Transforming customer journeys with digital experience strategy

Drive brand loyalty through a compelling digital experience strategy

Here's how to develop a customized digital experience strategy that resonates with your audience and elevates your brand.

• Leverage Digital Platforms and Technologies
• Understand the Difference Between DX and CX
• Focus on Key Components of DX
• Implement a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
• Adopt Emerging Technologies
• Personalize the Customer Experience
• Create an Omnichannel Experience
• Monitor and Optimize

Keep reading to learn more.

Did you know 65% of customers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising? And that 71% of customers recommend a service or product after a great experience. 

That’s where digital experience (DX) is essential in enhancing the customer journey. 

Brands that provide a great shopping experience at every digital touchpoint of the customer journey are more likely to generate loyal customers.

So, what is a DX, and what digital experience strategy can you follow to enhance this experience?

Let’s explore!

Digital experience landscape

A digital experience (DX) is an interaction between a customer and a brand. DX is possible only because of digital platforms or technologies.

Usually, a digital experience begins on one platform and transitions onto another. For example, a customer may download your mobile app but start the conversation by sending an email requesting features of your products. The same customer visits your website to end the conversation (make a purchase).

Websites, social media platforms, mobile apps, e-commerce sites, content, and smart devices provide customers with a digital experience.

Today's digital experience landscape includes artificial intelligence (AI), headless CMS, and customer data platforms. With these technologies, brands can design a hyper-personalized and real-time customer experience. This translates to higher engagement and loyalty. 

But how is it different from customer experience (CX)?

While CX and DX may sound identical, they’re not. DX consists of online platforms like mobile apps, smart devices, websites, and mobile apps. However, CX exceeds the boundaries of these channels and includes customers' online and offline experiences.

In short, DX is a subset of CX. 

Key components of digital experience

The key components in creating a successful DX include:

User interface (UI)

The user interface is the face of the technology through which the user first sees and interacts with your business. The login screen or homepage are all examples of the UI your potential customers initially see. It controls the look and feel of your digital interface. UI shapes the first perceptions about your brand.

With a well-designed UI increasing website conversion by 200%, ensure your UI is intuitive and easy to use.

User experience (UX) design

User experience (UX) design reflects your brand’s ability to deliver a smooth and seamless user experience. Through user research, UX design predicts how customers will use your digital products and services.

UX design is about ensuring a consumer can complete the task at hand. So, it’s crucial to consider accessibility, responsiveness, and ease of use.

Customer experience (CX)

The customer experience approach focuses on the perception that a customer develops while buying a product or a service from your brand. CX involves nurturing good customer relationships for repeat purchases and referrals.

With positive customer experience encouraging 81% of customers to purchase, CX ensures customers enjoy their lifetime with your brand.

The role of a digital experience platform

A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated collection of technologies that manages your brand’s DX across various touchpoints.

E-commerce, content management, localization, analytics, and personalization are the core elements of the DXP. It helps you deliver a consistent experience. 

Brands can use DXP to build, deploy, and improve websites, mobile apps, and portals. After a DXP implementation, brands:

• Provide a digital experience with timely, unified, and continuous access to information, knowledge, and interaction.

• Apply UX design practices like journey mapping, personal modeling, and data-driven insights. This improves the overall customer experience at all touchpoints.

• Personalize content content creation and product recommendation. 

• Aggregate and track key performance indicators (KPIs) by gathering data from multiple digital channels.

Today, digitally sophisticated and visionary companies cannot afford to ignore DXP platforms. Brands with multiple touchpoints and high stakes in digital experience are more likely to benefit from DXP platforms than others. 

Case study

Let’s understand the role of a composable DXP using a case study. 

Solo Stove, a mid-market retailer, switched to Contentstack’s composable DXP to drive higher conversions and sales. The composable DXP helped the company increase web traffic by 60% and online orders by 200%. 

Adopting a composable DXP is the future for brands looking to create omnichannel campaign experiences to drive higher conversion rates.

Strategies to enhance digital experience

Creating a digital experience doesn’t happen overnight, but that doesn’t give modern brands the bandwidth to ignore it. But the good news is that by using a few strategies, you can elevate your DX.

Know your customer expectations

An excellent digital experience is built on knowing what your customers expect. Brands need to understand that customers have different requirements at different times. So, you need a solution that works for individual customers.

Once you know what content they love, how they navigate, or what kind of UI design attracts them, you can enhance their digital experience.

That’s where digital experience platforms (DXP) like Contentstack provide you with information, such as engagement and interaction data of customers. This helps you create a robust digital customer experience strategy. 

Create personalized experience

With 71% of customers feeling frustrated with an impersonal shopping experience, providing personalized experiences is the key to an effective digital experience strategy. Show customers that you’re looking for them and not targeting a particular demographic, segment, or personality under which they fall. 

Instead, you’re searching for them as individual customers. Companies like Netflix are witnessing tremendous growth — they curate their content and products for individual customers. 

You can achieve this by using artificial intelligence and machine learning to study, analyze, and understand individual customer behavior. A personalized experience starts when you recommend products or services based on the customer's recent search. 

Implementing this type of personalization isn’t a one-time effort — it’s an ongoing process. If your customers are ready to share data and information with you, they expect something in return!

Use omnichannel for a unified experience

Given the numerous digital touchpoints customers use — whether mobile apps, websites, social media platforms, or email — creating an omnichannel experience is challenging.

Providing an omnichannel experience means having a unified design, synchronized customer data, and integrated customer support across all your digital points. 

For instance, if a customer interaction starts on an email and continues on a mobile app, customers receive the same experience. The interaction starts from where they left off.

That’s good because you know where to restart the interaction when a customer reaches out about the same issue on different digital channels. 

Use digital twins for advanced experience planning

Digital twins are virtual twins of your product or service. You can test them under various scenarios in your digital environment and measure their performance before building on them in the real world. 

A digital twin is a great way of creating avatars representing your target audience. This helps you visualize them, better comprehend customers’ behavior, and identify areas for improvement.

For instance, your customer’s digital twin may reveal that customers leave your website within two to three minutes of arriving on the home page. This may suggest issues with the user interface or the content quality. 

You can test different strategies through these digital twins. For instance, you can tweak some of the elements in the user interface and then measure the effect on the customer’s behavior.

Watch the video below to see how Contentstack helped ASICS Digital deliver global experiences.

After successfully addressing the needs of its global consumer and business-customer base, Peter Nealon (Vice President, Engineering at ASICS Digital) said:

“By making the switch to Contentstack, we’ll be able to provide creative, unique content experiences and operate with speed and flexibility for years to come.”

Emerging technologies in digital experience

Emerging technologies enhance the speed and smoothness of the digital experience and provide a uniform and consistent DX. Here are a few technologies that can impact the future of the digital experience landscape.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

With customers getting used to interaction with chatbots and various voice command devices, AI is one technology that will profoundly impact the digital experience.

Today, based on what chatbots have learned from their past conversations with customers, they can predict the next best action and even handle transactional calls, which humans previously answered.

By recognizing customer’s moods and emotions, chatbots can transfer calls to humans, providing a seamless digital experience.

Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics employs past and present information to predict future customer actions. With predictive analytics, you can understand customer needs, enhance your marketing strategy, and make data-backed informed decisions. 

This helps you offer tailored products or services to customers before they even realize their need for such products.

Customer journey optimization

Customer journey optimization improves a customer's experience with a brand. This optimization starts when a customer hears about your brand and lasts until the customer makes a purchase and beyond.

By monitoring each touchpoint, you can understand which needs you can fulfill to improve the digital customer experience.

FAQs

What is the best approach to building an effective digital experience strategy?

In developing a digital experience strategy, understand what your customers expect, leverage suitable tech tools in your tech stack, and continuously enhance your services using customer feedback.

What tools are required for digital experience management?

The tools you require for digital experience management are DXP, analytical tools, data platforms, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

What metrics help you assess the success of your digital experience strategies?

You can use metrics such as conversion, customer satisfaction, engagement, and retention rates to measure the success of your digital experience strategies.

What distinguishes digital experience from customer experience?

Digital experience refers to every digital interaction a customer has with a brand. In contrast, customer experience considers interactions through online and offline platforms.

Why should AI be used in digital experience strategies?

Artificial intelligence is crucial in digital experience as it helps with personalization, predictive analytics, and automated customer care. This offers a seamless customer experience.

Learn more

As brands strive harder to achieve customer loyalty and fulfill their expectations, providing a superior digital experience is necessary. That’s why a composable digital experience platform (DXP) is the key to a successful digital experience.

Composable digital experience platforms (DXP) like Contentstack assist brands in delivering unique omnichannel digital experiences. Request a demo, or if you have a question, do not hesitate to contact us.