7 Priorities Brands Must Consider for Effective DX

This will be the year that brands hone in on improving the digital experience (DX) for consumers. With 71 percent of consumers expecting companies to deliver personalized experiences and online shopping revenue projected to reach more than $800 billion in 2022, brands need to make DX a priority in order to stand out in a crowded marketplace, improve customer loyalty and relations, and drive sales.

Clearly, it’s not something brands can afford to overlook. So, what are the key must-haves for an effective DX? The following seven strategies are essential to keeping the content pipeline flowing and improving time-to-market.

1. Know your customer.

Gaining a thorough understanding of customers’ digital preferences and behaviors is key to creating a great digital customer experience. Brands must start by thinking about the customer journey in its entirety, removing any obstacles and making sure that moving between platforms is seamless.

They must also go deeper. This could include specific levels of support that the customer might need, their preferred marketing channels, and the technologies they're most comfortable with.

2. Personalize, personalize, personalize.

We're living in an era of personalization. Customers now expect brand interactions to be tailored to their specific situation and will turn to a competitor if these expectations aren’t met.

Brands must therefore focus on personalizing the DX. This could mean sending special offers based on a customer’s behavior, offering in-session loyalty promotions that are relevant to the user, or adapting offers based on a customer’s location — anything that makes them feel valued as an individual.

3. Stay connected.

Today's marketing relies on a patchwork of interconnected systems that need to work seamlessly together to deliver solid, high-performing digital experiences that keep customers coming back for more.

This makes a highly integrated, connected marketing tech stack vital for any brand that wants to distribute — and update in real time — optimized versions of marketing assets across touchpoints, websites, e-markets and social channels.

4. Remain consistent.

When consumers interact with a brand online, they expect that brand to be presented in the same way across all channels. The challenge is that upholding a brand’s identity as it grows can be tricky.

Maintaining consistency across all customer touchpoints is key to delivering a cohesive digital experience. The transition between each channel and element must be fluid and seamless. That’s what will build confidence in the brand while increasing loyalty, brand recognition and customer satisfaction.

5. Integrate automation.

With brands under pressure to produce engaging materials while managing costs and time constraints, creative automation technologies enable them to increase their content output without sacrificing quality.

With creative automation in place, design teams can create a master template and lock certain brand elements. Wider teams can then access this template and modify editable elements as required. This empowers brands to free their designers from the burden of grunt work and scale the creation of high-quality, personalized content.

6. Leverage data.

Gathering, consolidating and organizing customer data into a single platform is vital to delivering personalized digital experiences at scale. Although this has traditionally been a challenge, brands now have access to more robust customer data than ever before.

Marketing teams must leverage this data to understand and visualize how and where customers interact with the brand. This can then drive all future decisions, making it easier for brands to provide superior customer experiences at the right time.

7. Prioritize employee experience.

Finally, brands can’t forget about their employees. Employees are largely responsible for delivering high-quality, differentiated experiences. Therefore, improving the digital customer experience starts with improving the employee experience.

By making employees’ lives easier — e.g., standardizing marketing collateral or making assets easier to find through a metadata-based platform — and giving them the tools to do their jobs more effectively will result in employees being more engaged and more likely to contribute to a superior customer DX.

Brands must deliver the best possible DX for their customers in order to remain competitive. Building these seven priorities into a DX strategy and executing on them will go a long way towards helping the initiative (and the business) succeed.

Brian Kavanaugh is the director of global field and customer marketing at Bynder, a digital asset management platform that enables teams to collaborate in the cloud, get content to market faster, and maximize the impact of marketing assets.