How the Modern Business Will Deliver and Measure Successful Marketing in 2020

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There’s no denying that evolving technologies and the increasing number of mediums we use to deliver marketing messaging have changed the way we do business. Success, however, is still contingent on one chief arbiter: The consumer.

So who is today’s consumer? They are informed, critical, and less patient than ever before. And they don’t want just to buy a product or service; they want an immersive experience from the moment they become aware of their need throughout the purchase and use of their item.

We’re living in the age of experience.

However, many decision-makers are bound to eschew this fact in 2020 and beyond and continue to depend on a simple, outdated equation for measuring value: Return on investment (ROI). It’s time to look beyond just ROI to deliver and measure modern consumer experiences with return on experience (ROX).

Why Brands Must Supplement ROI with ROX in the Age of Experience
ROI, the traditional “money in-money out” equation by which brands measure the profitability of an investment, only scratches the surface of the complicated relationship between the customer and the brand. ROI answers the question, “What did a customer do?” But, it doesn’t answer the question, “Why did the customer do it?”

While we can’t jump into the mind of every customer to understand exactly what motivates them, we can go beyond a measurable difference in how much we spend versus how much we earn to understand how consumers are experiencing our marketing efforts.

Using ROI as the core metric to drive your marketing strategy isn’t just incomplete, it’s also limiting. Because it only focuses on the monetary value created by a specific action, it limits us to invest solely for financial gain. When we only measure ROI without ROX, we overlook what the customer actually desires and responds to.

That’s why ROX is a vital addition to ROI for the modern business.

By going beyond ROI with ROX, marketers can take a more holistic approach to track the value that end-to-end experiences provide. Positive ROX can take many forms—lowered bounce rates, more employee satisfaction, increased referrals, positive brand sentiment, improved CLV (customer lifetime value), etc.

Statistics show that prioritizing the customer experience pays off. Consumers don’t just spend up to 16% more with companies that offer better experiences, 63% are happy to share their personal information with businesses who use it to create a delightful experience. If you want these kinds of results, here’s what you need to know to create modern experiences.

Rebuild Your Tech Stack to Create Consumer Experiences Worth Measuring

The technology used to build compelling customer experiences should be dependent on the vision decision-makers have for the consumers’ journey—not the other way around. There’s no way you can prioritize the customer experience if you’re bogged down by technology that imposes slow time-to-market, limits content creation, and lacks flexibility when it comes to infrastructure and integration.

Instead, prioritizing the digital experience all starts with adopting a digital experience platform (DXP)—modern software that enables organizations to manage multiple integrated technologies and personalize the individual digital experience across omnichannel touchpoints.

To reap the benefits of a DXP, you must build it on a foundation of flexibility. For businesses that produce content, the ideal foundation is a headless content management system (CMS)—a content repository that separates the creation of content from design and development.

Unlike a traditional, monolithic CMS, a headless CMS uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to bring together content, design, and development. This API-first approach allows teams from across your business to collaborate and deliver impeccably-designed and perfectly-personalized experiences to every channel, device, and consumer—every time.

A headless CMS empowers organizations to make the most of their investment in delivering modern experiences and measuring ROX thanks to limitless integrations that enable end-to-end consumer experiences.

Personalization and Behavior Tracking

An essential step to building a DXP to deliver experiences is integrating a content personalization tool. Numerous personalization tools are available, such as Monetate, which is a popular personalization tool for ecommerce; Optimizely, which is a widely used enterprise-level personalization system; and Evergage, a more affordable cloud-based personalization tool.

To personalize a visitor’s experience, you need to segment your customers, create personas and develop content that targets each persona. Using metadata, you then label or tag the content, so that your personalization engine can show the related content when a visitor’s persona matches the defined criteria in your personalization tool when visiting one or more of your digital channels.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is also vital in helping track and build customer loyalty. A CRM tool can give you insights into a customer’s purchases and to identify similar products or services a customer might want. CRM software enables you to be proactive and attentive to customers on their digital journey to match marketing campaigns with the individuals most interested in the related product or service.

The term Voice of the Customer (VoC) refers to the process of capturing customer’s expectations, preferences, and dislikes. A VoC tool can help garner opinions and feedback from customers. Companies use VoC tools to determine what is missing between their customer expectations and their experience with the business. The data collected from customers informs companies to make decisions that address what their customers want.

Measuring Customer Experience

A person’s feelings determine behavior that motivates decisions and ultimately builds brand loyalty. To identify a customer’s emotions towards your company, products, and services, you want to capture and act on customer feedback.

Some tools and methodologies can help you capture feedback and measure your CX success. Customer Feedback Metrics (CFMs) refers to adding a customer feedback process. Chat tools are becoming increasingly popular for obtaining feedback from customers, as well as post-interaction surveys that can help measure customer experience. Acting on this feedback is critical to improving customer relations and adjusting business processes to meet or exceed customer expectations.

Another popular customer experience measurement tool is a Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is a measurement for customer experience management programs based on an index ranging from -100 to +100. It measures how willing customers are to recommend a company’s products or services to others using a customer’s overall satisfaction with a company’s product or service. NPS has its critics, but combining customer feedback metrics along with acquiring other feedback from customers is sure to improve measuring customer experience.

Will You Make ROX Part of Your 2020 Marketing Plan?

By 2020, Walker, a customer experience consulting firm, predicts that the customer experience is going to be more important to consumers than the price and the product. In this age of experience, it’s no longer going to be enough to focus only on ROI when it comes to measuring your success. By helping you take a more holistic approach to qualify the value you bring to your customers through experience, ROX also helps you build a stronger customer base and future-proof your business.

One of the best ways to improve ROX is by prioritizing the customer’s end-to-end digital experience. To truly prepare for the digital experience demand in 2020 and beyond, invest in a DXP built on cutting-edge headless CMS architecture, personalization and behavior tracking tools, and ways to measure and act on customer feedback to turn your ROX vision into reality.

Brent Heslop
Brent Heslop is a Content Strategist at Contentstack, the leading Content Experience Platform. Prior to Contentstack, he worked for over 15 years as a Senior Web Technologist at TIBCO Software. Brent has authored 15 popular computing books that have been translated into several languages. He has also taught HTML and Web programming at UC Santa Cruz Extension and has held numerous corporate seminars on Web publishing and programming.

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