Lindsay Boyajian Hagan, Vice President of Marketing, conductor.
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Customer experience (CX) is critical to an organization’s success, especially during a recession. Flush out all the new product add-on flashes and remove the sale accessories. What’s left is the core of your business: the customer experience. That means what and how you deliver value to your customers.
Customer experience defines how customers interact with your product or service as a key driver of customer retention and loyalty. How do they feel about your brand? Are they getting real value? Could they come back to buy again? Will they recommend you to others? Pondering these questions will help you assess how strong your CX is and where there are gaps or areas for improvement.
A great place to start improving your CX is to focus on your existing customers.We have a wealth of data detailing previous interactions with brands that not only help us make decisions, but are generally perceived as costly to acquire new customers. 5 times or more Than keep existing customers. Plus, making sure your existing customers are happy can have long-term benefits. Satisfied customers are not only repeat customers, they can also refer new businesses through word of mouth, testimonials, and social media.
That means we’re focusing on customer experience with our existing customer base and starting to ask the right questions. Let’s take a closer look at the basic ways you can improve your customer experience and, in turn, bring long-term benefits to your business.
Build a foundation by investing in your number one asset: your website.
With an estimated 2.14 billion people shopping online in 2021, it’s safe to say we’re in a digital-first economy. In fact, according to projections, in less than two years, global e-commerce sales are on the road to reaching $7.5 trillion. Customers very likely interact with your brand primarily online, so your website is one of your brand’s most powerful sites. of Your Strongest Asset — It can be your business’s greatest driving force.
With increasing customer expectations for a seamless online experience, investing in your website to deliver a fast and responsive experience is imperative. why? A slow loading website creates a sub-optimal customer experience and can lead to low engagement, high bounce rates, and low conversion rates. It can also have a significant impact on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings and, in turn, your organic traffic. At my company, we found that on average, organic searches generate 44% of his overall website traffic for major industries. So any impact on organic traffic can have a big impact on your bottom line.
Screaming Frog and ContentKing (Disclosure: My company acquired ContentKing in 2022), assess page speed, check for broken links, assess site for issues, and see if there’s anything else that might impact the customer experience baseline If you have great content and resources on your site, but your customers can’t access them properly, you’re wasting a lot of valuable time and money.
Create helpful content and make it discoverable.
Now that we have a technically sound site, it’s time to focus on content and architecture. Helpful content is a great retention tool for supporting existing customers and driving repeat business. The majority of online interactions start with search engines (often with people asking questions). Strengthen existing customer relationships by establishing yourself as a source of valuable content that meets their needs. By building this trust, you can establish yourself as a trusted ally in their pursuit of knowledge and an asset they can rely on again and again.
When creating useful content, ask yourself: What questions are customers asking? How can we best meet their needs? Are there evergreen or seasonal topics our brand can talk about? Popular search engines such as Google Analyzing SEO data and search volume for specific topics in is a great way to learn what people are looking for and where you can lend your expertise to best serve your customers. am.
Not only do you want to create authentic content that your customers will revisit and position themselves as a problem-solving resource, but you also want to organize your content in an intuitive and user-friendly structure. Consider your customer’s mindset when organizing your content. Beyond navigation, evaluate how you label your content with key SEO metadata such as page tags, title tags, and meta descriptions to enhance your digital presence and how it appears in search engines. please.
Consider investing in local SEO.
Depending on your industry, you may also consider investing in local SEO to identify region-specific interests, questions, and searches for your customer base. By targeting a narrower subset, you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers, improve your search engine result page (SERP) rankings, expand your digital presence, and significantly increase your chances of conversion. . Additionally, investing in local SEO gives you the opportunity to research local competition and see where you have opportunities to grow your market share within your industry.
in short
In today’s world, your digital presence is one of your most important assets. It’s the conduit through which you connect with your customers, build irreplaceable trust, and ultimately build symbiotic relationships that lead to long-term business outcomes. By investing in the customer experience, prioritizing the creation of valuable content, developing an intuitive information architecture, understanding local SEO insights, and ensuring technical SEO runs smoothly, the customer You can transform the experience and deliver it to your business and your customers for years to come. come.
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