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Five Strategies For Customer Experience Marketing

Forbes Communications Council

Sherri Schwartz is the Head of Marketing at OvationCXM, a global leader in customer experience management (CXM).

In today’s experience economy, companies must put the customer at the center of everything they do, delivering engaging and meaningful experiences across interactions.

Why? They want to buy. You want to sell. It’s up to the brand to make that happen in the most seamless way possible because not only do they want to buy, but they want it fast, easy and convenient. Exemplary CX is the most valuable driver of business performance, impacting customer retention, loyalty and lifetime value.

Customer expectations on how brands interact with them have never been higher, and they expect companies to deliver personalized experiences across every touchpoint. Enterprises that don’t get the customer experience right will pay the price in customer churn. According to a survey from PwC, 32% of consumers surveyed said they would walk away from a brand they love after just a singular bad experience. Our research finds that 76% of businesses have walked away from onboarding before even using a product due to it being too complicated or complex.

To meet and exceed consumer expectations today, businesses must prioritize customer experience marketing in their overall marketing strategies. By focusing on delivering high-quality interactions, companies can easily create lifetime customers. Building strong customer relationships like this requires marketers to know their customers, understand buying patterns, recognize key pain points within the customer journey, respond to customer feedback and leverage technology.

1. Know the customer.

Companies can’t create a great customer experience if they don’t know who their customers are. Enterprises must conduct thorough research to determine their specific attributes, needs, pain points and motivations to create the foundation of their buyer personas. Create buyer personas, or semi-fictional profiles of target customers, that personify the traits and characteristics of valuable customer segments. Provide the insights needed to shape CX marketing strategies and tailor experiences to key customer segments.

Developing a deep understanding of who customers are, what they value and what satisfies them allows brands to better empathize and connect with their customers and deliver on expectations for personalized customer experiences.

2. Understand buying patterns.

Understanding customer buying patterns—the why and how of customer decisions—is vital to informing marketing strategies aimed at delivering great customer experiences. Marketers can develop more customer-centric marketing strategies by understanding how consumers are shopping and what affects their decision-making. Gathering insights from buyer journeys including place of purchase, items purchased, time of purchase and purchase frequency helps companies better understand how consumers are engaging with and responding to their marketing campaigns.

Armed with this data, companies can segment customers and predict their purchase behavior based on shared characteristics. Gaining a deeper understanding of target markets allows companies to refine campaigns, customize marketing funnels for each segment to create more personalized buying experiences and help customers move more seamlessly through the buying journey.

3. Provide an emotional connection.

Consumers today want their relationships with brands to be less transactional and more emotional. And that makes emotion one of the most important drivers of customer experience today. A Deloitte Digital report noted that “rational considerations may connect customers with brands, but emotions are what bond them in a sense of relationship.”

CX marketing strategies that focus on emotionally engaging customers are effective in building long-term relationships and creating brand advocates from loyal shoppers. There is a clear payoff in emotionally connecting with customers. A Harvard Business Review study found that on a lifetime value basis, emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers.

Some of the ways brands can foster emotional connections with customers include being authentic, using humor, building trust and showing empathy.

4. Monitor and respond to customer feedback.

Listening and responding to customers should be a top priority and a key part of CX marketing strategies. Consider using conversational AI capabilities via webchat to drive meaningful conversation and learn from customers in real time. Also, utilize forms and surveys to monitor post-event interactions. By leveraging in-the-moment and after-moment tools, you can ensure the business is well equipped to track and fix the customer experience for the present and future. It is critical to track this customer feedback to gain visibility into how customers are feeling about products or services and to identify customer pain points and areas that need improvement.

Implementing a system for monitoring and responding to customer feedback provides data enterprises can use to adjust and improve CX strategies. Important data from feedback from surveys, web analytics, online reviews, social media comments, call center analytics, customer support emails and chats can all be worth their weight in gold for providing a better experience.

5. Leverage technology.

Delivering a seamless customer experience is not hard in theory—but it has gotten more difficult as customer expectations have gotten more sophisticated. New technology is driving rapid change in what’s considered great customer service. Over the past few years, there have been breakthroughs in tools to help organizations optimize customer relationships by providing a unified view of each customer’s journey across departments, teams and partner systems. Platforms designed to support and elevate real-time CX also allow businesses to:

• Design and build personalized journeys for their customers.

• Expand visibility into customer journeys.

• Connect third-party ecosystem partners, process automation, journey orchestration and communication channels together seamlessly through one platform.

• Unlock customer data visibility and enable cross-channel communication and collaboration.

As PwC said: “Experience is everything. Get it right.” Customers now have more choices than ever and now expect CX on par with Amazon and Netflix. CX marketing strategies can help companies create engaging, meaningful relationships with customers that help them to thrive in today’s experience economy.


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