Whether you sell apparel, beauty products, or software, all eCommerce businesses revolve around the customers that support them with sales; without customer sales, eCommerce businesses simply wouldn’t exist! While generating revenue from customers is essential to keeping eCommerce businesses afloat, it’s not enough to focus on purchases alone. Successful businesses prioritize their customers at every step of their buyer’s journey through Customer Experience Management (CXM).
CXM allows your business to tailor its operations to varying segments and interests, giving equal attention to every customer, despite where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Adding CXM to your business strategy can help you and your business
a) Streamline customer experience efforts across all of your operating channels,
b) Re-prioritize customer experience in existing strategies, like email marketing, and
c) Maintain customer experience as a pillar of your overall business strategy.
But, before you can add CXM to your business strategy, you need to go back to basics and fully grasp what CXM is all about.
In the following sections, we’ll explain what CXM is, what you need to know about your audience for CXM, and how it can be integrated with an existing strategy like email marketing.
So, are you ready to start putting your customers first again? Let’s get started!
What is CXM?
You might hear “customer experience” and immediately think that CXM is about customer satisfaction. While that’s partially true, Customer Experience Management has a wider focus than satisfaction alone.
According to Microsoft, CXM “is a system of marketing strategies and technologies that focus on customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience.”
Essentially, a CXM strategy helps your business to first identify customer expectations, and then exceed them in every way possible.
This does lead to customer satisfaction and happiness… but it also leads to trust, loyalty, advocacy, recommendations, reviews, word-of-mouth advertising, retention, new client acquisition, repeat purchases, and more.
Things to Consider Before CXM
At this point, you might be thinking that CXM is the perfect solution for your eCommerce business.
While you might be right, don’t plan too far ahead just yet; there are other things to consider, first.
Before diving straight into developing your Customer Experience Management strategy, there are 4 things you need to understand about your audience, first.
1. Customer Characteristics,
2. Customer Journey,
3. Customer Preferences (Analytics), and
4. Customer Opinions (Feedback).
Ultimately, you can’t develop any form of CXM without a concrete understanding of these 4 areas of your customer base. After all, how could you possibly achieve customer success if you don’t know anything about your customer in the first place?
1. Customer Characteristics
Before even considering a CXM strategy, you need to know who makes up the audience that you’re trying to serve, what issues they have, and what they value.
A good place to start is by answering the following questions.
■ What is the demographic of your audience?
□ Sex, age, location, marital status, parental status, income, education, etc.
■ What problems does your audience have?
□ Then, how does your product/service solve that problem?
■ What values does your audience have/what do they care about?
□ Then, how do you reflect these same values?
Once you have a clear understanding of your customer characteristics, you can apply this knowledge to your customer’s journey.
2. Customer Journey
The customer journey (or buyer’s journey) is a commonly used concept in sales and marketing, outlining the different stages of a customer’s “path to purchase.”
The customer journey has 3 main stages:
1. The Awareness Stage: the buyer becomes aware of a problem they need to solve.
2. The Consideration Stage: the buyer starts considering solutions to the problem.
3. The Decision Stage: the buyer weighs their option and makes a decision on a solution.
While these 3 stages are always part of the customer’s journey, it’s not enough to just accept them as-is.
You need to consider how your specific buyer fits into each of these stages, first. Then you can move on to examine their preferences along the way.
3. Customer Preferences (Analytics)
Understanding your audience’s preferences when it comes to advertising and communication is key to developing successful marketing tactics and, eventually, a strong CXM strategy.
This is where customer preferences come into play because one of the best ways to understand preferences is through analytics.
Evaluating which content is the most successful with your audience can (and should) inform your future marketing decisions, encouraging you to put out more of what is working, and less of what isn’t working.
Analytics are a helpful way to see preferences through data, but another great way to find out what your audience thinks is just to ask for their opinion!
4. Customer Opinions (Feedback)
Asking for feedback is the simplest way to understand your customer base prior to developing a CXM strategy, and can be easily tailored to your business and existing platforms.
For example, you can easily send out an email asking for reviews and linking to a review platform like Okendo, or even put out a call for feedback on social media.
When you directly ask your audience for feedback, a few things happen.
1. You get a clear, direct response to what real people are thinking about your brand/product/service.
2. Your audience feels appreciated and recognized by you because you’re showing you actually care.
3. You start building social proof for your brand/product/service, which will help with trust and confidence.
Soliciting customer opinions is an integral part of the pre-CXM process, but it shouldn’t stop once you have a CXM strategy in place! Feedback is a great way to check that you’re maintaining the standards you developed through CXM.
Developing Your CXM Strategy
Once you feel confident in understanding your audience’s characteristics, unique customer journey, preferences, and feedback/opinions, you’re ready to work on a CXM strategy.
However, while you’re working with your team to develop new CXM endeavors, don’t overlook how Customer Experience Management can integrate into your existing strategies. If your business leverages email marketing, for example, this presents an incredible opportunity to integrate your new ideas and principles about CXM into a strategy you’ve already developed.
Integrating CXM With Email Marketing
Your business’s existing email marketing efforts present a unique opportunity for CXM integration.
Since email is already such an effective marketing tool — and it’s most customers’ preferred marketing channel — it doesn’t take a ton of effort to integrate your existing email marketing efforts with your new CXM strategy.
The best way to integrate your email marketing and CXM strategies is simply to expand the types of emails you send. Some great emails to add to your roster include
■ Welcome emails,
■ Meet the Team emails,
■ Confirmation emails,
■ Order Update emails,
■ Thank You emails,
■ Reminder emails,
■ Incentives and/or discount emails, and
■ Feedback and/or survey emails.
While you’re expanding your email marketing efforts, don’t forget to go back to basics.
All email marketing efforts — combined with CXM or not — should always adhere to email marketing best practices. Personalization, anti-spam compliance, and a strong opt-in/opt-out process, for example, should remain top of mind.
By sending emails that better prioritize customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience, adding CXM to your existing email marketing should be a minimally invasive process with maximally beneficial results.
Wrap Up
If your eCommerce business is considering developing a Customer Experience Management strategy, then congratulations! Your customers would be thrilled to know that your brand is making strides to improve customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience.
Before committing to any aspect of a CXM strategy, there are a number of considerations to evaluate beforehand.
■ Do you know and understand your customer’s characteristics?
■ Do you have a clear understanding of your brand’s unique customer/buyer’s journey?
■ Have you explored your customer preferences through analytics?
■ Have you solicited customer opinions, feedback, or reviews?
■ Do you understand how CXM can integrate into your existing strategies like email marketing?
If you can answer a resounding “Yes!” to the following questions, then it’s time to put CXM in your development pipeline, upgrade your email marketing strategies, and refocus your brand around your customer’s needs.