A few years ago, almost everyone was used to a disjointed online experience as businesses built significant latency into a mostly sub-par digital presence. Customers may have tolerated that in past years, but they are not so forgiving anymore as our expectations from the digital world have enhanced significantly. Today, it’s perilous for businesses to deliver anything but the most seamless experience online for their customers. Buyers also have more choices today as they can better compare the features of your products and services against your competitors – all while immersing in the digital experience that you offer. Anything short of a best-in-class digital experience will have your buyers looking elsewhere. Today’s end-user experience must be fast and straightforward with the least complexity and the minimum number of steps. It must be intuitive and contextualized for relevance. Here are a few ways how businesses can achieve this.
Website
A good website helps the buyers at every stage of their customer lifecycle and provides contextualized resources based on the sales cycle. However, your website may be completely separate from the rest of your company’s IT platform, like an unchanging business card that looks the same to everyone. This lack of personalization could make your digital experience just so-so and make you disappear in a sea of competitors. Instead, use your data and reporting to understand your customers better and build a more personalized online experience for them. Study surveys and feedback forms to better understand their pain points and slowly start including converging points on the relevant pages and make sure your design is consistent and fast across different types of devices.
Data
Marketers use data to personalize content, and developers use data to craft personalized online experiences. However, if your customer data lives in one or more silos, you can probably not have meaningful insights into their behavior and will not personalize their experience. So consider where your data lives, consolidate your data locations and aim to bring all of your customer data into one place. Such an approach is often called a lift-and-shift which can be a significant cross-functional business activity – the fruits of which should be clear to everyone involved!
Reporting
Whatever your business goals may be, reporting helps to uncover how to achieve those goals best. Reporting today needs to be attainable and actionable in real-time by all different types of business users. When data is stored in disconnected systems, pulling simple reports can be error-prone. Reporting capabilities should be pre-built in a dashboard as this will help you answer complex questions quickly and adjust your business strategy at digital speed!
Automation
Automation drives an immediate, high-value touchpoint with buyers who need close attention. If your contact database isn’t integrated with your online presence, it’s unlikely that any onsite buyer behavior will make it into your contact record. That means you have no visibility into how they interacted with your company preventing you from enrolling them into any marketing automation. Automation is all about response logic; ‘if they do X, we will react with Y,’ and a proper response requires consistent tracking of buyer actions. So building some automation workflows for your contact database is a good start.
Conclusion
Work towards crafting a best-in-class online experience for your customers and understand its significance to your future growth. Combine a good website, data consolidation, reporting dashboard, and automation to develop a platform that delivers the experience to attract new customers and keep your current ones.