7 Steps to a Better Customer Experience

According to research, by 2020, digital commerce will account for half of all B2B revenue. At the same time, B2B revenue from offline channels will decrease by 20 percent. This means your mandate as a B2B marketer is to create hyper-personalized, seamless, omni-channel campaigns that resonate with each customer. It’s a tall order, but not an impossible one, especially since there are martech tools that can help you develop and send personalized omni-channel campaigns at scale. The steps you will need to take in order to achieve your CX goals are:

Step 1:  Prep Your Data

Personalized campaigns require high-quality data that is clean, complete, enriched and standardized. When customers encounter campaigns that are tailored to their individual needs it demonstrates to them that you are listening and that you care. It also simplifies their work-life, which increases their brand loyalty to your organization.

Martech: To ensure data is campaign-ready for any channel, integrate your CRM, MAP and any other data source with a data management tool that cleans and enriches data in real-time.

Step 2:  Map the Customer Journey

It’s imperative that everyone on your team understands each touchpoint in the customer sales cycle. Tracking their interactions will reveal insights that help you improve their experience of your brand. It will also reveal where prospects are dropping off in the process and which campaigns are generating the most action, among other insights.

Martech: A CRM, a MAP, a data management tool, and a marketing/data dashboard are the main tools you will need to monitor CX on an ongoing basis.

Step 3:  Develop Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)

As you analyze customers according to a variety of variables such as demographics, geography, industry, size, titles, etc., you should begin to see some patterns and commonalities that your best customers and biggest deals have. Knowing the characteristics of your ICPs is critical to your ability to target prospects well through segmented lists.

Martech: A CRM, a data management tool, and a marketing/data dashboard will help you analyze and visualize customer data and pinpoint ICPs.

Step 4: Segment Lists

Targeting the right customers with the right messages through personalized campaigns is much easier to do when you segment your campaign lists into groups that share similar interests, backgrounds, needs, budgets, etc. Another reason that you need to segment your lists is to prevent unsubscribes. A whopping 56 percent of customers and prospects, who unsubscribe from an organization’s communications choose to do so because the content is not relevant to them.

Martech: Your CRM and data management tool should allow you to export segmented lists to your MAP.

Step 5: Develop Personalized Campaigns

To execute this step well, your creative team will need to have a solid knowledge of the needs of each segment you plan to target. Depending on your customer communication preferences you will want to be sure campaigns include multiple channels, from SMS and MMS, to email and RSS, to voice, chat, direct mail and beyond. Ask customers what channels they prefer for communications, as well as how often they want to hear from you, and then honor their wishes.

Martech: A project management tool will help keep teams and campaigns on track for deadlines, and a content management tool will allow your team to develop a library of content, which will save money on the costs of developing future content.

Step 6: Automate Campaigns

Companies that are adept at sending hyper-personalized omni-channel campaigns often use a combination of content management tools and MAPs to build a customer journey that is truly engaging. The best content management tools make personalization even easier by pulling content from across your enterprise, organizing it into queues for various channels, and sending no-touch personalized campaigns.

Martech: A MAP and a content management tool that is integrated with data sources across your enterprise will enable you to send hyper-personalized omni-channel campaigns with greater speed, frequency and efficiency.

Step 7:  Monitor Campaign Performance

Once campaigns are out there, it’s important to track the open rates, click-through rates, opt-out rates and requests for materials, as these metrics will demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of each campaign and enable you to make modifications that ensure subsequent campaigns perform even better.

Martech: A MAP and marketing/data dashboard with reporting capabilities will allow you to track campaign performance with ease and share reports with everyone involved in the campaigns.

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