86% of buyers are going to pay more for a service or a product that is going to provide excellent customer experience. Since marketers are the ones who engineer the journey of a buyer, it is not surprising to see the rise in prominence of customer experience strategy as a bargaining token for larger budgets. The efficacy of the strategy has received wide acceptance. In the last few years, the C-suite has been seen to soften in investments of marketing technologies as well as resources in order to provide an analysis of big data and improve the experience of customers. Gartner has recently made 3 predictions that pertain to the loosening of customer experience foothold.
- Profitability is going to replace customer experience as a no. 1 strategic marketing priority by 2022.
- The C-suite’s investment in customer experience programs funded through marketing is going to see a 25% budget reduction.
- By 2023, marketing analytics is going to have a 50% reduction in funding.
Digital marketing experts have worked so hard that they are fighting back to prove their value and not become an expendable business function. If you want to prove your value in the customer experience department, here are some the things you can do:
- Evaluate technology resources, invest in the right tools and make cuts
If the outlook in digital marketing is bleak, get rid of things that are not going to help you survive. One problem with digital marketers is that they are spending too much on integrating, outlining and envisioning data and not have enough time on actually using the data to improve processes or showcase their business value. The best way to go about this is through a technology audit.
You must know the specific purpose of every investment and use it to guide you when shopping. If the tools in your marketing stack does not have a particular purpose, you need to consider replacement or removal. Do not always go for the easy integration pitch. Integration of new platforms into existing systems is never easy. Make sure you do your research and ask certain questions regarding legacy software. Always ask for proof.
Do not always invest in shiny new toys. Each tool that you add is going to increase your workload and put a strain on your IT. You need to keep it simple, scale new technologies and make strategic decisions. Don’t always assume that bigger is better. Brands like Salesforce, Marketo and IBM are forces to be reckoned with but it doesn’t mean that smaller vendors can offer the same thing.
- Try to align your strategies and digital marketing tools with the long-term business goals of C-suite
The C-suite is getting tired of doing the same thing over and over. Vanity metrics such as impressions and click through rate don’t matter to them. What they are after are how your actions affect the top priorities for the company. According to Gartner, only 6 percent of the marketers place top priority on the right metrics to demonstrate value as it relates to customer experience. You need to learn what C-suite’s present business priorities are as well as how you can reposition marketing activities and technology investments in order to support their objectives.
- Create a long-term customer experience strategy that can be quantified and use the correct metrics to prove the impact of short-term business
The correct metrics referred to here are LTV or lifetime value and NPS or net promoter score. Lifetime value is a formula that is used to find out about the total value a company is going to get from a customer throughout the whole lifetime of the relationship. In order to calculate LTV, you need average order value, purchase frequency, customer value, customer lifetime value, detractors, passives and promoters. NPS can be derived through a short survey that uses 3 to 5 questions on a scale of 1-10 in order to gauge how loyal customers are to your brand.
NPS surveys can be conducted quarterly to check the rhythm of your customer relationships. In a lot of cases, internal marketing teams are stretched thinly in order to get immediate action, especially when it concerns expensive investments in technology and significant changes in strategy.