Creating a Seamless Digital Customer Experience: Tips and Strategies

What is digital customer experience?

A digital CX is the perception of your digital brand as customers and potential clients engage with your brand online. Digitizing the customer experience enables you to streamline sales, marketing, and customer service.

At the basic level, customer experience is how your customers experience your brand when interacting with it. A digital customer experience includes how customers experience your brand online through your website, emails, social media, and other digital channels.

A digital marketing CX focuses on engaging customers throughout the entire customer journey and various customer touch points across channels.

Simply put, the digital customer experience refers to how your customers interact with your brand across digital channels, including social media, your website, email, chatbots, and even digital ads.

Some brands are purely digital from the start. These include e-commerce companies, software, mobile apps, and so forth. However, some companies must invest in digitizing customer experiences when they take their businesses online. For example, a brick-and-mortar company may begin selling products online through an e-commerce website. Any brands that interact with customers online should focus on modernizing the customer experience.

Examples of digital customer experiences

Digital CX doesn't only refer to B2C businesses. Instead, it can apply to any industry that serves customers or clients online. Take a look at the following examples to understand how the digital customer experience works for various types of businesses:

• Banks. Banks provide digital experiences by allowing customers to open accounts, check balances, and perform other financial transactions. Customers may also download an app to manage their money on the go.
• Education. Students can take online or hybrid classes and sign into a portal to access coursework with tracked information about their grades. They also have the ability to send direct messages to teachers and have online meetings.
• Retail. Online and brick-and-mortar stores can interact with customers online to attract business and promote sales. Retail stores can use various marketing techniques and channels to guide customers through the customer journey and interact with them at each touch point.

Why is digital customer experience important?

Digital customer experience is crucial for any business with an online presence. Even if you don't use your website for sales, you should still provide a good customer experience. Unfortunately, the customer journey can be complex, especially when using on and offline channels. Your digital CX should guide clients through the customer journey to facilitate purchases and lead generation.

A robust customer experience strategy offers your business the following advantages:

• Improved customer loyalty. Client retention is crucial for all businesses because it’s more affordable to maintain your existing clients than invest in new ones. An effective digital CX strategy can improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention by guiding clients through the customer journey without friction. Once clients have a good experience with your brand, they’re more likely to become repeat buyers.
• Increased engagement. Digitizing the customer experience on multiple channels can improve conversion rates and increase engagement with your brand. The more satisfied customers are with your digital experience, the more likely they are to purchase your products.

For instance, if you have a slow website that doesn’t load properly on mobile, you’re providing a bad experience, which can affect your ability to attract customers.

• Better marketing. A good digital experience can support your marketing efforts. As an online brand, you likely lead visitors directly to your website, where they can make purchases or request more information. While you can invest in all the best marketing strategies, your marketing won't provide results if your website has poor CX. On the other hand, improving the customer experience online can enhance your marketing efforts.

How to build your digital customer experience strategy

Digital customer experience management goes beyond designing and developing a website with a good user experience; it involves all the touch points and interactions your customers have with your business online.

Here are a few tips to help you build an effective digital customer experience strategy:

1. Gather customer data

Consider the multiple channels you use to engage with customers, including social media, your website, digital ads, email, and SMS marketing. You can gather data about the customer experience by using social listening tools to monitor your brand online and see what customers are saying about it. You can also use live chat and customer surveys to learn how customers feel about your business.

2. Develop insights

With your data, you can begin finding patterns and developing insights. Reading customer feedback and reviews can help you find issues within the digital customer experience. For instance, if your clients say you don't respond to customer inquiries over email, you know there's a communication problem within your digital experience.

3. Take action

After discovering what your data is telling you, it's time to take action. When you've resolved immediate customer service issues and complaints, you should focus on optimizing the entire digital experience. For instance, if multiple customers have complained about your website loading slowly or a complex checkout process, you must improve these areas to ensure a positive experience.

Tips for improving digital customer experiences

Your digital customer experience strategy should provide actionable insights that help you communicate with customers more effectively.

Here are a few tips to help you improve the customer experience on digital channels:

Understand your target audience

Before digitizing the customer experience, you should learn as much as possible about the people who will engage with your brand online. You can create buyer personas to step into your prospects' shoes and find new ways to market to them while identifying opportunities to enhance digital CX. For instance, you may find that your audience prefers to use social media for customer service instead of email or phone calls.

Develop an omnichannel approach

Omnichannel marketing integrates various aspects of the customer experience to improve cohesion. With an omnichannel approach, customers can interact with your brand across different digital mediums. For instance, some customers will prefer not to call your business. Instead, you might provide them with an online chat solution they can use while on the go.

Focus on mobile

Many customers use their mobile devices to find products and services online. If you provide excellent mobile CX, you may be able to convert visitors into paying customers.

Consider how your audience engages with their smartphones. They use social media, shop, and engage with apps. At each customer touchpoint, you need to provide a consistent experience, whether they're interacting with you on social media or via a chatbot on your website.

When developing your digital customer experience, always ensure every element is mobile-responsive. Your website should be mobile-friendly, with contact options that allow customers to use their smartphones to reach your business.

Collect customer feedback

The more you learn from your customers, the better you can make their experience with your brand. Using customer surveys and reviews can help you transform your digital customer experience strategy by providing insight into how customers react to your marketing techniques, checkout process, and everything in between.

For instance, you can read reviews or directly ask clients via surveys about their experience with your brand. Every time someone uses your online chat option, you should ask them to submit feedback. This can help you improve the digital customer experience.

Grow your business with effective digital customer experiences

Whether your business operates solely online or you have a brick-and-mortar store and website, all great digital customer experiences are cohesive. If your customers interact with your brand on social media, via live chat, or on your website, they should have the same positive experience that leads them through the digital customer experience journey.

Design and implement an effective digital customer experience with Mailchimp. With our suite of marketing tools, you can create a website, social media posts, and emails to provide a seamless and streamlined customer experience that helps you sell more.