By now, we all understand the importance of our online customers’ experience. Today’s digital marketing is not just about bullying prospects into becoming paying customers with the right placement of the call-to-action button (though the right placing is certainly important…).
Today, we understand that the customers’ experiences begin eons before prospects are ready to buy. Savvy internet shoppers look for information, compare, read reviews and testimonials, consume content, make purchases, and share their experiences socially.
What today’s digital mediasphere needs is to start developing a customer experience strategy across the entire buying cycle:
- To become a trusted source of information
- To be viewed as a truthful advocate
- To provide a positive shopping experience
- To be easily shareable and likeable
Below, five actionable steps you can (and should) take to create a winning online customer experience strategy.
Step 1: Understand who your customers are
Before you can take on optimizing customer experiences, you must first seek to understand your customers’ profile or persona.
To do this, start by researching your existing customer base to single out those with the highest lifetime value. That is, those customers who make multiple purchases, upgrade their memberships, or renew endlessly. Find out what these users have in common. Location? Age? Job title? Socioeconomic status?
Build personas for each segment. You may have noticed that your best buyers are rich baby boomers in hot climates who love your product or 20-something urban fashionistas who tweet and Facebook. Generally, you will notice 3-5 main personas that are your highest value customers: the ones you wish you could copy and paste into multiple reproductions of themselves.
Once you have a thorough understanding of the customer segments you are targeting, you can better optimize their experience, from site design that will implore them to respond to content they will be motivated to consume.
Step 2: Find out what your customers want
Once you know who your customers are, the next (very logical) step is to find out what they want. Some great ways to do this:
- Ask them: create surveys (possibly with incentives for future purchases) and send them to current customers who fit your personas.
- Watch them: track landing pages and exit pages, monitor the types of content consumed, and study heat maps to watch the funnels they follow toward making purchases.
- Learn from others: understand your competitors’ successful initiatives and duplicate (or even, improve on) them.
Step 3: Give your customers what they want
The heart of customer experience strategy
Now that you know who they are and what they want, give it to them!
That is: give them options where they need them and make it easy for them where they get confused.
Also, offer free trials of services if your research revealed they like that or rewards programs if those are their cup of tea.
Give them content in the way they like to consume it (White papers? Videos? Case studies? Step-by-step instructions?) and make sure they are not bothered by the steps required to access it (are they OK with gated content or more likely to consume if it’s open?)
Make sure you communicate in a way that is amenable to them. How often do they want to receive your newsletters and special offers? Do they prefer personalized and fun transactional emails or dry facts? Have you tried offering text message reminder options?
The choices are endless and the opportunities abound to give your customers what they want. This is the most important step of creating an optimized customer experience strategy. Customers always appreciate getting what they want.
Step 4: Test and Measure
Sometimes, we can get lucky by following a hunch. More often, skilled marketers get qualitative results by acting upon data. At every step, with every change you make (no matter how minor it may seem), you always track and measure.
Do not ignore your best hunches, but always track their results. And the poorly-performing changes, before you remove them forever, try tweaking them and test again.
Step 5: Reward Customers for Sharing
There is a paradigm shift in today’s virtual world. What started out as a faceless domain filled with anonymity and ambiguity has morphed into a social sphere of influence, with people liking, sharing, tweeting, and +1ing their preferences and experiences.
As a marketer reaching out to a specific persona, one of your greatest assets may be the influencees of your current customers.
So, offer them rewards, refer-a-friend specials, and most importantly, engage with them on the social channels they use.
Customer Experience Strategy Steps
Text or video? Simple or complex design? Many options or quick selections?
What your customers prefer will depend on who they are. And there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. But by figuring out who your customers are and what they want, you can easily give it to them and improve your customer experience strategy in the process. By testing and measuring every action, you can track their behavior and preferences. And, by rewarding them for sharing and engaging with them socially, you can grow your customer base with more of the kinds of customers you profit from.
Don’t bully; instead, research, learn, understand, provide, and engage!
