Today’s modern customer expects a personalized experience when interacting with your brand. In an era of endless digital advertisements and generic social media callouts, highly personalized customer experiences allow you to differentiate your business and gain a competitive advantage against other advertising businesses.
With 87% of business executives believing customer experience is a top growth engine, the number of companies investing in customer experiences increased 13% within the last year. By creating unique customer experiences throughout your communication channels, you can increase brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, and your return-on-investment (ROI).
Ready to increase your advertising revenue? Let’s look at how you can create impactful, personalized experiences that delight your customers and fills your sales pipeline.
Key takeaways:
- A personalized experience fosters loyalty between your brand and the customer
- Empowering your team with the right resources allow you to better meet customer needs
- Develop an omnichannel strategy for a consistent brand presence for your customers
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience references the connection between your business and customers. Whether it’s exposure to an online advertisement, a call to your support team, or an email, every interaction someone has with your brand creates an impression that has a direct impact to your bottom line.
To better track ROI, you can measure customer experience success by:
- Sending feedback survey results
- Analyzing the reason why customers churn
- Reviewing support ticket or inquiry trends
Your customer experience has two main components: products and people. The product relates to your advertising business, whether it’s your physical publication or the media you offer to sponsors. When it comes to people, it’s all about how your internal teams interact with customers and help provide solutions.
Why is Customer Experience Important for Publications?
Your customers have all the power, and creating a personalized experience can drive customer spending up by 140%. With access to more advertisers and resources than ever before, customers can make their own buying decisions without ever needing to pick up the phone.
For some publications, prioritizing the customer experience can:
- Boost the customer’s lifetime value
- Build deeper brand loyalty and awareness
- Increase your brand reputation and competitive differentiators
5 Best Practices to Deliver a Personalized Customer Experience
While traditional customer service is still important, it’s no longer the only way to deliver a personalized experience to your buyers. Here are a few ways you can meet your customer’s expectations to drive revenue:
- Empower Your Internal Teams
Before you optimize your advertising products, you need to focus on your employees. Your customer support team is at the forefront of every customer interaction, so it’s crucial that they have the right resources and technology to resolve issues quickly. They should also have skills to deal with angry customers.
You’ll need to develop a robust training process that supports each team member. To get started, create a top-down strategy that demonstrates your commitment to the customer experience by answering these questions:
- Can your team support timely customer inquiries?
- Can your team communicate with customers on their preferred channels?
- Do you have any quality assurances in place?
- Do you provide your team with client data?
- Understand What Your Customers Need
The more you’re able to think like your customers, the better you can sell your products. What are their challenges? What do they need, and how does your advertising business solve their problem? Answering these questions in your strategy shows your customers that they’re not just another number.
Consider creating customer personas to embrace a customer-first mindset. For example, Robert is an organized 42-year-old Purchasing Manager for a B2B distributor. Susan is a tech-savvy, 32-year-old Marketing Manager who specializes in brand awareness. Once you have personas built, you can personalize your messaging to each pain point, and better meet their needs.
- Capture Customer Feedback
The quickest way to know your current experience baseline is to simply ask your customers. Empower your team with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, so they’re able to ask the right questions and enter them correctly for you to analyze further. With a CRM, you can have productive conversations with your customers and use the feedback to personalize future interactions better.
Here are a few ways you can capture customer feedback:
- Provide questions for your teams to ask over the phone
- Use a chatbot feature on your website for customers to speak to a rep – 79% of businesses agree live chat positively impacts revenue!
- Send different surveys throughout the buyer’s journey
- Analyze and respond to reviews
- Use listening tools to understand what customers are saying about your brand across all social channels
- Use Technology to Personalize Experiences
The power of AI and machine-learning technology enables you to deliver 24/7 personalized experiences to your customers when and where they want them. Develop customer journeys to help strengthen the relationships with your customer and find any gaps within their experience. For example, you may notice that you have a higher churn rate after six months or that your marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are stuck in the pipeline for too long.
You can further implement personalization in the following ways:
- Use geolocation and demographics to personalize messaging
- Cross-sell recommendations based on past behavior
- Provide dynamic content on your website
- Follow-up from feedback surveys or reviews
- Embrace an Omnichannel Strategy
Whether it’s pricing or communication channels, customers want more choices. Your customers are no longer waiting to connect with your brand. Instead, they’re using multi-channel journeys to make purchasing decisions. For example, 50% of web traffic is now driven by mobile devices.
What’s your biggest challenge? Each interaction across every channel needs to be consistent and deliver a seamless experience to eliminate the chance of a negative gap. A successful omnichannel approach will:
- Delight your customers through smooth communications
- Save your business money and time by cutting down time-intensive resources
- Get a better view of the customer journey to understand your strengths and weaknesses
- Develop a stronger, more impressionable brand that drives loyalty
Start Thinking Like the Customer to Fill Your Pipeline
With more channels and communication touchpoints, you can empower customers to make buying decisions and become your brand advocate. Brand advocates will continue to partner with your brand and leave positive reviews or send referrals. To drive revenue and fill your pipeline with high-quality customers, get started by delivering personalized customer experiences throughout the buyer journey.
Ready to boost your advertising bottom line? Contact Boom Communications Group for more information.