Tag Archive for: customer experience

Four Ways to Improve Your Customer Journey

Improving your customer journey can have a major impact on your bottom line. To improve your customer journey you have to identify the gaps in your service delivery to your customers, as well as focus your efforts on providing the desired experience at every stage of the sales funnel. 

Here are four ways you can work to improve your customer journey. 

1. Identify pain points. 

Analyze your touch points to determine if there are areas where customers have difficulties. These are the points that customers will remember the most, so you’ll want to remove these points if possible. While not all pain points can be completely removed, so focus in on other elements that can make the experience better for customers. 

2. Remove unnecessary steps. 

Similar to tip number one, you’ll also want to analyze all touch points to determine if you have any unnecessary steps required to perform an action. Try to minimize the effort (time, cost, steps, reasoning) your customers need to give in order to get to the core of your products or services. 

3. Answer questions in advance. 

Think about what types of questions customers might have or tips that would make purchases easier for them. You can add these to your website’s FAQ page or create other content around these topics, such as case studies, videos, blogs, etc. The key factor is that you answer questions in advance, so a question doesn’t turn into a complaint or prevent people from making a purchase. 

4. Personalize your content. 

Monitor customer interactions to understand the unique needs of each customer. This insight can help you to personalize messages to each of your customers so they feel that they have a real relationship with you and that their needs are being taken care of. 

Final Thoughts

As customers become savvier and more empowered, it makes the customer journey experience even more important. When you put a greater focus on customer experience strategy, your results can have a positive impact on customer loyalty, higher retention and increased revenue growth. 

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

5 Strategies To Use Customer Testimonials To Gain Leads

We all look for and act on social proof, otherwise known as reviews or recommendations from any community. These recommendations can come in many forms. Word-of-mouth, third-party reviews, as well as what I’m focusing on in this article – testimonials. Customer testimonials influence us all of the time, even subconsciously, on how we behave and also our purchasing decisions.

It doesn’t really matter anymore who the review or recommendation is coming from. What matters is that we see evidence from our peers about services or products that either worked or didn’t. What matters is that we’re seeing evidence from our peers – in this context, other consumers – that the decision we’re about to make to purchase is the right one.

Design Great Testimonials

A great testimonial should include specific product or service details, but what does it all entail? Vague statements such as “great product” or “loved it” don’t usually persuade a customer.  Instead, your testimonials should describe what is so great about your product or service and how it benefited your customers. Include elements such as a name, date, and photographs of the customer or brand that you worked with. This information all serves to help legitimize the testimonial.

Improving Customer Experience

This goal is relatively straightforward. If you improve customer experience, you’ll satisfy more people and generate more testimonials. Consistent engagement is very important because only 28% of positive customer experiences end with leaving a review. If you’re putting effort in to enhance the customer experience, make sure you are also including feedback collection features. It is important to give your consumers the opportunity to provide a customer testimonial.

Understand Customer Journeys

Customer service teams often focus on negative feedback, but we want to remind you that there is a lot to learn from positive reviews as well. They tell you what your company is doing right and what you shouldn’t change. Understanding your customer journeys will help you replicate customer success and generate future testimonials.

Use Visual Content

What’s even better than a text box talking about your amazing products or services? Video content.

For a few of your most enthusiastic and dedicated customers, invest in video production of their testimonials to bring their stories to life. The video will tell your story across different media — on your website, YouTube, and social media — in a unique and engaging way.

Feature Content Anywhere Possible

If you have any compelling case studies, make sure to feature them anywhere you can on your site. Other creative ways to feature them are putting a link to the case studies on your blog, in your email signature, and in all of your social media profiles. The more places potential customers can see the results of your work across different media, the better.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

The Importance of Transparency in Digital Marketing

As marketers, we naturally feel the need to put a fresh and positive spin on every situation. Unfortunately, this tendency can easily become filled with dishonesty and secrecy. In digital marketing this usually manifests itself in the skewing or complete obscurity of data. So how can companies better hold themselves accountable?

Customers

One of the best steps that your business can take towards being more honest with customers is letting them in. Giving clients access to all of their company platforms is a great way to remain transparent. Making sure that the client is the administrator of their own Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social media accounts is crucial. This way, the customer can maintain control over their accounts no matter which digital marketing agency they decide to work with.

Paid advertising campaigns are a bit of a different story. Typically, digital marketers have top level control over all client campaigns. This gives them the ability to organize all customer accounts side by side, with as little fragmentation as possible. However, marketers can still easily grant permissions to the client through these paid platforms.

It is also very common for digital marketers to withhold access to paid platforms, so that the client does not accidentally alter any campaigns. The real problem lies in marketers who do not provide genuine reports. Any reputable digital marketing agency should provide ample proof of their advertising efforts. These reports should highlight both the successes and failures of those efforts.

Employees

Many people assume that transparency involves only the customer, but true transparency concerns every aspect of the business. All employees, from the top to the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, are a part of the company’s transparency.

An article from Forbes suggests that there are four major components to improving transparency within a business: honest communication, open doors, collaboration technology, and sharing news.

One main takeaway from these four points is for leaders to be open and receptive of all employees. This can be done in many ways. Even something as simple as literally leaving an office door open can have a large impact. Allowing employees to feel heard and respected is vital in keeping their work efforts honest.

The same article also shows a focus on collaboration. Making an effort to keep each staff member up to speed with emails and instant messages can go a long way. These techniques make employees feel connected to one another, which in turn makes them more likely to maintain open and honest work behaviors.

Create the Perfect PPC Campaign in 5 Easy Steps

1.) Define Key Performance Indicators

Not all KPIs are created equal. When starting an advertising campaign, make sure to clearly state which metrics are most important to you. Do you want to focus on conversations, or reach? Do you want higher click-through-rates, or impressions?

For example, if the client is looking for new leads, you want to focus on conversions. If the campaign is generating a ton of clicks but still isn’t showing many conversions, then there may be an issue with your ad and whether or not it’s truly relevant to users. Lower volumes of clicks that actually produce sales are so much more valuable than massive amounts of clicks and no real results.

2.) Optimize Your Landing Page

Develop a simple, succinct, and foolproof landing page. Lead the user through your landing page effectively by giving them fewer options. Restricting actions such as navigating to a different page or downloading different files makes it clear what the correct actions are.

The best way to do this would be to create a unique landing page for an ad. This will also help you to see how well the ad is performing. Keep the landing page short and sweet with a quick contact form or sign up sheet, and you will significantly lower the risk of confusing the user.

Also make sure that the landing page is as relevant as possible to the ad. This will help to improve both the quality score of the ad, as well as its conversion rate.

3.) Boost Your Quality Score

There are so many simple ways to improve your quality score. Google’s algorithm gives first and foremost preference to the user’s experience. This means that it tries to show only the ads that are the most relevant to that user and their recent search. A better quality score equals better positioning on the results page. Oh, and did I mention that all of this is for free?

Here are a couple quick solutions to enhance your ad’s quality score:

  • Add sitelinks
  • Refine your keyword lists to improve relevance  
  • Optimize the landing page

4.) Focus on What Happens Next

The customer’s experience does not suddenly end once they click on your ad. There is always a next step. Did they fill out a form? Did they look at other pages on the website? Did they leave the website?

Try to dive deeper into how users are engaging with your brand, and what types of responses they are receiving. If they did fill out a form, where did that information go? Is it sitting in a file that no one ever checks on their computer’s desktop? Or is it being utilized and added to the company’s email marketing campaign contacts? It is not enough to simply have the information, it also must be used effectively.

5.) Don’t Stop Improving

Even if your campaign is performing well, it can always be better. Keep refining your keyword lists to make sure that all of the terms are extremely relevant to their ads as well as to potential customers.

Making these types of small changes over a long period of time is a strategy referred to as making “micro-wins” and can be explored further in this article of ours. Micro-wins won’t produce phenomenal results right away, but they certainly will over time.