3 ways to deliver better marketing experiences

“As martech ambassadors, we have a choice,” said Nina Butler, director of event experience at Alyce, in her presentation at The MarTech Conference. “We can continue to create more of the same experiences that over time have become more generic — a little bit more spammy, a little bit more self-serving — or we can pause, reflect, and start to think about how we can begin creating more meaningful moments that deliver lasting impressions with our buyers.”

Part of the modern marketer’s responsibility is to reduce the number of impersonal touches prospects face. Digital customers are increasingly disillusioned with brands due to so many negative interactions, which is why marketers need to differentiate themselves via engaging customer experiences.

“Oftentimes, it’s those differentiated experiences that help your brand stand out from the pack and create more momentum in that customer journey,” she said.

Here are three ways Butler recommends marketers deliver better customer experiences.

Work to bring offline audiences online

It can often be difficult for marketers to draw in potential customers from offline platforms (like podcasts), especially when those avenues offer people so much useful information.

“How can you take what is normally a long game — like building up credibility and subject matter expertise in your space, hoping that over time people view your brand as the expert — and shortcut some of the time and get more instant results by driving [people] back to your website?” asked Butler.

Butler’s marketing team was able to draw in these audiences by combining their marketing automation system with a chatbot. After realizing they were missing out on a highly relevant audience from a marketing podcast, the team set up a chatbot on their site with a specific keyword and custom URL. Then, they asked the podcast host to share the keyword and URL with their listeners, directing them to the site. When the listeners visited their URL, the chatbot noted when the keyword was entered and then rewarded users with a customized gift.

This highly effective tactic helped Butler’s team bring in a whole new audience, enhancing the customer experience through personalization.

Identify valuable actions and reward users

“Think critically about what the actions are that are most valuable to your community,” said Bulter. “Look at KPIs that drive community membership or subscriber growth year over year.”

Whether it’s a click on a call-to-action, email open, or sales form submission, marketers need to analyze customers’ most valuable actions, taking note of behaviors and circumstances that lead to these events. Butler suggests marketers help facilitate these actions by offering users gifts upon completion, which are determined by engagement tiers.

Brands can use a marketing automation platform to monitor behaviors and engagement, then email gifts to qualifying members.

“As you’re thinking about the most valuable outcomes, make sure that you are looking across your marketing automation and technology to ensure that you can monitor your desired behaviors,” said Butler. “You want to make sure that you’re normalizing your aspirational KPIs with the things that you can indeed track successfully.”

Highlight customer milestones with gifts

“I think we could all agree that we are living in this world of digital distance and, honestly, digital dissonance,” Butler said. “When it comes to these transactional touches, how do we create some memorable moments out of those experiences instead?”

Her team, with its emphasis on rewarding audiences, recommends marketers use technologies that monitor customer behavior so they can note milestones they consider valuable. Customer journey analytics platforms can help pinpoint these behaviors in the customer experience, which can include specific site engagements like form fills, course completions, product purchases and other actions.

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Butler says milestone recognition isn’t so much about where it takes place in the customer journey, but rather about how your brand acknowledges it. It’s about how your brand rewards the customer, using whatever gift will improve the experience.

“Gifting is going to be a way to get into the hearts and minds of your loyal, championed customers,” she said.