Get inspired! Inspirational content in the customer journey
Investigating the effect of inspiration pages on the dropout probability of customers in an e-commerce setting
Senne Aarssen
MSc Marketing Intelligence Thesis defense
Relevance
MARKTANALYSE
More and more customers engage in online customer journeys
A critical challenge for companies with regards to the customer journey is to make sure customers stay in their journey (Chau et al., 2006)
There is an explosion of possible customer interaction points (Maechler et al., 2016)
One of these interaction points, are inspiration pages. These pages can give customers ideas about consumption possibilities (Bottger et al., 2017)
Theoretical Framework
MARKTANALYSE
Customer journey
“See, Think, Do, Care”-model (Kaushik, 2013) Inspiring content
“A customer’s temporary motivational state that facilitates the transition from the reception of a marketing-induced idea to the intrinsic pursuit of a
consumption-related goal” (Bottger et al., 2017)
Customer inspiration can lead to higher purchase intentions (Bottger et al., 2017)
Customer dropouts
Methodology
Results
Looking at inspiration pages:
The probability of dropping out of the customer journey is 0.0064% smaller for customers that saw inspiration pages during their journey*
Number of inspiration pages:
The probability of dropping out of the customer journey is 0.0019% smaller for every extra inspiration page viewed by a customer*
Results
Type of inspiration page:
We did not find a significant effect of the type of inspiration page on the probability of customers to drop out of their customer journey
Moderating effect of small screened devices:
When using a small screened device, and keeping all other variables at a
constant, the odds ratio of saw any inspiration (0.71) increases by a factor of 15.3.
This means that the negative effect of looking at inspiration pages on the
Discussion
Looking at inspiration pages, number of times inspiration pages have been visited and device type
All supported our hypotheses Very small effect
Type of inspiration page
Split not distinctive enough
Implications
Academic Managerial
Inspiration pages can help customers go through a smooth customer journey
Altough the effect is small, inspiration pages can be used to increase the conversion rate
Invest in high quality content and make pages easy to navigate to
Make these pages work on small screened devices
Limitations & future research
- Data from one specific industry
- Only customer journeys within one company - Observational data endogeneity
