The Weekly Marketing Roundup: 24/01/2020

In this Weekly Marketing Roundup: 24/01/2020 we discuss how to maximise the customer experience with personalisation and automations. We will also talk about the importance of online reviews and how it influences future shoppers.

We're going to host an event on the 12th February 2020, partnering with Hubspot and Reviews.io. to discuss more about this topic. If you'd like to receive a private invite to this event, please comment below. #marketingnews #sydneydigitalmarketing #digitalmarketing #weeklymarketingroundup

Thank you for tuning into this Weekly Marketing Roundup: 24/01/2020. Here we discuss customer experience and online reviews. Join the conversation in the comments below.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience -- or CX -- refers to the sum of every interaction a customer has with a business, both pre- and post-sale.

According to 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, there are four key competencies businesses that must sustain to achieve long-lasting customer experience success:

1. Purposeful Leadership: Leaders operate consistently with a clear set of values.
2. Employee Engagement: Employees are aligned with the goals of the organization.
3. Compelling Brand Values: Brand promises drive how the organization treats customers.
4. Customer Connectedness: Customer insights are infused across the organization.

How to Improve Customer Experience in 4 Steps?

1) Purposeful Leadership

Failure to align senior leadership around customer experience initiatives could spiral into a number of implementation problems down the road, including inconsistent interactions, siloed information, and overall lack of buy-in.

You need to be organized.

If you have someone in the company that is dedicated to the improvement of customer experience -- a VP of Customer Success, a Chief Customer Officer, Customer Success Manager, etc. -- the strategy should begin in their hands, but bear in mind that they can't, and shouldn't be expected to, manage this type of change alone.

Ensure a clear plan for execution.

2) Employee Engagement

You want to focus on your ability to assist customers in accomplishing what they want to do.

Ensure that everyone in the organization -- especially the folks in customer-facing roles -- is aligned on how to deliver productive, purposeful customer interactions.

One way to do this? Create a customer journey map.

The best way to visualize how a customer interacts with a business is by mapping it. Most customer journey maps start as excel sheets that outline key events, customer motivations, and areas of friction within the user’s experience. Then, this information is combined into a comprehensive visual that describes an average experience with your business.

Depending on your product or service, you may want to create several maps that reflect specific customer interactions -- for example, onboarding. For other businesses, it's more helpful to define one comprehensive maps that includes everything from the first touch point to the very last engagement.

By clearly mapping out the stages a customer will go through before making a purchase, we're able to align the customer experience accordingly. But the buck doesn't stop once they open their wallet -- in fact, the post-sale experience is equally as important and should reflect the interactions leading up to the transaction.

3) Compelling Brand Values

These values should be aimed at providing clarity around both what you stand for as a brand, as well as what the overall shared vision of the organization is. this effort should be driven by leadership. However, it can turn into a company-wide initiative if you want to ensure that the ideas resonate with everyone before making it official.

4) Customer Connectedness

Customer data is one of the most powerful assets your company can leverage.

 You should evaluate software that makes it easy to bring customer conversations and context together!!

Not to mention, having the means to distribute customer insights across the organization can also:

1. Eliminate the need for laborious data collection before a customer's need can be addressed.
2. Help to create a competitive advantage by increasing efficiency and upping opportunities for more personalized service.
3. Help all departments create a deep understanding of the customer.
4. Make it easier to identify opportunities for up-selling and reengagement initiatives aimed at increasing revenue.
5. Inform the development of products or services.

3 Ways to Personalize the Customer Journey Experience.

To really increase the customer/brand bond, marketers should employ the full arsenal of personalizing techniques — in other words, producing experiences driven by data and relevant insights.

Indeed, If you’re a smart marketer, you know that the customer journey should not just be a shove down the sales funnel. It should be a bona fide experience that’s been tailored to the wants, needs and expectations of the customer.

1) Segment Your Customer Base

Purchasing Behavior

When your customers reach specific spending levels, they’re taken on a customized VIP journey that gives them added benefits like coupons, awards and special discounts. You can also use their past purchases to recommend additional items of interest.

Some experts recommend breaking down customer behavior into “personality types,” like:

• Persuadable buyers
• Buyers that need proof
• Risk-averse buyers
• Price-conscious buyers
• Buyers who research before purchasing
• Buyers who don’t have an urgent need

Stage of the Journey

You can also segment your audience based on where your customers are in the marketing journey. Indeed, this allows you to provide content that’s relevant to each stage.

Benefit Seeking

If you segment according to the benefits your audience is seeking, you’ll be able to offer more relevant products that are personalized to each segment.

Moreover, While purchasing behavior, journey stage and benefits are just a few of the ways you can fine-tune your audience segments, other options include: By loyalty, By usage level, By experience (satisfied vs. unsatisfied customers), By interest.

2) Personalize Your Brand

There’s no better way to do that than to send marketing emails from a real person in your organization rather than from a simple outbox address. When HubSpot did this, they saw their click-through rate jump from 0.73% to 0.96% with an additional 292 clicks added to the total.

You can also add pronouns like “I,” “our,” and “we” to speak directly to your prospect.

3) Pull the Trigger on Emails

Sending emails triggered by behavior has a 152% higher open rate.

Stay in Touch! Engage them! Reward Loyalty!

After a welcome sequence, many email marketers stop the conversation cold.

Instead, offer your customers additional relevant content, ask them questions about their experience or answer pertinent product- or service-related questions to keep your brand in their inbox — and in their thoughts.

Offering similar products, querying if your customers have questions, or just sending a simple reminder can often jump-start the marketing experience again and get your sales funnel moving.

Create better customer experiences by using Hubspot automations:

Marketing automation is the future.

Remember that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience!

Hubspot is a "Growth platform" that offers a monthly software subscription that delivers marketing, sales, and support tools to companies.

• Marketing products are designed to help companies create content, generate leads, and nurture them until they're qualified and sales-ready.
• Sales products are designed to help companies engage potential buyers, demonstrate the value of your offering, and close deals, and,
• Support products are designed to help companies Resolve customer issues to ensure success that generates positive word of mouth.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to the process of using software to automate marketing tasks and activities.

Marketing automation delivers many benefits:

• Marketing team efficiency
• Improved personalization
• A better experience for customers

Think of marketing automation like building a house. You need to lay the foundation of the home before you can begin building anything. You need to carefully plan and design the project.

Automation Means Less Focus on Strategy

Marketing Automation is Not the Cure for Growth:

Marketing automation certainly makes executing marketing strategies easier for both teams and individuals. But automation is not a cure for slow growth, either.

HubSpot Marketing Software Workflows

These workflows are the steps and sequences that HubSpot will execute based on a variety of triggers. Those triggers could be simple — like signing up for your email list triggering a string of automated marketing emails. Or they could be more complicated — like viewing a specific blog post triggering a completely different string of emails, outside of your normal campaigns.

Importance of online reviews and how it influences future shoppers.

One of our partners, Reviews.io is a review platform that helps you build traffic, trust and conversion.

With 82% of Australians basing their buying decisions based on customer feedback, reviews have never been more important.

Collecting reviews in the right way with the right provider makes a BIG difference in not only ROI but also ensuring they are being leveraged in every possible way and channel. Reviews.io is a Google licensed provider.

A customer review is a reflection of someone’s experience and feedback on your company’s products or services. They’re found on sites such as Google Reviews, Amazon, Yelp, and social media. Consumers use reviews during the purchasing process to understand how your product works and if it’s worth the investment.

Moreover, Customer Experience is about perception. No matter what you think about your brand or the experience you provide, the customer experience is what each of your customers perceives it to be.

Reviews have become a valuable resource for shoppers because they get to read first-hand examples of what real customers experiences with your business were really like.

Understanding and Improving the Current Customer Experience

Your reviews aren’t just valuable to the potential customers reading them; they can be equally as valuable to you and your business as well. With the right tools, reviews can help you understand a lot about the way customer perceive your business and how you can improve those perceptions in order to better the overall customer experience.

52% of customers who have left a bad review expect to receive a response from the business within 7 days or less and 21% expect a response within 24 hours. This expected response time is reduced even further for comments and reviews that are left on social media, with 46% of consumers expecting a response within just 6 hours!

Responding to reviews will also help improve the perceptions of both those who left the review and those who will be reading them.