Performance Marketing Expert

Creating a Winning Customer Experience

As marketers, we all know that a solid customer experience can pay dividends in the form of increased conversions and engagement. However, to shift from product-focused to customer-focused marketing, you must be prepared to adapt to your user’s needs and listen to the feedback you’re receiving.

At Rise’s recent Internet Marketing Leadership Series event in New York, we heard from a number of marketing experts who shared their insights on building trust through customer-led experiences. Creating a digital experience that resonates with your audience is a challenging and rewarding process that’s akin to training for the digital marketing Olympics.

The day’s sessions, featuring marketing leaders from Forrester Research, Nationwide, BMO Financial Group, Univision, Shutterstock, John Wiley & Sons, and Optimizely, proved that brands need the right tools, mindsets, and skills to go for CX gold. Here are a few takeaways from the event to put you on track to win by providing your customers with relevant and consistent messaging:

 

Pump up your process.


Superior customer experiences connect with your audience through effectiveness, ease, and emotion.The reality is that to achieve those three E’s, you have to create the right infrastructure and enable your internal team with a clear vision. You will benefit from holistic data that delivers a clear customer lens, as well as metrics that match your overall business strategy and goals. What’s more, you’ll need to create an environment that supports quick ideation and implementation. After all, speed matters to your customers, who are becoming increasingly faster and more responsive themselves.

 

Build your creative muscle.


It’s not easy to develop customer-centric reflexes. You have to take what you know about your customers and turn those insights into action by developing innovative solutions and finding a way to measure success. You may rely on net promoter scores (NPS), customer surveys, or engagement on social media, but make sure you have a metric in place. Truly delighting your customers also requires an element of creativity. Luckily, there are repeatable practices and processes like design thinking and A/B testing that can change how your team approaches a challenge.

 

Leverage existing customer data.


In addition to your channel insights, look within your CRM and other data systems for information you can use to engage existing customers or reach similar audiences that may not be in your pipeline. You may not realize the wealth of customer insights you already have at your fingertips, just waiting to be analyzed and optimized for each stage of the customer journey.

 

If you fail, know that it’s ok. 


Some of the most important lessons you will learn will be the result of failure. The question is, how will you react, adapt, and implement new ideas to deliver success?

At the event, senior marketers from leading brands took us down their varied paths from concept to implementation of digital initiatives, in which the customer experience was placed center stage. Each tale included highs and lows, lessons and mishaps, but there were several common strands. All of the brands on the panel put three things at the top of the must-have list: goals, testing, and customer insights. With that trifecta in place, digital transformations can be measured and adapted as needs change.

 

After all the training and testing, there’s one more important question to consider: how do you know when a CX-driven digital transformation project is complete? There’s no Olympic judge deciding this one. The answer will be different for each transformation -- and there may not be just one finish line when you’re continually testing, listening, and optimizing. Remember, you can start small to create a process, then build from there. Your customers are always in motion, so you must be too.

Whether your brand is in the midst of a digital transformation project or you are optimizing your existing customer experience strategy, please don’t hesitate to reach out if Rise can be a resource.

04/06/2016 at 12:00