Customer journey optimization is designed to help you capture more leads, maximize revenue, and improve customer satisfaction.

To get it right, you need to optimize every touchpoint along the customer journey, from awareness to purchase through to advocacy.

This is no easy feat, given the digital customer journey is no longer “linear”—touchpoints are everywhere (websites, social media, forums, comment sections, instant messages, reviews, etc.). 

Additionally, today’s consumers increasingly shop in “micromoments,” or whenever the mood strikes.

The best way to capture these “always-on” consumers across a sea of channels is to create tailored messaging that speaks to how they feel at every potential moment they interact with your brand.

To do this, you need to run extensive research to understand the context in which your audience shops so you can grab their attention and provide a convenient experience that simplifies their life.

In this article, I’ll help you understand why you need to regularly assess and improve your customer journey. Then, I’ll walk you through nine tried-and-tested steps for customer journey optimization.

Customer journey optimization involves regularly identifying, mapping, and optimizing key customer interactions to improve the end-to-end customer experience. 

The goal is for marketers to optimize their touchpoints so that their solution is top-of-mind, easy to find, and simple to interact with at every stage of the journey.

For example, a commercial real estate agency might learn through their customer research that their website visitors are bouncing off their website’s “Contact” page. Using this information, they can run tests to optimize their messaging, reduce form fields, or conduct further research to uncover what seems to be stopping people from submitting inquiries.

The agency might also uncover that their ideal customers ask a lot of questions on forum sites like Quora. Using this information, they might allocate resources to answering questions and point prospects at an optimized landing page (such as an FAQ page on their website).

The point is to make the digital experience so easy for your customers, there’s nothing to stop them from doing business with you.

Here are a few more ways customer journey optimization can help you improve the overall digital experience:

The first step in optimizing your customer’s digital journey is to define and map every digital touchpoint. 

Consider this the research stage. At this point, you’ll evaluate what your customers are doing, including:

When Spotify began this process, it created a customer journey map that outlined seven stages of the “music sharing experience”:

They further broke down these seven stages (visit, listen, discover, share, discuss, receive, respond) into five different elements:

Organizing the customer journey into steps and stages helped Spotify isolate the reasons customers engage at every touchpoint. 

Here’s how you can do the same across four main customer journey stages.

The first stage of customer journey optimization is awareness. This is when the customer hasn’t heard of you, or perhaps has heard of you and maybe even engaged with an early touchpoint (like visiting your website) but doesn’t necessarily show strong buyer intent yet.

In the digital world, this can be an incredibly complex stage. With access to your competitors at the tips of their fingers, they may be vetting your business against others. Your job in the awareness stage is to capture their attention—and then hold it. 

Those who are ready to buy may quickly move through the next steps by initiating a checkout or contacting your business straight away. For those who aren’t yet in the decision-making stage, you’ll want to focus on helping your audience recognize and recall your brand. 

Here are three ways to optimize this stage of the customer journey:

The customer engagement process has begun. At this point, customers might be walking down the purchasing path, even if they’re not quite there yet. Think of the consideration stage as the point when the customer thinks of your product or service as a potential purchase.

These are your customers watching your demo videos and engaging with your newsletters. They’ve already made the decision to engage with you. Now, they’re wondering if your solution is right for them.

Here are some examples of where you can optimize the journey at the consideration stage:

The purchase is a critical point in the customer lifecycle. It’s when a prospect converts into a customer—and someone who can potentially have a relationship with your business for years down the line.

To help this happen, you need to stay out of your own way. Reduce all friction in this stage to help customers go from A to B as easily as possible. 

For example, Amazon’s “1-Click” technology eliminates several stages of the check-out process for customers who have opted-in. It allows customers who have decided they want a product to initiate the purchase immediately.

There are many ways to optimize this stage of the customer journey, including:

Once your prospect becomes a customer, you’ll want to focus on nurturing that relationship to keep them coming back and encourage them to share their positive experiences.

To focus on retention, consider what and how you are communicating to customers immediately after they’ve placed an order. Depending on your product or service, how often do you reach out to them with new products and feature updates in the future, and how do you tailor that messaging to match their first experience with you?

If a customer has completed a sale and you’ve invested in the retention stage, you’re in a great position to leverage their delight (and create loyal brand advocates).

Respectfully approach customers for reviews, social proof, and star ratings. Consider how you can get your customers to work for you without it feeling like work. If your customer experience has been stellar, they’ll likely be willing to go the extra mile for your business.

There are some individual touchpoints after leaving the checkout page that are key to optimize in this stage, such as:

You may not engage a customer at all of these touchpoints, but any time you please a customer can be a unique opportunity to hold their loyalty down the line. 

Now that you know why customer journey optimization is important and what it looks like from a high level, it’s time to dig into your unique customer journey.

Follow these nine steps to create a customer journey that delights your buyers throughout their contact with your brand.

Your customers’ journey may look entirely different to another business’s journey. To start optimizing your own customer journey, you need data on what that currently looks like. This is the step in which you’ll gather customer data using a variety of tools, including:

Data collection can mean everything from secondhand data (customer journey analytics that examines customer behavior on your website) to direct questions you ask your customers. 

Let’s say, for example, you’re a boutique hotel chain. You’ll want to gather data on the types of customers who stay at your hotels. You can do this through user surveys after the booking online, or one-to-one customer interviews with current, past, or regular guests.

It’s best not to rely on any single tactic. Instead, unify intel from each of the five data gathering methods above to build a comprehensive view of who your customers are and what gets them over the line to the checkout page.

Once you’ve mapped out your own customer journey, you’ll want to identify the key points of friction. Where do most of your prospects step away from their decision to purchase? 

Returning to the hotel chain again, let’s say you identify a lot of customers as one-off customers. They come, they stay, they report having a nice time in your survey, but they never return. You have identified a potential area for improvement (getting more customers to return).

Why is this happening? Perhaps your hotel is in a holiday destination that doesn’t attract repeat customers, and guests need a push to return (e.g., discounts on hotel rooms, group stay offers, or even partnerships with other local amenities, like spas).

After you’ve identified your friction points (and why they’re happening), you can now set specific, measurable goals to address them.

SMART goals are a popular tool to put realistic actions in place. According to the methodology’s creator, each goal must be:

The hotel chain above might decide they’re going to track returning customers over the next two quarters. One cohort might receive a discount via email that they can redeem if they decide to rebook within the next month. Another cohort might serve as a control group.

You’ve audited your current customer journey and identified friction points for your target audience. Now, it’s time to modify your current journey with those pain points and customer desires in mind. This will help you to create the customer journey that will capture and convert your ideal customers.

Some businesses might struggle with the step above, especially if they aren’t able to collect accurate customer data. In this case, you can construct an ideal customer journey. What do you want it to look like when a customer has a completely satisfactory experience? What steps can you eliminate?

If we take our hotel chain example, they want website visitors to book a hotel or spa stay.

But, they may be neglecting to cater to gift-shoppers. What if you want to book a surprise stay for a loved one? You shouldn’t have to wait until the checkout page to make this distinction.

To make this easy, the hotel may consider adding a “Gift Vouchers” option below the main booking feature to serve those buying spa breaks and holidays for their loved ones. They can then browse the range of available offers and decide whether to pick a date, or let the lucky recipients choose themselves.

After mapping your ideal journey, consider a roadmap of tactics you’ll use to execute your strategy.

What order should these tactics be in to optimize your customer journey? What data will you need to gather to optimize these steps? Are there any current existing technology gaps that you’d need to begin optimizing?

The hotel chain’s plan to email past guests with their offer to rebook will take (at the very least):

Once you’ve formed your plan and gathered your resources, you’ll need the various teams involved to be on the same page. Reduce silos by building new project teams that incorporate leadership from different departments. 

Try to avoid “segmenting” different parts of this customer journey to different departments, as this can hinder communication and add unnecessary friction. Instead, unite different teams by having them each focus on similar KPIs for measurable, specific results.

With your teams implementing the next steps, now’s the time to set up A/B testing. This is a powerful step in optimizing your customer journey. Small changes can generate big leaps toward goals.

When we worked with Viceroy Hotels and Resorts, we suggested implementing testing. We began with a simple button copy test, which weighed two call-to-action buttons against each other. This included the following options:

From this iteration, “Book Your Room” won.

But we didn’t stop there. We then pitted this copy against another hypothesis: “Check Availability.” The new button copy won by such a large margin, it increased room reservations by $30,000 each month. This is the power of testing even the smallest variables at each customer touchpoint.

Now that you’ve collected your data, it’s time to ask: “Where are the opportunities for improvement?” 

You can gather insights from sources like:

When we worked with MIT Sloan Executive Education (MSEE), we asked questions about who the customers were and how their journey could be simplified. 

We used that data to decrease marketing spend and increase conversions by 67%. 

About 73% of customers use multiple channels during their journey. If you want to maximize your reach, target customers across multiple (relevant) channels that your target customer uses.

It’s also important to ask what your customers are doing on each channel because intent isn’t universal. 

For example, a customer might find your landing page through a search query, but they may not be ready to buy yet. Knowing this can help you create informational content designed to capture this kind of traffic and mold them into potential customers.

The customer journey is essentially the story of your ideal customer personas discovering your brand, making a purchase, and becoming loyal advocates. Optimizing the customer journey means taking the steps to make that story a happy one.

The best businesses are willing to conduct self-examination. They look honestly at their touchpoints across multiple channels and ask where the customer journey can be improved. What’s causing the bottlenecks? What are the pain points introducing friction? Then, those companies test new solutions until they find those that resonate best with their customers.

The customer journey optimization process is ongoing and never quite finished. Implement habits from the steps above and make it a regular part of your marketing strategy to strengthen your bottom line.

Around 73% of consumers surveyed by PwC pointed to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Yet, less than half said companies are doing a good job of providing a top-notch customer experience.

Closing this gap can give your business a competitive edge.

If you want to improve your customer experience (CX), you’ll first need to measure it with a customer experience audit.

In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct a thorough audit. This will help you create a plan of action to improve your customer experience, encouraging them to buy from you (and keep coming back).

Customers want the best experience possible, and they don’t want to expend more effort searching for a better option. 

These are the two sides of the customer experience coin: on one hand, you have to do things that make customers happy. But it’s just as important to avoid the painful, high-friction experiences that come with CX functionality problems. 

But you can’t deliver that clean customer experience without first getting your hands dirty. That means taking a hard look at your customer touchpoints and what the data says about their performance in a customer experience audit (CX audit). 

It might not be easy, but a CX audit can yield benefits for your business, including:

Empowered with new insights about your customer experience, you’ll be able to identify new ways to delight your customers and repair any points of high friction. 

But before you can do that, you have to ask yourself a very basic question: how do you conduct an audit that yields insights this powerful?

To conduct a CX audit, you’ll first need to map out the customer’s journey for each customer segment (including existing customers). Once you’ve done that, you can get into the details and define where each type of customer encounters your brand.

To diagnose any issues and make a prognosis for treatment, you’ll need to gather data and analyze it according to customer motivations. Only then can you make your plan to address the issues.

I’ll show you how to do all of that below.

Here is a brief list of checkpoints you can use to begin a customer experience audit that highlights key areas for improvement.

Also known as the “customer lifecycle,” a customer journey map is the beginning-to-end tale of their experience with you.

In this step, you need to map out the various stages of the customer journey. Focus on high-level points, such as pre-sale points in the customer journey and post-sale points.

Pre-sale touchpoints are all about generating enthusiasm (e.g., social media and landing pages); post-sale touchpoints are about earning enthusiasm (e.g., thank-you and promotional emails). 

For example, for a student interested in a business course, the high-level journey might look like this:

Once you’ve defined the stages of your customer journey for each customer segment, both pre-and post-sale, you have your map in its broadest sense. Now you’re ready to start collecting the data. 

Once you have the overview of your customer journey, it’s time to go granular with each touchpoint.

When it comes down to it, an audit of the customer experience is really an audit of a series of customer touchpoints. Those touchpoints are what determine and define a customer’s true digital experience with your business. Did you meet customer expectations, or are there key points of friction where you disappointed them?

Take the customer journeyroadmap you’ve defined in the previous section and track all of the touchpoints in which your customers interact with you along the way. 

Here are some common touchpoints to consider:

To make sure you’ve rounded up every touchpoint in your business, consider each stage of the buyer’s journey and map every point they might come into contact with your business. If you’re not sure, you can always ask some of your customers what steps they took to find you in a survey or series of interviews. I’ll talk more about that in a moment.

Once you’ve added these touchpoints to your customer journey roadmap, collect all the data you have on each stage and touchpoint.

Look for areas of high friction. For example, look at where your website viewers are bouncing off the page, where your email list is unsubscribing, and where your shoppers are abandoning their carts. I’ll discuss friction further in step four.

Often, the challenge here won’t be finding data. It will be making sense of the mountains of data available to you.

To avoid overwhelm, take a “one at a time” approach. For example, you might do one review of your data platforms at a time. A Google Analytics review is a good place to start. If you run another platform, such as Clickstream, check that out next. 

Or, you might choose to look at each touchpoint individually, putting in plans to optimize each as you go.

For each touchpoint in each stage in the customer journey, ask yourself the following questions:

Diagnosing your poor-performing customer touchpoints sounds easy. But without a frame of reference, it might feel like you have a haystack of data and you’re looking for a needle of insight.

Use the AIDA + post-sale funnel to inform your diagnosis of poor customer experiences. Here’s what AIDA means:

Through this lens, you should be able to sort your data and organize it effectively, gauging where in the funnel you’re going wrong. 

At some point, you’re losing opportunities to delight or avoid disappointment with your customers. Determine the motivation behind the issue (whether it’s an “attention” problem or a “desire” problem) to inform your response and improve the experience.

Consider conducting customer interviews to identify basic problems. Customers might not always tell you how to improve something, but they can certainly tell you what to improve.

Gather a large enough sample size of customer feedback until you can pinpoint patterns in what they tell you. Review client feedback, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and customer satisfaction surveys. 

Quantitative insights can be helpful, but the full gamut of qualitative customer responses will put your finger on the pulse of the customer experience.

Keep in mind that each tool has its specific strengths, as well.

Diagnosis is half the battle. Once you know what to fix, improving the customer experience can be as simple as a quick edit in your content management system (such as removing a form field in your newsletter sign-up process). Or, for larger changes to embedded systems, it can mean hours of meetings between departments. 

So, how do you prioritize your next steps?

Build a roadmap based on the problems you’ve diagnosed. Create benchmarks and goals for improving friction on each of the specific touchpoints you identified and plot your timeline to address them. 

These benchmarks and timelines are unique to each business. Small issues for smaller companies may be resolved quickly. For larger companies with many departments to coordinate, or larger issues, more time may be needed.

Regardless, it’s a good idea to plot the issues and timelines on a roadmap so you don’t loose track.

For example, here are some of the most common friction points and how impactful they can be on your CX:

Finally, make customer experience management (such as your CX audit) a routine part of your marketing strategy. You never know when a new issue might pop up. The more quickly you fix it, the smoother your customer experience will be across all demographics.

Of all the customer-centric initiatives you launch to improve your digital experience, a CX audit is the most foundational. 

Your customer experience audit will identify “kinks in the hose” that restore the flow of conversions to your business. Most importantly, it will help you identify the hidden problems you didn’t know were plaguing your business. 

Once you’ve mapped out the entire user experience, found key points of weakness, and actioned your improvements, your customers are more likely to thank you with purchases, loyalty, and advocacy.

Your target audience for executive and continuing education programs is using a variety of mediums, channels, and devices to learn about courses. This includes social media, search engines, landing pages, email, and more—from both mobile and desktop.

That’s why if you want to recruit the most qualified leads, your higher education marketing strategy must consist of optimizing each and every relevant channel, and providing a good user experience (UX) across every device.

To do this right, you need to center the digital customer experience and implement the right tactics. 

In this blog post, we’ll look at the importance of putting the customer experience first in higher education marketing, along with the best practices marketers can apply to boost engagement and enrollment.

An effective higher education marketing strategy starts by putting the user experience and the needs of participants first. Here’s why:

There are various touchpoints that each student goes through in their higher education journey. By focusing on the customer experience first, you can personalize each touchpoint to the student’s needs at every funnel stage. 

Let’s say a prospective student is intrigued by your education website and fills out a form to gain more information about a course or program. From those answers, you’ll have valuable data that you can use to further engage them in a more targeted manner. 

This may look like adding them to a unique email marketing segment based on their demographics, career area, location, and interests. With segmentation, you can skew the messaging in a way that’s compelling and aligns with their goals and motivations. 

Continuing with our example, if you know the potential student is interested in your Digital Business and IT courses (based on their form-data), you can showcase messaging, images, and topics related to this track. 

In doing so, you’ve built a data-driven, customer-centric experience that motivates them to learn more and ultimately convert.

The goal of lead generation isn’t to attract the most leads as possible. Instead, it’s to attract the right kind of leads—as in, the prospects most likely to enroll in a course. 

Pursuing unqualified leads wastes precious time and money for higher education marketers. By understanding your ideal target students, such as their age group, goals, interests, and challenges, you can segment your marketing efforts to attract and nurture the best prospects. 

For example, before MIT Sloan Executive Education (MSEE) collaborated with our marketing team at Smart Panda Labs to drive more participants to their programs, they had difficulty filling their pipeline with quality leads. The reason was that many of their prospect campaigns lacked strategy and proper segmentation. 

Using tactics such as social advertising, we were able to help them target students based on relevant factors to their audience, such as demographics, interests, and firmographics. The result? They were able to generate thousands of qualified leads and a 111% increase to their database. 

If you want to recruit more qualified leads, your marketing plan must consist of optimizing each and every relevant channel. A strategic omnichannel experience helps you reach your ideal audience where they are, in the right way, at the right time. 

Putting time and effort into researching and understanding how your audience seeks information related to your offering (and in what manner) is a key part of centering the digital customer experience.

For example, if your qualified leads are finding you through paid ads served after a Google Search, make sure you are optimizing your ad campaigns to capture more of your target audience. This may involve:

This effort ultimately shows that you’re willing to go to your target audience and serve them the information they’re looking for, rather than making it difficult for them to find your programs (and subsequently struggle through a confusing UX to sign up for one). 

Ultimately, an omnichannel approach boosts your reach and creates more opportunities to engage with students wherever they are.

Any friction on an education website can slow down or stop the progression of enrollment. By focusing on the user experience, you understand what the user goes through, which helps you identify sticking points preventing your website from reaching its conversion potential. 

During our collaboration with MSEE, part of our agency’s strategy was to identify website bottlenecks or UX obstacles and find ways to improve them. One insight that we found interesting, for example, was that users who created an account on MSEE’s page were 1000x more likely to register.

As a result, we tested a new design on the initial registration page to reduce friction and push more users to create an account. The new design generated a 28% increase in new account creation.

Here are our expert tips on the best digital marketing strategies to drive more brand awareness and more students to education programs:

Your landing pages create the first impression that a visitor will have about your executive or continuing education programs. It’s where they learn more about your courses and offerings and determine whether it fits their career goals.

However, most landing pages perform poorly, with an average conversion rate of 2.35% across all industries. It’s why you want to optimize your higher education landing page strategically, so it serves your function and helps achieve your goals. 

Here’s how you can create the perfect landing page for your programs in four steps:

Here is an excellent example of what a high-converting landing page looks like from LinkedIn Learning. The second that visitors land on the page, they can see that this platform is geared toward development-seeking professionals and managers who want course options for their teams. The design is simple and the text is easy to read. Importantly, visitors are segmented with two button options.

The individual course landing pages show what students will learn on the course, how long it will take, and feature extra information such as transcripts from the course, certificates upon completion and instructor information.

As a bonus, visitors can also check out a video about the course, engaging them with multimedia preferences.

Social media marketing is one of the most powerful tools for higher education institutions. It allows you to boost awareness around your education programs. For the best results, adopt both organic and paid reach. 

Organic reach refers to any social media activity that doesn’t consist of paid promotion. Like posting on your Facebook page, live streaming a subject matter expertise (SME) discussion, or writing and sharing an article on LinkedIn. 

On the other hand, paid social reach refers to any advertising that you launch on social platforms. It comes in a variety of formats, such as posts to display content in front of your target audience or sponsored ads. 

The main benefit of paid reach is that you can personalize campaigns based on various factors, such as age, gender, and interests. It’s a simple and direct way of promoting your educational program in front of the right people at the right time.

Here’s an example of a paid ad from RISD Continuing Education. The ad uses engaging imagery and encourages their target audience (adult learners looking to start a career in the arts) to learn more about their education courses:

The ad includes a link to all the different art courses that RISD offers, such as 3D modeling, photography, and graphic design.

Here’s another excellent example from IE Business School Executive Education. The ad includes precise information on what students will be learning in their global advanced management program:

They include video content to make it more engaging and visually pleasing. This helps catch the attention of IE’s target audience (business executives) as they’re scrolling through their feed. 

Data should drive each marketing campaign you launch. By collecting and leveraging marketing analytics, you can run more strategic campaigns that personalize each step of the student journey. 

For example, machine learning is one the best marketing tools available as it pulls from historical data and reports on which actions will increase conversion rates. Thus, it can remove any guesswork and catalyze you to make smarter, more informed decisions.

Let’s say that you have a subset of people interested in a blend of in-person and virtual learning. With machine learning, you can identify who these students are and target them with custom programs they can take advantage of. 

Another benefit of using marketing analytics is that you can segment your audience based on students who converted vs. those who did not. You can then look at the insights for both groups and form a data-driven hypothesis on why certain students aren’t signing up for your course. 

Say that you discover that students that don’t sign up are getting stuck in a loop on your website. Perhaps a heat mapping tool like SessionCam shows endless loops between two specific pages—and then they bounce.

Armed with this data, you can target the “did not sign up” because of a “website bottleneck” cohort with ads that lead them to a simplified version of your landing page. 

Perhaps this copy has half the amount of information and is incredibly straightforward. It also combines the information from the two pages they were oscillating between and provides several CTAs that promote getting in touch to speak to a rep to learn more. 

Once set up, monitor their site behavior to see if landing page conversions for this group increase. If so, you’re onto something. If not, A/B test with different copy to see if that makes a difference. 

If that still doesn’t work, go back to the drawing board and see what (if anything) you missed. Perhaps the answer is to instead add a chatbot to your home page to help answer questions in real-time.

Email is a staple tactic in every higher education marketing strategy and an excellent way to nurture leads. It also comes with a high ROI: for every dollar spent on email marketing, you generate a return of $44.

However, building a list of qualified leads for your continuing education programs is just the first step. You must also optimize your email marketing strategy in a way that engages prospects and drives more enrollment. 

For example, segmentation plays a critical role as it ensures you’re consistently delivering the right message to the right person. Segment your emails based on factors such as course interest, demographics, and where the prospect is at in the application process. 

Lack of proper segmentation was one of the reasons MSEE (from our example above) was struggling with retention. Their low CTR was a clear indicator that their emails weren’t driving students to take action. 

By improving their email marketing with segmentation, MITSEE boosted their CTR on email communication by 21%. Their audience also got more exposure to additional courses from their institution, which instantly increased enrollment.

Another critical factor to successful email marketing is personalization and automation. This can be as simple as starting with automatically adding a {first name} tag to your email headlines: email subscribers are 26% more likely to open emails with personalized subject lines. Of course, the body copy should also speak to their needs and desires so that they are compelled to click through and ideally click a CTA. But you certainly shouldn’t be manually sending every email. Automated drip campaigns that trigger based on certain behaviors save you valuable time, and money.

Your past students can become the best advocates for promoting your higher education programs. Hearing real-life success stories goes a long way in convincing potential students that they can benefit from your course as well. 

In fact, a customer research project we helped manage for MSEE showed that 68% of prospective students said they read course reviews prior to making a decision. 

Take this example from MSEE, where Steve Suarez, a past program participant, discusses his experience:

He touches on:

In doing so, Mr. Suarez effectively:

Here are some tips for collecting testimonials:

After collecting feedback, it’s time to share those stories in a compelling way that inspires prospects to enroll. The best ways to share your testimonials include:

Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that your continuing education programs are ranking on search engines. This is key, as many potential students are doing their research online. The higher your ranking, the more likely students are to discover your courses and enroll in your program. 

Here’s a checklist you can follow to make sure that you’re optimizing your content marketing strategy for SEO rankings:

As with any marketing campaign, the best place to start is by understanding your digital customer experience. This way, you can tailor your outreach and messaging to your target audience and ensure that your entire customer journey is tailored to their needs, as well as the channels they frequent.

Attracting qualified students consists of a combination of the right higher ed marketing tactics and segmentation. This way, you can personalize each step of the prospective student’s journey, drive qualified leads, and ultimately boost enrollment to your continuing education programs.

The modern customer’s attention is split in so many directions. They’re going through various digital channels, such as social media, customer support, and email to find solutions to their challenges. 

What does that mean for brands and marketers? To deliver the best results, you need to optimize each touchpoint of the digital experience so that you can push prospects down the funnel and turn them into loyal, paying customers. 

Launching a seamless digital experience requires a solid game plan. It’s only by combining research, personalization, and an omnichannel approach that you can engage and attract the most customers as possible.

In this article, we’re going to show you how to create an exceptional digital customer experience in 2021.

The customer digital experience refers to all of your target audience’s online interactions with your brand. It can include your social pages, your company website, or live chatbots. 

How you optimize the digital customer experience will set the impression of your brand in customers’ minds. Is your digital experience helpful for your target audience and solving their challenges? Or is it confusing and full of friction?

Top tip: If you’re wondering how to overcome the barriers and prepare your business to deliver a world-class digital customer experience, we’ve put together some advice in our article on how to accelerate the digital transformation process 💡 

How you optimize your digital customer interactions can make or break the success of your brand. Here’s why:

A common mistake that brands make is focusing solely on acquiring the most customers for their product or service. Unfortunately, many brands put so much effort into customer acquisition that they forget one crucial element to growing a business: keeping their existing customers happy. 

An effective digital experience strategy leads customers to come back hungry for more. As a result, it boosts your retention rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and how loyal customers are to your brand (customer affinity). 

What does a higher customer retention rate lead to? It leads to more conversions and growth for your company’s bottom line. An aging but widely-cited Bain & Company study revealed that even a 5% increase in retention could boost company revenue by 25–95%. 

Those effects appear to be consistent among today’s consumers. A more recent empirical study based on this paper found that a focus on customer retention over 12-18 months boosted revenue by 80%.

Customers will even opt for a premium-priced product if it delivers a better experience than the lower-priced competition. According to research by PWC, customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for a product that delivers a great experience. They’re also 63% more willing to give up their personal data (such as contact details) to a company that offers a positive experience.

Your brand’s advocacy and digital experience both go hand in hand. If customers have an exceptional experience with your business, they’ll be more likely to spread the word and tell their friends about it.

After all, who’s better to promote the quality of your product or service than your own customers? With the power of social proof (referrals, case studies, testimonials, etc.), you can welcome exponential deals. 

So what does a compelling digital experience strategy look like? All experiences are not created equal. Returning to the PWC research mentioned above, customers value some experiences over others. Customers reported that they were more likely to pay more for efficiency, convenience, and knowledgeable service over brands offering charitability, automation, and global presence.

Here are the steps to ensure that you’re delivering the digital experience that increases brand loyalty and drives revenue for your brand:

There are a couple of things you must prepare first before you can launch your digital experience campaign. These strategy prerequisites include:

Your core purpose  and business goals will be your starting line to set your digital experience campaign on the right foot. By revisiting both of these aspects, you’ll better understand which direction to take for your strategy. 

Your core purpose is the statement that reveals why your company does what it does. A famous example of a core purpose is Nike, whose brand statement is: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” 

When it comes to your business goals, think about what you’re trying to achieve this month, quarter, or year. For example, you may be trying to boost awareness around one of your new products. Or your current goal may be to get more customers to upgrade their memberships. 

Your digital experience strategy will be founded on your purpose and how you’re currently striving to achieve it. 

Brand positioning identifies how your brand is different from others and the image you want to project. It will help the messaging of your digital experience strategy and how you’ll communicate your products’ value to ideal prospects.

A big part of this will be researching your competitors and the market. You’ll need to have a solid understanding of their digital marketing strategy, what customers are saying about their products, and how your product or service holds up against them. 

From there, you’ll be able to identify weaknesses and showcase the value of your product to target customers through differentiation in your messaging. 

A discovery strategy allows you to identify product-market fit and plan out your budget. It ensures that even before you launch your digital experience strategy, there’s a need in the market for your product or service. 

You must get a clear idea of your customer’s needs to create a digital experience that matches their expectations. That way, you can create a more relevant, personalized digital strategy that will engage and retain the most customers as possible. Here’s how you can achieve this:

To identify your ideal customer, create a list of their attributes such as age, job role, gender, goals, and the challenges they’re facing. It puts you in their shoes and helps you identify ways that your product can help them and achieve what they want. 

Make sure to also capture information that dives into how they behave online, how they seek information, where they spend their time, and so on. By understanding customer behavior, for example, you can identify which channels you should focus on to reach out to them.  

Along with creating buyer personas, start collecting data around your customers. Here are some of the different ways that you can learn more about your audience:

By combining all of these different tactics together, you’ll gain a clear picture of who your ideal customer is and how your product fits their needs. 

Understanding the customer’s needs is as simple as asking them to drop their feedback on what they expect from the digital experience. On top of collecting their thoughts, it shows customers that you value them and want the best for them. 

To do this, reach out to them via email or use your social media platforms to collect their thoughts. There are also various tools you can use (which we’ll dive into later) that automate the process of asking customers for their feedback. 

Based on the data you collected on your target audience, create a customer journey map consisting of all the typical customer’s digital touchpoints. You can then identify ways to optimize each stage by outlining each touchpoint as the customer goes through the funnel. 

For example, let’s say that your target customer’s first touchpoint is through a google search on their mobile phones. To optimize for this stage, you’ll have to make sure that all of your pages are mobile responsive, so they look good on all devices. 

Once you understand your target customer, it’s time to get to action. Here’s how you can get the most out of your funnel and convert the most customers:

According to a study, 73% of customers use multiple channels during their journey. To maximize your reach, make sure to target customers on all the channels they’re using to discover solutions to their problems. It ensures that you can reach customers wherever they are and regardless of the device they’re using. 

One of your digital experience strategy goals should be to drive conversions, such as lead generation, purchases, click-throughs, etc. Once you have settled your focus on a specific conversion, you can make adjustments to your webpages to optimize for this behavior. For example, if you’re trying to gain as many leads as possible, you can add forms to high traffic pages, include CTAs and gate high-value content (like ebooks). 

You should also make sure that the speed of your website is fast because the first five seconds of page-load time has the most significant impact on conversions. If your page is slow to load, you may be missing conversions before they’ve even seen your content.

Leveraging storytelling in the customer experience allows you to build an emotional connection with your prospect and boost engagement. According to research by Capgemini, 70% of customers that feel emotionally attached to a brand spend twice or more money than less attached customers.

Your brand’s storytelling can come in many forms, such as social media campaigns telling your brand story, videos showing how customers overcame their hurdles with your products, and clever website design and copywriting.  

Ensure you deliver content that speaks to the needs of your target audience and that you’re promoting it effectively. On top of ranking higher in search results, it helps build the trust of your target users, generate more qualified leads, and boost conversions. 

Customers are more likely to purchase when you include personalization as part of the digital experience strategy. It does so by adapting to your customer’s specific needs so you can reach out with the most relevant offers and optimize your digital experience strategy for conversion.

For example, let’s say a customer already purchased one of your products in the past. One way to optimize the digital experience and boost conversions is to retarget them with complementary products to their previous purchase.

If a potential customer has any issues or challenges during the digital experience, you must provide them with the support they need to push through the funnel. It reduces friction and ensures that they eventually convert into a paying customer. 

Here’s how to do that:

Including self-service solutions, such as a knowledge base, allows users to answer their questions without reaching out for support. Forrester found in their research that 53% of online adults in the US may abandon their online purchase if they can’t quickly find a solution to their question. They also found that phone calls are best left to one of the later stages in the evolution of problem escalation.

A chat feature on your website allows you to respond to user requests 24/7. Preloading a chatbot with FAQs can get your customers a solution while live reps are offline. It can also direct inquiries that require human intervention to agents when they return. 

Using automated chat and live chat ensures that customer experience includes minimal disruptions.

You’ll want to measure the results of your digital transformation strategy to ensure it’s effective. Here are some common metrics to measure to understand if your digital experience strategy meets your customers’ needs. 

Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely customers are to recommend your brand to others based on a score from 0–10. It’s a very straightforward metric that determines how well your product or service is good at generating brand advocacy. 

Your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a percentage metric that measures how happy customers are with your product or service. When analyzed along with your NPS, it can give you a reliable picture of your brand loyalty. 

When your CSAT is high, it means that you’re developing a healthy customer relationship with your prospects. However, if your CSAT is low, it could mean that there are issues about your product or service that you should look into and fix. 

The Customer Effector Score (CES) measures the level of customers’ efforts to resolve their issues. It helps you understand various essential things about your customer support. 

First of all, it measures whether things are working correctly and identifies sticking points in your strategy. That way, you can enhance the experience by filling in any gaps. 

Also, it allows you to understand how your customers are engaging at each touchpoint of their buying journey. You’ll see why specific strategies lead to more conversions and whether or not you’re targeting the right segment of customers. 

Your churn rate is the percentage of customers that you’re losing across a timeline. It’s a vital metric to understand the health of your brand. 

While losing customers is part and parcel of running a business, a churn rate that’s too high is a sign that something is wrong with your user experience. For example, it could be due to not targeting the right customer, poor onboarding, or not providing customers with the support they need. 

Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the amount of revenue that you bring in with each customer relationship. The better you’re able to manage the relationship between your brand and your customers, the more money you can bring. 

The biggest benefit of measuring CLV is that it helps you identify which segment of your customers are the most valuable to your company. You can then use this data to improve your future digital experience campaigns and attract more qualified customers. 

With these numbers, you can measure if your strategy is working as intended or what is broken. You’ll also be able to determine whether your digital experience is helping you work toward those business goals we spoke about earlier, so you’ll know if your business is growing forward.

Technology can make managing the digital experience much easier and efficient. Here are some of the best tools we recommend to optimize your digital experience while saving yourself time and money from manual work.

User onboarding is essential to the digital experience because it creates the customer’s first impression of your brand. It’s your job during this stage to educate them on the value of your product so they don’t churn in the early stages of using your product. Some possible  tools you can use for onboarding include:

Customer service software centralizes all of your tickets in one place. As a result, it allows you to better manage and track each customer request in the digital experience while saving plenty of time for your support agents. We recommend:

While collecting customer feedback is vital to learn more about your audience, doing it manually will cost a lot of time. So instead, it’s better to use tools that do all the hard work of getting data from customers thanks to automation functionality. Here are the tools we recommend:

Website analytics tools provide you with solid insights into each aspect of your website’s performance. With these platforms, you’ll get access to data such as who’s viewing your website, how long the average visitor spends on pages, and your conversion rate. We recommend:

Launching the right digital experience strategy requires a lot of testing to identify what tactics work the best with your audience. The following tools help you test different aspects of your digital experience strategy in real-time, such as your website design and product, to analyze the reaction of your customers. We recommend:

Predicting your customer’s behavior helps you identify which steps to take to push down the funnel in advance. These tools can help you better understand the customer journey to deliver more personalized offers thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning. We recommend:

With all we’ve just shared, digital adoption is about so much more than subscribing to an impressive tech stack. It’s about leveraging these tools alongside an effective digital experience strategy, so you can maximize their use and achieve specific goals. 

Whether you’re a SaaS provider, ecommerce brand, or a mobile app owner, there are a lot of components that go into building a successful digital experience strategy. 

First, you need to research your audience and the various touchpoints they go through in their journey. With this information, you can start identifying ways to optimize each stage of the customer funnel with personalization and omnichannel experience tactics.

Then, you’ll have to measure your success. It includes considering metrics such as your NPS, CSAT, churn rate, and average customer lifetime value. 

Lastly, don’t neglect the power of technology. There are various tools you can use that help reduce your manual work to focus more on strategy.

Before the pandemic, 8 out of 10 organizations were pursuing large-scale digital transformation efforts. Yet, fewer than one-third reported success and were up against a 45% chance of delivering less profit than expected.

Now that COVID-19 has brought about 10 years’ worth of change in 14 months, the pressure on businesses to digitally transform has skyrocketed. In fact, 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate their digital initiatives.

So, how can you hasten your digital transformation process to meet the moment and ensure you meet or exceed expectations?

By focusing on a digital experience strategy above all. 

In this article, we unpack why an exceptional digital experience is crucial to success. We also explore the opportunities that digital transformation affords your business, the barriers to progress, and the solutions to overcome them. 

83% of millennials and 85% of business buyers now say the experience is just as important as the products or services a business provides. 

To keep up with demand, trends, and expectations, it’s critical to improve your digital experience before you fall behind the curve and lose out to digitally savvy competitors. 

As exceptional experiences win the day, it’s crucial to grasp what the digital experience truly entails. This will help you to:

The digital experience encompasses the entire digital ecosystem. This includes both the customer experience (which is external-facing) and the employee experience (which is internal-facing).

The digital customer experience, on the other hand, is anything that directly touches the customer, from advertising to web properties to communications, and the measurement of all those touchpoints.

Thus, the digital customer experience is a piece of the digital experience at large. 

When building a digital transformation process, you need to develop fundamental strategies and practices that empower your business to accomplish a purpose at every point in the customer journey.

This goes beyond simply adopting powerful new digital tools. You need c-suite buy-in and employee adoption to leverage your tools to reach their potential and ultimately produce the best results. 

In effect, to create an exceptional digital customer experience, you need to build a seamless external and internal digital experience from the top down. 

There are dozens of benefits to digital experience transformation. From providing personalized customer journeys that foster loyalty and retention to leveraging data to make smarter business decisions.  

Here are five benefits that stand out from the crowd:

Knowledge is power, and data packs a ton of it. Without data, it’s difficult to quantitatively and qualitatively understand:

With each day, the power and opportunity that you can leverage from data increases. 

For example, done right, leveraging machine learning capabilities can help you analyze and action your customer’s needs, pain points, and desires in real-time. You can also use it to automate communications and tasks, learn from intelligent recommendations, and more.   

But this means little without a detailed digital roadmap. Otherwise, you’re taking in data at record speed but don’t have benchmarks or goals to measure it against. Worse, you don’t have a long-term customer data storage strategy and lose crucial information over time. 

Related companies, a privately-owned real estate firm, had a similar problem. They launched a website, ran paid ad campaigns, and invested in Salesforce Marketing Cloud—but their digital strategies were faulty. 

In essence, they adopted the right digital tools but hadn’t uncovered how to use them to their fullest potential. And if you don’t know what to look for, data is as invaluable as foreign money with no place to spend it. 

We ran an audit to properly analyze performance and uncovered several weaknesses in The Related Companies’ digital user experience. After enforcing our recommendations, they saw:

To learn more about how we used data and analytics to help Related Companies make smarter digital decisions read the full case study. 

When systems work well together, they’re bound to provide a more seamless experience. This logic must be applied to digital experiences, too.

This is why it’s critical to consider organization-wide goals when shopping for digital solutions. If you buy one shiny new tool after another, but they don’t integrate with one another, you won’t achieve peak performance. In fact, you may end up creating more work for yourself.

Take MIT Sloan Executive Education (MITSEE) as an example. They recently completely moved to the Salesforce ecosystem to drive their business forward; from operations, marketing, and intelligence perspectives. And they did this all while harnessing the capabilities of robust technologies to fuel their digital experiences.

Prioritize adopting technologies that have multiple capabilities, are agile, and able to grow with your business. This will save you time and money in the long run, and importantly, create a seamless ecosystem that incentives adoption. 

As we mentioned at the outset, customers give significant weight to the experience. Today’s buying journey emphasizes unique, segmented, and targeted journeys.

This is key, as 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs. And 52% of customers expect offers to be personalized 100% of the time.

Given that personalization demand is trending upwards, companies that don’t tailor their offerings to unique needs will fall behind. 

To create a one-of-a-kind experience, you need to speak directly to your audience with targeted messaging.

We did just that for UF Health Cancer Center when they asked for our help to increase awareness for a specific procedure. Because they didn’t know how to reach their target audience to bring awareness to this unique offering, they weren’t seeing many new patient sign-ups.

Through our personalized and targeted approach to lead acquisition, we saw 1,500 clicks and 217 conversions (forms completed) in the first three weeks. And over an eight-month period, we generated: 

Not only was this great for their ROI, but they were able to finally reach and engage the people who truly needed this treatment. 

To learn more about how we carried out this multi-channel approach to lead acquisition, read the full UF Health Cancer Center case study.

Inefficiency is the fastest way to burn investments. The good news is, done right, investing in digital transformation can generate valuable rewards, such as:

A notable case in point is our case study with Related’s Los Angeles property. After implementing a more efficient PPC strategy, during the first full month, they saw:

That’s fast. And it proves that with a well-executed strategy, you can see an increase in ROI almost immediately.

Year over year, they saw:

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, arguably the most important benefit is the ability to adapt to unpredictable change. 

Digital experience transformation affords you the opportunity to make organizational and experiential changes at speed. But again, just because societal demand calls for rapid innovation doesn’t mean you should rush the process.

Curbside pickup, telecommunications, telehealth, virtual events, and more digital experiences like these helped to ease the burden of the recent global health crisis. 

As the prioritizations of convenience and value are here to stay, it’s even more critical to demonstrate the same level of agility as we enter a new normal. 

Importantly, once you do begin your digital transformation process, you must consistently keep pace with customer expectations and market trends. Momentary agility will only lead to short-term gains.  

Top Tip: To learn more about how to curate a digital transformation strategy to build processes that align with organization-wide goals, read our guide on a stress-free process for adopting new digital tools.

The best way to realize success is to get ahead of potential barriers. This way, you’ll be ready to deal with any challenges that come your way and save time and money otherwise spent putting out fires.

Here are some of the main barriers to successful digital transformation, with solutions in short order in the following section.   

The digital economy is shifting at a breakneck pace. We’d be lying if we said keeping up with these changes was easy.

In fact, this means that you’ll need to revisit your strategies, processes, tools, procedures, and experiences quite often.

According to McKinsey, the top economic performers set, execute, and adjust their digital strategies at a faster pace than the competition. Specifically, they assess their digital ecosystem on a weekly and quarterly basis, depending on the specific use case. 

Conversely, weaker performers evaluated their digital systems and performance annually. If you don’t keep up with analysis, evaluation, optimization, and iteration, you’ll quickly fall behind. 

The main types of digital security threats include:

Failing to consider all of the above could put your entire company at risk, alienate customers, damage your reputation, and eat into your profits.

Without a motivated team ready to dive into change, your digital investments will suffer.

That said, change is hard, and it’s difficult to incentivize employees to embrace it—especially if they’re comfortable with the current systems. 

This is why it’s so important to get leadership buy-in. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to foster resentment due to a lack of accountability and effort at the highest level.  

If you improperly set expectations, move too quickly, skip comprehensive training, launch changes without guidelines, reallocate employees without much thought, and don’t lead by example, you will likely struggle.  

An interesting result of digital adoption is ensuing social disconnect. As brands and people rely more on technology than ever before, we’ve sacrificed some key human needs: connecting in person.

Of course, this has been difficult during the pandemic. But especially as lockdowns end, people are yearning for a return to face-to-face experiences.

This can throw a spanner in the works, as just as you embrace a digital experience transformation, your customers may seek a digital disconnect. 

Getting digital adoption right may be an expensive upfront investment. If your business has tried and failed in the past, leadership may be wary of setting aside a big budget for round two.

Even if this is your first attempt at digital transformation and you follow the best practices, you may lose money. Any number of things could go wrong, like investing in the wrong tools, under leveraging platforms, using tools incorrectly, getting the customer experience wrong, and so on.

It’s a risk that we feel is worth it, but there’s no shortcut to success. 

If you don’t have leadership with technical expertise, it may be difficult to get it right. That said, a digital experience consultancy can fill that gap, at least temporarily.

But in the long run, the most successful companies benefit from hiring digital talent, such as a chief digital officer (CDO) or chief analytics officer (CAO). 

Investing in talent costs money, takes time, and may require leadership restructuring. 

Everything we just outlined has a solution. Here’s how to get it right: 

If you make tech decisions based on what you think will make you digitally savvy, rather than your customer’s needs, you’ll be left behind when trends shift. 

As you begin your digital transformation journey, make sure your decisions are based on the customer experience above all. To do this, it’s key to switch your mindset from product-focused to customer-focused. 

Once you’ve built these foundational digital processes, it will be much easier to ensure that your subsequent digital decisions follow a similar path. The subsequent solutions explain how to do just that.

Choosing to center the customer experience is a good start, but it won’t get you far without organization-wide-goal alignment.

This is where leadership buy-in comes into play. Digital initiatives must come from the top-down so that everybody is embracing change, on the same page, and excited to invest in the right tools to drive the organization forward. 

Before you begin, it’s critical to lay out clear priorities that are tied to measurable outcomes. Of course, getting boardroom buy-in and agreeing on business-wide goals isn’t easy.

The best way to tackle this hurdle is to collect supporting data that paints a picture of the opportunities your business will reap from a digital experience transformation. This includes data on your current industry, trends, customer needs, competitor analysis, etc. 

Then, use those findings to:

When you present data in this fashion, it helps you to tell a compelling story that’s hard to ignore. Plus, it makes it far easier to adopt the right marketing technology because you’ve built a strategic digital roadmap that fits with foundational goals. 

Happy employees are more productive and do more quality work. Because employees are the heartbeat of your organization, their buy-in is key if you want your digital systems to run as intended.

To get your employees excited about these changes, you need to create a dynamic business environment that (again) is led from the top-down, centers accountability, and takes their ideas into account. 

Digital transformations are more likely to be exceptionally effective when:

This makes sense, as clear processes, procedures, and shared responsibilities are table stakes for most business endeavors. Digital experience transformation should be no different.

Whether it’s leveraging an existing tool in a different way, or strategically choosing a new one, your tech should integrate so that everything works together. This point goes to the importance of a seamless digital ecosystem.

This will help to streamline adoption and use, make data collection and analysis easier, and lead to better employee and customer journeys alike. 

A digital experience roadmap is your best asset here. Similar to a business plan, a roadmap will help you to:

But before you can build a comprehensive roadmap, you need to understand how mature your digital experience is at present. A digital experience maturity quiz is a great jumping-off point. 

We outlined many potential digital risks that are serious in nature.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to manage them and remain secure and compliant:

Along that same vein, digital transformation is not a one-and-done experience. Rather, it’s a continuous process that requires nurturing in order to thrive. 

This is why leadership buy-in, organization-wide goals, employee engagement, and the customer experience matter so much. If everybody is working together in a seamless ecosystem built on a strong foundation, it will be much easier to evaluate what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change.

If your digital experience transformation is piecemeal, half-hearted, and full of sticking points, you’ll lose money and your effort won’t meet expectations and goals.

The answer? Consistently evaluate and update your strategies and processes through data gathering, insights, and experimentation. This will help to drive iteration, learning, and growing—all tenets to a successful digital experience. 

Deciding to embark on a digital experience transformation presents endless opportunities. At the same time, it’s full of challenges that you must understand and strategically overcome in order to realize success.

If you develop a clearly defined plan that centers the customer experience and journey and prioritizes a seamless digital ecosystem, you’ll be well on your way to untold benefits. 

73% of companies report that if they don’t adopt new digital tools and commit to digital transformation they will soon be out of business or marginalized.    

Critically, respondents in the same report state that the two most important facets to a successful digital adoption effort are:

In other words, when it comes to digital adoption, it’s not just about finding the right tools. Rather, it’s about curating a comprehensive digital transformation strategy, led from the top-down, that provides a clear direction and goals.

This way, you can strategically leverage digital tools to enhance both consumer and employee experiences while setting a strong foundation and framework that you can continuously build upon. 

In this article, we identify why digital adoption is more than new technology, why it’s crucial that businesses embrace all aspects of it, and the steps you can take to maximize digital utilization in the short and long term.

Digital adoption is not about formulating a strategy to fit the technology you have (or are considering investing in). 

Rather, a crucial first step is understanding your business’s goals alongside your customer’s needs and building a strategy that supports them. In other words, successful digital adoption is about utilizing digital tools to complement and implement your business strategy and the customer experience. 

Too many businesses take an overly simplistic approach to digital adoption. For example, investing in a landing page builder to convert more leads and setting it live without considering the best practices for a landing page development process. 

As a result, it’s not uncommon for businesses to see a misalignment between their digital tools and processes and the goals they want to achieve. 

Continuing with the landing page example, if your goal is to convert more leads but your chosen function (i.e. design, layout, messaging, benefits, CTAs, etc.) doesn’t intelligently incentivize visitors to engage, you likely won’t reach your intended goals.

Ultimately, an effective digital adoption strategy will help you to:

True transformation requires continuous and incremental improvements. Anything less fails to consider that meaningful change comes from a paradigm shift where strategy, not technology, takes the lead.

While the pandemic isn’t going anywhere for a while, we’ve certainly moved on from the reactive rhetoric around COVID-19’s effects on business.

That said, even after it’s gone, the pandemic has had a significant effect on customer behavior; the likes of which may take permanent hold. 

Data from McKinsey show that in just two months, COVID-19 has accelerated digital transition for both businesses and consumers by five years. Further insights from McKinsey also revealed:

These facts don’t just highlight the urgency with which businesses need to adapt—they illustrate a shift in attitude towards brand loyalty with consumers prioritizing convenience and value. 

Another key statistic to be mindful of is that the third quarter of 2020 saw more than 1.5 million business applications made (2x the number compared to the same period in 2019). 

These start-ups don’t just showcase agile entrepreneurship, they represent another challenge for existing businesses that will have to compete even harder to gain and retain customers. 

To stay ahead of the competition, businesses will have to reply in kind and demonstrate the same agility and digital entrepreneurship. Yet again, this illustrates just how critical it is to have a comprehensive and considered digital adoption strategy that reconciles consumer pain points and delivers a positive customer experience. 

At Smart Panda Labs, we’ve seen examples of digital adoption initiated but subsequently not keeping pace with consumer expectations or competitor alternatives. Our case study on Wyndham Vacation Rentals illustrates this point well. 

Despite having a digital strategy in place, and attracting heavy traffic to their website, neither of these tactics were effective in driving revenue growth. We identified a number of reasons for this:

These points show how vital it is to stay agile. Remember, true digital adoption means making continuous and incremental improvements in order to meet business goals. 

In this example, our solution was to analyze behaviors and monitor metrics such as site visits and conversions. Using these data points, we were able to hypothesize and experiment with A/B testing. As a result of our work, we were able to:

Your digital tools are a way of empowering your fundamental mission; which should be to delight your customer, grow your business, and ensure employees have everything they need to do their jobs effectively.

Thus, using a digital tool to its fullest extent is certainly important (and far superior to under-leveraging an expensive or shiny new instrument). 

But if it doesn’t help you achieve your predefined goals, is negatively impacting employee productivity or morale, and is disrupting the customer experience, it can’t be considered a successful implementation.

In essence, turning on a new tool and utilizing all of its features only holds power if it’s aligned with your desired outcomes.

For digital adoption solutions to work, you need to clearly define your business goals first. For example:

The importance of employee engagement shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Gallup research revealed that workplaces with highly engaged staff see 59% less turnover and 21% increased business profitability. 

This makes business-wide collaboration imperative in order to ensure everybody is on board and motivated to leverage digital tools to their fullest potential.

In order to identify and audit the right digital tools for your business, consider:

For example, after auditing your current email marketing efforts, you may find that the sooner an inquiry is responded to, the higher the close rate. Therefore, some email automation (or reactive processes) may need to be implemented. 

But as we’ve touched on, that isn’t as simple as turning on a templated canned response and calling it a day. Instead, start with your process. Consider:

Now, you can intelligently turn on automated responses that are personalized, segmented, and set to reply within a specific time frame (that you’ve uncovered based on data-driven research). 

If your existing email marketing platform doesn’t fit your new needs, you may want to consider switching vendors. 

Or, if you aren’t sure of how to leverage your platform to its fullest capabilities, bring in a digital experience consultancy to help you assess and create a strategy that aligns with your goals and follows a calculated roadmap.

Once you’ve collaborated with your team, stakeholders, and a consultancy (if applicable) and identified the appropriate digital tools, the next step is to ensure those platforms are utilized to maximize output. 

Put simply, as alluded to in the previous section, picking a new tool without a detailed execution plan won’t get you far. 

Of course, you may get lucky and see impressive results at first, but that success will likely peter out in short order. And, once you lose your momentum or alienate your audience or staff due to a poor digital or work experience, it’s difficult to build back trust and confidence. This is where ROI decreases, brand loyalty takes a hit, and leadership cuts your budget because you can’t prove value. 

To avoid this outcome and ensure your business makes the most of its digital tools, both in the short and long run, key considerations include:

Only by setting out clearly defined processes will your business be able to adapt and demonstrate digital entrepreneurship for the long term. 

Once you kick off your digital adoption process and lay the necessary groundwork, future audits and analysis should gradually become nothing more than business as usual to ensure that best practice is consistently maintained.  

Digital adoption is not just about using new features on the latest digital tools—it’s far more strategic and process-driven than that. 

Fundamentally, it’s about understanding your current position, evaluating where you want to go, and building a strategic roadmap that will get you from A to B. 

This way, you’ll grab every opportunity to improve the customer and employee experience alike and leverage your technology to the fullest.

This is why we preach that digital adoption is never just about technology. Rather, it’s about how it can empower employees to help you achieve your business goals and fulfill customer demands at the same time.

Orlando, FL – January 28, 2020  — Smart Panda Labs, a digital consultancy that leverages data and creative intelligence to drive customer lifetime value, today announced its certification as a Salesforce Consulting Partner.  As a Salesforce Consulting Partner, Smart Panda Labs enriches its service offerings to support clients with existing Salesforce applications or to lead successful implementations of world-class, cloud-based solutions.

”We partner with technology leaders who will enable us to further optimize the customer journey and building customer relationships is an integral part of that journey,” said Shamir Duverseau, co-founder and managing director of Smart Panda Labs.  “Salesforce offers a premier set of solutions that bring together processes, technology and people to improve customer acquisition and increase customer retention – all on a single integrated platform. As a Salesforce partner, we can now capitalize on the power of the Salesforce ecosystem to help our clients generate more prospects and increase revenue through a personalized customer experience.”

Salesforce Offerings

“We’re delighted to have Smart Panda Labs join the community of Salesforce Consulting Partners who are vital to enabling unparalleled customer success in every industry and every market around the world,” noted Tyler Prince, EVP of Industries & Partners at Salesforce.

The Smart Panda Labs team of data analytics and business intelligence experts use CRM to help their clients to build and manage customer relationships and all associated data and information as well as acquisition, content marketing, automation, and predictive intelligence.  Salesforce certification strengthens these capabilities with Salesforce-authorized services for:

• Discovery assessment to evaluate an existing Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementation or gather requirements for a new one.
• Strategic planning to ensure key business processes are addressed.
• Implementation designed to integrate Salesforce with existing applications and accelerate the time to value.
• Customized management solutions for continuous optimization of new customer acquisition and customer retention strategies and tactics.

“The ability to deliver these services to our clients is mutually beneficial,” said Duverseau. “These services drive client success and Salesforce certification is strategic to our growth in the coming months.”

About Smart Panda Labs 

Smart Panda Labs is a digital consulting firm that drives customer lifetime value by optimizing every digital experience along the customer journey in a variety of considered purchase industries such as higher ed, travel and hospitality, healthcare, real estate, retail, and technology. MWBE-owned and founded in 2010 by digital strategy experts from Fortune 1000 companies, Smart Panda Labs is focused on the strength of data-driven and creative intelligence to increase their clients’ new customer acquisition and improve customer retention.  Visit Smart Panda Labs. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.