By | Dawn Castell
Optimizing your customer’s experience on your site is a smart way to get new customers. It is also a smart way to foster customer loyalty. According to statistics, just 41% of marketing executives are actively using customer engagement data to build their marketing strategy. Along with failing to use the available data, the same marketers and business owners are not paying attention to their customers before or after the sale, either. One of the main barriers to being able to do this is not having a clear understanding of the customer to begin with.
You must understand who your customers are. By doing this, you can improve the customer experience, create better content, and increase your sales. The trick is figuring out what methods to use to learn more about your customers. For example, do you rely on surveys and social media or online qualitative research? Should you combine these research techniques? Keep reading to learn some effective ways to learn more about your customer and help ensure their experience with your business or brand is always a positive one.
Utilize Intelligent Customer Engagement Tactics
Providing an optimized customer experience is invaluable when it comes to retention and revenue. If you get this right, it can also serve as a source of insight to your customers. Today, being able to engage with your customers in real-time is easier than ever before. This is possible thanks to the innovative tools that are now available. For example, messenger is becoming a much more popular type of customer service. It is even possible to utilize technology that allows you to speak with your customers as they are browsing your site. These channels are an effective way to collect customer insight. The proprietary data you collect when you interact with your customers, no matter the channel, will help you better understand them. Be sure to work closely with your customer service teams to find any patterns and to react to the insight and information you acquire.
Along with this, nothing is as helpful as customer development. By talking to your customers on the phone regularly, you can learn more about their challenges, needs, and pains. If you want to embrace this tip, you should schedule regular calls to fully understand what your customers love or dislike about what you offer. With this information, you can turn unhappy customers into satisfied ones, create more detailed buyer personas, and improve your onboarding process. As you continue to work to ensure your customers remain engaged during the initial stages of the customer journey, you should think of this growing relationship as a type of two-way street. Make sure you encourage your customers to share their opinions and ideas by adding a customer satisfaction survey to your email drip efforts.
Improve Your Buyer Personas
Some marketers make the mistake of using more generic demographics such as location, profession, and age to create buyer personas. These types of data points will not provide sufficient information to create messages that will resonate with your audience or customers on an emotional level. An effective way to learn more about your customer’s preferences is by using the Acquisitions tab found in Google Analytics. With this, you can see what sources your traffic is coming from, such as professional forums, industry blogs, social media outlets, etc. Once you have this information, you can apply it to your buyer personas to know when and how to reach them more effectively. When you gather keyword data, it can help you discover the words and descriptions that buyer personas are using to describe your products or services. When segmenting your customers based on keyword searches, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to help create a list of the most common keywords people are using to arrive at your site. At this point, you can group the keywords into several themes and then assign the various personas to them based on the information you have gathered.
Use Customer Analytics to Generate Data
From reading through a web page to clicking on a link, every customer action provides helpful insight into customer behavior. To figure out how people interact with your site, you can attempt to use a behavior tracking tool. One option is Google Analytics, which will help you gather insight, including bounce rate and the amount of time someone is spending on a page. The behavioral information you collect can help you develop conclusions related to your audience and do not really understand. It can also help you figure out what they do and do not like and how you will be able to create a much stronger website experience. For example, if someone finds it difficult to navigate to a specific sales page, you can adjust your interface to improve UX. If there is a page people are spending more time on, take some time to analyze the page’s content to see what is holding their attention. Something that is even more important is if one page has a higher bounce rate than the others. Find out what is making people leave.
Make Plans for the Future
It is essential to make a plan to ensure future customer engagement. In fact, this is just as important as creating a plan for the here and now. This will help put your customer experience teams in the best frame of mind to respond to your customers during challenging or stressful situations. You can use predictive modeling software to mine current customer data to help you identify cyclical trends or patterns that will help with your decision making. There are tools available to help you with this.
Follow Your Customer’s Path
If you want to really understand the dynamic and unique customer buying journey, you have to put yourself into their shoes. You can do this by using something called customer journey mapping. With this, you create a graphical representation of your customer’s journey that is based on essential touchpoints. This means interactions between your customers and the brand at all stages of the purchase – before, during, and after. With this information, you can figure out the motivation someone has to take certain actions or steps. You may even want to create milestones, such as if someone has not logged into their account or app after a specific amount of time. With this, you can begin to take steps to improve engagement or find new ways to engage with these individuals.
Learning More About Your Customers
Thanks to things like strong customer touchpoints, behavioral recording tools, and advanced analytics, it is now easier than ever before to get to know and really understand your customer base. The methods that are outlined here are considered “common practices.” They are meant to provide information and inspiration for your customer engagement efforts. However, you have to customize these to ensure they are right for your audience. Take some time to use trial and error if necessary, which will help you see what is working for your business and your customers. Knowing your customers will help you engage with them, which is something you want to increase sales and keep customers coming back. Being informed is the best way to reach and understand your customers
