just the right content that is relevant to their industry and the work they do,” Hart said.

Hart shared three ways Nvidia moved its needle. First, it built a platform to bring its customer data together, both digital and in-product data. Second, the company overhauled every experience—from websites to email templates to nurture journeys.

“We improved lead score models and pulled in predictive scoring tools, building some in-house with our data science team,” she said. “We built programs for the middle of the journey, where we most want to engage, share industry innovation, invite them to seminars and training, and celebrate their work.”

Third, Nvidia’s marketing organization partners very closely with its sales team to vet new models and get feedback on what’s working. Case in point: Nvidia’s social monitoring was inaccurately predicting sentiment much of the time. For example, posts about early tumor detection were classified as negative.

Nvidia marketers worked with the AI research team, who created a new algorithm and improved accuracy to over 80%. The company also created a customer segment scorecard to better understand engagement upstream in the journey so it can optimize its content faster, Hart said.

“Our goal is to intelligently connect and engage across a wide set of customers, from avid gamers to AI researchers, to create new customer relationships and build on existing ones—intelligently,” Hart said. “Bringing our data together for a unified view of the customer, and focusing on intelligent experiences and insights [was key].”

This post originally appeared on CMO.com March 28, 2019.

The post The New Way Forward In B2B: Account-Based Experience appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from Marketo Marketing Blog https://blog.marketo.com/2019/03/the-new-way-forward-in-b2b-account-based-experience.html