6 Best digital customer experience strategies and why you need them
In an increasingly competitive digital landscape, it’s no longer enough to “be online.” You need to provide a consistent, cohesive customer experience across multiple digital channels.
A strong digital customer experience can set you apart from the competition. Don’t let slow load times and unsightly web pages prevent prospects from converting to customers.
Browsing your website, app, social media or e-commerce store should be effortless for your customers. The content should be relevant, with no design flaws hampering their experience.
In this article, we’ll explore the best digital customer experience strategies you can use to achieve this.
What is digital customer experience?
The digital customer experience is all your customer’s interactions through digital channels, such as your website or app, and, crucially, the perceptions and feelings these interactions produce in your customers. But it’s not just your website and app. Digital CX encompasses all digital touchpoints with your brand on every internet-connected device, from smartphone to laptop to tablet.
It goes beyond the websites, e-commerce stores and apps you own and run. Interactions through social channels—like Facebook, Instagram or TikTok—are also part of the digital customer experience. It even includes digital customer service touchpoints through your helpdesk or email.
Why is a good digital customer experience important?
Your digital customer experience affects your reputation and the value customers perceive in your products. 84% of executives said excellent digital customer experience is necessary not just to be competitive, but to survive.
Here are just a few ways a good digital experience can transform your business:
Improved customer satisfaction: 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences. Only a smart digital customer experience can deliver on these expectations.
Stronger customer loyalty: 88% of online shoppers prefer to keep buying from companies offering personalized experiences.
Better brand reputation and perception: 75% of customers have recommended companies based on excellent service experiences.
Ultimately, a strong digital CX can be a competitive differentiator. With more loyal customers and higher retention rates, you get more return on investment from every marketing campaign.
But getting there is not easy—most companies struggle to make progress. According to Forrester, over 80% of business leaders said that improving CX was a high priority, but just 6% of brands saw significant improvements in 2023.
And there’s a reason for this lack of progress. Despite executives saying it was a high priority, only 38% of companies had clear goals and a strategy for digital CX in 2022.
Lay the foundation for future digital CX success by finding strategies that will work for your company.
What are some different types of digital customer experience strategies?
Digital customer experience strategies come in various forms across digital channels and formats. Below are six strategies to help any company improve its digital experience.
Digital customer journey mapping
A digital customer journey map outlines every meaningful touchpoint customers have. It’s a visual representation of all the steps your customers take while engaging with your site, social media profiles and other digital assets.
You can do this by looking at various user flow reports in your analytics platform. Behavioral analytics makes it easier to explore different journeys and patterns in tailored reports.
But regardless of the analytics platform you use, it should have a journey report. Spend some time diving into the most popular customer journeys (or flows).
Pay attention to the pages they land on, where they make a purchase, and any touchpoints in between.
Visualize the most popular flows that your prospects and customers take, and what they want or need from each step:
Where do they first interact with your brand? Which page or social media channel?
What content is crucial to helping them move down the funnel?
How do they typically convert (demo, free trial or sales call)?
What happens just before prospects abandon their carts or otherwise leave your site without doing anything you want?
Align your content strategy with your ideal customers
In this age of content, most companies already have some form of content strategy. In a 2023 survey, only 9% of marketing teams said they didn’t have one.
But there’s often too much focus on SEO with little consideration for their ideal customers. This misaligned focus can show up in multiple ways:
Content is focused on high-volume general keywords your target audience won’t search for.
Your content team spends too much time on acquisition (top-of-funnel content) and not enough time delivering value to customers.
The best way to realign the strategy is to dive deep into your customers through journey mapping, surveys and customer interviews. Use customer journey analytics to determine the types of content that contribute to purchase decisions and increased loyalty.
You can then use this insight into your customers to realign your plan. Here’s an example of some adjustments that may be suitable for your company:
Focus deeper on specific pain points that matter to your ideal customers despite lower search volumes.
Invest more in middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content that contributes to sales.
Make more room for post-sale content that delivers value to existing customers.
Align your social media engagement approach with your content strategy
Your social media presence should feel like a logical extension of your brand. If you dive deep into complex topics on your company blog but only post shallow memes on X (formerly Twitter), that’s a clear mismatch.
Don’t go for engagement at all costs. Stick to your brand and content strategy.
Of course, you should adapt to what people expect from different platforms. Here are two examples of what this can look like:
Since X is a common channel for existing customers, Shopify uses it to highlight how to use new features in short videos.
Because LinkedIn is a solid B2B channel for networking and reaching new potential clients, Zendesk’s CMO Kelly Waldher is sharing an interview with Forbes about AI.
The post leverages Forbes’ brand power and avoids directly pushing Zendesk’s products. Instead, it positions Kelly as an industry expert. Plus, the post aligns with a renewed focus on AI in Zendesk’s content across all customer journey stages.
Optimize your user experience to be effortless and efficient
Modern consumers hate interruptions and poorly designed interfaces. You'll lose out on potential customers if your user experience doesn’t flow seamlessly. You’ll also alienate your existing customers over time. After just one bad experience, 54% of consumers will stop using a brand.
That’s why you should invest in continually optimizing your user experience. And again, experience or behavioral analytics come in handy at this stage. Performance reports like struggle analysis can identify common issues with your user experience.
This analysis helps you find pages (and the specific parts of the page) where users struggle to achieve their goals.
For example, it could be an animated form that takes too long to load, leading to dead clicks. In the case of SoFi, a digital personal finance company, an error message was keeping users from completing loan applications. With analytics, they found this and not only improved their customer experience, but prevented the loss of millions of dollars.
Once you’ve identified the issue, test the problem and design and implement a solution.
You should also dive deep into how individual users use and feel about your site and app. Use session replays and user interviews to explore every action particular users take and how they feel about the experience.
Then, leverage these insights to brainstorm potential improvements to the overall experience for all users.
But don’t think you can pat yourself on the back after your first UX effort.
The journey of optimization is a continual one. Every time you add a new feature or page, you’re likely adding new issues with them. So keep checking for user issues and optimizing your experience over the long run.
Deliver a consistent omnichannel experience
According to omnichannel research by McKinsey, more than 50% of consumers engage with 3–5 channels when they:
buy products
resolve customer support requests
A good customer experience should be consistent across these channels. For example, your store should highlight products the customers liked in the app.
If you fail to do this, that creates a jarring customer experience. It’s like having to start explaining what you’re looking for from scratch with a new sales rep.
But achieving cross-channel consistency isn’t easy. McKinsey recommends focusing on high-value customer journeys and a few high-priority channels. Start by using the “omnichannel matrix” to figure out how to tackle specific customer journeys.
Buying a new product across your app and website is a crucial journey. It must be backed up with integrations and features that make the process seamless. One way to do this is to use the same customer database for the app and website.
McKinsey also recommends integrating channels in the support experience. A telecom company giving support reps data of customer’s interactions with the support website. This connection helped speed up support calls about disputing bills. (Over 70% of the callers had previously interacted with the website for 10–15 minutes.)
This is an example of using data beyond the helpdesk dashboard and social channels to provide a smoother customer experience. There’s a big difference between “What did you say was your issue again?” And, “I see you’ve struggled with generating custom reports. Have you tried x?”
True omnichannel support leads to a faster, more cohesive, comfortable and effective customer experience.
Deliver real personalization
Many marketers treat personalization as a quick checklist item when developing their campaigns. But in 2023, it’s not enough to call customers by name or recommend products based on a year-old purchase.
As covered above, customers expect you to adapt to their changing needs over time. They want relevant recommendations and content based on how they interact with your brand.
That means you need to demystify your data to make sense of their touchpoints in real time.
But this is easier said than done. Implementing personalization requires a variety of different tools and strategies. Check out what personalization looks like in real life for an insurance company for inspiration.
Digital customer experience strategies can help you optimize your digital footprint and how customers experience your brand online. However, you need to understand the ideal timing within the customer journey to implement them effectively.
How to improve digital experiences across customer journey stages
To help you better implement these strategies, we’ll cover how to implement specific tactics in the context of the customer journey. As you saw above, a customer journey is a visual, or map, of the interactions a customer has with your brand before and after a purchase or other desired action.
Awareness
The awareness stage is when prospects first notice your brand through marketing, social media, word of mouth or other channels.
Concrete optimization ideas:
Figure out which platforms your ideal customers spend the most time on.
Create engaging content on social media platforms targeted toward your ideal customer.
Encourage customers to share your product through referral programs.
Discovery
In the discovery stage, customers want to learn more about your company and products. They look for information on your website, social media and review websites.
Concrete optimization ideas:
Use personalized ads to retarget potential customers more effectively.
Dive into customer journeys to figure out which top-of-funnel content is most important. Then optimize that content through A/B tests—creating a variant of your original page with a different introduction, headline or illustrations, splitting the traffic and comparing the results.
Read more: 3 Digital CX Tips to Remain Competitive in Ecommerce
Evaluation and comparison
During the evaluation stage, customers compare your products with your comparison. They’ll read case studies, comparison posts and other content. They will also explore review sites or video reviews on YouTube.
Concrete optimization ideas:
Write case studies highlighting issues and data points that matter to your ideal customers.
Create comparison posts that highlight your unique strengths from the viewpoint of your ideal customers.
Give product samples to industry-specific influencers. Don’t waste money on a mainstream influencer like Taylor Swift. Smaller influencers have the highest engagement rates, and lend your product credibility.
Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on relevant industry review sites.
Conversion and purchase
This is where the prospect finally becomes a customer and starts using your product or service. They sign up for a demo, jump on a sales call, start a free trial and finally, sign the contract.
Concrete optimization ideas:
Analyze the user experience and streamline the purchase process to minimize dropoff rates. Do a struggle analysis and optimize for the customer effort score(CES)—an analysis of how easy it is for customers to complete important tasks, in this case, adding a product to cart and purchasing it.
Track conversion rates—both visitor-to-lead and lead-to-purchase rates. Compare various segments based on referral sources or initial page visited.
Optimize your offer and landing pages continually through A/B or multivariate testing.
Do you offer freemium products? Optimize around onboarding (next stage), as usage plays a crucial role in converting free to paid users.
Onboarding and user experience
The journey isn’t over just because a prospect becomes a customer. If the customer is unhappy and returns your product (or cancels during a free trial), you lose money instead of making it.
A good post-sale experience is key to driving loyal customers, which is crucial to recoup your customer acquisition costs. In 2023, 35% of the revenue of ecommerce stores came from just 5% of their most loyal customers.
And according to McKinsey, SaaS companies with strong retention practices have been able to grow their revenues from existing customers by 120%.
That’s why onboarding and the post-sale experience are such a crucial stages in the customer journey.
Concrete optimization ideas:
Make sure your onboarding process is comprehensive and effective. Use the UX analysis and optimization process mentioned above to achieve this.
Offer customers guides and tutorials to help them learn to use your product.
Train customers on social media channels like X, LinkedIn, TikTok or Facebook.
Collect and analyze data from follow-up surveys to measure customer satisfaction levels. Then, adjust your pricing plans or user experience based on these results.
Support
Post-sales support is your last line of defense in case something goes wrong. But don’t think of it as a cost sink.
Customer support can be an opportunity to build loyalty and stronger customer relationships. Paradoxically, customers who experience prompt and good service after a bad experience are often more loyal than those who experience no issues. This is called the service recovery paradox (SRP).
Concrete optimization ideas:
Offer multiple digital channels for customer support. Centralize inquiries in a single dashboard to deliver a cohesive experience across those channels.
Set benchmarks and KPIs to improve response times to keep customers from waiting.
Empower support agents to make decisions about things like returns or refunds.
Assist agents in solving requests with virtual assistants that help them decipher your tutorials.
Loyalty, repurchase and sales expansion
Once you’ve onboarded a customer, your job isn’t only to solve their problems. You should work to strengthen your relationship with your customers continually. That will allow you to earn repurchases or expand your existing deals.
Offer continual, personalized training on better utilizing your product.
Keep your customers engaged with marketing targeted to existing customers. Cover upcoming features and how you work closely with your clients to improve and further develop your product.
Train your customer success reps about offering personalized add-ons or upsells. Ensure they add value to the customers they pitch, or you may alienate loyal clients.
Deliver personalized product recommendations based on purchase history and recent digital interactions.
Best practices for improving the digital customer experience
Improving your digital experience isn’t an easy project. Even with good intentions, many teams complicate their CX or deliver unsatisfactory personalization.
Here are five best practices that will help you please your customers at scale:
Customer awareness—go beyond quantitative data to understand your customers
Don’t just look at basic analytics data points like conversion rates. Explore how users interact with your site and product with behavioral analytics.
Hold interviews with high-value customers and figure out exactly what drew them to your product:
What key problems it helps them solve
Why they chose your product over competitors
What channels they spend time on
What content they engaged with before deciding to make the purchase
Many marketing teams think they understand customers because they have a set of metrics they follow. But quantitative data alone isn’t enough. You need to dive into qualitative data to understand the why behind your customer’s actions.
For more information, read our guide on how to measure the customer experience.
Deliver a truly personalized experience
Don’t use dated techniques and tools that only approximate a personal experience. Use the data your customers give you effectively. Or they won’t understand why you’re asking for it in the first place.
Here are a few specific tactics:
Centralize data from multiple sources (websites, social media, apps) into a single platform you can use to train algorithms.
Use integrations to deliver a consistent experience based on this data across platforms.
Upgrade your recommendation engine with generative AI to give more personal recommendations. The algorithm must consider more than just a one-time purchase.
Read more about the three prerequisites for great digital CX and how to maximize them.
Standardize the customer experience with an omnichannel strategy
Customers can discover your company from countless channels, so ensure they all have a consistent message and brand.
They can find your product through your website, app, ad, content, or word-of-mouth recommendation. Make switching between channels (for example, going from your website to your app) a seamless experience for the user.
Invest in high-quality content that delivers real value
Don’t outsource content creation to generative AI or the lowest-bidding freelance writer. Your content is one of the most important communication channels with prospective customers.
To make the right impression, you need to hire true industry experts to create content that makes a difference. Here are some ideas for specific high-value content:
Fund original industry research into issues that affect your ideal customers.
Answer common questions and concerns with expert interviews.
Create original case studies.
Create step-by-step walk-throughs with concrete examples from actual clients.
Leverage AI in all these aspects
Developments in generative AI mean it can be a powerful asset in all areas mentioned above.
You can use AI to increase the value your customer gets from their digital experience.
AI chatbots can answer their questions and help them schedule a demo of your product.
AI tools can assist your company in helping the customer get results by educating and guiding them on how to use your product.
Digital customer experience trends in 2024
Technology is changing so fast that your customer experience must keep up, or you will be left behind. Here are three of the biggest trends that are changing the digital CX landscape in 2024:
Increased use of generative AI to improve digital experiences
Generative AI will play an increasingly larger role across various channels and interactions. In 2023, 70% of CX leaders planned to integrate generative AI into CX touchpoints over the next two years.
The rise of Autonomous CX
Autonomous CX is the latest stage of AI-powered customer experiences, where you leverage generative AI to deliver a truly personalized experience in real-time.
Generative AI sorts through content in your database and delivers only what’s relevant to each user.
Generative AI can choose between headlines or even adapt copy in real-time.
Chatbots powered by generative AI can deliver human-like responses and help solve customer issues.
Decreasing consumer trust because of AI use (and its media coverage)—and what to do about it
But with great power comes great responsibility. The power of AI (and how the media reports on it) has led to growing consumer skepticism and fear.
Only 51% of customers in 2023 said they generally trusted companies. This is partly due to the rise of AI and customer sentiments towards it.
The answer is to be transparent about data usage. Explain to your customers exactly what data you collect, and how you plan to use it. And finally, use that data effectively to deliver a more convenient experience.
If you track app and website usage, use the data to personalize the customer’s experience. In 2023, 66% of consumers would happily provide this data to “brands they love,” in exchange for a personalized experience.
What’s next?
Digital customer experience is a deep topic and discipline. Just reading this guide can get you started, but won’t get you to the finish line.
We’ve spent over 3,000 words to share actionable strategies and tools to optimize your digital experience, but we’ve only scratched the surface. If you truly want to improve your CX, dive deep into each strategy and topic mentioned above. A good place to start is with digital customer experience management and autonomous CX:
Further Reading:
FAQs
What is an example of a digital experience?
An example of a digital experience is when you access a company’s website, online store or app on your smartphone or laptop.
Why is digital experience important?
A good digital experience can help differentiate you from your competition, boost customer loyalty and improve your bottom line.
What is CX in digital marketing?
Customer experience in a digital marketing context refers to the discipline of improving your customers' experience on your website or in an app.
