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8 Tactics for a Great Digital Customer Experience Strategy

26 Mar
2021
8 Tactics for a Great Digital Customer Experience Strategy

How your customers perceive your brand is everything to your business.

This is more true now than ever considering recent CX research:

  • 73% of people say customer experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions
  • 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after a single bad experience
  • 65% of consumers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising

Not to mention, every single consumer has instant access to hundreds of friends and followers across social platforms, and people aren’t shy about sharing their experiences. According to Esteban Kolsky, 13% of unhappy customers will share their experiences with 15 people or more.

Getting customer experience right is critical to the survival of your business. This post will delve deeper into how you can improve others’ perception of your brand through digital interactions.

You’ll learn:

  • What digital customer experience is
  • 8 tactics to improve your digital customer experience strategy

What is digital customer experience (DCX)?

While CX is how a customer perceives your brand based on every single interaction they have with your company, digital CX is strictly interactions that happen on digital interfaces.

Digital CX is technical, omnichannel, and experienced across multiple devices, making it complex, challenging to manage, and hard to get right.

To help you create an excellent digital customer experience for your customer, here is a closer look at 8 helpful strategies.

8 Tactics for to Improve Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy

1. Build an intuitive eCommerce store

There’s little worse for motivated online shoppers than landing on a product page and having a difficult time navigating the site, adding products, and making payments.

The first step in an excellent digital customer experience is to focus on UX. Here are some suggestions to build an outstanding eCommerce store:

  • Categorize products. Structure your online store by grouping products into sensical categories, especially if you have dozens to thousands of products. Look to clothing brands for examples as they typically nail product categorization. Here’s a great example from American Eagle.
  • Include faceted search. Product filtering is another great way to improve UX. This is when you provide a way to further filter product results by things like color, price, size, and style. I like this example from Zappos.
  • Build good product pages. Helping customers easily find your products is only half the battle. You also want to give them enough information about individual products so they know what they are getting, but not too much that they’re overwhelmed. Everlane is a good example of an eCommerce brand with excellent product pages. Everlane provides a picture, product details, price, a description, and even suggestions to complete the look. 


2. Optimize the check-out process

Have you ever been ready to make a purchase and abandoned ship because the check-out process was complicated?

I know I have several times. Regardless of how new your eCommerce store is, there is no excuse for a messy check-out process

Here are some ways to capture more sales with a top-notch check-out process:

  • Provide convenient payment options. There are so many convenient payment options these days where consumers can pay for something without even thinking about it. The more convenient payment options you have, the better. I buy waaaaay more from Sephora than I should because it’s so dang easy (sorry, husband).
  • Go mobile. Seventy-nine percent of consumers have made a purchase with their smartphone in the last 6 months, and 55% of all internet traffic is from a mobile device. Make sure it’s possible for your customers to buy with their phones on your mobile app.
  • Offer guest checkout. No one likes to enter in all their information at check-out. Take the time to set up a guest checkout option. You won’t regret it.
  • Ask for an email address. The one piece of information you do want to ask for is an e-mail address. That way, if the person abandons their cart, you can follow up easily.

3. Create cohesive CX across all digital channels

As the internet grows, so does the need for a stronger Omni-channel presence. Don’t believe it? Stats show there will be a 40% increase in digital customer service interactions in 2021 and brands will undergo digital transformation and grow their channels from 8 to 11 to accommodate.

If you want to stay ahead of the game, you have to put in the time and effort to create a smooth flow across all your customer touchpoints and channels. This includes providing online support, live support, Facebook messenger support, and more.

It’s critical to make it easy for customers to get in touch with you. And, when they do, you must offer transparent, realistic online customer support. This includes increasing the ways customers can contact you online, responding to reviews, and engaging via social media.

If you haven’t already, let’s explore 5 Ways Data Feed Management Unlocks Omnichannel Success.

4. Segment your email lists

There are several reasons why segmenting your email lists is a good idea, but providing an excellent consistent experience rests at the top of the list.

As a quick review, segmenting your email lists means dividing up your email subscribers according to different categories, including age, geo-location, gender, behavioral patterns, interests, and more.

When you know who your customers are and segment your lists appropriately in your Sendlane account, it’s easy to send the right messages to the right customers at the right time, providing a stellar digital CX every time.

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5. Automate everything

If one thing is true about the digital world, it’s this—everything happens instantaneously and brands are clamoring for the attention of consumers.

In fact, digital marketing strategists estimate the average person sees between 6,000 and 10,000 ads per day.

Customers won’t sit around hoping you’ll reach out to them. And, by the time you get around to it, they may have already left your site and bought from a competitor.

The secret sauce in providing an excellent customer journey is to respond to customer behaviors quickly and appropriately. How? Automation.

Email automation is a great example of how this works. With a powerful email and SMS marketing platform like Sendlane, you can set up behavioral triggers that will send relevant emails to individual subscribers automatically.

A popular behavioral trigger is when a customer abandons their cart. When distracted shoppers leave your site without completing their purchase, you should engage them within 4 hours with a powerful and friendly message like this one from Thousand Fell.

This automation promises further customer engagement by:

  • Responding to a customer behavioral trigger
  • Offering a warm welcome
  • Including a call to action
  • Providing a discount code for future purchases

It’s hard to forget about Famous Footwear with this kind of automation.

6. Leverage customer data to get to know your customers

Engaging with your customers is one way to get to know your customers, but no eCommerce business owner has the time to sit down and have a chat with every customer all the time.
But, every eCommerce business owner can invest in data-driven insights to learn who your customers are, what they like, and how they behave online.

Sendlane offers real-time analytics and deep data integrations including CRM, making it easy for business owners to track metrics, create timely messages, and foster ongoing and meaningful customer relationships via relevant communications.

//[inject:ad-multi-automations]

7. Elicit feedback from your customers

Providing an excellent digital experience involves analyzing data-driven insights, using your expertise, and making judgment calls. 

However, since you’re working toward creating a speedy, seamless, and mobile-friendly DCX for your customers, it’s best to put your biases, and sometimes big data, aside and elicit direct customer feedback just like in this email from Chewy.

When you ask customers exactly what their pain points are across the digital ecosystem, you learn about customer expectations.
Work on creating a constant customer feedback loop that you can reference whenever you need insights from your VIPs. Some great ways to gather customer feedback include customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT), interviews and focus groups, and online communities.

8. Look into a virtual waiting room

Have you ever wanted to purchase a hot new product from an eCommerce store only to get to the website and have it crash?

And, then have it crash again. And again.

This is a frustrating experience for online retailers and customers. eCommerce business owners lose out on an abundance of sales because of a bogged down server. Consumers may never end up acquiring their intended purchase. Worst of all, online buyers may even have a bad taste left in their mouths due to a poor user experience.

In fact, stats show that 88% of online shoppers will never return to a website after a poor user experience. Nobody wins.

The good news is you can avoid this situation entirely by using a virtual waiting room to facilitate your eCommerce store.

A virtual waiting room like Queue-it is an online queue system designed to prevent website crashes and slowdowns during massive user peaks. In essence, users wait in line on a first come first serve basis. As soon as the server frees up, the virtual waiting room will allow customers to enter your site.

With a virtual waiting room, you can control the flow of visitors who enter your site. You keep the traffic below breaking points, keeping your website running smoothly all while controlling the digital journey.


Improve your digital CX with Sendlane today!

Providing an excellent digital experience is essential to the success of your business. What’s crazy is customers probably won’t notice when you do provide a good digital experience, but they will notice if you don’t. 

As you look to improve your overall customer experience, consider making it easier for customers to interact with you on all digital touch-points, including your email marketing platform.

For help with segmentation, automation, and data-driven marketing decisions, try Sendlane. Check us out free for 60 days!

Want to learn mor about marketing? Check out our similar posts:

Omnichannel Marketing: 5 Strategies to Drive Growth in 2021

3 Outstanding Customer Loyalty Programs & What You Can Learn From Them

8 Ways to Successfully Align Your Social Media & Email Marketing

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