Google Optimize is being discontinued, leaving many businesses in need of a new optimization tool. With so many options available, it can be challenging to choose the right one. To help, we've compiled three key pillars to guide your vendor selection and start working towards better customer experiences.
by: Lasse Jacobsen Skytt
On the 24th of January Google announced that Optimize will be discontinued. You probably already heard about it and that is probably why you’re here. So I will skip the announcement and get straight to the question that every company with a Google Optimize container is asking right now: What solution should we use for our optimization efforts going forward?
There is still some time until Sep 30th 2023, but professionals working with Optimize should already start scouring the market for an alternative solution. Google assessed that their product does not offer all the features modern experimentation programs demand, and which are offered by numerous competitors. Yet, they announced that they will deploy integrations of GA4 properties with 3rd party testing platforms.
So what now?
Since Optimize was the only free testing tool, an investment is necessary, but how big and where? Several tools can replace Optimize. On top of your current tech stack and resources dedicated, you should take the time to evaluate your optimisation ambitions.
We’ve compiled three pillars to guide your vendor selection and start working towards greater customer experiences.
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The Dev Optimization cycle
If you have a rapidly evolving website or app, integrating a framework for testing in your development cycle can bring great value. It supresses the guesswork of marketers and designers as you ensure that the changes impact the right KPIs and the user response is positive before going live. It also serves as a feature flagging functions to prevent any technological impairs.
Doing so can optimize your development efforts, both by quality assurance, and by feeding insights into your ideation and development processes.
Ultimately, your choice of tool should be in line with your current tech stack (many tools support seamless integrations) and the end-user skills (the usability of the tool is more technical or marketing -or both- oriented). -
1:1 Communication
The 2023 digital landscape is crowded, and companies need to cut through the noise. For that, all interactions need to relate to the individual customers’ needs at the right time and the right place, as they expect it.At Merkle, we advise and help our clients to activate their data to engage meaningfully and personally with their customers: it elevates their experience, but also drives profits, and reduces your costs. Platforms dedicated to testing and optimization also have personalization and segmentation functions to achieve this 1:1 communication goal. Consider these capabilities to choose a tool that can support the entire customer experience orchestration. So even though you are not planning to roll out big personalization efforts this year, the new tool can support your ambitions for customer experience maturity.
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Recommendations and affinities
Knowing what product your customer might buy next is hard to foresee as a marketeer and different customer groups have different buying patterns. Getting an overview of all the different types of behaviours your customers are showing can be close to impossible, at least without the proper technology to enable these insights. Luckily a lot of software solutions are available that makes it simpler to map all your products and assign them values.By using these automated recommendations, category and product affinity models, the engine will automatically serve the customer with the most relevant product.
This interaction can either activate as a possible up-sell in their buying journey, later as a follow up email or the next time your customer returns to your platform.
In conclusion
There are many paths to choose when setting your ambition for the future of you customer experience optimization. No matter what industry, B2B or B2C, customers expect more of you and in a format they prefer. Leveraging optimization and personalization tools to enable these moments and offer the customers what they anticipate, will no doubt increase over-all performance of your platforms and improve your customers’ experience.
