Your Guide to Simplifying the Digital Experience

Global eCommerce reached nearly $6 trillion in sales in 2022; web-based B2B sales, meanwhile, exceeded $2.5 trillion. Even historically brick-and-mortar businesses — like local restaurants, bodegas and pharmacies — deliver products to customers who place orders on the internet; those that don’t still rely on the internet for branding, promo and education. Nearly 80% of Americans shop online. More than 80% conduct online research before making a purchase. And 93% say online reviews influence their buying decisions. For SaaS and other digital businesses, every stage of the customer journey occurs online; for everybody else, the digital experience is no less integral to sales success. So what makes the digital experience successful? Simple. Simplicity. Simplicity in message and language, simplicity in design, simplicity in sales execution, and simplicity in support. Of course, “to achieve external simplicity,” we must “embrace internal complexity.” 

Simplifying the Digital Experience

Stage 1: Branding

Unless you’re Amazon, you can’t be everything to everyone. The most proven path to business success is finding a niche and meeting a need or solving a problem. So don’t get fancy. Research your closest competitors, conduct a SWOT analysis (of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), and develop your brand story by answering the following questions:

• Why and how were we created?
• What are our core values?
• What is our value proposition?
• What value do we provide consumers beyond our product/service offerings?
• What makes us special or unique?
• What is our brand personality and voice?

Stage 2: Data Collection and Target Audiences

Once you’ve established your identity, it’s time to determine the types of consumers that would most identify with your mission and values and most benefit from your products or services

• Use your existing zero-, first- and third-party data to learn as much as you can about your customers, subscribers, website users and social media followers
• Use an SEO tool to identify who your key competitors are targeting
• Use a CDP to organize and manage all your customers and prospects, segment audiences based on your user personas, and personalize your marketing, ads and communications
• Use any feedback your CX and sales teams have logged to identify gaps and opportunities
• Use surveys, focus groups and on-site design elements to learn more about what customers, prospects and the general public think of your brand, products/services and messaging
• Develop user personas, including personal background; professional background; user environment; preferred content types, platforms, devices and communication times/frequency; attitudes, interests, motivations, needs, goals and pain points; buying motivation(s), or what the user hopes to accomplish by purchasing; and buying scenario(s), or the context in which a user is likely to purchase
• Leverage the Empathy Map to enhance your user personas

The Empathy Map

Developed by Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE and co-author of Gamestorming, the Empathy Map “helps people step inside the heads of their audiences” to gain “a better picture of who we’re talking to when we design products, services, and experiences for people.”

To create yours, ask client-facing and senior-level internal stakeholders to answer the following for each user persona:

• Who/What is influencing this person?
• What are they hearing from these influences?
• What are their top priorities?
• What do they spend most of their time doing?
• What do they want to be doing?
• How is their world changing?
• What market trends are affecting them?
• What are they telling people?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What do they look forward to?

Stage 3: Design

Now that you know who you’re targeting and why, you need to ensure your website is designed to help you achieve your goals. 

Take a minute or two to think about your favorite websites. What do they all have in common? My guess: easy, intuitive navigation; straightforward, concise language; visual queues and interactivity; and clear, appropriate calls to action. Even with all these elements, though, there’s no guarantee a website will meet the needs of its target audiences. User-centered design (UCD) is that assurance; when applying the UCD framework in your web design, you don’t predict what your site visitors want, you learn directly from them and never settle, consistently improving the user experience. This not only benefits the user but also the brand, as the empowered user follows the path from awareness and discovery to interest and consideration and then onto making a purchase decision. 

To gather the data you need to create a user-centric site:

• Use A/B testing tools to conduct usability tests to verify which site features drive the most conversions or keep users on the site the longest
• Employ and leverage the learnings from eye tracking technology
• Employ website user feedback tools
• Conduct on-site surveys
• Conduct a sentiment analysis at all critical touchpoints

To implement, test, optimize and scale your user-centered design, follow these seven steps:

1. Conduct a behavioral audit of any existing digital designs, identifying gaps 
2. Review and identify trends in your customer survey results
3. Develop new data-driven designs, emphasizing the end user throughout the design and development process 
4. Solicit feedback throughout the design process, sharing your mood board, storyboard, wireframes and mockup
5. Continuously test the new designs and content against carefully selected control conditions, and keep a searchable results library of all experiments
6. Scale your winning design(s) and content approach(es) across your website
7. Continually monitor, analyze and iterate based on user behavior

Stage 4: Content Strategy

With the right website design strategy and elements in place, content marketing is king. Through SEO, ads and social media, content will bring users to your site. On your site, it’s your content that will inform, inspire, generate leads, and ‘keep them coming back.’

Your content marketing strategy dictates the content you’ll create, as well as the formats and mediums you’ll use; the review and approval processes you’ll follow; the audiences for which you’ll be creating your content; the cadence at which your content will be created, published and promoted; and even the tools you’ll use to create, publish and promote your content.

Developing Your Content Marketing Strategy

To ensure clear direction for your content marketing strategy:

• Define goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART)
• Start with your overall business goals, proceed to your long-term strategic marketing goals, and conclude with your content marketing and campaign-specific goals
• Identify the digital marketing KPIs against which you’ll measure your content’s performance
• Outline your expectations for each stage of the customer lifecycle

Once you’ve clarified who you’re targeting and what you hope to achieve with your content marketing, look back at what you’ve already created to determine whether it meets those deep, forensic, technical SEO requirements. Then, ask yourself:

• Is our content up to date? 
• Is our content optimized for search?
• Is our content evergreen? (Will your content last forever?) 
• Does our content meet the requirements for the intended stage of the customer lifecycle or sales funnel?
• Does our content have a clear target audience?
• Does our content include an appropriate CTA?

To conduct your audit, follow my seven steps to success — and: 

• Consider developing new campaigns with any content that already meets all the requirements (Keep)
• Remove any content that is outdated, contains inaccurate information and/or has performed poorly (Kill)
• Update any content that, if optimized, might perform as well as the content you’ve elected to keep (Refresh)

Next, and before you begin planning and creating your custom content, secure buy-in from all parties on how your content will be produced and disseminated. Specifically:

• Who are our content strategists; creators; reviewers; marketers; and analysts?
• How are the content themes and subjects determined?
• What types of content (e.g., blog posts, white papers, landing pages, or videos) are being created? And what unique step(s) does each type require?
• At what cadence is the content released?
• How are the content deadlines determined?
• Where, when and how is the content promoted? 
• What type of project management style (e.g., agile) are we adopting? 
• What project management software are we using (e.g., JIRA, for agile)?

Finally, flesh out your content marketing ideas. 

Start by outlining your core competencies, or the subject areas about which you have the most expertise — these will form your content hubs, for which you’ll create what’s called pillar content. Your content hubs can be created as sections of your website, or as long-form (blog) reads, with the pillar content providing a high-level overview of the subject, while linking out to more granular, funnel stage-specific content.

Next: 

• Interview internal stakeholders on topics their past work suggests would appeal to your audience(s)
• Look back at your content audit and identify the topics with the best performance
• Ask your high-value clients and influencers what inspired them to visit your site, request a demo, make a purchase or promote your brand
• Spy on your competitors — what concepts or content types do you see that you haven’t touched on or tried? 

Then, sign into your SEO tool, confirm your current SERP rankings and priority SEO keywords, and create your Target 10 SEO Keywords List.

With all this organized, you can identify gaps and opportunities related to your user personas, funnel or lifecycle stages, content types and keywords — with the goal of covering them all, as well as interconnecting related pieces of content to direct users down the funnel/lifecycle and toward your desired actions.

Once you’ve finalized your content plan, you can create your editorial calendar. 

Use your preferred project management software to build out a master calendar, as well as the timeline for each campaign, project and assignment, assigning all roles from development to approval and from distribution to monitoring, analysis, iteration and optimization.

Stage 5: Promotion

Alongside SEO, social media and digital advertising are the best methods for ensuring your content, brand and products/services are being seen. With the right target audiences, customer data and content strategy, you should be able to increase brand awareness, generate site visitors and leads, develop and nurture customer relationships and identify influencer marketing opportunities using social media and digital ads.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Your social media strategy dictates the social media-specific content you’ll create, as well as the formats, mediums and platforms you’ll use; the review and approval processes you’ll follow; the audiences you’ll target, as well as when, where and how often you’ll target them; and even the tools you’ll use to develop, schedule, release, monitor and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.

Develop your social media marketing strategy using everything you know about your customers’ and prospects’ social media preferences and activities — and create a sub-strategy for each social media platform based on their best use cases. Then:

1. Monitor and react. Many of the most successful companies on social media don’t merely stick to the plan, they continually seek out and take advantage of ever-changing trends.
2. Trust your social media team. If you trust your recruitment and hiring processes, you should be able to count on the people you’ve hired to strategize, implement and analyze your efforts on social media. If your company requires a litany of approvals before anyone can post, you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities — and stifle the creativity of your team.
3. Analyze and iterate. Each of your social media posts represents a learning opportunity. By tracking and analyzing your data over time, you can begin to identify audience trends and adjust accordingly, phasing out less popular campaigns and investing further in the most effective approaches.
4. Take risks, and develop a personality. You should have defined your brand voice already. All you need to do, then, is apply that voice on social media, consistently, and with vigor. Not every trend or snippet of industry news requires a response, but when you do participate, post with confidence and tell it like it is. This is the only way you’ll build that coveted ‘thought leader’ reputation. Also, it’s the best way for the world to learn what you stand for.
5. Use influencers and customers. Not in a manipulative way. This benefits everyone. Forty percent of teens trust influencers more than their friends, and 92% of all consumers consider peer reviews and user feedback to be the most credible source of purchase information. In other words, what sells is seeing other people using and discussing the product. What sells is showcasing characters that consumers either admire (i.e., influencers) or with whom they can relate (i.e., average users). So, create an influencer program with perks for participants, and keep an eye on those tags from customers because they’re (obviously) the best source of user-generated content.
6. Create community. There are multiple ways to do it and you just need one that works for you, whether it’s sparking conversation in the comments section of your posts, creating and curating Facebook Groups or Reddit Communities, or building a forum or social networking space for customers and prospects to congregate. The more people talk about what you do, the more the excitement grows — and with excitement often come conversions.

Digital Advertising Strategy

Also known as online advertising, internet advertising or web advertising, digital advertising is the practice of delivering promotional content to users through online and other digital channels, including websites, apps, audio and video streaming channels, and search results pages. Digital ads can be created in a variety of media formats including text, image, audio, video and even AR and VR.

All digital ads require the advertiser or sponsor to pay for the ad to be served, based on pay per impression (PPI), pay per click (PPC), or pay per action (PPA); all digital ads are goal-oriented (e.g., brand awareness or sales), measurable, and easily integrated with your CDP and DXP; all digital ads are backed by data, dictating ad type, target audience, timeline and more; and all digital ads fall into one of two categories: personalized, based on user activity, behaviors and interests, or non-personalized, designed to amplify overall brand awareness.

The 11 primary online ad types are:

1. Search
2. Display
3. Native
4. Mobile
5. Video, CTV and OTT
6. Audio
7. Retargeting
8. Social media
9. Influencer Marketing, Brand Sponsorships and Product Placements
10. Metaverse/In-Game
11. Chatbot

And that’s not all. You can now run ads:

• On screens at government agencies (e.g., the DMV); in elevators (e.g., in hospitals and office buildings) and taxis; and on gas pumps
• In apps we already use, including for work (e.g., Zoom and Outlook)
• In mobile push notifications (e.g., Uber pushing ads for other companies)
• On the packaging of products we’ve already purchased (e.g., a Honda ad on an Amazon box)
• In the background of our favorite TV shows and movies — even after they’ve been released (e.g., in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan)
• As popup banner ads over live TV
• Wherever we scroll on a webpage, via ‘sticky’ Google Side Rail Ads that stick to the page and follow you around

While not every ad format is appropriate for every campaign or even every brand, every digital advertising (and digital marketing) professional needs to know the ins and outs of each.

To find out which ad types are right for you, use the ultimate guide to digital advertising. 

Stage 6: Lead Nurturing and Conversion Optimization

No matter which path a lead has taken to enter your customer lifecycle/sales funnel, you’ll need an email (and SMS) marketing strategy to nurture them into a customer — and, ideally, a loyal follower and brand ambassador.

After all, good business isn’t about closing a deal, it’s about developing a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with your customers; the goal is to maximize the customer lifetime value of each prospect. And the only way to achieve this goal at scale is through the email drip campaign.

Hence the name, an email drip campaign isn’t a race — it’s a strategically scheduled, automated series of emails designed to methodically hand-hold the consumer from lead to customer, down the marketing-sales funnel. More holistic, comprehensive email drip campaigns don’t stop there, either, continuing to: 

• Provide value via thought leadership, exclusive offers and customer support
• Nurture existing customers into repeat customers and brand ambassadors
• Expand customer relationships through cross-selling and upselling opportunities

The two key elements of an email drip campaign are:

1. Email marketing automation, or the automated delivery of a specific email communication based either on a predetermined schedule (the foundation of your drip campaign) or in response to one of a set of predetermined user behaviors, actions or status changes (triggered emails with more specific focus)
2. Drip marketing, or the slow and steady release of a series of communications designed to maintain engagement and expand relationships without over-communicating 

Most importantly, with drip marketing and email automation, you write and design the emails once, and then your CRM — powered by your CDP or DXP — uses AI to leverage customer data and their behaviors/actions to automate the personalization and delivery of your emails. 

Building Out Your Email Drip Campaign

In case it wasn’t already clear, you may have to create a multitude of drip campaigns; e.g., triggered by:

• A newsletter subscription or unsubscribe
• A contact form completion
• A gated content download
• A demo request
• An ad-generated website visit and bounce
• An extended on-site session duration
• A completed survey
• An abandoned cart
• An initial purchase
• A birthday or anniversary
• An extended period of inactivity

No matter what, follow these eight steps in developing each email drip campaign:

1. Choose your trigger
2. Identify and segment your audience, based on the trigger
3. Map out your drip campaign and all the prospective paths, noting when and where along each path emails should be delivered
4. Write and design all your drip campaign emails and mid-campaign triggered emails
5. Create A/B tests with email subject lines, email preview lines, in-email messaging (e.g., tone, voice, length, etc.), and design elements (e.g., CTA buttons, image placements, headers and footers, etc.)
6. Turn on your drip campaign to begin dissemination and data collection
7. Measure and adjust based on performance, using the most tried and true digital marketing metrics but also moving beyond vanity KPIs like open rates to truly understanding sentiment and other key factors
8. Conduct periodic reviews to ensure your messaging and the experiences you provide do not go stale or become out of date

Although there’s no set rule on the number or types of emails to include in a drip campaign, there are established best practices based on at least a decade of experiential research. Most brands selling most things could adhere to the following:

1. The first email in the sequence should be sent immediately, establishing the relationship, thanking and/or congratulating them for/on their enrollment, outlining what they can expect from future communications (including the cadence), and offering an opportunity to unsubscribe
2. The second email should be sent either 24 or 48 hours after the initial signup, providing exclusive content to help in their research and offering personalized support
3. The third email should be sent one week after the initial signup, providing more granular, brand-specific information and links for product details, demos and comparisons
4. The fourth email should be sent 10 days from the initial signup, offering an exclusive discount or other buyer’s motivation
5. Follow-up marketing/nurture/educational emails should continue to be sent automatically and periodically over the course of the first month to any non-converted lead who hasn’t unsubscribed but also hasn’t taken any action to trigger sales
6. Any lead that takes no action in 30 days should be segmented out as “cold” — and can be communicated to quarterly, via monthly newsletter, during major promotions, or on a birthday or anniversary

This is the foundation of your email drip campaign. For optimal results, your email drip campaign must be supported by pre-determined trigger emails built in to deliver automatically based on a lead’s behaviors (e.g., clicking a link, watching a video, abandoning cart, completing a survey, opening an email but not clicking, unsubscribing). These types of actions, for instance, are what trigger the sales team to nurture the lead from middle to bottom of funnel and then from consumer to customer.

Like your initial drip marketing, these sales emails should also funnel recipients in one direction — by moving from a simple offer of assistance to a direct sales pitch. (Many times, a phone call is necessary to close the deal — but if managed correctly, your sales agents should be well equipped to move from automated messaging to one-on-one, person-to-person contact.)

Of course, the final trigger is the sale — while the sale, meanwhile, should initiate a second email drip campaign, structured similarly, to:

• Provide ongoing value 
• Not only retain but cross-sell and/or upsell the customer
• Develop brand ambassadors to do your promo for you

Stage 7: Customer Success and Brand Loyalty

To build brand loyalty, be sure your nurturing campaigns continue beyond the initial sale — and use my version of the User Experience Honeycomb, reconfigured for the full customer journey:

• Useful. Are our products or services useful to our target audience(s)? Do the user, prospect, lead and customer experiences we provide all offer value? How can we innovate to improve the usefulness of our offerings and how we communicate about them throughout the customer journey?
• Usable. Do we develop our products or services with our target audience(s) in mind? Do we design for ease of use? What improvements have been requested, and do we continually strive to streamline our offerings and how we communicate about them, based on user/customer feedback?
• Desirable. Are the products or services we offer what target audience(s) want? Do they solve a problem and/or otherwise meet their needs and goals? And what about the messages, interactions and experiences we provide — are they designed to promote the brand, or elicit an emotional response from our target audience(s)?
• Findable. Are our products/services and content discoverable through search, on social media, in the news, in stores, and/or via strategically placed native or banner ads? Can our customers continue to find us wherever they are (e.g., on their preferred social media platform or device), and for any reason (e.g., to make another purchase, or to fix a technical issue)? 
• Accessible. Do we simply follow the latest regulations on accessibility, or do we actively strive to deliver the best possible products/services and experiences for all people, irrespective of capability/disability, on all platforms and devices throughout the customer journey?
• Credible. Are we merely providers of a specific solution to a unique problem (if so, we have to be the undisputed expert), or are we industry insiders with extensive knowledge and experience? Do our C-suiters headline/keynote conferences; write articles, op-eds or guest posts; and/or appear as thought leaders in high-profile media? Is our website an eCommerce platform, or is it a hub for everything our customers (and future customers) need or want to know? Do we respond to complaints, listen to our customers, and showcase product improvements based on feedback?
• Valuable. Do we provide value to our customers, our employees, our partners, and our stakeholders? Do we continue to innovate to increase the breadth and depth of that value? 

Bonus: Digital Transformation

Even standardized, validated, deduplicated and consolidated customer data used to create customer profiles for advanced targeting needs a conduit. CDPs allow marketing, sales and CX professionals to use data for modeling, segmentation, targeting, testing and more, improving the performance and efficiency of your lead generation, nurturing and conversion efforts. They also integrate with end channels, like email marketing or digital advertising platforms. But they don’t do everything. And that’s where the digital experience platform, or DXP, comes in, leveraging the CDP’s “solid bedrock of data” for “the delivery of personalized experiences that consumers have come to expect and demand from brands.”

This is how you initiate your digital transformation.

Supporting Your Efforts

At Customer Engagement Insider, we specialize in custom content creation and syndication, designed to generate leads that convert. To learn more about how we can support your efforts at optimizing the customer journey (and simplifying the digital experience), download our media kit.

Image Credits (in order of appearance) 

1. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/wqtQnP1LUXw
2. Photo by Patrik Michalicka on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/r3iAqHb7JWs
3. Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/cY_TCKr5bek
4. Photo by UX Store on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/jJT2r2n7lYA
5. Photo by Skye Studios on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/NDLLFxTELrU
6. Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/tiNCpHudGrw
7. Photo by Jennifer Delmarre on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/IqmuHJF5khU
8. Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/M-ecv1ju6aM
9. Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/5IHz5WhosQE