The role that your product and price play in getting your brand off the mark is huge. People are obviously going to notice the quality of your product and the price of it from the offset. It used to be the case that if your company had a decent product at the right price then you were bound to be pretty successful.

But these days customers have a lot more to consider. With numerous competitors operating in every market, they are pretty much spoiled for choice. Companies have to do more to get the attention of their customers and keep them in the long run.

The ones that excel are winning the battle elsewhere, and that is with their online customer experience.

To put it simply, the customer experience is their opinion on how they have been treated by a particular brand. A good interaction or an easy to use website/app can have a really positive impact on the customer’s experience with you. On the other hand, if their experience is poor then they might be looking elsewhere next time.

In a nutshell, the online customer experience is an incredibly important aspect of your business that should begin to take more of a priority if it isn’t already.

Getting Off on the Right Foot

About 80% of companies worldwide believe that they provide a top quality online experience for their customers. That’s a pretty good number, right? Well, only 8% of customers actually agree with them.

With these numbers in mind, it’s plain to see that there is an issue here that needs to be addressed for a number of businesses out there. 

Brands need to understand that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. It is so important that the first experience that your customer has with you, especially online, is a positive one. 89% of customers are more than willing to move on after one bad online experience.

If businesses could dedicate a bit of time and work towards providing the best online experience possible they would certainly reap the rewards. Personalisation plays a key role in making your customers happy with your brand and the experience they have with you.

After a personalised experience with a business, 49% of users are likely to spend more or make impulse purchases. This means you have happier customers who are willing to spend more money on your product. 

The key element here is to truly understand your customers. Try to get an understanding of what they value most. Tell them the things they want to see or hear, all through the communication channel they respond to most.

Providing the Personalised Online Customer Experience

Good quality communication and a positive online user experience begins with understanding your customer. The best way to go about this is to leverage the information and data you have at your disposal. 

Using your data to identify what a particular customer likes or values leads to a good experience and customer retention. For example, you may notice that a certain customer on an eCommerce website mainly looks at the men’s hats section of the site. This is something we now know about the customer and we can now show them relevant content or promotions for men’s hats, nudging that person to complete a purchase.

The customer comes away from the experience feeling as if they are understood by your brand. And with that positive customer experience they will come back in the future to use your product again.

Importance of Segmentation

Understanding your customers with data also allows you to put them into different segments. This means that you can start to build particular campaigns for these groups of customers. What is really important here is that they are sent things that are relevant to them. Referring to the example above, there is no point in sending the customer messages or promotions about women’s shoes if they use your site to look at men’s hats.

As well as this, the channel by which you send messages to your users is an incredibly important aspect of providing a quality online experience for the customer. If a customer never opens your email promotions, then it would be insane to keep sending them emails. Instead, you could identify which channel they respond to best and use that avenue.

There are plenty of channels to explore when deciding on how to communicate with your customers. Web engagement is of course something that businesses are using for their websites on laptops or computers.

A lot of brands have adapted to the high uptake of smartphones in the recent past which opened up a new way of communicating with customers. So through mobile engagement you can send things like app push notifications or in-app messages to engage your users.

personalised mobile notification

The thing is, all of this can be done quite easily, especially through the Xtremepush platform. It doesn’t take a degree in computer science or an in-depth understanding of it for this to be done well.

Impact on Your Brand

As I’ve said previously here, the impact that providing a great online experience for your customer can do wonders for your business. A happy customer is much more willing to part ways with their money for your product if you’re the provider of that happiness. 

The overpowering positive with providing this experience is that it builds trust in your brand. Through personalised and relevant messaging, your customer feels as though you truly understand them. The relationship between you and your customer is deepened.

About Xtremepush

Xtremepush is the world’s leading customer engagement, personalisation and data platform. We work with top brands across all industries. Schedule a personalised demo of our platform to learn more about how we can help your brand drive revenue.