Providing outstanding customer experiences lies at the heart of every modern business. Did you know that 80% of customers consider the experience that a brand brings to the table as important as its product or service?

Till some years ago, consumers looked for two basic asks from a brand: a quality product and fair pricing. But that’s history. New-age users have much higher expectations, as they look for personalized interactions, connected experiences across digital channels, instant support, and frictionless journeys.

Creating great CX isn’t just an ideal business plan anymore. It’s key to driving long-term growth and improving engagement and retention. We’re living in a world of disruptive technology – where a product or service could be path-breaking one day and outdated the next. In such a scenario, the experiences that brands offer are increasingly emerging as a key differentiator. In order to win customer loyalty, brands must not only scale up their customer interactions but also show that they have their users’ best interests in mind.

So, what comprises seamless CX? It’s essentially an end-to-end brand experience – from discovery, checkout, to post-purchase. If done well, it results in higher customer delight, loyalty, and better business bottom lines. If done wrong, you could see your customers shift loyalties and move to the nearest competitor. In fact, the stakes around providing the ideal CX have become so high that even one negative experience can cost you a user, and influence the perceptions of other consumers as well – as customers who have a bad brand experience tend to talk about it.

Statistics show that satisfied customers generate up to 2.6X more revenue than a moderately satisfied user and a whopping 14X more revenue than a dissatisfied one.

With thousands of new online businesses joining the hyper-competitive digital retail space, leveling up your digital marketing strategy has become critical.

In this blog, we delve into the world of Marketing 2.0, decode CX, and look at what makes a winning marketing game plan.

Decoding…
New Customer Expectations

Everyone gains from a good customer experience: your customers, your business, and everything in between. What is a good customer experience? It’s a wow customer journey that engages users across touchpoints, generates great feedback, and builds a long-term relationship between a brand and a user. Building stellar CX has become an essential investment for brand and business building.
Let’s look at what a good experience translates into for a customer.

• The Power of Personalization

  Customers are surrounded by personalized experiences today and they expect the same from every brand they come in contact with. They want businesses to understand their unique needs and expectations – and not be treated like a number. In fact, advances in AI are taking this trend to a whole new level: hyper-personalization

• Omnichannel, Connected Journeys

  Customers expect consistent interactions across departments, and providing omnichannel experiences is a need of the day. Modern users seek multiple channel options, including both physical and digital. Companies that do this right, create seamless connected experiences that promote higher interaction and engagement

• Innovation

  Innovation has become a sure-shot way to get closer to your customer. Modern businesses need to think laterally: what product, service, or experience will enthrall the customer? What are our competitors doing, and how can we do it faster? How can we make space in the heart and minds of the customer, in quick time? Short answer: Innovate. Get granular in understanding your customers and make their need fulfillment the engine for driving more innovative CX

Marketing is evolving and how:
Changing trends

We all know that corporations exist to make profits. However, there has to be a parallel and larger goal to achieve this objective – to be aligned with the needs of your users. Marketing is the super highway that connects customers with brands, helps them find out about each other, and develops a relationship that is beneficial for both.

Businesses can script a successful marketing story if they develop a clear understanding of the needs, preferences, and behavior of their customers.

Don’t make your brand the focus of your marketing strategy. If you want to quell competition and stay successful – focus on the customer instead. And this is best done by getting a 360-degree Customer View – who they are, what makes them tick, what they want, and how you can add value to their lives.

What are the pillars on which
new-age marketing stands?

• CX – the ultimate goal of Modern Marketing

  Customer experience has always been an important metric for marketers. But it’s now underlined: Recent surveys list CX as the most exciting business opportunity on the anvil. In today’s increasingly online world, the way consumers research and shop for products and services has metamorphosed. They don’t rely on paid advertising anymore. Instead, they use social media, blogs, video reviews, and diverse information to get in-depth reviews of the product they are buying. This has completely changed the marketing game: don’t tell the user how good you are, prove it

• Use data to understand your customer

  We live in a data-intense world. Data is driving how marketers understand customers and their businesses.
  While businesses have stockpiles of intelligent data to build a marketing strategy, the real value-add happens when they use the data qualitatively. Data can serve many marketing functions – it enables micro-segmentation, promotes personalization, helps get customer insights and identify emerging trends. Armed with this information, marketers can optimize processes and strategies. Data-driven marketing delivers more engaging and relevant marketing campaigns, on the most effective channels

• Onboard WhatsApp and Chatbots as the new modes of customer communication

  Here’s a metric that marketers cannot ignore: over 80% of companies that use AI-powered conversational solutions or chatbots find it an absolutely valuable asset. How has it transformed their marketing and sales efforts? By enabling them to answer product and service queries, send payment, delivery and refund notifications, and to spread marketing information.
  WhatsApp uses AI to analyze data and answer routine questions quickly – have emerged as a go-to way to engage with customers 24×7, offer better support and experience in clearing customer queries, setup automated replies outside business hours, and handle multiple queries at the same time

• Make Customer Service the foundation of your marketing plan

  Today, customer service is more than just solving problems and closing tickets. It means delivering proactive support, at any time, on a channel of choice. Customer service has gained so much traction that it is now considered a strategic function for brands across sectors. Why has this happened? The better the customer service the higher the retention. Happier customers are loyal customers, and it costs less to retain customers than to attract new ones.
  Customer service is also a key differentiator that sets organizations apart from their competitors. Brands that focus on seamless customer service also provide personalized experiences to their users

• Put the spotlight on Feedback

  Ask any seasoned marketer and they’ll tell you that customer feedback has emerged as a fundamental pillar of success. After all, it’s the most precise way to find out what’s product specifications and CX strategies are working well with the user and what are the potential areas of improvement. If you don’t incorporate feedback into your marketing mechanism, you are bound to falter.
  Customer feedback can provide brands will powerful and holistic information that gives critical insights into how they are perceived by their users, improve experiences, boost loyalty, and cut marketing expenses

How to create a winning marketing strategy
marketing strategy

The power of relevant & personalized content, choice of channels, Customer Data Platform have transformed the way brands work. Modern businesses are in search of a new approach to marketing effectiveness in order to survive and thrive through the upheaval.

Make a splash through the Omnichannel world

As customers keep switching between online & offline buying, brands must make it a priority to deliver Connected Experience across channels. They must actively focus on streamlining sales, personalize customer journeys, reward customers, create strategies that deal with cart abandonment, and fine-tune their delivery and pickup models.
Here are some pro tips that can help marketers build an effective omnichannel strategy:

1. Show that you value your loyal customers. Reward them

Rewards build customer loyalty. The reach of reward programs has become huge – from airlines offering frequent flier miles to telecom corporations giving away no-fee deals to get more volume, brands are spending millions in deploying loyalty programs. After all, statistics prove that a company’s loyal customers are also the most profitable. The advantages of loyalty programs don’t end there – in the long run, loyal customers buy more, pay premium prices, and bring on board more referrals.
Pro tips on creating a profitable reward program:

• Create a meaningful loyalty program
• Reward loyal customers with early-access programs
• Offer referral bonuses
• Create rewarding milestones in customers journey
• Offer preferential service terms

2. Onboard the latest and most relevant tools

There are digital tools galore in the market today. A strong tech stack results in optimum growth, helps brands provide seamless users experiences, and turn them into loyal customers. Here are some tools that have become a must-have to create a strong marketing game plan:

• Loyalty Management Solution: To build brand advocacy via engagement and reward programs
• Unified Campaign Engine: To connect and engage with customers on a communication channel of their choice
• Feedback Engine: To listen to the customer, understand what they want and take timely action
• Analytics Solution: To listen to your data | Data-Driven Marketing
• Conversational Commerce Solution: To provide phygital experiences via WhatsApp or WeBot
• Digital Receipt: To send customized communication to customers

Always track and measure results

It goes without saying that tracking and measuring the performance of your marketing plan is critical for its success. To do this, you must understand the performance of your campaign and have access to valuable insights such as customer behavior, interactions, and shopping journeys. It is also equally important to track which channel your customer is coming from, what your audience is doing on each channel, what is working, and what is not working.

Sum Up: Time to relook your marketing strategies

The times are changing and modern marketers are keeping up with this change by creating more customer-friendly strategies. As evolving customer demands, a need for providing cutting-edge experiences has changed the way businesses work. It’s time every marketer jumped onto this new marketing ship – before it sails.