Consumers today have high expectations for the companies they do business with. They don’t just want a product or service. They want a customer journey. It’s a real challenge for businesses to craft that journey, with so many details to plan and execute. Among the most effective strategies to do so is to focus on customer personalization to build a more meaningful experience.

What Is a Customer Journey?

customer journey

Understanding what a customer journey is the first step to building one for your customers. Everyone understands that there are certain things you need to know about your customers, who they are, what they’re looking for, and how you can give it to them. However, the customer journey represents a comprehensive look at what’s really happening when customers interact with your business.

Not all businesses have the same customer journey. You can look at a traditional retail store and plot out the journey fairly simply as needing to buy something, evaluating options, going to the store, making the purchase, and using the product.

However, customer experience mapping is far from that simple for most online businesses. Instead, these businesses need to identify how customers are finding them, how they interact with their websites, the impact of follow-up marketing, how reviews factor into the equation, and more.

How Can I Handle Customer Experience Mapping?

experience mapping

Because every business is unique, there isn’t a sure-fire way to put together a customer experience map. You could have certain factors at play those other businesses wouldn’t ever have to worry about. In many cases, developing a better understanding of the consumer decision journey is best handled by relying on data.

Ideally, you should have access to a wide range of analytics for your store, website, marketing, and more. With this data, you can begin to shape a model of how your customers interact with you throughout the customer journey. What are your click-thru rates for ad campaigns? Are you dealing with abandoned carts? How do customers respond to follow-up emails?

By asking yourself the right questions, you’ll be able to develop a more accurate model of how customers are really using your business. From there, you can address stress points and make improvements as needed.

What Is Digital Customer Experience?

A digital customer is one who is interacting with your business strictly or primarily online. This isn’t the same experience as somebody has physically going to a store, so it can’t be handled the same way by your business. Instead, you need to be implementing specific digital strategies in order to evaluate what is digital customer experience and how you can improve it.

There are more tools than ever available today to improve the digital customer experience. For one thing, the consumer decision journey now extends far from your website. Businesses have a range of social media and paid marketing campaigns that are also critical to the digital customer experience and often the first point of contact. Making these elements dynamic and meaningful can really improve how a customer sees your business.

How Do Personalization and Customer Experience Go Together?

Many of the tools available today for improving customer experience focus on customer personalization. Businesses are able to make a truly personal connection with their customers, which in turn helps promote sales and encourage repeat business.

There are many different ways that businesses can implement personalization and customer experience to achieve the best results. One of the simplest examples is the use of a customer’s name in your correspondence. That’s a basic feature of most email and other communication management platforms, but even that makes a difference.

Today, there are many more opportunities for advanced personalization. With the right data, you can provide a highly tailored customer experience that can identify what your customers are looking for and make it easier for them to find it. In doing so, you provide a faster and more straightforward customer journey.

How Can I Make Customer Experience More Dynamic?

Customer Experience

When it comes to the customer experience, businesses need to understand what types of content are most likely to lead to a sale. For almost any customer base, that means video. Customers who would lose interest in reading through product descriptions or other content are more likely to hang around for a video that delivers that information instead.

Whether for your website, social media, or other marketing, videos simply perform better than text and images. Video content also provides businesses with another opportunity to really establish their brand and build a more meaningful connection with their customers. Your videos can implement your unique voice, style, and tone to distinguish your brand in the eyes of your customers.

Can Video Content Be Personalized?

There are plenty of personalized customer experience examples out there, but chances are the only ones that come to mind are text-based, like putting someone’s name into an email header template. It’s not like you can film unique videos for every single customer, but there are still ways to implement personalization into video content.

A video can be personalized with a wide range of elements, much like any other type of content. Customer names, locations, or even targeted content can be implemented. Of course, pulling this type of ambitious campaign off would be a real challenge for just about anyone. However, you can implement your own video personalized customer experience examples with the right tools.

How Can I Deliver a Personalized Customer Experience With Blings?

Blings is a personalized video solution that makes it possible for businesses to integrate true personalization into video content. The platform is highly effective and can easily scale to meet the needs of any business.

The data-driven platform lets you make campaigns that feature real-time video personalization, including a wide range of interactive features to further enhance customer engagement. Blings also provides businesses with comprehensive analytics so that they can better craft the customer journey.

Does your business need something new, a better way to reach your customers? You can get started with Blings today and find out how far innovative video content can take your business.