5 Things Every CMO Should Understand About AR Experience Design

As we’ve watched the slow uptake in VR adoption, it would be simple to dismiss AR as having similar challenges ahead. But as we mentioned in a past article, the installed base AR-capable hardware has already reached a critical mass of users the moment iOS 11 was released. Every mobile handset from the iPhone 6s up is capable run apps based on Apple’s ARKit. Google has followed suit with its similarly capable ARCore for Android devices. So, any marketer looking to dip a toe into the AR waters already has billions of active, waiting AR-ready consumers, worldwide. But as with any burgeoning technology, creating a truly valuable and engaging customer experience that forwards your business goals requires maintaining perspective in what really makes its use successful. Here are a few things to consider, so that we all avoid launching the next “stache.”

1) It’s about experiences, not technology

Every potential project should be evaluated in terms of how it enhances the customer experience and/or strengthens the relationship with the customer. This idea seems basic, but when new technology appears, even veteran marketers looking for any possible competitive advantage, can get swept up in the fervor of novelty at the expense of strategy. Great brands have proven, time and time again, that being first is far less valuable than being thoughtfully great.

2) It’s about time

A well implemented AR experience can offer incredible time savings for consumers. IKEA has given us a beautiful example of this. The IKEA Place app lets consumers virtually place any piece of IKEA furniture right in their own home. They can position it, rotate it and swap it out for something else in moments. No more trodding to the store for a better view, or carting something back to the store because it didn’t feel right in the space once it was in the home.Images: ©IKEA

3) It’s about measurement

Permanently emblazoned on our office walls is the phrase, “It ain’t creative unless it sells.” A great AR experience should be created and considered in terms of whether it will result in a measureable impact on whatever KPIs are driving the success of your product, brand or business. Will it drive sales? Will it drive users to connect with more content? Will it increase users’ advocacy and sharing of your brand? Will it reinforce your competitive position in the marketplace? Do you have the infrastructure and personnel in place to review and analyze the data generated? Even the most basic of AR projects require substantial resources to achieve, so make sure you have the measurement analytics tools and processes in place to understand if you are maximizing your return on investment. Both Apple and Google provide in-app analytics tools that can aid in understanding user behaviors. So, what should you measure?Primary measurements may cover basic use and engagement:Installs – how many times your app is installed?

Opens – is it being used after the first install? How, when and where is it being activated?

Purchases – are purchases being made with the app or does it push visits to a transaction outside of the app itself?

Content Views – are users exploring deeply within the content provided?

Shares or Invites – if you are providing means of sharing or connecting with social media accounts, how often is that feature activated?

Custom Events –  are specific behaviors that drive revenue or leads being accounted for?

Complementary measurements may track connections to the rest of your digital ecosystem:

Google analytics - are you properly attributing and tracking online sessions for users who originate from the app?

Leads generated - how many app users translate into active leads?

Social Mentions and Shares - whether through the app or organically, how often, by whom and with whom is the app mentioned or shared?

4) It’s about human nature

Technology evolves at an increasingly rapid pace. Human nature, however, does not. When creating or evaluating any potential AR experience, ask what basic human need it addresses (or leverages).

Does the experience foster or improve a sense of community or belonging - either within your specific target segment or the greater population?

Does the experience confer status upon the user - perhaps through either gamification, social rankings, early-adopter or exclusivity-based bragging rights?

Does its use instill confidence - either through confirmation or positive feedback?Ultimately, AR experiences have the ability to connect with customers on a level that supports at least a few tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as well as your business needs. And those marketers who can deliver on that potential will always outcompete their more traditional competitors.

5) It’s never been easier to innovate

Historically, as digital technologies and media have emerged, the tools used to create the content have lagged. In the case of AR, however, elegant development tools like ARKit and ARCore that take care of the bulk of the mathematical heavy lifting and foundational coding have made it easier than ever to close the gap between innovation and execution.

In short: the dog already needs to dance really well

Unlike those early years of the Web where people were entertained for hours by blue text links and static webcam images of a Cambridge University coffee pot, thanks to early successes like Pokemon Go and SnapChat filters, consumers’ expectations of AR are already quite high. Marketers need to understand that AR experiences exist as integrated parts of their consumers’ lives, not aside from it.

7 Ways To Improve Your Customer Experience

Eventually, every product or service category becomes a commodity

The result of the inevitable maturing of markets is that today’s innovation becomes tomorrow’s fish and chip paper, so to speak. And as the hyper-connected environment of the internet empowers your customers to price compare among a virtually infinite set of your competitors, this process will only continue to accelerate. But just because the category itself is commoditized, there is still competitive advantage to be found in the customer experience you build around the transaction. So, let’s look at some of the quickest ways you can diagnose any issues, avoid common pitfalls and improve your customer experience.

1.    Survey your customers

Assuming you have an established mailing list for your customers, set aside part of your outreach schedule to survey them about their experiences. If you have the budget, conduct focus groups or one-on-one user testing sessions. The most useful topics of inquiry are generally surrounding points of friction in the user journey. Ask them about what’s working, what could work better, and what’s not working at all. Observe their navigation patterns and choices.Watch for the big issues, sure, but more importantly, watch for the micro-moments, the hesitations that interrupt the journey ever so slightly. It’s not always the big hiccups that depress your conversions, but the aggregation of a number of small pain points spread across the total population of your customers’ base can add up. In the end, it always pays to actively listen to your customers. It’s rare that customers can tell you the best ways to fix their pain points, but they are great at telling you what those pain points are and why they are annoyed by them.

2.    Survey non-customers

If you don’t already have access to a mailing list of non-customers, this group may be a bit harder to engage. But any business seeking to increase market penetration would be well served by knowing what about the experience of engaging with your business is ultimately undesirable, or at least not desirable enough to overcome the switching costs.

3.    Make sure contact information is up-to-date and easily accessible

If anyone asks how to get ahold of your customer support, you’ve already failed. It’s frustrating to search a site, fruitlessly, for contact information. Worse yet is finding contact information and attempting to use it, only to find a disconnected line or an unmonitored “catch-all” email account. Place contact information on every page, and the more avenues of communication available (e.g.: email, phone, twitter, et al), the better.

4.    Prioritize and minimize available actions

When considering any information architecture or user experience design challenge, there is always a fine line between simplicity and obfuscation. Knowing where that line actually lies needn’t rely on guesswork, however. This is a perfect use case for a systematic A/B testing or conversion rate optimization (CRO). Create iterations of the page or screen in question and test the variants for effectiveness. You should be able to uncover what level of information delivers the most positive impact on KPI levels.

5.    Focus on load times

While it seems like a performance issue, optimizing load times is really about keeping the user happy. Google has an interesting framework for evaluating the experience surrounding load times called RAIL. The idea is that the longer the load time, the greater the frustration and decrease in focus on the task at hand.

Delay & User Reaction

Source: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/rail

6.    Mobile first. Seriously.

The rationales for not replacing or updating non-responsive legacy web properties usually sound reasonable: “We’re a B2B company. Our customers don’t need mobile.” Or, “Who would make a major industrial purchase from their phone?” But dive into the analytics of any site and the volume of traffic originating from mobile devices is likely to be well over 50%. Regardless of how we imagine any customer’s work day, their browsing habits are created and reinforced by their habits in and out of work. And, for most people, that means using their mobile device to fill any idle moment—whether that’s work, pleasure or some jumbled mashup of the two. They don’t distinguish between dayparts or environments when seeking information, and if your experience doesn’t address their needs, whenever, wherever, they choose to enter it, they will move on.

7.    Improve on your competitors’ best UX ideas

Legendary Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs is oft quoted as saying, “A good artist borrows. A great artist steals.” Amusingly, he seems to have stolen the phrase from Picasso, who likely lifted it from the annals of history. The point here is that you should be looking at your competitors’ customer experiences at least as frequently as your customers and potential customers are. Create an incognito browser window and take the user journey yourself—yours and your competitors—from search up to the moment of conversion. Take time to formally document and compare your user journey to that of your most successful and least successful competitors. Make a list of the most useful features and designs and look for ways to optimize your own experience based on those models. Imagine the perfect user journey and compare it to the journey you’re offering. If there’s a gap, choose the best ideas, from anywhere you can, to fix it.

Ultimately, experience is brand and brand is experience.

In marketing journals and blogs across the internet, you’ll see stories about the death of brands. Or, that brands don’t matter. But it is probably more fair to say that what defines a brand today is less the logo, typeface, slogan or ad campaign than it is the experience the user associates with it. And that is where you’ll create your next market advantage.

Can you answer these 5 influencer marketing questions?

Influencer marketing is not new. In the mid 1960s, when Lee Iacocca was General Manager of Ford, he was preparing to launch the new Mustang onto the American public. Legend has it that as part of the marketing program, Iacocca placed Mustangs in the hands of “big men on campus” types at colleges and universities across the country to jumpstart the new model’s cool factor. Today, influencer marketing is common practice for a growing portion of marketing budgets, with brands expected to spend as much as $5-10 billion with influencers by 2020. You could say that with social media, influencer marketing has been taken to scale. For marketers who haven’t yet taken the influencer marketing plunge, it’s time to ask some basic questions:

1. What are the FTC regulations governing influencer marketing?

   Why is this the first question? If you have never done influencer marketing campaigns, this is an easy (and potentially costly) point to overlook. The FTC requires all influencers to disclose any sponsorships near the top of any post. The FTC has an online endorsement guide in an easy-to-follow Q&A format. Protecting yourself and your influencers is easy, but you need to understand the constraints.

2. How do you find influencers in the first place?

   According to the Linqia State of Influencer Marketing Report 2017, 64% of respondents engage dedicated management companies (Linqia being one example) to provide turnkey influencer programs.

3. How do you distinguish between reach and influence?

   In its simplest form, reach is equal to the number of followers or subscribers that are exposed to an influencer’s content. Some may add secondary reach numbers, e.g.: populations exposed to reshares. But anyone can buy followers, or the appearance of reach. So, neither of those numbers really quantifies influence. To quantify influence, you need to do a little homework beyond the raw numbers:

   1. What percentage of the influencer's audience meets your target customer profile?

   2. What percentage of the content they produce is relevant to your industry and target customers?

   3. Does the influencer achieve more or less engagement when they are delivering content relevant to your industry or business?

   4. Do they command a similar presence across platforms?

4. How do influencers get paid?

   There are a number of methods, each with its pros and cons. Some favor success on the influencer end of the funnel, other favor success on the marketer’s end of the funnel.

   1. Free products or services—you want the influencer to talk about something, you give them that something for free. This is generally better suited to one-off campaigns, product launches etc.

   2. Pay per post (PPP)—a set fee paid to the influencer for each blog article or social post linking to your site. Easy to verify, but it assumes all posts have equal value, regardless of their effectiveness.

   3. Cost per engagement (CPE)—a set fee for every click, share, forward, et al. This model begins to distinguish between the relative values of various posts, but is more cumbersome to track and doesn’t tie back well to downstream business metrics.

   4. Cost per click (CPC)—a set fee is paid to the influencer for every click through to your site. It addresses the issue of relative value based on effectiveness of the posts to generate clicks, but stops short of rewarding for the quality of the customer delivered.

   5. Cost per acquisition (CPA)—a fee is paid only when someone an influencer has directed toward the site converts to a customer, e.g. subscriptions or sales. This definitely favors the marketer as it limits the ultimate cost per acquisition.

5. How do you measure ROI (Return on Influence)?

   So, after you choose a cost model, how do you tie it back to success measures? The short answer: the closer your metrics get to an actual monetary transaction the greater your ability to calculate true ROI. Now, for the longer answer. If your goal is increased awareness, you can run pre and post campaign awareness surveys. But it’s probably impossible to tease out the incremental effect of an individual influencer outside of the broader marketing you’re performing. If you’re looking for something more concrete, like page views, supplying influencer-specific tracking URLs tied into your analytics package, or creating influencer-specific landing pages will do the trick. That will at least get you to understand what those specific clicks and views are costing you.

   Delving even more deeply into the analytics, you can track specific events to see how deeply the users the influencer is delivering are engaged. Ultimately, if you assign a specific dollar value to specific engagement points, confirmed active leads, or final transactions, and you can review your analytics to track those leads back to specific influencers, you can quickly come very close to quantifying exact percentage returns on dollars spent.

Bonus question: should you trust your brand to a third party?

The simple answer is that your brand is already being talked about online. So, assuming you’re transparent about the sponsored nature of your influencer relationships, proactively guiding the conversation into positive territory can only be beneficial. Just take the time to understand who those influencers are and what the depth of their influence is. Also make sure your compensation method aligns with your business goals and analytics capabilities. The rest should feel like a great conversation.

“What’s the deal with #hashtags?”

You can almost hear Jerry Seinfeld’s nasally voice in your head. All joking aside though, their usage seems to be extremely arbitrary, especially when it comes to individual social media platforms and the users themselves. Recent studies have shown that topics without a hashtag trend higher than their hashtag equivalent. All of that begs the question, do we need hashtags at all? Before we can answer that we need to understand from where the hashtag originated.

#BackToTheFuture

The history of hashtag use in social media goes back 10 years to 2007, where it was used on Twitter for the first time as a way to organize during a time where social media search left a lot to be desired. In addition to the searchability and categorizing qualities, it also could be used to add further context to Twitter’s restrictive 140 character limit.The hashtag caught on rapidly on Twitter, and soon it started to make its way to rival platforms. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn all wanted a piece of the hash-action and hashtags became even more plentiful. Eventually, marketers wanted to get in on the action too and the hashtag began to take on a life of its own.

#StateOfTheHashtag

Now, after nearly 10 years in use, let’s take a look at the State of the Hashtag across the five major social media platforms. Do they work at all, and if so – which platforms embrace them best?

Snapchat

You can load up your posts and comments with as many hashtags as you like on Snapchat. The problem is Snapchat doesn’t offer a search option, and there is no way to track hashtags or to categorize them, rendering hashtags mostly useless on Snapchat. Bash the hash!

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has had a love/hate relationship with hashtags in the past, but right now, it’s in love. With its makeover in early 2017 came a new emphasis on categorizing hashtags and utilizing them through the search option. A recent study by B2C shows that posts with a hashtag saw a 11% jump in reach and a 17% increase in interactions. Both are modest gains but gains nonetheless. The verdict? Utilize hashtags on LinkedIn.

Facebook

Hashtags never really caught on for Facebook users. Hashtags don’t offer your content much value, and they may actually hurt your organic reach. A recent BuzzSumo study found that Facebook posts featuring a hashtag attracted only 70% of the organic reach of posts that did not feature a hashtag. According to a recent report from Your Story, posts with hashtags received only 0.8 percent viral reach, while posts without hashtags had 1.30 percent viral reach. Steer clear of hashtags on Facebook; they’re not only useless — they can be harmful.

Instagram

Instagram is a hashtag lover’s utopia. Not only does the platform boast a 2200-character limit, allowing you to flood your posts with hashtags, but on Instagram, they actually work. A 2016 TrackMaven study revealed that the optimal hashtag count for engagement on Instagram was nine. That’s right. Nine hashtags are recommended for every Instagram post in order to build your audience and keep engagement elevated. It’s the visual nature of the platform that so readily empowers its users to search using hashtags and to categorize their content.

Twitter

The original home for hashtags. Hashtags have been instrumental for users to find, search and comment on communities and topics of interest. As a news-breaking platform, the hashtag allows Twitter users to quickly search for a topic and users who are engaged in the conversation around it. The 144 character limit doesn’t allow for a lot of hashtags, but a recent BuzzSumo study suggests that using one or two hashtags per tweet can increase your engagement by 21%. But stop at two, because that same study showed that using three hashtags or more lowered your engagement by nearly 17%.

#BestPractices

Hashtags are great for building engagement on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. When writing your social content, remember to use hashtags more strategically. Here are five ways to make hashtags work for you:

1. Keep it short – If your hashtag is too long or contains multiple words it’ll be to be difficult to read, much less type. Keep your hashtags to a limit of 10 characters—including the hashtag itself.

2. Use abbreviations – Scroll through Twitter or Instagram during any live event and you’ll see the hashtags with the most traffic are abbreviations or contain abbreviations. #Lolla is going to be easier to type and search than #Lollapalooza. For sporting events, #CLEvGSW is easier to type and search for than #ClevelandVersusGoldenState.

3. Test your hashtag – Utilize Hashtagify and the advanced search within Twitter to see if your hashtag is already in use, and by whom. A rival brand may have already used your hashtag. Or, worse yet, your hashtag may have a connected meaning that is completely unrelated and inappropriate to the message you’re trying to deliver. Do some basic research to protect your brand. Utilize platforms like ‘Hashtagify.me’ to search the web for hashtags, related hashtags and their usage rate.

4. Use them when context is needed – If your post is in reference to a specific event or topic then use a hashtag to give context to your post. “I can’t take it anymore!” reads a lot differently with a hashtag: “I can’t take it anymore! #Cubs”

Resources

http://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-improve-facebook-engagement-insights-from-1bn-posts/

https://coschedule.com/blog/how-to-use-hashtags/

https://yourstory.com/2017/04/using-hashtags-right/

https://blog.markgrowth.com/what-is-the-current-state-of-the-hashtag-bef93c9736ad

Is your smartphone making you stupid?

Maybe outsourcing to a second brain wasn’t such a good idea.

In the past few years, a number of long-term, peer-reviewed studies have come out that have begun to suggest that the piece of technology we once called the “Jesus phone” is really no savior at all. In fact, it may be, for our productivity and general mental acuity, just the opposite. Even if we ignore the socially inept habit of dodgily flicking about your smartphone screen while in the presence of other humans, there appear to be some very real changes that occur in the chemistry of the human brain that may suggest we rethink our attachments to these devices.

We’re not Pavlov. We’re the dogs.

I have no doubt that there was nothing other than benign intent in the original design and implementation of the iPhone™ and Android™ notifications systems. You get a message—a text, an email, an incoming chat—you get a notification. Seems fair enough. But it turns out that when presented with these notifications, visual or audible, our brains release a tiny bit of dopamine. Historically, we associated dopamine with pleasure. But more recent studies are linking the neurotransmitter to something more akin to “seeking.” Pleasurable or otherwise.

It seems dopamine is connected to general curiosity. And that, it seems, is where we get into trouble. Notifications, Twitter responses, Facebook newsfeeds, all provide a virtually endless cycle of instant gratification. Worse still, is that the dopamine system in our brains is heightened by unpredictability.

And finally, when we realize that the dopamine system is also especially sensitive to reward cues (the sound of an incoming text, that buzz of an incoming Snapchat story), it’s clear that, intentionally or otherwise, we have imposed on ourselves the mother of all dopamine loop generators. We all end up, in some sense, Pavlov’s dog, waiting for the bell to ring.

We’re constantly distracted.

Another study just published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research presents the case that even the presence of our smartphones within arm’s reach causes a measurable hit to cognitive ability—”brain drain” as the authors put it. And, as you might have guessed, the more addicted you are to using your device, the worse this specific malady seems to be.

“Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence.“

-Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. BosBrain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

The authors of the study conclude their report by saying that the increased cognitive load accompanying the presence of the smartphone might actually hinder consumers’ ability to evaluate marketing offers rationally, defaulting to more emotionally driven heuristics. The good news? That effect is less of an issue with advertising presented on the mobile device itself, since it is no longer a distraction, but the point of focus itself.

You’ll probably forget you read this anyway.

The final report I came across is by Russian security experts at Kaspersky Labs. They assert we’ve all become so accustomed to offloading to our smartphones that we are, in effect, losing our ability to actively transfer information into long-term memory. Here are some of the highlights:

• Up to 60% of adult consumers could phone the house they lived in aged 10; but not their children or the office or their partners without first looking up the number.

• One third of consumers polled were happy to forget, or risk forgetting, information they can easily find – or find again – online.

• When faced with a question, a third (36%) of consumers would turn to the internet before trying to remember and a quarter (24%) would forget an online fact as soon as they had used it.

• “Digital Amnesia” was equally and sometimes more prevalent in older age groups.

• And none of us is actively doing much to protect the collection of data we’re storing on our computers and devices. (This point is not surprising. After all, this is Kaspersky talking, they make data protection software.)

So, how do we get our cognitive mojo back?

Simply put, we have all adopted behaviors with regard to our smartphones that, by nature of our evolutionary biology, are self-amplifying. Disrupting those stimulus and reward cycles will not be easily accomplished by casual means. You’ll probably need to create new, deliberate counteracting behaviors or strategies that are equal in measure to your level of dependency.

Moderate dependency: Schedule some alone time every night.

When you come home at night, put the phone on silent mode and into a closed cabinet. Never set it on your nightstand “just in case.” In other words, develop your ability to ignore the phone at times when being disconnected poses the lowest social or professional risk. Eventually, you should become more comfortable managing your daytime relationship.

Substantial dependency: Turn off notifications. Ditch social media.

The best way to break the dopamine reward cycle is to remove the reward triggers, e.g.: all of the dings, rumbles and text bubbles that tell our brains to prepare for seeking. Also, get rid of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat or any other streaming-feed-based reward generators. Then feel your anxiety subside, your relationships deepen, the clouds depart and rainbows appear deep in your amygdala.

Severe dependency: Go “dumb phone” cold turkey.

If your smartphone has taken control of your life, your happiness and your freedom, it may be time for the nuclear option. For something more in the tactical nuke range, try the new Nokia 3310 reissue. You can still text and get email, but it’s certainly a barrier to getting lost in your phone for hours at a time. Or, if you require the full-on ICBM, get something like the LG Wine 4. Imagine the reduction of anxiety in your life with 6 hours of talk time and 15 days of standby battery life in your pocket.

Ultimately, no technology is good or bad.

You may think I’m some smartphone hating Luddite. Nothing could be further from the truth. The smartphone revolution has been very good to me. But, I understand I fall into the “Moderate Dependency” category. So, the phone goes into a cabinet, on a charging cable, around 7:30 every evening. Sure, I have FOMO. But less and less so for what’s happening on my phone.

Replace Your Sales Funnel with a Sponge

There are no funnels anymore.

I think it’s time to put the traditional sales funnel paradigm into the same category as pagers, fax machines, and videotape—tools that have traveled from inspirational to indispensable to mostly irrelevant. I say “mostly” because, like anything, there are still some businesses with extremely long sales cycles for which the funnel paradigm makes sense. Some hospitals still use pagers. Some insurance agents still submit applications for coverage via fax. And—well, sorry, I can’t think of any industry that needs videotape. So why lump the venerable sales funnel into that family? Simply put, it implies a certain linearity of decision-making and extended consideration behaviors that are no longer consistent with the instant gratification environment in which most customer relationships are created.

Customers have a need—they aren’t looking to build a relationship.

A funny thing happens when consumers have what effectively amounts to an infinite number of suppliers to choose from. Competition becomes infinite. Information arrives instantaneously. Pricing becomes transparent. And every “thing” becomes a commodity. For most sellers, the idea of nurturing a prospect through an imposed knowledge or awareness funnel of any kind is laughable. The idea of a sales funnel implies connections created and strengthened over time, but today, there are often only seconds between search and purchase, not days or weeks.

If their needs aren’t easily fulfilled, consumers adopt a new need.

I mentioned in an earlier blog post about a lead response study by sales training firm LeadSimple that showed a 40% close rate for leads contacted within an hour. Returns diminished over time, falling to a 10% close rate for leads contacted within 24 hours. That rate dropped even lower as time progressed. A fourfold decrease in results in less than a day! I would argue that this is less an indicator of the value of speedy customer service than it’s an indicator that consumers are more often buying purely on impulse. Increasingly, it seems, transactions are instantiated more on a desire for consumption than a need for a specific end. And if our first impulses go unsatisfied, we bounce to the next whim and satisfy that until our capacity for (or interest in) consumption is exhausted.

Here comes the sponge.

In this environment, the paths to conversion are infinitely varied and nonlinear. But, ironically, so are the exit points. The trick is to view every entry point as the optimal completion point, not permission to force a potential customer to adhere to your internal processes. Don’t require registrations to get information or downloads. Don’t force account reps onto customers who merely wish to transact and disappear. A perfect example of this thinking is Amazon’s “Buy now with 1-Click” functionality. Ultimately, clicking “Buy now” is redundant with clicking the “Add to Cart” button followed by the “Choose Your Shipping” page, followed yet again by the “Review Your Order” page—either way, the box arrives in your preferred location at your chosen period of time. But it represents parallel paths to filling the desire, neither imposed on the customer by the company. You’ll see a lot of pundits talking about optimizing micro-moments. This is nothing more than the realization that every seemingly inconsequential point of friction in your web or mobile user experience that delays gratification of the purchasing impulse is a missed opportunity. Every extra step added to a process can devastate conversion rates. And I agree with that. But that thinking is potentially still too linear, too funnel-centric. The sponge perspective says you not only remove friction but also increase entry points and allow for more self-service. Put a “Buy Now” button in a banner ad. Create an e-commerce-enabled Facebook Messenger bot that customers can hail with a word and make purchases through without ever touching your site.

The only conversion that matters is a sale.

At the risk of sounding like Blake in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, while your marketing is focusing on filling the funnel, a closer may already be drinking your coffee.