Editorial
Technology has become a permanent fixture in our lives but using it to create a relationship that works for both sides takes care and consideration. How can you transform a budding attraction into a fully formed customer journey?
Here are five key principles for building and deepening lasting customer relationships:
1. Be Consistent
Customers’ experiences with companies are formed by their interactions at every stage of the purchasing process. These are the interactions with digital touchpoints across multiple channels that make up the customer journey.
Because customers can now choose the ways and channels in which they interact with companies, making sure those interactions are frictionless and consistent can often produce greater customer loyalty, trust and customer retention. Nurturing superior experiences results in customers becoming enthusiastic brand advocates, which frequently leads to customers spending more money.
2. Be Sophisticated
The digital era has spawned complex customer journeys that require sophisticated new levels of multichannel engagement that many traditional web CMSs cannot handle. That makes deep-level personalization essential because shallow demographics don’t cut it anymore. Companies must quickly understand their customers’ needs and give them what they want when they want it.
It’s necessary to pull data from a number of online and offline sources to gain a complete overview of specific needs, interests and expectations, which makes it no longer just about selling products but about turning those products or brands into lifestyle choices.
3. Be Personal
Personalized content is an integral component of almost all stages of the customer journey and through marketing automation, content can be segmented by customer attributes to deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time.
Digital marketing and customer experience management must be intricately interwoven with content marketing strategies to map content to each phase of each customer’s purchase journey. By integrating CXM (customer experience management) solutions with your CMS, you can achieve the kind of intelligent content delivery that delivers real insight for each customer segment.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
Learn how to convert existing assets into video experiences in near real-time.
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
Webinar
Jun
21
Retail Reinvented: A Masterclass in Creating Digital Experiences That Click
Hear how online retailers architect their digital experience infrastructure for peak traffic and demand
Webinar
Jun
22
How to Succeed in Today's Engagement Economy
Doing true personalization at scale with marketing automation
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
4. Be Nurturing
Integrating your platforms to unify functions such as e-commerce and marketing will ensure that content is being applied effectively for engagement across all channels. Use analytics to reveal deeper insights, as well as functionalities such as lead nurturing and marketing automation to create unified campaigns that nurture, engage and respond to customers more effectively during the customer journey from the web to social media to email.
Keep in mind that customers have often traveled through most of the customer journey before they ever speak with your sales team. This means that companies must help customers navigate the sales funnel toward a buying decision with sensitive and intelligent lead nurturing processes.
5. Be Channel Specific
Channel-applicable personalization is key to nurturing positive customer experiences, but effective personalization can only be achieved using accurate, up-to-date customer information, channels, products, geolocations and other relevant data domains.
Using a CXM platform to achieve critical integrations with other systems provides access to customer data no matter where it is stored. With a complete and continuously updated customer picture available to sales, products teams, marketing and management, platforms can be integrated with systems such as CRM, customer service applications and other analytics processes.
Title image Teddy Kelley
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
