Implementing the ultimate digital experience

Today’s shopper is 100% connected digitally 100% of the time. The proliferation in mobile devices means that customers can browse and buy whenever and wherever. With technology now being inseparable from everything consumers do and attention spans diminishing, this presents a new battleground for brands where they are being constantly challenged to innovate, cut through the clutter and keep up with this rapidly changing evolution.

It is the age of the customer. By adding value to every single customer interaction, at every touch point, today’s retailer cannot only make one-to-one customer engagement and capture loyalty, but also operate more efficiently, gain market share and drive profitable growth and brand engagement. In this piece, I wanted to share four simple steps brand marketers can take to ensure they are providing their customers with the ultimate digital experience.

Step 1: Define your objectives

The starting point is to agree your overall objectives and identify what would really transform your customer’s lives and bring your brand experience to life.

Do you want deploy an ultimate digital experience to increase sales and return on investment (ROI)? Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty? Boost conversion rates? Improve order accuracy?

Take a look at what your competitors are doing – but don’t follow their journey, create your own path. And push your existing agencies and technology suppliers to help challenge this and bring them on your journey.

Step 2: Prioritize the quick and easy wins

Once you have established your objectives, you need to prioritize and determine the most essential solutions and which ones are quick and easy to deploy.

It could be confronting the realities of your legacy technology. It could be better use of customer data collected across all touch points - turning them into insights through your analytics solution. It could be engaging customers in an interactive dialogue, capturing and connecting purchase history in store and online.

You won’t achieve everything overnight, but identifying incremental steps will help you prove the value of this journey to the business and set the path to success.

Step 3: Validate your existing ecosystem and extend it if needed

Use your incumbent ecosystem of technology providers and agencies to help. Your existing analytics solution may only be working at 30% of its capability; your marketing agency may be really experienced in marketing technology and social media activity.

Take a good look at what they have in their current toolkits to map your journey to delivering the ultimate digital experience and identify any gaps. Create and map your ecosystem for success.

Make the most of the new powerful and proven digital marketing solutions available. These ‘all-in-one’ cloud based services enable you to accurately deliver connected digital marketing campaigns. You can create personalized content and deliver it through the best channels to your consumers.

Step 4: Invest in customer engagement - not technology

This is an evolution. New digital marketing platforms equip you with tools to automatically analyse and store incoming data, helping you to refine your messages, channels and responses faster.

Monitor your success metrics on real time dashboards and value your ability to quickly and easily create and adapt your campaigns to delight consumers and deliver it through the best channels.

The ultimate digital experience

Turn the classical purchasing path to brand affinity and even advocacy with the ultimate digital experience. The ultimate digital experience boosts the traditional purchasing path by adding value at every stage of the customer purchasing path with personalized, relevant, content-rich, orchestrated engagement on the right time, at the right location using the right and preferred channel to enhance brand affinity at every touch point.

Omar Janabi is Senior Director of Marketing at Mapp Digital. Mapp Digital is one of the largest, global independent marketing technology companies. Our Customer Engagement Platform, with integrated Data Management Platform and customer-centric services assist mid-market and Fortune 500 companies maximize return from digital marketing executions.

Follow us @Mapp_Digital, or visit us at mapp.com