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Two Essential Factors of a Personalized Customer Experience

Personalizing the customer experience is essential right now in order to stand out from the competition. Yes, it may feel like an unscalable thing to incorporate into your customer experience strategy, but ignoring this important aspect of your customer’s overall experience with your brand could be hurting you in the long run… especially during a time when everyone wants to feel that personal support and care as a customer. 

Admit it, it makes you smile when the barista at your favorite coffee shop remembers your name AND how you like your coffee.

Or when the bartender gives you that extra mug of beer when you’re feeling kinda down. Or when your local restaurant gives you free dessert because it’s your birthday.

These little gestures and personalization make you come back. Right?

Your online customers are no different. They’re more likely to stick with a brand that gives them a personalized experience. That’s why you need to be thinking about how you can create a personalized experience for your audience.

You need to think about the different ways that your brand will interact with your audience and create intentional touchpoints to connect with them.

You also need to be intentional about how you design your products so that they meet the needs of your customers.

And that’s what we’re gonna talk about in this continuation of the five elements of creating a customer experience. (You can check the post about the brand avatar that we talked about last time here).

Let’s get started!

Want to dive a little deeper into the subject? Listen to Bobby discuss the concepts in this post in Episode 276 on the Certified BADA$$ Online Marketing Podcast!

Here’s What We’ll Be Covering…

  • What is a personalized customer experience
  • How do you personalized the experience for your customers
  • The second element of the customer experience machine: intentional touchpoints
  • How you can establish intentitional touchpoints
  • Why you should be willing to do the unscalable in your business
  • The importance of customizing your touchpoints
  • How you should think about improving various experiences of your customers
  • The third element of the customer experience machine: product design
  • Why product design is important for customer experience
  • Why the needs of your customers matter more than yours

What Is A Personalized Customer Experience?

Before we get down to the nuts and bolts of creating a personalization strategy, let’s be clear about what we mean by it.

When we talk about customer experience here, that includes the very first moment that your customer encounters you to when they buy from you to the time they receive their products and even beyond that.

In other words, it includes not only your existing customers but also your prospective customers.

Whether that’s through browsing your website, reading your email, listening to your podcast, watching your live stream, or using your product, there’s some level of experience there.

A personalized customer experience is about providing service to the customer based on their individual needs and preferences. In the personalization process, you’re recognizing that your customers are humans with unique traits, needs, desires, and experiences.

Catering to them on a personal level improves customer experience, which helps drive customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, engagement, lead generation, and ultimately, conversion.

How Do You Personalize Customer Experience to Build Customer Loyalty?

We can probably list several steps to do personalization, like segmenting your customer base, collecting quality customer data, or leveraging technology.

But for now, we’re gonna talk about two important factors here: intentional touchpoints and product design. These are two of the five elements of creating your customer experience machine that you need in building a business.

Establish Intentional Customer Touchpoints

As I said, there are various points of interaction between your brand and your customers. And we need to consider that when thinking through customer experience.

How do you make sure that every time your customer interacts with your brand, they have a positive experience?

The more personalized ways you can come up with to have interactions with your people, the better for creating a better customer experience.

Let’s start with these three tips:

Be Willing To Do The Unscalable

You have to be willing to do the unscalable, especially during the early days of your business.

For example, if someone from your audience sends you a heartfelt email, make sure that you respond. It’s one of the most important touchpoints for your business.

As your business gets bigger, it will be harder to answer every email and no doubt you’ll miss many of them. But the goal is to make people feel that they matter to you.

They understand that as an entrepreneur, you’re busy and you have a lot on your plate. So, when you give your time to respond to them personally, they feel extra special.

They know that they matter to you, and that wows them. It gives them an amazing customer experience, which attracts them more to your brand.

Customize Your Customer Touchpoints

Another part of these intentional touchpoints is to customize your interactions with people as much as possible.

For example, when you have email marketing sequences, you have segmentations. Let’s just say you had an email sequence that had seven emails. Everybody’s going to get seven emails. But on the third email, there are four versions and people will get a different version based on the information you have about them.

That level of intentionality will change the experience that people have. It will make people feel like you’re speaking into their souls way more. It’s little things like that that will help you create a positive customer experience.

Improve The Various Customer Experiences

A customer experience strategy is also about recognizing the different touchpoints and trying to find ways to improve the various experiences.

  • How can we improve the experience?
  • How can we make it seamless? 
  • How can we show our people that we care?

That’s a big part of the process. You need to find ways to go above and beyond the minimum requirements and exceed your customers’ expectations.

For example, if the touchpoint is the customer service, it’s crucial to respond to queries immediately. If there are issues, make sure that you address them promptly and that you provide solutions.

Design Products to Meet Customer Needs

Why is product design important? Why does it matter in customer experience?

Whether it’s paid or free, your product design is what gives your people a reason to buy from you instead of your competitors.

This is about designing a product and the different things you offer in a way that really meets the needs of your people. It’s a big part of providing a wow customer experience.

You need to be intentional about your product designs to ensure that everything you do is helping your customers get the results that they want.

Make sure that your products have and deliver what your audience needs.

Again, it’s not based on what you want, but what they need.

For example, if your audience needs more than just information, don’t just offer a course. That’s just information.

If they need help in implementing what they learned, you need to design your product offerings in a way that will help them with that. Helping people get results is a powerful thing to provide an amazing customer experience.

Let me cite my offers as an example. We have:

  • BADA$$ Online Marketing™ University (BOMU), which is our free experience and where we deliver courses. We’ve organized it in a way to help people do the right thing at the right time in their business. It’s designed to deliver powerful information that will work for people without them having to pay an arm and a leg to get started. This meets a huge need when it comes to accessibility of information… info our people NEED.
  • BADA$$ Online Marketing™ Membership, which is for people who want help implementing. This is structured to give people who are in the early phases of their business access to experts to implement what they’ve learned… which is a serious need in our audience. They need help taking action, so we built this membership to help.
  • BADA$$ Online Marketing Coaching, which is for people further on their journey who want more strategic and targeted help with implementing new strategies and experimenting with more advanced marketing.

 

Do you see how it’s a customer journey?

When someone joins BOMU, which is free, they go through the courses. When they get value from those courses, they’ll consider signing up for a paid product like the membership.

And then let’s say people who are in my membership get great results and they move from phase one all the way to phase four. They got to the point where I helped them walk through the journey of building a successful business. Guess what? They’re going to be primed to buy my coaching program.

If you design your products to deliver the value that your people need and get them results, that’s a powerful customer experience machine that will drive your business to success.

Summing Up the Customer Journey Personalization Strategy

Your customer experience feeds into everything else in your business. If you do that right, it helps improve your conversion.

Because of a positive customer experience, people will buy your next product.

Again, make sure that your products are designed to give your audience what they need, not what you want, even if it means your product can’t be as scalable as you want it to be.

You need to be more involved in providing a personalized experience for your people. Ultimately, the success your customers have is what will matter.

Read the rest of this series in the posts below:

About Bobby Klinck

Harvard Lawyer and Online Entrepreneur

About Bobby Klinck