In past years, a digital experience was a part of the customer enhancement journey but never a priority. However, the last two years have pushed entrepreneurs to go digital and build a community online. The main reason for this shift is the pandemic, where customers turned to the internet to buy almost everything. Even as COVID wanes some, that preference is staying intact.
Hence, businesses of all sizes are now keen on crafting a digital experience that can help attract, acquire, and retain customers. Let’s examine a few actionable tips to elevate your digital experience.
What Is A Digital Experience?
Your customers’ interaction with your brand’s products and services on digital platforms is the digital experience. Now, this can be on your website, mobile application, social media channels, email marketing campaigns, and other communication channels.
Let’s look at a simple example.
Gmail Predictive Text. It is no surprise Google can predict what we want when we enter the first word in the search bar. But, Google has taken another step with predictive text for Gmail. This predictive text is limited to only one or two words, but four to five words that can essentially complete your sentence. And the best part is that the language it uses isn’t robot-like at all. Instead, it’s natural and authentic, which is a testament to Google’s machine learning capability.
In a fast-paced world, where we exchange multiple emails daily, anything that can make the process quicker and more efficient is greatly beneficial. This innovation shows how businesses take the extra mile to provide their users with a good digital experience.
Why Should A Good Digital Experience Matter To Your Brand?
If you’ve had a brick-and-mortar business, it might not be easy for you to shift online completely. But once you are aware of how a good digital experience can change your business, you might reconsider your decision. Here are five powerful impacts a digital experience has for your brand:
- Enhanced customer journey and satisfaction
- More sales
- Easier to retain customers and attract new customers
- Turn your customers into brand evangelists
- Stay ahead of your competitors
Quick Tips To Enhance Your Brand’s Digital Experience
1. Provide a consistent experience across all platforms
Whether your potential customers get introduced to your brand via social media channels, emails, or even ads, they are very likely to end up on your website. The quality of your website will ultimately make them decide if they want to continue interacting with your brand.
Your potential customer should have a unique experience with your website that encourages them to buy. Therefore, your website shouldn’t only state what you offer but rather be designed in a way that further informs your customers and increases your bottom line.
Also, try aligning your website with your other communication channels, including social media, mobile phone applications, chatbots, and advertising. By aligning, we mean the content, messaging, and design should be consistent across all channels.
2. Prioritize delivering excellent user experience and accessibility
Did you know that a 250 milliseconds delay in site load time could cause a 50% drop in traffic? Moreover, 88% of consumers who have had a bad experience are less likely to return, making it clear how important it is to deliver a fast and smooth online experience. And to do this, you can start by understanding customer behaviors and mapping their journey to their behaviors.
By understanding how and when your customers will interact with your brand, you can optimize those moments for the best experience. For example, consider you are running a restaurant during the pandemic. Your customers are very likely to order food from your restaurant online. Offering a centralized point to order online can be one of those digital touchpoints for your brand.
To ensure you can deliver a good experience to your customers and meet their changing requirements, you can consider a restaurant online ordering system. Adding this system helps retain your customers by providing them with an easier interface to order food, encouraging repeat visits.
3. Deliver valuable content
Your customers will engage with your brand in different ways, whether paid media, emails, social media posts, or even your website. Irrespective of the mode of communication, focus on delivering value. After all, the content you create and share online reflects your brand. It is what helps your potential customers form their impression about it.
So, make sure your content is easily accessible, appealing, clear, and can add value to your customers’ lives. To find out what works for customers today, try keeping up with the latest marketing trends and predictions.
Another way to ensure you can deliver useful content is by building a buyer’s persona, understanding your target audience’s pain points, what motivates them and then creating your marketing content around it.
4. Deliver an ongoing experience
The goal is always to convert people who interact with your brand into customers. But your plan shouldn’t end there. What happens next? To retain your audience, you must deliver a world-class post-sale experience.
For example, let’s look at Amazon. Does your interaction end after you have placed an order? Never. Once you have ordered something, Amazon immediately sends you an email notification containing all the information about your order, including the tracking details. Then, once you receive the order, it again sends an email asking for your feedback.
This communication flow is how a brand keeps building a relationship with its customers even after meeting the primary goal. You could even conduct webinars to get a better understanding of what your customers like and how you can appease them.
Key Takeaways
Owing to the rapid digital shift, online customers are always on the go. As a result, a smooth digital experience is non-negotiable. Hence, you should prioritize being consistent across all platforms, authentic with your content, delivering value, and most importantly, keeping your customers at the heart of what you do.
Moreover, you should keep track of your traction and review the results periodically to get a better understanding of what’s working and what’s not. This process will not just help you have an effective plan in place; you will also get closer to delivering the best digital experience possible to turn tire-kickers into buyers and one-time buyers into life-long customers.
