Generate Leads Based on Your Customers’ Experiences
It’s no secret – reliable and effective lead generation is difficult, with poor campaigns being costly. But, as time goes on and the internet is becoming an ever more integral part of marketing, the importance of generating leads is growing equally. The question then is simple – how best can you navigate the importance of lead generation while avoiding excessive costs?
The answer is in customer experience. By ensuring your business offers a standout customer experience, your customers will thank you by providing your business with an equally impressive rate of growth. There are a few ways of improving the customer experience you provide. AI and automation are two burgeoning features, but one much more accessible approach is left unutilised by many businesses – an insight-led customer experience.
What is an insight-led customer experience?
Insight-led customer experiences are an application of information gathered using data analytics. By making use of a range of software, tools, and best practices, you can gather crucial insights into how your customers act. While data has always been an important part of understanding and advertising to your audience, today’s information age has made the entire process much easier and much more rewarding.
There is a range of tools available to gather insights, from Google Analytics or trends, to Klout. By using these tools, you will have access to a vast amount of data. This includes demographics, site interactions, browsing history, and so much more. With this data in hand, you will be able to create an experience tailored to your customers, improving retention, satisfaction, and proving invaluable in lead generation.
Examples of insight-led customer experiences
Insight-led customer experiences isn’t the most obvious term to decipher, but it’s quite simple at its core. Essentially, it refers to practices that use the data gathered in the form of insights to create a better quality experience for your customers.
For example, a simple application of insights to improve customer experience is to keep your customer’s cart as they left it once abandoned. You’d be surprised how many simply forget to carry through with a purchase after a browsing session, so keeping their cart full serves as a good reminder for them to complete their purchase once they return. This makes them happy, as they get the products or services they wanted, and makes you happy thanks to the successful conversion.
Along a similar vein is offering coupons tailored to the customer that sees them. While discounts are always nice, they aren’t a one-size-fits-all promotion. Insights can show what your customer isn’t thrilled by, and more importantly, what they are, enabling you to put the right coupons in front of them. Needless to say, a fashion-mad customer that sees a discount coupon for clothes is much more likely to use it, rather than one for tech products.
Why use insights in your marketing strategies?
The reason for using insights is simple – surprisingly few businesses are taking advantage of the available benefits. Despite the overwhelming majority of businesses rating a good customer experience as very important, less than half report having the means to adequately collect relevant insights into customer behaviour. If you opt to use insights, you’ll be ahead of your competitors thanks to the in-depth actionable data provided.
There are other reasons, however. One reason that shouldn’t escape your notice is that tools are important. Capable employees are a must-have, of course, but there is only so much they can do without adequate tools and equipment. After all, employees can be trained to perform their tasks, but tools cannot be trained to work outside their intended role. By supplying your new employees with the right tools, in this case, insights into customer behaviour, they will have an easier time doing their job. This benefits everyone, as your employees can get on with their work with less unneeded difficulty, and your business receives a productivity boost as a result.
Of course, the main reason to use insights is in the benefits they themselves offer. Ultimately, insights shine by providing businesses with actionable data, allowing them to improve both their customers’ experience and their own marketing campaigns. By tailoring your marketing campaigns to target key demographics in a way that appeals to them, you will not only boost your lead generation, but provide a better experience for your customers while doing so. With insights, everyone’s a winner.
Creating insight-led customer experiences
It’s easy to scrape together any series of data sets and work from there, but you’ll be making the end goal much harder to reach. If you work with data, you’ll likely be familiar with garbage in garbage out, and it’s just as true in a marketing context. By instead prioritising quality data, gathering data on your audience specifically, not just some sets of averages across your entire industry, you will see much greater success than doing otherwise. This is insight-led customer experiences in a nutshell.
Before long, this prioritisation of quality data will earn you a trove of effective insights waiting to be put to use. You’ll need to apply it across all of your marketing strategies, else you’ll see considerably mixed results. There are a few approaches to doing this, with technology becoming ever more closely connected to these sorts of tasks. There are digital marketing platforms that come equipped with tools that can automate updates to customer experience. With little input from you, these platforms can be tasked to detect improvements to customer experience and will roll them out automatically, though the results of this are reliant on high-quality insights. In addition to automatically implementing improvements, digital marketing platforms can make AI-powered recommendations and predictions based on your insights. As good data is critical to keeping ahead of the curve, these features can be extremely helpful, at a manageable cost too.
Using insight-led customer experiences as a means to generate leads is a continuous process. Data is updated, audience preferences change, and once accurate insights begin to miss the mark. Because of this, you’ll need to make insight gathering a core part of your business, in order to stay in touch with your audience and continue generating good leads.
