Customer-Focused Strategies for Digital Transformation
Putting customer experience first is an entirely digital endeavor that builds loyalty and strengthens relationships.
As technology evolves, so do our behaviors and habits. The way customers interact with businesses also evolves too, as digital technology continues to be a staple in our everyday lives. One behavior that is consistently trending upward is the amount of time consumers are spending on their smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
In turn, businesses have to craft their customer experience approach to be digitally diverse if they want to keep customers brand aware and engaged. When it comes to digital efforts, gone are the days when a business could simply build a website and call it a day. Now, when a business competes for consumer attention they must do more than simply have an online presence or website. And, when it comes to capturing consumer attention, more devices and digital platforms means more intense competition. As a result, businesses must work harder and smarter across digital channels, not only to stay top of mind to their customer base, but also to stay competitive.
One way for businesses to accomplish this is through the implementation of customer-focused digital strategies that aim to build brand awareness, customer satisfaction, and — ultimately — grow sales.
What Is Digital Strategy?
A digital strategy is a plan that focuses on maximizing the business benefits of technology-focused initiatives. For some businesses this may mean creating new products, reimagining current processes, or simply growing engagement with their target audience.
A successful digital strategy will focus on improving performance through the purposeful utilization of digital platforms. This process is technology-focused and typically aims to improve customer experiences along with other related business processes. A key component of any digital strategy is determining a specific goal, such as growing consumer loyalty by crafting engaging digital spaces that deliver value.
In today’s largely digital world, businesses must have a highly targeted digital strategy if they are going to keep customers engaged and remain competitive. This is where digital strategy, often simply referred to as digital, comes into play. Simply put, a digital strategy is a tool used to help businesses map out their digital presence and achieve their business goals.
What Is Digital Transformation?
For many business owners, digital transformation — much like digital strategy — is a new way of thinking about how you do business. This approach puts customers and their experiences first. Digital transformation reimagines how business is done by emphasizing customer experience and focusing on ways to craft engaging digital experiences.
The ultimate aim of digital transformation is to improve your business processes through the utilization of your business’s digital presence across various platforms — such as websites, mobile applications, and social media. In this way, digital transformation is similar to digital strategy. Alternatively, digital transformation differs from digital strategy in its holistic approach to problem-solving.
Whereas digital strategy focuses solely on the technological aspects of crafting a digital presence, digital transformation places a larger focus on your business’s overall mission and involves intradepartmental collaboration.
Ultimately, digital transformation can help your business become more profitable by attracting and maintaining a loyal customer base that enjoys the digital experience that your brand provides. Rather than merely creating a digital presence, digital transformation is a way of utilizing digital spaces to intentionally craft an experience that leaves customers feeling good, and as a result, returning for more.
How Digital Strategies Improve Customer Experience & Relationship
Customer-focused digital strategies can give your business the opportunity to provide customers with a notable and satisfying digital experience. This can be achieved through several different approaches that culminate to create and maintain a loyal and trusting customer base.
Improvements in customer experience are achieved by paying close attention to user experiences throughout their entire journey as they interact with a business. This is done by utilizing touchpoints — which is any instance in which a customer comes into contact with your business.
This means that customer experiences are crafted and analyzed from the moment they see your business’s ad, visit your website, or complete a purchase on your app.
Touchpoints & Consistency
A key component in crafting a digital strategy is creating consistency across touchpoints — especially digital platforms. This means that no matter how a customer is interacting with your business, there is a consistent standard and attention-to-detail.
Since this consistency will affect how customers perceive your brand, a lack of consistency across touchpoints can easily leave customers with a bad impression. By creating consistent touchpoints, customers trust that your brand will provide them with a consistent experience no matter how they engage with it.
Ease of Use & Convenience
Another important way which customer-focused digital strategies can improve customer experience is through ease of use and convenience. The more difficult an app or website is to navigate, the less likely a customer is to make a purchase or return. Customer-focused digital strategies offer your businesses a way to plan and implement changes to digital spaces to make the process of interacting and engaging with your brand as easy as possible for customers.
When customers feel like your digital space is easy to navigate, they’re more likely to return and browse. This is because customers now trust your business to provide them with an easy enjoyable experience when they engage with your digital spaces.
Ultimately, digital transformation is a process that allows you to completely design how your customers engage with your business in digital spaces. This process gives you the chance to connect with your customers in meaningful ways that build a strong sense of trust and brand loyalty.
How to Implement Digital Strategies & Achieve Digital Transformation
So, now that you have an understanding of how digital strategies and digital transformation can help your business build better relationships with its customers you are likely excited to get started. However, you may feel like this is shaping up to be a daunting task and maybe you’re unsure of where to start.
To help you crack the implementation nut, we’ve compiled the following step-by-step guide on how to actualize customer-focused digital strategies for digital transformation.
Step 1: Define Your Goals & Desired Outcomes
Before getting started and implementing any changes, it’s important to define your goals and desired outcomes. Understanding what you aim to accomplish by implementing customer-focused digital strategies is key to reaching your desired outcomes.
Whether you intend to increase customer loyalty, make more sales, or improve customer service, having clarity about your exact goals can help you tailor both your digital strategy and digital transformation efforts.
Step 2: Make Sure Everyone Is on Board
An important aspect of digital transformation is altering the way that you and your organization do business. This requires a holistic, intradepartmental approach to change that involves everyone from managers to marketing specialists.
For the implementation of a digital strategy for digital transformation to be successful, everyone in your organization will have to be on the same page. This is especially true of those in senior management positions — such as CEOs. Having a shared, customer-focused mission is key to creating impactful change with digital transformation.
Step 3: Map Out Your Customer’s Journey
Both digital strategy and digital transformation revolve around crafting digital spaces that satisfy customers and make their interactions with your business smooth, seamless, and enjoyable. To create such an experience, you’ll first need to understand your customers. One proven way to develop an understanding of your customers is by creating a customer journey map.
A customer journey map is a representation of how customers interact with a business. Typically depicted as a chart, this type of map shows every point of contact that a customer has with a business, whether it’s seeing an ad, having a text conversation with a customer service representative, or exploring the business’s website.
Customer journey maps can also help you develop a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of your customers’ behaviors and experiences as they engage with your brand. The customer journey mapping process will also help you to pinpoint areas where you can improve your digital presence and, in turn, the experiences that you provide to your customers.
Step 4: Use Data To Personalize Customer Experience
An important part of digital transformation is creating personalized digital experiences for your customers. This can come in a variety of forms, such as suggesting products based on a customer’s purchase history or utilizing SMS messages to enhance a customer’s personalized experience.
To determine the specific interests of individual customers, you can utilize historical data that highlights how customers interact with your business. By drawing upon this data, you can make educated guesses about what appeals to a customer and market to them accordingly. This hyper targeted marketing approach makes them feel as if they’re engaging in a personalized digital experience.
Step 5: Simplify Your Digital Spaces
A key aspect to keep in mind when crafting a digital experience is simplicity and ease of use. To attract new customers and earn their loyalty, you’ll have to make sure that your business’s digital spaces are easy to use and most importantly — convenient.
The more difficult it is for your customers to interact and engage with your digital spaces, the less likely they are to trust that your business will provide them with an engaging and enjoyable digital experience. By creating a convenient experience that makes it easy for customers to engage with your business at every stage of their customer journey, you’ll be able to retain their interest.
It is critical to remember that customers are more likely to make a purchase or follow a brand if their first few digital impressions are positive. Making a positive impression and imparting an intuitive and rewarding digital experience can truly be the difference between retaining a loyal customer or losing their interest and business.
Step 6: Interact With Your Customers Across Marketing Channels
Digital strategies and transformation both put an emphasis on creating a digital experience for your customers through a range of channels. Though you should put time and energy into crafting impeccable digital experiences on your business’s website, it’s also important to utilize other marketing channels to engage with your customers.
Email and text marketing and social media platforms are all ways to actively engage with your customers, which is key to building more meaningful relationships with customers. Channels such as text and SMS marketing can help you not only boost sales, but deliver a much more personalized experience to your customers.
Text marketing companies, such as EZ Texting, have developed SMS marketing tools that can help your business craft an impactful retail mobile marketing strategy and expand the channels that your business uses to engage with customers. These text marketing tools should be used in combination with other marketing channels for maximum impact.
Let Digital Transformation Strengthen Your Customer Relationships
Customer-focused digital strategies and digital transformation allow you to forge a deeper relationship with your customers. By being mindful about your customers’ touchpoints — and crafting these touchpoints in ways that enhance your customer experience — you can retain loyal customers that trust your brand and frequent your digital spaces.
EZ Texting’s text marketing services can help diversify the ways you engage with your customer and help you craft a new touchpoint that leaves customers feeling more connected to your business. So why wait? With EZ Texting’s no-risk free trial there is no reason to delay exploring how you can be engaging with customers on a deeper level today.
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