How many times have you stopped engaging with a brand because of one digital experience—like a bombardment of impersonalized emails?

Surveys show that 32% of customers will stop all future touches with a brand after just one bad interaction. That might not seem like a large figure at first, but if 32% of 1,000 walked out the door, that’s a major loss of 320 potential brand advocates.

This is why the digital experiences you provide people with are so crucial. If you don’t have a solid understanding of the journey your customers take to a sale, you’re much more likely to accidentally deliver engagement-ending digital experiences.

So, to avoid 320 (or more) potential customers writing off your brand for good, you’ll need to build a strong foundation with a digital customer experience strategy. And we can help with that!

What Is digital customer experience (DX)?

To get the clearest picture of the digital customer experience, put yourself in online shopping mode. The last time you considered buying something, you probably had multiple touches with the brand:

1. You saw a social media ad and clicked through to the website. 
2. You received an email from that brand talking about the ease of buying and tracking orders through their app. 
3. You downloaded the brand’s app and found the products you wanted at a discount.

Simply put, all these online interactions with a brand across the entire journey, pre-sale and post-sale, constitute a user’s digital customer experience (DX).

What Is digital customer experience strategy?

Realistically, customers who have just one digital experience with a brand before making a purchase…are extremely rare. Moreover, even if you do acquire a customer through a single digital experience that effectively inspired their FOMO, the number of those that then become brand loyal is even lower.

Because the majority of your customers can be expected to cross paths with your brand multiple times over their lifecycle, you need a well-thought-out digital experience strategy to keep them engaged at pivotal moments.

Your digital experience strategy is the plan your company will follow to ensure that each step of your users’ online journey works together as a holistic unit. 

Successful digital customer experience management doesn’t stack different independently operating online channels on top of one another and call it a day. The goal isn’t to simply cast as many blankets over as much digital real estate as you can. 

Rather, successful strategies build relationships between all parts of the digital journey, unifying the full experience seamlessly from the web, to email, to app, and onward. They engage people with the right messaging at the right moments to smooth out the transition from prospect to sale, to brand advocate.

Why is Digital Customer Experience strategy important?

It’s no secret that digital channels have become a vital component of customer experience. People do the vast majority of their “window shopping” through digital devices, even if they plan to eventually purchase in-store, or speak with a representative.

It’s been found that companies who invest in omnichannel efforts, including digital experiences, saw that the average amount spent by customers per shopping moment increased by 4% online, and by 10% offline.

Millennials specifically have been known to prefer consulting a digital device about a brand or a product before ever setting foot in a store—and this behavior has resulted in 13% more spent per shopping trip than single-channel customers.

Neither offline customer experience, nor digital consumer experience, exist in a vacuum. Today, if you’re not investing in a strong digital customer experience strategy, you’re missing out on a significant chunk of additional sales.

Digital customer experience strategy frameworks of maturity

Every company currently has a varying level of digital customer experience maturity. Online as well as offline, your DX maturity refers to how well you understand, engage, and hone your digital customer journey.

There are multiple levels of DX maturity—typically, four to six. It might surprise you to know that the majority of businesses, even large revenue earners, have a CX maturity that leans toward the low end of the scale. Achieving mature DX strategies is an intensive process. Certainly worth the effort—but involved nonetheless.

Thankfully, there’s a lot of research on there surrounding the measurement of CX maturity, and what separates mature from immature DX.

Temkin Group’s framework, for instance, describes DX maturity across six stages. According to their model, the biggest divider between immature DX and mature DX is the willingness to change company values, processes, and culture as a whole to evolve around the customer journey.

Jeanne Bliss’ framework also stresses the value of aligning company leadership and culture with the customer experience you want to deliver, embracing customer feedback, and viewing individual customer journeys as assets.

6 key components of a mature digital customer experience strategy

Regardless of the framework source or number of steps to maturity, the learnings across them are similar: To reach DX maturity, the company as a whole needs to evolve.

But what exactly does that entail? Next up, we’ll go over some of the major pieces surrounding how to improve digital customer experience strategy. These are principles of customer experiences that leading organizations have successfully fine-tuned to achieve DX maturity.

Heads up: If you’re curious to know what stage of DX maturity you’re at now before you learn how to improve across these major areas, here’s a quick fifteen-question assessment.

Condensed and centralized data

Many companies believe that more data is better—and that’s not necessarily untrue. However, an overwhelming amount of data coming from multiple different sources at once actually does more harm than good. And not all collectible data will help you evolve your DX.

Having datastreams that prioritize data around your core KPIs, and being able to centralize that data for holistic analysis, is one key player in DX maturity. And you’ll need an intuitive omnichannel customer journey analysis tool to help you achieve this most effectively.

Mobilize all teams for a common goal

Not surprisingly, what’s happening within company walls heavily affects how mature your DX can be. Having various teams that handle multiple channels, data analysis, content creation, and so on is a good start—but now, all these teams need to work together to the same ends.

Establishing a company culture that identifies the common DX goal for every team, involves each team in the progression toward that goal, and encourages teams to collaborate will ultimately lead to a successful DX.

Clearly understand and orchestrate customer journeys

You might have a general idea of the steps your customers take toward a conversion. After all, most marketing-savvy people have seen a sales funnel before, and recognize the difference between the top of funnel touches and bottom of funnel touches.

However, understanding a full customer journey goes beyond the typical linear marketing funnel. Customer journeys are often seen as cyclical, and you can’t always predict the order in which every type of customer will progress to your desired action.

Customer maps can help you define the different customer personas that experience your brand, and build a better understanding of customer paths based on real-time data. 
Make no mistake, mapping out the intricacies of the (likely multiple) customer journeys you have will take time and dedicated research. But the result is then being able to anticipate how best to engage with your customers at crucial points in their evolving journeys.

Unify content

Having a wealth of amazing content is step one. Keeping that content where everyone can access it and know what content should be used where? That’s another story.

Organization is key for unified digital experiences. If your teams can’t find the relevant content they need, or if each team has access to varying versions of the same content, it’s impossible to make a seamless DX.

Achieving DX maturity normally means investing in robust Digital Asset Management (DAM) software that can keep all your content teams on the same page.

Personalize and engage

Even two customers at a similar place in their journey might respond differently to the same messaging. That could be because each of these customers took different paths to reach the same ends, or are anticipated to take different paths after the current point.

Personalization that takes into account who your customers are and how they’ve interacted with your brand already helps feed a more engaged customer journey overall.

These personalizations can be experiences like:

• Offering customers discounts on specific item categories they’ve viewed.
• Organizing navigation to prioritize the content they’re most interested in.
• Tailoring search results to their history.
• Reaching people with customized e-mails triggered by their specific activities.

Some of the best digital customer experience examples come from brands that work with AI and automation tools to send customized messaging when it counts the most. Moreover, they’ve usually integrated their site with these automation tools, creating A/B testable experiences that automatically cater to different customer journeys.

Real-time analysis and experimentation

Because the customer journey constantly evolves in real-time, much of the work you’ll be doing to achieve and maintain DX maturity will be re-evaluation and experimentation.

There’s always a “next best thing” we can do to resonate better, even with customers we thought we had figured out. So it’s best not to look at a customer journey as a challenge you solve once.
Businesses that have achieved DX maturity are constantly experimenting, learning, and reworking using digital customer experience analytics gathered in real time.

Looking forward: Digital customer experience trends

As you’re getting ready to map out your customer journeys and strengthen your digital experience, you should know that the demands of digital experiences are rapidly changing.

Keeping an eye on what consumers expect from digital experiences, and being aware of oncoming changes to the digital landscape, will be key in building a proactive (rather than reactive) DX.

That said, here’s a quick look at some key trends that all companies should have their eyes on when building their DX:

• Predictive analytics: Invest in technology that helps you predict and respond to your customers’ next moves.

• Chatbots and DX: Customers are beginning to favor the convenience, availability, and capability that modern support bots provide.

• Personalization: Consumers want more than their name slotted into a bulk email. Customized recommendations, navigation, and memory of past engagements are vital.

• On-brand omnichannel: Robust omnichannel strategies that present themselves the same across all channels (even offline) retain 89% of customers.

• Data security: Cookiepocalypse is happening. Asking for consumer consent and making your privacy policy accessible is more important than ever.

• Transparency: Put all fees, pricing, and delivery expectations in front of your customers from the start to create lasting brand bonds, and share the “not so corporate” side of your business with tactics like user-generated content.

Real-time data: Leverage real-time data analysis technology to analyze and respond to customer moments as they’re happening, not after the fact.

Conclusion

Consumers progressively expect more of the brands they interact with digitally (as well as offline), and it makes sense! We’re living in an age where personalization, convenience, and consistency are more important than ever.

By now, you should have a solid understanding of what DX is, and how you can achieve a successful DX strategy. But we know that this knowledge alone can be hard to assemble and act on without a set of robust tools to take care of the tedious parts. 

Adobe’s suite of industry-leading digital customer experience services comes in handy for not just one, but every piece of the customer journey—whether it’s orchestration, personalization, and on. And if you’re worried about bringing more robust platforms onboard, our Adobe magicians can take the tediousness out of that part for you, too.
So…how are your customers interacting with your brand today?