Why Connecting Your Customers With Your Product Is the Most Critical Aspect of CX

An amazing customer experience (CX) is a sought-after yet rarely achieved goal for growth marketing teams. In this article, David Greenberg, CMO, Act-On Software, dives into how marketers can reach this goal by supercharging engagement around their product or offering.

There is no shortage of competition when it comes to providing a stellar customer experience (CX), yet few have it right. To stand out in congested, noisy industries, great marketers aren’t only concerned with developing creative awareness and lead generation campaigns, but they’re also equally obsessed with extending the value of their offerings to existing customers. With 50% of consumers believing brands need to try harderOpens a new window , upleveling CX to this higher standard should be top of mind for any savvy CMO. But this isn’t your traditional platitude-driven CX strategy; this new era is all about finding ways to actually help your customers optimize your product or offering. By leveraging engagement data to personalize and segment products, truly CX-driven marketers learn their customers’ wants and needs from the inside out and, in turn, create more memorable campaigns for incoming prospects.

Here is how you can do it.

Learn More: 3 Principles To Make the Customer Experience More Human, At Scale

1. Using Product Engagement Data To Streamline Success

Tracking and acting upon the right product engagement data will provide insight into what is working (and what isn’t) in a marketing campaign. Traditional marketers are accustomed to keeping tabs on incoming leads and their overall pipeline. But marketers who win will be thinking of data much more strategically and addressing the most burning questions surrounding their product. How can we help them? How can we understand their use case?  How can we go above and beyond and provide proactive support? From onboarding to educating to maximizing every feature or service you offer, each touchpoint is an opportunity to learn more about their successes and failures.

Take, for example, the insights a marketer can pull from her most recent product “how-to” webinar. If she notices high attendance, it’s safe to assume a good chunk of her customer base is having a hard time navigating the topic or is simply interested in supercharging their expertise. Going a step further, she can analyze the comments in the webinar chat, track down which questions were most frequent and gauge the overall level of participation. With this data, she can immediately address commonly held pain points or subjects of interest by developing content that dives into each and promptly disseminating it amongst the attendees. This not only shows she’s listening, but it also shows she cares about driving customer literacy and evangelism.

By following these breadcrumbs, marketers can better serve their base while simultaneously informing future campaigns and proactive prospect/audience outreach. A customer’s problem or passion will likely be the same as an incoming prospect’s, so why let this data die before you can optimize it?

2. Product Engagement Changes Throughout the Customer Lifecycle — So Your Marketing Should Too

Your interaction with a new client doesn’t begin and end with the onboarding process. A successful marketing strategy requires you to keep customers engaged with your product continuously. This is where many companies fall short. They turn a lead into a customer and simply move onto the next. A great marketing automation platform will serve as your partner-in-crime for nurturing the entire customer lifecycle.

Without the proper technology, it can be arduous to track every single customer engagement thoroughly. By integrating your stack with the powers of marketing automation, you can passively track a plethora of useful real-time insights without lifting a finger. See a small sampling of tactics below:

• Engagement scoring: Scoring your leads’ intent based on their firmographics data and behavioral cues. Leads, customers and users all need to be measured differently.
• Intelligent follow-ups: Intelligent actions that are based on behavior automatically allow marketers to optimize the timing of contact, the message shared, and the suggestions created for offline contacts such as phone calls or direct mail.
• Customer-centered messaging through nurture campaigns: Nurture campaigns send different follow-up communications based on how a prospect interacts. The right marketing automation platform can then manage your leads on its own, based on their data and “digital body language.”

Whether you have a nimble team or a fully stacked marketing department, leveraging the power of automation gives you the ability to be in a million places at once. It also provides the agility to change strategies on the fly and ensure you’re only putting energy into campaigns that foster the kind of product engagement that turns into evangelism.

3. Leveraging Engaged Customers as Your Biggest Advocates

When a customer is engaged, they are likely receiving optimal value out of your product or service by utilizing all of its features. When this is the case, customers find the offering more memorable and successful, therefore turning customers into experts who receive a high ROI. This strengthens brand loyalty and trust, and, more so, it sets the stage for them to brag about the offering to their friends (hello new customers!)

Engagement is a strong signal that a customer is already actively finding value from a product or service. This is great, but how can you up-level that relationship? Take advantage of the fact that an engaged user is more likely to provide active commentary or respond to inquiries for customer feedback. Put this into action and give them a “seat at the table” by incorporating their feedback and understanding that your success is directly tied to theirs.

A handful of engagement metrics to track in this arena include help center requests, customer support and account management interactions, and in-product engagement. This valuable information gives you an on-the-ground look at how folks are interfacing with your product, brand, and people. For example, if someone has gone to the “I need help for X” button several times, that can trigger an automated proactive support communication plan to teach them how to do it. By showing them you are paying attention to every touchpoint, you’ll soon be known on the block as the brand that actually listens. In today’s highly involved consumer market, this is a crucial way to stand out amongst new prospects and keep customers coming back for more.

Learn More: 3 Ways Digital Omnichannel Customer Engagement Tools Help Small Businesses Compensate for Leaner Teams

Always Learn from the Past

The beauty of customer engagement is that the more it’s tracked, the stronger your campaigns get for incoming prospects. This “inside-out” mentality not only ensures that your priorities are straight and you’re treating those who already engage with your offering well, but it also makes it easier to onboard new customers into a culture you can be proud of. Set your CX on fire by always learning from past engagement mistakes and wins!