Philip J Mikal

MIT’s Sloan School of Management presents a method to infer a website user’s cognitive style from click-stream data and to dynamically change website layout and design elements to be optimal. Their test case with British Telecom increased purchase intentions by 20%.

“Website morphing complements self-selected branching (as in dell.com), recommendations (as in amazon.com), factorial experiments (Google’s website optimizer), or customized content. Website morphing is an example of targeting optimal marketing communications to customer segments.”

Download the PDF of ‘Website Morphing’, part of the upcoming book Marketing Science

An often forgotten opportunity to offer a promotion or otherwise influence your customers is the logout screen. In researching logoff screens for ChargeSmart’s credit card bill payment service, I captured logout messages for eight top online banking websites.

Chase and USBank are straight to the point, offerring a simple status message and little to no navigation. Citi and WaMu step it up a bit and at least offer up a thank you message. I’m a big advocate of thanking customers whenever you can as long as it’s genuine and appropriate. (For more on “thank you” in general, watch this short TED video on the power of saying thank you.) Wachovia, Wells Fargo and HSBC are running a promotion. My favorite, Bank of America, has a personalized offer that I believe is specific to my personal banking history with them.

Click for the full screen capture.

Bank of America

Chase

Citi

HSBC

USBank

Wachovia

WaMu

Wells Fargo

I’m not the only one who is curious. Chek out Jim Bruene’s take on August 2008 online banking logout messages over at NetBanker.

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