Despite the mountain of software tools and social platforms made available to marketers in recent years, conversion rates haven’t budged. E-Commerce conversion rates in the current year are 2.5 percent, according to Statista Inc. Not terrific considering 70 percent of marketers say converting leads is their top priority, according to Hubspot Inc.

Perhaps they could make their digital marketing more effective if they’d watch how consumers actually engage with it. 

Marketing technology is getting more advanced, integrating things like virtual reality and artificial intelligence to help close customers. However, “All of that’s just gimmicks unless you can actually think about how you make that real for your brand,” said Andrea Ward (pictured), chief marketing officer of Magento Inc., which offers cloud-based e-Commerce solutions for business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Andrea Ward in our Women in Tech feature.

Earlier this year, Ward spoke about digital marketing challenges and workable solutions during an interview at the Professional BusinessWomen of California Conference in San Francisco, California. The crucial thing for companies to do is put themselves into the minds of their thinking, feeling customers, she told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Where are they and what are they doing when they come across the brand? It is not about accosting them, but rather engaging them, Ward said. What type of brand interaction would a consumer actually desire on a particular website or application?

“Commerce, I feel, is the moment where a conversation really turns into a relationship,” Ward said. “It needs to be trustworthy; it needs to be authentic. That means businesses need to create individual experiences that really reflect their brand.”

It also means no pop-up ads. In the TV era, viewers became used to regular commercial interruptions. Obviously, most would have blocked them if they had the choice. Free online pop-up blockers have significantly lowered consumer tolerance for in-your-face marketing. In fact, today’s consumers can be pretty harsh; 72 percent say that a pop-up ad would actually lower their opinion of a brand, according to Hubspot.

Social gen puts the ‘you’ in YouTube

The internet has created a whole generation of consumers who expect to drive their own experiences with content and ads. For a lot of millennials, even Facebook’s supposedly targeted ads are unwelcome. Earlier this year, a study from Lithium Technologies revealed that 74 percent of 16- to 39-year-olds don’t want to see ads on social media; 56 percent of those actually reduced their visits to, or quit, social sites due to ads.

“They don’t want to be targeted or broadcast at on social media like it’s a TV or a radio,” Lithium President and Chief Executive Officer, Rob Tarkoff, told SFGate.com. “They want it to be a conversation; they want to engage. It has to be a two-way interaction if brands want to succeed,” he said.

Are today’s companies supposed to sit in a corner batting their lashes, hoping that customers approach them for a dance? Au contraire, according to Ward. “We’re going to them rather than trying to draw them in to come to us,” she said. “It’s that change from thinking about trying to attract your customer to come to your business to really bringing the business to the customer.” The trick is to meet them where and when they want with an interesting question instead of a loud exclamation, she added.

What does this two-way marketing street look like? A compelling example comes from luxury British fashion brand Burberry. In 2009, the brand launched a social-media campaign with its Art of the Trench site. The website invited users to submit photos of themselves or friends sporting Burberry’s signature trench coats. Photos of regular people on the street in Burberry trenches were soon plastered on the site. Visitors could share the photos via social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

A year later, Burberry had over 1 million Facebook followers. Its e-Commerce sales had grown dramatically, and Art of the Trench resulted in more sales than any other avenue for the brand.

This proves that, though users say they dislike marketing on social sites, it does not mean that marketers cannot reach and convert them there. But the marketing must be part of the experience they came for, not a distraction from it. Another such example is Facebook Messenger users hailing Ubers in the chatbot without leaving the app.

A fitting selection

In some contexts, even the tech that Ward warns could be gimmicky can boost conversions if it gives consumers what they desire in the moment. Magento works with an eyewear merchant in Mexico City that lets users try on glasses with virtual reality.

“That’s a natural extension of the brand and a way to use virtual reality,” she said. “If those customers didn’t have that experience, it would be less likely that they actually would buy.”

All kinds of MarTech can raise conversions as long as it is paired with a strategy that respects the human element, Ward stated. Savvy bands are synergizing both into a new marketing paradigm.

“It’s a great time to be a marketer,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the PBWC Conference. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE