When it comes to focus areas that eat up most of marketers’ time and resources, customer experience reigns at the top of the food chain. According to the “Customer Experience Optimization Report” by Econsultancy and Ensighten, 96% of company marketers and agency respondents (including vendors and consultancies) consider customer experience optimization somewhat important or critical.
Marketers who take pride in their customers’ experiences can leave a major (paw) print on their organizations. In fact, 94% of marketers and 79% of agency respondents say that higher engagement and conversion rates are among the many benefits of customer experience optimization. Better brand perception and loyalty (66%, 47%); renewal, cross-sell, and upsell (50%, 41%), and increased average order value (22%, 29%) are also benefits for marketers and agency professionals, respectively.
But for customer experience to be king, data must become a “mane” focus. Behavioral (81%, 76%), transactional (78%, 83%), and geographic data (59%, 55%) are some of the key forms of data that marketers and agency representatives collect to enhance their customer experiences. And these surveyed professionals prey on a number of different channels to do so. Email (62%, 67%), social media (37%, 49%), and search (35%, 47%) are their top off-site sources for data collection, according to the report. And while marketers and agencies are always on the hunt for first-party data (76%, 68%), they’re also on the prowl for second- (15%, 17%) and third-party (9%, 15%) data, as well.
Granted, today’s customer is an entirely different species—one that engages with brands across multiple touchpoints. Therefore, if marketers and agencies truly want to optimize the customer experience, they need to do so for both on- and offline channels. Consider the following data from the report: 83% of marketers and 88% of agencies use customer data to optimize the customer experience on desktop websites. Marketers and agencies also use this information to improve customers’ experiences with email (67%, 54%) and mobile websites (50%, 68%), respectively. As for offline channels, marketers and agencies use customer data to better their call center (68%, 55%), print (36%, 34%), and in-store experiences (33%, 46%). And while connecting all of these touchpoints may give marketers a roaring headache, they know that it’s essential to their success. In fact, more than half (51%) of marketers strongly agree that achieving a single view of the customer is critical to their success.
Still, marketers face several mighty challenges when it comes to driving insights from their data. For instance, 48% strongly agree that they’re not able to extract the full value from their data sources, and 16% strongly agree that they feel overwhelmed by the volume of incoming data. But marketers and agencies are beginning to make strides in these areas. According to the report, 70% of marketers and 57% of agency representatives say that they’ve started to connect the dots, but admit that they have a long way to go.
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