“The most effective way for the decision makers in organizations to realize financial success is to ensure their businesses get ever better at meeting the needs, wants and expectations of their customers,” writes Ian Golding at CustomerThink.
“By doing so, not only will they be elevating customer experience to the forefront of everyone’s thinking, they are far more likely to achieve long-term sustainable growth.”
For many of today’s marketers, “customer experience” equates to the relationship customers have with the brand via email, which means it’s critical for every message to elevate the customer experience. Here are four services to help do that.
1. Enhance your brand’s visual marketing capabilities with Olapic
Visual content has always played a critical role in marketing, but back in the day, visual content was sourced by advertising agencies – it certainly didn’t come from customers. But today’s marketers are challenged to leverage – successfully and legally – visual content that comes not only from their customers, but also from influencers and, of course, from the brands themselves.
That’s where companies like Olapic come in. Its goal is to help brands develop a “high-performing visual content approach optimized for every touchpoint.” The company says it has worked with “hundreds of the world’s leading brands to help them scale visual content creation, regain trust through authenticity, and co-create experiences with their customers.”
Olapic aggregates images submitted by users on various social media channels. It uses a curation algorithm and human editors to identify the images best suited to a brand’s specific use and, of course, create a positive customer experience that furthers the brand’s goals.
**2. Realize the full potential of transactional messages with Iterable
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Transactional messages aren’t sexy, but they can be a critical to email marketing success.
**“**Transactional emails offer a unique opportunity to engage with your users,” writes Alyssa West at InstaPage. “By making your transactional emails a vital part of your email marketing campaign, you’re making the most of every point of contact with consumers.”
These types of triggered messages – which include order confirmations, receipts, and cart-abandonment messages – serve the practical purpose of delivering specific information, but also have the potential to be customer-experience drivers — after all they are opened and clicked far more often than bulk emails. That means they deserve the same level of attention given to marketing messages.
To get the most out of your transactional messages, consider using a platform such as the one offered by Iterable, which “automates campaigns through a visual, drag-and-drop workflow, activates on any type of internal and external customer data and allows marketers to personalize messaging at scale across multiple channels.”
**3. Test your design across clients and devices with Email on Acid
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After you spend time crafting compelling copy, drafting a pithy subject line and selecting the perfect images, the last thing you want is for customer experience to be sabotaged by a coding or design error.
Remember last fall, when Gmail for iOS started to replace the copyright HTML symbol and other symbols, such as registered and trademark, with an equivalent blue-hued image? As design-related problems go, it was more of an annoyance than a major glitch – but it does point to the importance of testing your messages across clients and devices.
It’s impossible for you to manually test your emails using all client and devices on which it might appear, but you don’t have to do. Email on Acid offers tools that allow email marketers to preview messages in more than 70 different email clients and mobile devices in seconds. It promises to defeat image blocking and verify every link and image reference in its clients’ messages, thus ensuring your customers get the experience you have in mind for them.
4. Leverage the engagement power of intelligent content with Movable Ink
There’s perhaps no better way to engage with customers than by activating your customer data to create experiences that meet them at the critical “moment of open.”
With Movable Ink’s intelligent content platform, you can do that by pulling content directly from your website, social media channels, or asset libraries to display real-time information like live pricing and inventory. The platform makes it easy to access your data – whether it’s through your CRM or an API – and use it to create 1:1 email content, and add personalization with contextual elements like local weather, time, device and more. It can also be used to include user-generated content in your emails. You can add your live social feeds to drive engagement, and filter content to ensure that only your best social content is visible by your customers.
We’ve had a lot to stay about intelligent content on this blog in recent months (of course!) – you can find out more about it here, here, and here.