8 min Read

Week 4: The Digital Customer Experience (DCX) – The Marketing Funnel & Flywheel

“The collective mosaic of these impressions forms the experience a customer has with a company. So, the digital customer experience you create is the collective result of all the impressions created by your digitally influenced customer interactions.”

Check out our video on LinkedIn introducing this weeks topic; The Digital Customer Experience Strategy; the Components of the Strategy. Last week we touched on the DCX Strategy top-level, we definitely recommend heading and checking that out before reading this weeks.

With that in mind, in the most succinct way, your digital customer experience strategy is crucial to your business so you have a hand at your customers through every stage of their journey.

And poor impressions come in the form of more than just mobile app crashes or slow website performance. Are your emails going to spam? Not receiving images in their inbox? Not receiving confirmation or updates when they have submitted a contact form? Image. How. Frustrating.

Not communicating the right thing to your customer at the right time is your sure way to lose a sale or an opportunity.

What used to be simply known as the marketing funnel; awareness, consideration and conversion, has now evolved into the marketing flywheel.

Goodbye Marketing Funnel, Hello Marketing Flywheel!

As seen below in the graphic by Hubspot, the world of digital marketing is moving away from a simple one-way road, to a never-ending 360.

Why we love it? It’s because marketing for your brand should never be a one-way road if you want to have a successful long standing business.

The idea that engagement with your customers is a never-ending process, solidifies the idea that maintaining a relationship with your current customers is one of the most important things to you.

Some funnels also add two further stages called Loyalty and Advocacy below Conversion, this helps brands see that there is more beyond ‘snagging a purchase’ or ‘another sale’. There’s real people at the end of this and opportunities to turn them into word-of-mouth marketers and loyal fans.

With the marketing flywheel, there are three stages; Attract, Engage & Delight, with customers at the very centre. This should be seen through your Marketing, Sales & Service lines.

How to Attract your Audience

1. Knowing what they like: Figure out what makes your audience tick (using the tips in last weeks blog), part of this includes knowing what your audience engages with most. Colours? Designs? Branding? This is all about creating ads that look and feel nice to the eye and the mind.
2. Eliminate barriers as they try to learn about your company. Go through their journey from the outset, how is your website performing on both mobile and desktop? Are there too many pop-ups? Are they learning the best parts of your business straight away or is it obvious to them?
3. Earn people’s attention, not force it. Some forces you can apply are of course content marketing, search engine optimisation, social media marketing, social selling, targeted paid advertising, and conversion rate optimisation. But finding the balance where you can offer meaningful engagement rather than just transactional.

How to Engage your Audience:

1. Be where your audience is. Don’t make it difficult for them to engage with your brand and product.
2. Focus on opening relationships, not just closing deals. Again, your current customers are just as important as acquiring new ones, they also tell a lot about your business if you listen to them. Building relationships and remembering your customers are real people will help you a lot more in knowing what they want and when.
3.Think personalisation. From website and email personalisation, database segmentation, marketing automation, lead nurturing, multichannel communication (chat, phone, messaging, email), sales automation, lead scoring, and try before you buy programs. This can all be done with a powerful CRM (more on that in a sec).

How to Delight your Audience:

1. Help, support, and empower customers to reach their goals. What does your audience really want? If they can’t get it from you then how can you help them get there?
2. Customer success is your success. Some forces you can leverage are self-service (Knowledge base, chatbot), proactive customer service, multichannel availability (chat, messaging, phone, email), ticketing systems, automated onboarding, customer feedback surveys, and loyalty programs to name just a few.
3. Provide value. Give them something to want to be a part of. Whether this be a good cause, a great sentiment or something usable in their day to day life. For example, when creating blog content for your brand, what other problems might your audience and potential audience have that you can answer?

How to choose a CRM that works for your Digital Customer Experience

Thinking MailChimp?. If you are a business wanting to grow, or wanting to focus on your digital customer experience, MailChimp is just not going to cut it.

When we spoke about database segmentation, marketing automation, lead nurturing, sales automation and lead scoring, these are all key elements for your digital customer experience action plan.

It is so important for your digital customer experience, to have a platform that can follow and use the data that is given to you by the customer, i.e. their touch points and interactions with your business.

A platform like MailChimp is an ESP – an Email Service Provider. Platforms like Hubspot and Active Campaign are CRM + ESP which allows for these features above. And trust us when we say they’re not all winners.

A good CRM solution records your customers’ contact information and remembers the details of your relationship and every interaction—whether by phone, email and other channels such as social media or even your customer help desk.

It can (and should) also include everything from the customer’s initial purchase to their support history all the way to what the conversation was about during that last lunch they had with your regional sales rep.

What to consider when choosing a CRM for your business:

1.Define your Business Goals: Map it out using the S.M.A.R.T process, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.
2. Define your Business Needs: Take a look at what goals you have and make a list of the practical tools you need to achieve each goal. This will give you an idea of the features and functionality you require for day to day tasks.
3. Ask your Team: What tools would they find useful? How will they be using it? How many departments will need to use it and what features for each. Make their life easier – they’ll thank you for it and better work will come out of it.
4. Sort your Features: Prioritise! Make a list of your must-haves and nice-to-have’s.
5. Research: Make the most of free trials and support teams to help you understand how your features work together on the same CRM. Don’t be afraid to ask the hard-hitting questions and be strong on your list of must-haves. Read reviews and evaluate!

Our favourites, after years of trial and error, we just can’t match Hubspot’s capabilities and features, but we also love Active Campaign. Some of our clients swear by Freshworks too which incorporates the tools of a CRM, marketing platform as well as a sales desk system.

We also find PC’s article PC: The Best CRM Platform for 2021 super helpful!

Your Marketing Strategy: TOFU, MOFU, BOFU

Not just for the vegans – TOFU, MOFU & BOFU are a marketers best friend. We talked before about the flywheel – but for marketers, the idea of the funnel is to push people from the top to the bottom using clever tactics and tips.

TOFU: Top-of-Funnel is Awareness

At the top of the funnel, people generally don’t know about your brand or product. They are probably in the research phase or looking for something they don’t know they need.

Your aim here is to gain their attention and either educate or entertain them. You should introduce your product’s solution to their problem and position your business as a helpful resource to them.

Keep your audience broad here and assume that they have absolutely no idea who you are or what you do. Keep it short and catchy, and use your best USP’s to state the obvious.

This stage is where you will find the least amount of conversions, as this is an audience who needs more convincing on why they should choose you.

When organising a top-of-funnel campaign, think video!

Best platforms for awareness campaigns;

Youtube – a very cost effective platform, which low CPM’s (cost-per-thousand views), CTR will be low – but you can expect a jump in organic traffic.
Google Display Network – staying front of mind and being where your audience is on their favourite websites.
Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn – your chosen social platform, you can also retarget based on video views which is super helpful.

BOFU: Middle of Funnel is Conversion

The bottom-of-funnel is for the customers who have followed you through the top two levels of your funnel and have been qualified towards purchase intent. Now you can see why it is so crucial to understand the touchpoints between a customer and your business, and knowing how to track them for your digital customer experience. Now is the time to finally catch them. This is done in three ways;

A great asset to utilise here is your sales team – what is something they use when trying to convince someone to sign up or purchase with them? Think of your audience research as outlined in last week’s article to tap into what you think will get them over the edge.
Your BOFU searchers focus heavily on branded search, including product-specific searches and review types of keywords. On the flip side, they are looking for proof that your solution will deliver results/ROI/etc. and is the one they should purchase. Best platforms for conversion campaigns;

Google Search: You should find a lot of results here when using branded searches, or product-specific searches.
Google Display Network: use display retargeting creatives here with one of your conversion tactics to show to your audiences who have passed through the above two stages.
Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn – use creatives that take on one of your three tactics above. Keep copy super specific to converting the user – assume they are looking for a pinky promise before finally converting.

Maximise Brain Power to Drive your DCX Strategy

There’s more to your business than just you. By maximising brain power, we mean speaking and discussing with your team. Bring everyone together to help evaluate your best strategy.

The more the better! You’d be surprised the things you uncover when you speak to more people. It can also save you some frustration in the future if you haven’t supported your strongest and weakest links.

Run your team through the stages of your strategy and come up with an action plan, feedback and changes before putting in the effort of designing, implementing and launching before realising it isn’t right.

Run from the top to the bottom, through your audiences, through your data and analytics and make sure it speaks to the same thing.

Here’s your Digital Customer Experience Strategy Checklist:

1. Defining success: Sales, enquiries, leads, followers or clicks?
2. Mapped out your customer journey: all the touch points between customers and your brand.
3. Identify your audience: more than just age, location and gender, check the full list here.
4. Address the phases of their journey: how is your audience currently interacting with your business?
5. Where and how to advertise: choosing the right platforms for your audience.
6. How to measure success: setting your KPI’s and real stats based on your definition of success, i.e. X amount of enquiries per month.
7. Attribution checked: can you track your conversions properly? Is your Google Analytics configured correctly? Make sure you can track where your customers are throughout their entire journey.
8. Choose your CRM: does your CRM do everything you need? Does it support your end goal?
9. Lay out your funnel: what information should be shared at what stage? What images work well where? Where do we want to advertise and when?
10. Brainstorm: discuss with your team and ensure everything has been considered.

Next week we discuss; Your Website, everything you need to maximise your digital customer experience.

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