5 Steps to Assessing Your Digital Experience

Here’s how to go about enhancing your brand’s internet presence and generating more sales.

Increasing new business, customer retention, and revenue may all be impacted significantly by improving your brand’s digital experience. To achieve that, it’s critical to assess consumer brand interaction and the role that digital channels play in the purchasing process. This will enable you to identify experience gaps and choose the ideal internal architecture and martech tools to address them.

Here is a list of actions that every company should take to enhance their online presence.

1. Evaluate your Present Digital Experience

“To create a best-in-class digital experience, you must first understand your buyers’ needs and challenges,” Alp Mimaroglu, director of marketing at wholesale food distributor Sysco, said at The MarTech Conference.

While some purchases can be made wholly online, others need to be made in person by a salesperson. Analyze the part that digital experiences play in addressing your customers’ demands at every stage of their journey.

Even while B2B transactions frequently include real sales teams, certain B2B transactions might be purely digital. For instance, a chain of restaurants may use digital self-service to buy tinfoil or other basic supplies for their outlets. Before making a larger purchase for the company, they could initially buy some and test it out for themselves.

According to Mimaroglu, “[This example] only needs digital touchpoints for the customer to purchase.” “They don’t require sales assistance, offline marketing, or a demo. They’ll make a purchase based only on an email, the site, an offer, or a referral.

However, certain transactions could need a combination of a digital experience and in-person interaction with salespeople. For instance, a client could need a demonstration or a face-to-face sales call.

Mimaroglu advises observing a junior or senior member of the sales team to gain a sense of the complete scope of online and offline contact.

You may discover critical areas for development in the short term and create the foundation for longer-term successes by learning from the field and observing how customers engage with your company’s digital touchpoints.

2. Identify the digital touchpoints for your brand

With the aim of creating a uniform digital experience throughout the whole customer lifetime, identify critical milestones in the customer journey.

New Customers. Whether a customer is a net new client or a consumer switching from a competitor depends on where they are in the customer journey.

“You will have more time to get it right with this consumer if they are a net new customer who is not coming from a rival”, according to Mimaroglu. However, ”if they are coming from a rival, your time is limited, particularly if there is no contract since they will swiftly churn”.

Purchases. Make sure the digital experience at this point in the client’s journey contains the appropriate consumer suggestions as well as an intuitive e-commerce platform, if applicable.

Retention. Are there enough offers and other calls to action for repeat consumers to keep them making purchases? Are there any online locations where people may request service or speak with a live sales or service representative? These are chances for your business to increase income through the client experience while preventing them from doing business with a rival.

Choosing which touchpoints should use personalization is a crucial factor to take into account when mapping the digital experience. You will be able to give this personalization at the touchpoints you select thanks to the martech stack you have in place and the internal architecture we’ll talk about later.

3. Locate Gaps in the Digital Experience

To identify the holes in the customer experience, Mimaroglu advised starting with the things you can directly control, such as resources, manpower, and vendors. For rapid victories, “that’s typically a good starting point.”

Are the appropriate teams and funds in place? Can you start exploring new martech products to enhance your online experience? Most importantly, are you making use of the resources and tools you currently have?

You may move on to longer-term opportunities like cross-functional alignments, cross-channel orchestration, and working across teams to provide a consistent experience after evaluating the internal resources your organization presently employs, suggests Mimaroglu.

It will be easier to uncover capabilities you’ve never done before as well as capabilities you wish to develop with longer-term planning across IT and engineering.

4. Constructing and Enhancing your Martech Stack

Mimaroglu cautioned against chasing a single solution or “shiny object” in order to improve your martech stack.

Although there are various marketing technologies available for purchase that may enhance your digital experience, he said that if your present martech stack is not used correctly, the digital experience won’t be fully optimized.

If a new solution is cross-functional and requires other teams to adopt and coordinate its use, organizations should consider the time and effort involved in doing so.

Instead, start with strategy – what advantages and objectives result from a better digital experience? Then look for technological solutions to assist you in achieving those objectives.

Work with IT and engineers to determine the technological needs of future capabilities in the long run. For instance, it’s possible that your business lacks an all-in-one e-commerce solution. Develop an internal plan using martech to achieve that objective.

Mimaroglu advised against letting a martech vendor or consultancy direct the plan in any way. Your company needs to map out the martech path.

For the best choices for your martech stack, he advised, “You need to think strategically before just buying tools and build your team of experts internally.”

5. Execute with End-to-End Architecture

You need the proper end-to-end architecture that supports all of the touchpoints and unifies the experience if you want to create the finest possible digital experience.

It’s important to consider how everything works at your company as a whole, not simply how the martech tools in the stack function.

What is the operation of the data architecture? Mimaroglu enquired. How well integrated are they? How is the wiring? How am I going to orchestrate across channels? How would I want to customize it? 

Otherwise, when clients are served by several teams and apps, there would be gaps and disconnects, he continued. Therefore, the best-in-class digital experience is made possible by the end-to-end architecture.