RESSOURCEN
These days, marketers and brands are obsessed with the “customer experience”. But what exactly is meant by the ‘customer experience‘?
Customer experience is the sum of all interactions that a person has with an organization. Delivering an engaging one can be a challenge because consumers today have higher expectations and they are using more and more media channels on more and more devices.
So how can you live up to those high expectations and deliver a great customer experience?
The secret is that you need to stand out from the crowd. Focus on the customer and deliver communications that are truly relevant. Communicate using different media. Do it for each individual and coordinate all those media touchpoints very precisely.
The concept of a “customer experience lifecycle” is a popular trend in modern marketing thinking where each stage in the customer relationship is unique and important. In actual fact, every stage is an opportunity for the brand to gain more insight about the customer to improve the interaction.
Perhaps that opportunity is due to an initial interest or need or it might be at the moment of purchase (or even the moment after the purchase where the customer could become your advocate). Either way, it’s important that messages stay personal and use that individual’s preferred media at every stage.
But how can this be done on a massive scale?
Of course, there isn’t just one single customer journey. There are many journeys. Each customer experience needs to be unique. In order to create individual journeys effectively – and to scale, you need the right tools to orchestrate and automate your campaigns.
To give an example, we created some demonstrations to show how XMPie technology can typically be used for effective customer experience lifecycles. These working sample campaigns are for a fictional coffee company called Pressocup. Pressocup produces coffee machines and also sells the coffee capsules to the machine owners.
The Pressocup Campaign: An Example
Capturing and keeping a prospect’s attention is key – especially at the beginning of the journey. XMPie software gives web developers incredible flexibility for integrating personalization into any new or existing website. In one particular campaign for Pressocup to highlight the ‘awareness’ stage, we created a corporate website that delivers personalized web pages and images on-the-fly. It also creates a personalized PDF brochure according to the preferences of the visitor.
Next we have the ‚evaluation‘ stage – a ‘lead nurturing drip campaign’. Customers often do quite a bit of research prior to buying any product. How a company nurtures a prospect during this evaluation stage is critical for qualifying the lead and pushing it further down the sales funnel.
Anyone who has expressed interest in Pressocup would receive a full series of emails over scheduled times with different messaging and different offers. The campaign content varies based on prospect behaviors, responses and profiles, so the campaign is different for each person.
Other stages include the purchase, usage, repurchase and advocacy stages.
This last one, advocacy, is when a customer is so delighted with his/her experience that he/she is motivated to ‘refer a friend’ and make a recommendation. That is truly a winning moment. Our example demo campaign here uses both direct mail and personalized landing pages, offering discounts to the customer when they refer-a-friend.
The Pressocup customer lifecycle demonstration is very comprehensive because the way marketers interact and conduct business has become much more demanding. For some companies, it is even more extensive than Pressocup illustrates. For others, it can be much simpler and that’s ok. In today’s market, companies need to be able to provide this complete customer lifecycle experience on both a small and very large scale – possibly for tens-of-thousands of people or more. That would be impossible without a toolset like XMPie.
As marketers and brands try to figure out how to put customers at the center of their focus, they are leaning heavily on people like you – the printers and digital marketing agencies – to help them.
The question to ask yourself is: “Do I have the right tools to step up to that challenge?”
In Part II, we’ll be talking more about how these different touchpoints are created using the XMPie PersonalEffect platform and Circle for planning and orchestrating the campaign. In the meantime, if you’d like a live demo, please get in touch.
