Marketers always want to know what other companies are doing well, how they’re doing it, and what technologies are allowing them to achieve their respective accomplishments.
Loyalty360 caught up with Joakim Holmquist, director of digital marketing for EPiServer, to find out what marketers are doing well−and not so well−when it comes to customer engagement.
In this era of digital marketing, what things are marketers doing well to engage customers and where are the areas you think they should look toward to improve engagement levels?
Marketers are getting increasingly well-versed in optimizing the customer journey for conversions. It has never been easier to go through the checkout flow when doing a purchase or filling out an online lead generation form.
However, given that a normal conversion rate hovers around 2%, there is an enormous opportunity in trying to engage the other 98%. Smart marketers go beyond remarketing campaigns to bring back non-converting visitors and work hard to find out what the remaining 98% really want to accomplish when they visit your site.
There is a lot of room for improvement in articulating and measuring stuff that adds value to your business in the long run, but that isn’t a conversion. Things such as getting visitors to follow you in social media, downloading a product brochure, sharing a video, etc.
How important is listening to customers for marketers?
As important as it has always been. Successful companies and marketers have always had a keen sense of listening to their customers and delivering on their needs. While in the physical world it’s easy to ask questions and give your customers a voice, many companies are not good at this online. Ask yourself: Do you have a clear idea of the top three things your visitors want to achieve on your site?
Can you explain what you mean by visitor intent and how marketers can leverage this for greater customer engagement?
Visitor intent is what a visitor is hoping to complete when coming to your website (or app). For example, getting a support issue resolved, applying for a job, researching a product, or completing a purchase. You should be able to group visitor intent in three to six main buckets and have clear goals associated with each intent. That way you can keep track of how good you are at getting visitors to complete their intended tasks.
Customers just want you to make it easy for them, getting out of their way so they can do something else. If people are coming to you with the intention of solving a support issue, your KPI should be the amount of support cases you are solving online without the customer having to do a channel switch that would inevitably cause them additional friction.
How does a marketer know that it’s truly customer-centric and meeting customer expectations?
By using Net Promotor Score (NPS) and asking the simple, but revealing question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? A positive NPS indicates a customer-centric company meeting customer expectations and a negative NPS indicates the opposite.
How do you define customer loyalty and has that definition changed or evolved in this era of digital marketing and the Empowered Customer?
My definition still revolves around the propensity for existing customers to engage and purchase from you more than once.
However, there are now several studies showing that customers care about effortless experiences, where you provide what you set out to do. No more. No less. And when things go awry, they just want you to fix it with the minimal amount of effort being invested from their side. A free cookie, a cheerful smile, or even a personal relationship with someone at your company is not what they want.
So unless you are one of the few companies in the world that base strategy on truly delighting customers (Ritz Carlton, Zappos, and Nordstrom might qualify here), the real opportunity is to find and reduce the friction your customers have in interacting and doing business with you. Not to drive loyalty, but to mitigate disloyalty.
This might sound boring or pessimistic, but here is the thing: This is a HUGE opportunity because customers invariably report broken journeys, where for one reason or another they are unable to succeed in what they set out to do when they came to you.