Oct 30, 2021
Customer Experience (CX) expectations have been changing over the years due to the rise of digital marketing. With better ways to communicate, customers are now expecting that all brands across industries offer multi-channel engagement. Brands are expected to maintain simple and clear communications across multiple media channels powered by different digital marketing technologies and strategies. Customer experience excellence helps brands acquire more customers and also maintain higher retention rates. Customer data is the key to success in enabling this marketing strategy.
According to PWC, 63% of customers are more likely to share more data with the brands that offer a better customer experience. Customer data enables you to customize the products and services for personalization to drive customer loyalty. Successful and engaging CX is driven by personalization, curated content and enhanced customer service.
Businesses can leverage data collected through smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices for in-depth analysis of customer behavior and purchase intent insights. These analytics help brands predict the behavioral changes in customer demands and plan their acquisition, development and retention strategies accordingly.
However, when planning for an enhanced customer experience, you need to consider several factors like demographics, personalized needs of customers, level of support, and others. In this article, we will discuss different ways in which CX is transforming the future of digital marketing.
1. Beyond Conventional Engagements
Conventional channels of engagement are constantly getting challenged by rapid innovations in the field of digital marketing. For example, McKinsey’s research indicates that CX leaders believe that survey-based measurement systems offer only 16% of granular insights into the performance of current strategies.
Though many organizations are still using online surveys for aggregating data from users, they need to invest in advanced technologies and analytics. Take an example of innovations like voice commerce, where the entire eCommerce customer experience is powered through intelligent assistant technology.
This has resulted in a massive market that is growing at a rapid pace and providing better CX performance for several businesses. According to the Marketwatch, voice commerce market reached $30.4 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 77% to reach $1,377.0 billion by 2027.
However, the voice assistant is not the only innovation driving digital marketing strategies for enhanced CX. Voice assistants use Natural Language Processing (NLP), and you can leverage such innovations for several other marketing applications.
2. NLP-based CX
NLP helps interpret human language and offers specific terms that you can leverage to enhance the customer experience. Every organization works towards a better understanding of the user intent and plans their strategies to meet them. NLP helps these organizations to understand the real meaning behind user search.
Another aspect of NLLP that you can leverage for enhancing CX is engaging content. There are several examples of NLP-based tools that help you generate engaging copies for your customers.
However, the best use case will be to integrate a chatbot that leverages NLP to improve customer experience with powerful resolutions, answers to their queries, and personalized recommendations. Similarly, there is an entirely new paradigm of recommended suggestions driving the new era of digital marketing.
3. Product Suggestions
If you have ever used Amazon’s platform to buy a product, you might have experienced the product recommended by its recommendation engine. It is one of the finest examples of Artificial Intelligence used by an eCommerce giant for enhanced customer experience. Similarly, you can leverage such strategies for digital marketing campaigns and improve the CX.
Take an example of a kids apparel business that wants to improve the CX. Here, the core customer base is kids from whom getting feedback is not easy. However, you can leverage AI-based algorithms that design an application to integrate a gamification approach to creating a digital feedback system.
Now every kid can play the small game on their parent’s device that showcases your products and asks them to provide feedback through gaming. Such an approach can offer insights at the most granular level and help you improve the comfort of your apparel.
Showing empathy and compassion towards your customer for enhancements in their experience will make them understand your vision as a brand. But, at the same time, you need to ensure that their data stays private with enhanced security.
4. Secure Experiences
Security is one of the most significant aspects of CX. Even the most reliable digital marketing plans and strategy does not help if you don’t have secure platforms. In addition, cyber threats have increased due to the modern era of multi-channel interactions and the surge in social media integrations for digital marketing campaigns. However, there are several ways in which you can ensure that the user data is secure, like enabling HTTPS protocols, integrating user authentication technologies, defining robust security policies, and others.
These security measures ensure that the data is secure and enable compliance with major data regulations like GDPR. For example, HTTPS protocol provides that HTTP logic is implemented and the data exchanged is secure. In addition, you can buy SSL certificates from several vendors that offer HTTPS-based security services and encrypt the data.
SSL(Secure Socket Layer) ensures that the data exchanged between a user’s device and the browser is encrypted to remain anonymous. So, the data stays hidden and can’t be exploited through MiTM or man-in-the-middle attacks.
Similarly, you can leverage two-factor authentications through one-time passwords or an authenticator application. It adds an extra layer of protection for your platforms by validating the user’s identity. So, no phishing attacks or malicious injections can exploit users’ data and offer bad CX. With enhanced security measures in place, customer experience will be organically improved due to higher trust in brands by users.
Conclusion
When you strategize your digital marketing campaigns for enhanced customer experiences, an analysis of the system becomes paramount. It helps you understand the limitations of your system and architecture to cope with changing customer demands. Another essential aspect that you can leverage from such analysis is the need to integrate different innovations. Such research will allow you to find several bottlenecks and strategize integrations like AI and NLP for better CX.
If you’re still curious about why you need to focus on customer experience for your digital marketing strategies, subscribe to the TopRight blog! Or connect with me on Twitter and on LinkedIn. You can learn more about how to bring simplicity, clarity, and alignment to your brand’s story, strategy, and systems in our best selling book: Marketing, Interrupted.