Regardless of niche, most marketing strategies focus on capturing and retaining the customer’s attention. However, very few ever touch upon the experience. Less than stellar customer experience is the biggest threat to any business.
Successful brands always strive to provide the best digital experience for current customers and prospects. The key to a successful marketing strategy lies in attracting and maintaining your target audience’s attention through the customer experience.
Below are the five ways you can offer a memorable digital customer experience to your clients and leads.
Understand the Customer Journey
Every one of your customers follows a specific path throughout their purchasing journey. From awareness to advocacy, everyone’s journey is different. From start to finish, you need to provide the users with what they want – a solution to their problem.
Once you dig into web analytics and find out what makes your target audience tick, you can then create a personalized customer experience across the board.
To do so effectively, you need to find the answers to the following questions:
- What motivates them to buy?
- When do they make most of their purchases?
- Which device do they make most of their purchases from?
- What causes them to abandon their carts?
- What motivates them to remain loyal to your brand?
Develop Your Brand’s Personality and Voice
How do you recognize your favorite brand? Whether you love the way they tell their story or the way their customer service team takes care of you, everything that brand does breeds loyalty (or not).
To start developing your brand personality you need to pinpoint your core values and identify your unique selling proposition. Simply put, what makes you unique? Before you can sell to anyone, you need to be sold on your brand’s identity. In addition, you also need to define your brand’s voice. Is it serious or lighthearted? Reflect that in your approach towards advertising.
Truth be told, brand personality and voice play a big role when trying to improve customer experience. If you are not speaking the “language” of your customer, you’re missing the point.
Improve Online Shopping Experience
To improve the online shopping experience, not to mention overall digital customer experience, you need to also focus on user experience. From the moment someone lands on your website, you have about 7-10 seconds to make a lasting impression.
How easily users can navigate your website and find what they are looking for has a huge impact on customer retention.
If your website doesn’t streamline the process from awareness to checkout, you need to bring it up to code. Navigation and payments options are two of the most frustrating things consumers complain about when it comes to e-commerce.
In fact, if you cannot process payments quickly and efficiently online, your cart abandonment rate will skyrocket. Statistics show that many online retailers lose 75% or more of sales due to cart abandonment.
The top two reasons for never completing the purchase are
- unexpected or high shipping charges, handling fees or taxes and
- the requirement to create a customer account.
Your customers want transparency. Let them know upfront what you charge for shipping, offer incentives to buy more to get free shipping, and let your customers check out as guests.
Get Emotional
In addition, you also need to think like a consumer. When shopping online, how do you feel when you add a product to your cart and head to checkout? Are you excited to click the Buy Now button or do you often have doubts to complete the purchase?
Make it easy to complete purchases and offer reassurance to those who need it. Your customers will notice.
Optimize Your Website for Customers, not Search Engines
Search Engine Optimization is no longer sprinkling a few choice words in your copy. It’s about thinking like a consumer and using long-tail keywords that you would use yourself when searching for the type of product or service you sell.
Awkwardly placed, nonsensical words stuck in the middle of content not only look odd, but it is also a red flag for most people.
Deliver true value through your content. Think through the type of information your new customers will need prior to making a buying decision and what they’ll be looking for once they complete the purchase.
Optimize the customer experience with content that your customers will want to share and recommend to others.
Make the Most of Micro-Moments
With so many options out there, consumers’ attention span is more fragmented than ever. And it’s in these micro-moments we find customer’s intent and journey.
Customer intent tends to fall into the following four stages:
- I want
- I research
- I find
- I purchase
Be there for your customers during each of these stages. To do this successfully, you need to understand what customers want and need from you at different times. Far too many businesses make the mistake of optimizing for the “I want” moments as opposed to the entire journey.
If this happens, people are less likely to find your business in other micro-moments. The result is decreased brand visibility and lower ROI.
Wrapping Things Up
The ultimate digital experience happens when you are in tune with your target audience’s wants and needs. Empathetic marketing is the best way to identify their needs and create a memorable digital experience. If you are not reaching your customers at every touchpoint, rethink your marketing strategy to improve customer interaction, retention, and your bottom line.
