The age of digital transformation has arrived. Customers expect more of brands and marketers than ever as they move away from traditional (non-digital) channels in favor of an integrated digital experience.
To keep pace, brands must focus on their digital interactions with customers. This means using digital technology more effectively than ever.
Today, we’ll dive into the foundations of exceptional digital experiences. In this article, you’ll learn the following:
- What digital customer experience is
- The importance of delivering exceptional digital customer experiences
- The fundamentals of digital customer experience
- How technology drives successful digital customer experiences
What is digital customer experience (DCX)?
Digital customer experience is your customer’s perception of your brand as they interact with your marketing content across platforms. Throughout the customer journey, your prospects will interact with various content across platforms, from email and social media to websites, in-app experiences, and even AI interactions such as with conversational bots.
Digital CX isn’t simply about posting content to all your digital channels. The true success of digital customer experiences lies in curating the customer journey map to create an enjoyable and on-brand experience from their first interaction until conversion. Cohesive branding and personalization are both drivers of positive customer experience.
Why is digital customer experience important?
To understand the importance of creating seamless experiences, think about how we shop and interact online as consumers. Customer expectations have evolved. We want personalized experiences and a consistent experience with your brand as we move across different digital services in search of answers.
Say we’re scrolling through TikTok and come across a piece of sponsored content for a product. We watch that content and have more questions about the product, so we click the link and visit the website.
We see several features we like about the product and can see ourselves purchasing it. But first, we want to know how other customers have enjoyed their purchases. So we hop online and use social media or a mobile app to find informal reviews.
While scrolling through reviews, we find an interesting fact about the product best demonstrated in a video. We click the link and watch a YouTube tutorial.
Satisfied with our research, we return to the website to place an order. A pop-up offer for 10% off if we sign up for email updates is enticing, so we fill out the form and jump over to email to confirm the subscription and receive our code.
In just a few short minutes, we interacted with a product and brand using five different platforms. We took an entire customer journey, from awareness to decision, in a single session.
For customer experiences to drive engagement and conversions, the experience needs to be as easy as the above example every time. Creating digital customer experiences of this caliber is one of the biggest challenges marketers face. It’s why using process and technology to drive content creation and distribution is so important to brands intent on capturing customer attention.
How to build a digital customer experience strategy
Before you take your customer along the customer journey, you need an idea of where you want them to travel. Mapping out the customer journey will ensure you know where they’re headed and how to help them along the way.
Customers often make expected stops (digital touchpoints) along their journey from curious new prospects to loyal fans. Every stop along the way will inform their opinion of your brand. If the process is frictionless and informative, they’ll likely consider your product or service. If there are pitfalls or slow spots in the procurement process, they may become confused or frustrated and move on to another solution.
Four major categories comprise the customer journey:
- Prospective customers are those newly aware of your brand or product and interested in receiving more information. These customers may encounter touchpoints through advertisements, on a company website, in a store location, through email or social media, or during a trial.
- Purchasing customers are excited about your product and ready to adopt it. They may start on the website for purchase and proceed through your registration and billing workflow to become paying customers. Throughout this process, the workflow must remain targeted and smooth to complete conversion.
- Current customers will have different needs once a purchase is complete. They may require customer support by phone, app, or web. They may engage with your brand via self-service training or support content for answers to common questions or even use a chatbot or phone representative to get answers.
- Advocate customers are users who know and love your product. They may become brand supporters or evangelists, participate in online or virtual events, leave reviews, chat about the user experience on social media, or take advantage of referral or loyalty programs. These are your most vocal and loyal customers. They add to the brand knowledge base through their contributions online and reinforce customer relationships with the brand.
Best practices for creating a great digital customer experience
Building exemplary customer interactions is both an art and a science. An immersive experience considers how people use digital media, what compels them to action, and how your team should deliver these experiences. Here are five best practices to deliver experiences that convert:
Know your customer
Build an in-depth understanding of your target audience to create a customer experience and messaging that converts. Create detailed buyer personas that capture the pain points and desires most likely to motivate your audience. Then, use these data points to promote differentiation. Consider what type of customer journey works best for them, the speed with which they make decisions, and the outcomes they want to achieve in purchasing a product.
If you don’t know, ask (the customer)
To optimize the customer experience, go to the source. Conducting surveys and collecting customer feedback is a powerful way to fine-tune your campaigns and deliver the exact experiences your audience desires.
Customer satisfaction surveys, net promoter score (NPS) surveys, and requests for experience feedback are all valuable tools for building a customer-centric brand. This helps your brand focus on improving lifetime value and retention metrics, which is especially important considering 89% of customers will likely buy again after a positive customer service experience.
Use customer data to drive results
Look at platform analytics for data and information to develop future campaigns. Making data-driven decisions about customer experiences improves the likelihood your target audience will enjoy and engage with the content you produce. In turn, this builds customer loyalty and encourages prospects to continue along the customer journey toward conversion. Establish metrics that measure customer engagement and reveal customer needs. Use this to refine your digital customer journey and build better experiences.
Repurpose content
It’s expensive and time-consuming to produce redundant content for platforms. With the expense and labor of content production in mind, over 80% of marketers repurpose content for different social media channels. In a marketing landscape that prioritizes the omnichannel experience, you must be able to produce relevant and cohesive content quickly.
Use software that helps you deliver experiences across platforms without starting from scratch. A modern digital asset management (DAM) solution is one such platform. It allows creative teams to repurpose content quickly and easily for maximum ROI.
Use software for personalization at scale
Most successful marketers incorporate technology and automation into their marketing practice. These tools help teams move quickly and effectively while delivering a seamless and on-brand customer experience. Strive for agile marketing practices backed by a robust tech stack to enable better content creation and customer engagement.
Tools to improve the digital customer experience
To deliver exemplary digital customer experience at scale, it is increasingly important to take advantage of marketing automation and digital experience platform tools. These next-generation marketing solutions enable brand managers and creative teams to keep up with customer demand for information, entertainment, and solutions within the digital space.
For creative teams, a DAM enables faster and more compliant content operations. Using a DAM solution like Aprimo offers marketers the features to reach their audiences more effectively:
- A dynamic and searchable repository for every digital asset, using artificial intelligence (AI) to enable content production and asset utilization
- Real-time collaboration and communication features to speed production and improve outcomes for distributed teams
- Integrations with other key services to create a 360° view of your assets, campaign performance, and content lifecycle
It’s time to invest in the number one tool marketers use to empower their content operations. Start your journey to better digital customer experiences with a free trial of Aprimo DAM.