How to improve the digital customer experience using data

The rise of ecommerce and omnichannel shopping means that customers have higher expectations of your brand both online and in-store. To remain competitive, you need to use the customer data you collect from digital touchpoints to create a heightened digital customer experience.

Digital customer experience is best explained as brand-specific interaction that your target customer has online with your brand. Big data in retail and retail data analytics solutions have raised the bar for the digital customer experiences offered in the retail industry.

The benefits of collecting customer data and using it to inform the digital customer experience—as well as the customer experience in stores—are vast. Additionally, pleasant and personalized digital experiences can drive higher profits, improve retention rates, and boost customer loyalty.

Here are some ideas to improve the online shopping experience you offer:

• Evaluate your current customer experience.
• Focus your customer acquisition strategy.
• Retarget one-time buyers.
• Track customer retention metrics.
• Optimize your omnichannel strategy.
• Develop automated customer journeys.

6 ways to improve the digital customer experience using data

1. Evaluate your current customer experience.

The first step to improving your digital customer experience is understanding the quality and cohesion of the current experience you’re offering. This will require that you analyze the existing customer data you have access to, as well as any direct customer feedback from surveys and NPS scores. From these, you should be able to better understand your customer's attitudes and behaviors to discover what’s working and what isn’t.

Additional data points that should help you determine where you are currently are ROIs of customer-centric strategies, engagement and growth exhibited within customer loyalty programs, and your overall revenue growth. Being able to track and measure your activities against actual customer behavior and core business KPIs is key to understanding and improving your digital customer experiences. Reviewing each of these metrics should accelerate and inform the development of subsequent digital experience strategies.

2. Focus your customer acquisition strategy.

After identifying your customers with the highest lifetime value, you want to focus your customer acquisition strategy on audiences who look like these high-value customers.

This high-value customer acquisition strategy powered by data analytics can provide both immediate and long-term returns by attracting first-time customers who are likely to go on to become repeat purchasers. This helps keep acquisition costs low which improves your overall margins.

3. Retarget one-time buyers.

A customer that has already bought from you is more likely to convert than another who is yet to make their first purchase. Retargeting this one-time buyer is an effective post-purchase marketing strategy that leans into customer data analytics to upsell customers with timely, targeted, personalized marketing campaigns after their first purchase.

Identifying the right time—during the period known as the “buyer’s high” following a customer’s first purchase—will require customer data analytics. By targeting customers at the right time with the right messages and offers, you are better placed to drive conversions. Overall, this strategy is an extraordinary opportunity to generate additional sales and grow customer lifetime value without less effort and fewer resources than you would have with new customer acquisition.

4. Track customer retention metrics.

Customer retention is the key to profitability for any business. By retaining a large base of high-value customers, you can grow your profits and improve word-of-mouth marketing without adding to the overall costs of new customer acquisition.

A proactive way to improve your retention rate and reduce the churn rate is to keep track of customer retention metrics such as customer lifetime value, churn risk and other predictive retention metrics, engagement rates, and other important customer-centric metrics. By understanding the signs customers exhibit in the weeks and months before they churn, you can intervene early to prevent churn.

Click here to learn how to measure customer lifetime value, one of the most important metrics for understanding the health of your business and customer base.

5. Optimize your omnichannel strategy.

The omnichannel customer experience refers to the integrated customer interactions across multiple shopping channels such as in-store and online. By maintaining a consistent omnichannel marketing experience across each channel and throughout the customer journey, you’ll better satisfy your customers and improve customer relationships with your brand.

This omnichannel strategy will require you to have access to complete, centralized customer data from every channel, as well as the ability to easily activate cross-channel campaigns. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can help you bring together all of your data from every channel into an easy-to-understand single customer view. From this view, you can track and measure omnichannel metrics, discover valuable customer insights, segment customer audiences, and automate campaigns across any channel and touchpoint.

Optimizing this omnichannel customer experience helps improve customer retention and brand loyalty. An example of an optimized omnichannel customer experience would be a system where once a potential customer reaches out to your support team, the staff is able to access the real-time record of all their previous interactions with the business, both online and in-store. Consequently, the customer will not be asked questions the business should already know the answer to, thus improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the customer service team.

6. Develop automated customer journeys.

Customer experience (CX) automation is the use of technology that facilitates communication between the brand and the consumer without repeated manual effort on the part of the marketing, retail, or service teams. Developing said CX automation could mean that your customers enjoy seamlessly personalized experiences, faster service, and ultimately higher satisfaction with your brand.

By using tools like a CDP to orchestrate automated customer journeys for every lifecycle stage, you can offer personalized engagement at the right time in the right channels, without stretching your time-constrained team and limited resources. This is a great way to differentiate the customer experience in retail, resulting in greater profits and stronger customer loyalty.

The common theme for all these CX ideas? Data.

In order to improve the digital customer experience you offer to customers, you need to have comprehensive customer data combined and enriched into one easy-to-use retail data solution such as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), as well as the ability to quickly gain customer insights from that data, segment audiences, and activate omnichannel campaigns.

Lexer is the Customer Data Platform of choice for leading brands like Quiksilver, Igloo, Nine West, Rip Curl, Supergoop!, and more. As the only CDP built for data-driven retail businesses, we help the world’s most iconic brands drive incremental sales from improved customer engagement.

Interested in using a CDP to improve your customer experience? Click here to learn more about the impact a CDP could have on your business, from digital transformation and revenue growth to cost savings and internal collaboration.

Use the calendar below to book a demo of Lexer’s solutions or contact us for more information.