In this blog post, I will share the toolbox I use myself when I design marketing strategies.
Maybe you read my previous Mono Weekly post where I argued that customer experience is the new marketing.

Due in large part to online reviews and other user-generated content, brands are no longer in control of brand communication. Instead, customers now have a huge impact on how well a brand is perceived and received. Therefore, the customer experience is now the bedrock of marketing.

The customer experience toolbox has four pillars:

The importance of touchpoint analyses

Mapping your touchpoints can be a learning experience. A full touchpoint analysis goes end-to-end. From your online presence, Google My Business, Social Media, Website, and whatever a user will find when he googles your name or business, to the final touch on the customer journey, which for some businesses is an invoice.

Most of us get surprised by how many touchpoints we have in use.

At this stage, you will need to learn which touchpoints are in use, if the touchpoint is optimized to facilitate a positive customer experience, and which of your touchpoints is the most important for your customers.

For example, when I receive my products from a local vendor of beauty care, skonskincare.dk, it always comes with a handwritten letter and sometimes a free trial of a new product. Coming from the e-commerce industry, I learned that the most important touchpoint from our online purchase is when we receive our purchase. So, for an e-commerce seller, it’s a good idea to use this moment to delight your customer.

Further reading: Sales in 2021: From damage control to a future in control.

How to get the customer journey right

A few years ago, I was working for a Danish newspaper. Our main revenue stream came from print ads. The market for print ads was declining, but our share at that time was even worse.

We had to do something different to win market share again. One of our most important activities was mapping the customer journey with an outside-in perspective. We learned that the sales and marketing teams were spending 80% of their resources on only one part of the journey - part of the journey where few emotions were involved from the buyer’s perspective.

This insight gave us the motivation to re-set our approach and go-to-market strategies. The results were incredible. We went from losing market share to winning market share in a very short time period.

Here are a few questions you will need to ask:

• What does your customer’s journey look like?
• What is on the customer’s mind at each stage of the journey?
• Which touchpoints does the customer see?
• How does the customer interact with each touchpoint?
• What is the experience with this touchpoint?
• Does the touchpoint help the customer?
• Does the touchpoint delight the customer?
• Does the touchpoint surprise the customer?
• Is it a brilliant, basic, or a magic moment?

The best way to find out is to map the journey, add the touchpoints and talk to your customers to figure out, what matters and how the experience is.

Customer satisfaction and the power of a happy customer

Happy customers clearly matter more for some businesses more than others. For a small business owner, serving their local community is a clear differentiator when compared to the large vendors on the market.

Last year, a fun advertisement from Burger King was released in the Danish market wherein they poked fun at McDonald’s. Now, humor can be very different from country to country, so forgive me if the irony in this ad is too Nordic. All you will need to take out from here is that Burger King made it very clear that in 2021, you should not leave your customers hanging - bad customer service is so last season.

If you have a minute, then watch The Whopper Reply, and laugh (maybe).

So, the question we need to ask ourselves is, “how happy are my customers today?”

Being in constant contact with our customers is an opportunity that was presented to us by new, smart technology. Businesses can learn much more about their customers with the help of this tech, and marketers can create more personalized interactions to try and keep relationships with customers positive. On the other hand, customers can also help businesses create better products or services.

Businesses use customer feedback during product development to constantly learn and adjusting while creating the next best-in-class product. By addressing early feedback, the company can create a smoother customer experience for their customer base as a whole.

Further reading: The power of reviews

Data is your path to the gold

I was once working with a guy named Daniel. Daniel is a passionate SEO and conversion rate evangelist. He repeated more than once in our marketing meetings: “you can´t manage, what you can’t measure.”

Maybe a digital marketing guru said this first, but it’s not important. What´s important is, that Daniel was right.

When this marketing team started to create content based on data (search analysis) instead of content only created by creativity, our conversion rate went from 12% to 30% and that was just from the email campaigns.

The average time spent and the bounce rate of our website improved remarkably and the difference in our paid media activities was so big, that it was almost embarrassing.

There is a lot of data we can track and learn from, as data points come in many shapes and sizes. They are not all important, but make sure to track and derive insights from the important ones.

The above example from David and the marketing team was learnings from a content marketing team, where we learned that data beats creativity in the world of digital marketing.

Key takeaways

The customer experience toolbox has four pillars.

1: The touchpoints

Map your touchpoints and investigate, how your touchpoints meet your customers. Learn which touchpoint is the most important one and make it peak.

2: The customer journey

Map the customer journey end-to-end. With an outside-in perspective, learn where you are spending most of your efforts and if your go-to-market strategy needs adjustment to be customer-centric optimized to generate more revenue.

3: The customer’s satisfaction

Being on track with how your customers think you are doing is important. Best-in-class customer support and service can make a difference for your reputation and your revenue.

At Mono, we are proud of our best-in-class service desk, they score between 90% - 98% in eNPS, and we track this number daily. This makes Mono Solutions a preferred white-label marketing technology partner.

4: Data

Track, learn, and adjust. Let your data navigate for you. To get data, a small business owner needs a data hub. The business data hub for a small business owner is the website; so a website is a critical, need-to-have business asset in 2021.

Do you want to sell websites for small business owners, under your brand, optimized for best-in-class customer experience, then I suggest you get a demo of the Mono website builder platform, to learn more.

About the author

Mie Bilberg is the new VP of Marketing at Mono Solutions. Mie has a digital and strategic marketing background. Her roots are grounded in media and eCommerce, driven by a passion for customer experience, digital media, and content marketing. Most recently she was Head of Online Sales at Carlsberg Brewery where she launched a global eCommerce platform. Mie is a well-known face among the Danish eCommerce industry as she represents the jury that every year finds the best eCommerce businesses in Denmark. Mie brings experience from start-ups, and marketplaces like Just Eat - takeaway.com. She is the ex-Marketing Director for Metroxpress formerly owned by Tamedia.

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