Why is digital customer experience important for marketing

In today’s digital-first world, digital customer experience plays a pivotal role in shaping how people perceive and interact with your brand. But why is digital customer experience important for marketing? Quite simply, it directly influences user satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, your business's bottom line. By enhancing your product or service with a focus on User Experience (UX), you can significantly boost your marketing efforts.

What is Digital Customer Experience?

Digital customer experience refers to every interaction a customer has with your brand in the digital space. This includes how they navigate your website, their interactions with your customer service, the process of buying products, filling out application forms, or even booking a holiday. Every touchpoint matters. Positive experiences lead to conversions, while negative ones can result in high bounce rates and lost opportunities.

Why is Digital Customer Experience Critical for Marketing Success?

Here’s why digital customer experience should be a cornerstone of your marketing strategy:

1. Enhances Brand PerceptionA seamless and enjoyable digital experience helps customers build a positive perception of your brand. Whether they’re browsing your website, completing a purchase, or contacting support, each interaction influences how they view your business.
2. Increases Customer LoyaltyCustomers are more likely to return to brands that offer a great user experience. By improving your digital customer experience, you increase the likelihood of repeat business and brand advocacy.
3. Improves Conversion RatesA well-optimised user experience directly impacts conversions. Whether it's an easy-to-navigate website, a quick checkout process, or an intuitive application form, a better experience leads to higher conversion rates and increased sales.
4. Boosts Customer RetentionOffering a great digital customer experience is key to retaining customers. By continuously refining how users interact with your brand, you ensure they keep coming back, reducing churn.
5. Supports Omnichannel MarketingA strong digital customer experience ties into your broader marketing efforts across multiple channels. Whether it’s through social media, email marketing, or mobile apps, providing a consistent and user-friendly experience helps unify your message and increase customer engagement.

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The all important customer (or user) journey

All online advertising starts with a journey. One of the main areas of User Experience we focus on is the customer journey. This describes the steps that your user's take while they interact with your company. If you don’t understand these customer journey's and design appropriately, the users of your website or app will lose interest.

Presenting a user with something unexpected can result in a poor experience.

“A customer journey needs to be enjoyable as well as functional.”

Someone may have seen an advert on the TV, on Google or on a social media post. They will take action by clicking, calling or sharing. If they don't take action and you don’t understand why, a UX team will crunch the data to find the answers.

Plan out the customer journey so that your users achieve their goals. Then monitor feedback, and report on effectiveness.

Creating customer journey maps

By mapping out the touch-points of a user journey you can quickly identify where areas are weak and could cause a problem for the user. Journey mapping can be done on spreadsheets but I prefer them when they are more visual. It's worth hiring. designer and create something neat, tools like Adioma are a useful tool.

Key areas of online advertising

All areas of online marketing can monitor the performance of a campaign.

Measurable metrics can show the effectiveness (or failure) of a campaign. These could be through Pay Per Click, which measures Conversion Rate goals; SEO monitors visitor volumes, time on page, geographic location, bounce rate, keywords searches and more; or for social media, it’d be through the amount of shares, likes, views, tags etc.

How User Experience perfectly compliments online marketing

Analyses is key to the whole process

• How much revenue is your marketing campaign generating?
• What are your KPIs and how do you measure them?
• How do we align your marketing budget to your best KPIs?
• Who are your targeted users and audience?
• What goals do you need them to achieve?
• Why did/didn’t they take action?
• What fields on a form did they complete (or not)?

These are all the tools a UX designer should have in the box. Some say a UX designer should be a psychologist, a product designer, a head of sales, a business analyst and a digital device expert. I believe a UX designer should be able to:

• Research target audiences by research and stakeholder meetings
• Learn a business's strategies and KPIs
• Analyse competitors to understand market position
• Devise user buying personas and the journey they should take
• Design a layout to help your users to take a successful journey
• Place measuring tools to report on success metrics
• Perform follow up tasks for user retention
• Learn from all previous research and re-optimise for continuous improvement

Here at Ground, these questions are always applied to every campaign we take on and manage. Without it an online marketing manager is working blind and will, in all likelihood fail.

Key steps for better online marketing with UX

1. We design online marketing campaigns tailored for the users you need to market to.
2. We research and ascertain the best type of user or buyer for the thing you are offering
3. We create a customer journey to map out the path of your targeted users
4. We identify risks of these users losing interest or not finding what they need
5. We design layouts to ensure these journey's contain the features your users need
6. We apply tracking to show how these goals are measured
7. We monitor all keywords and how these keywords align with the customer journey
8. We create great landing pages to match keywords to customer journeys
9. We use tools such as optimizely and instapage to test new layouts

The cycle process of a customer journey

Does your sales department know how many people came to your website? Do they understand enough about the customer to know what they are interested in?

A great user journey never ends once the user has taken action. A great online advertising campaign always starts with research and an attractive proposition.

A great user experience should be able to design a cycle process to nurture customers by understanding more about them. Who didn't take immediate action? Who decided they didn't want to use you after they got in touch? Did they buy once and that was the last time you heard from them?

Any leads from users generated by an online marketing campaign should be stored in a suitable Customer Relationship Management tool such as Pipedrive or salesforce (if you can afford it). This CRM should be tailored to follow up on contacts in the database.

Continuous improvement

Once a website or marketing plan is live, most UX designers don’t stop there.

By conducting post-launch analysis and monitoring feedback a UX team can identify what worked and what didn’t. Then make informed decisions into continuous improvement. A UX designer can then optimise the project continuously letting businesses flourish from continuous improvement.

Find out more about our UX agency here.