Customer experience marketing means putting the customer journey—not sales—at the center of your marketing efforts.
Rather than focusing on making a sale, the goal of customer experience marketing is to create an enjoyable, memorable experience from the moment consumers meet your brand.
You can think of the goal as turning potential customers into life-long fans of your brand. You’ll be rewarded in the long-run with enduring customer loyalty, high retention rates, and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
What is the Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Service?
While customer service is part of customer experience, it’s only one part. You may have a customer service team dedicated to handling sales questions, purchasing, returns and troubleshooting, but customer experience is more than that. It’s a strategy that focuses on nurturing the customer relationship before a sale is ever made—and long after payment is collected.
Customer experience marketing is about fostering a positive brand association that extends to all the ways people interact with your company—not just on the sales floor, but online,, and through all of the marketing channels they use to connect to your brand. Customer experience marketing is used as part of a branding strategy to make the customer’s experience so good that they wouldn’t even consider switching to another brand. Customer experience marketing also generates increased engagement and positive reviews and recommendations.
Keys to Successful Customer Experience Marketing
Customer experience is important across all your marketing channels. Your users should have a great experience on every platform, device, and channel. Here are tips for creating a holistic customer experience marketing strategy that leaves customers wanting more, buying more, and recommending your business to others.
Take a Cross-Channel Approach
Show customers you care about their particular interests by using a cross-channel marketing approach. Cross-channel marketing not only reaches the customer via the channels they access most, but when they’re most likely to engage with that channel.
For instance, a user might historically never open emails, but they do open SMS messages. Rather than sending countless unopened emails, you could send this particular customer SMS messages. If the goal is to get the customer to open emails, perhaps the SMS message could include a note about the promotion code you sent to their inbox.
Why it works: Cross-channel messaging is essential for a seamless customer journey that leads your customer to your end goals—increased engagement and higher conversion rates. Cross-channel orchestration leads to consistency, which sets the framework for customers to recommend your brand to others. A good branding strategy that integrates consistency will lead to better brand awareness and loyalty, higher customer lifetime values and greater brand equity.
Take Full Advantage of Reviews
Customer reviews are a crucial part of any marketing strategy. With a cross-channel marketing tool, you’ll be able to keep track of your reviews and respond immediately, either thanking the customer for their feedback or addressing their concerns. Tracking review ratings is an important tool of customer listening, gathering priceless information about the customer experience and what you need to change about your strategy. And your responses to their feedback matter, big time. According to ReviewTrackers, 53% of consumers expect a response to their review within seven days.
Why it works: Reviews add legitimacy to your brand and products. According to a recent survey conducted by PowerReviews, 98% of consumers feel that reviews are an essential resource when making purchase decisions. The higher your customer ratings, the higher your brand equity. Keeping a close eye on reviews, responding appropriately and adjusting to customer expectations also reduces the need for expensive customer service interactions, increasing your return on investment and your bottom line.
Personalize Every Message
To create a smooth customer experience, you must deliver consistent branding across all channels. Never leave customers wondering if your brand knows who they are. Use a cross-channel marketing strategy to ensure your brand looks, feels and communicates in sync for every customer interaction across all platforms.
You can set up automatic connection points triggered by every specific interaction, personalizing the communication along the way and guiding the customer down the funnel at each point. The top personalization efforts that customers most expect include easy store/online navigation (75%), relevant product/service recommendations (67%), messages that are tailored to their needs (66%) and targeted promotions (65%), according to McKinsey & Company’s Next in Personalization 2021 report.
Why it works: A personalized marketing approach creates a better customer experience by anticipating their needs and meeting them in real time. Personalization leads to higher brand awareness and loyalty, better customer retention and higher lifetime customer values. Companies that grow faster net 40% more revenue from personalization than slower-growing companies.
Measure and Change
Keep a close eye on your customer metrics and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly. Your cross-channel marketing platform should provide a user friendly dashboard and offer customized reports to show you where your customer pain points happen. If you set up a marketing workflow to send an SMS message about a sale on a product, for instance, but the SMS message campaign has a low engagement rate, you know it’s time to make a strategic change. What’s more, these changes can be made in real time to adjust to customer expectations throughout the lifecycle of any campaign.
You can also use survey responses through your cross-channel marketing tool to calculate quantitative measures of how happy customers are with the overall experience of working with your company.
Common metrics include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS), based on responses to a question like, “How likely are you to recommend [XX company or service]?”
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), based on prompts to rate a certain part of the customer experience, such as product delivery or onboarding process
- Customer Effort Score (CES) determines how hard or easy it was for the customer to complete a task, such as completing an online order or setting up a profile
Why it works: Using metrics and adjusting in real-time is an agile marketing approach that allows you to understand what is and isn’t working for your customers and immediately create a better experience. This strategy leads to more team efficiency and better marketing results, because you’re not waiting until the end of a campaign to make changes. Instead, you can increase your return on investment in real time all while creating a better customer experience.
Benefits of Customer Experience Marketing
Focusing on customer experience may sound like a “nice” thing to do, but it offers true sales benefits. According to a recent Forbes Insights Report with Treasure Data, 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experience alone.
Excellent customer experience can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher customer retention, higher lifetime customer value and greater brand equity.
At the end of the day, you’re not just selling a product or service, you’re selling a brand and an experience. Customer experience marketing will help you keep the focus where it belongs—on building a strong relationship between your customers and your brand.
To start focusing your initiatives on the overall customer experience, schedule a custom Iterable demo today.
