What Is Digital Product Experience?
by Lumavate | Last Updated: Oct 26, 2023
by Lumavate | Last Updated: Oct 26, 2023
A digital experience is an online interaction between a customer and a brand. A digital experience can appear on a consumer’s smartphone, tablet, desktop, or TV. It takes the form of a website, mobile app, landing page, email, social media post, secure portal, and many others.
For manufacturing brands, digital experiences focus on their products. These digital product experiences bring physical products into an online format, enabling a wider audience of consumers to learn about, engage with, and buy a brand’s products.
Common digital product experiences include how-to videos, interactive product tours, social media posts highlighting a product's features and benefits, and digital product catalogs.
Good product experience management ensures that customers have the information and tools they need every step of the way so that they can make an informed choice they’re happy with.
It’s statistically proven that customers will pay more for a better experience. Accordingly, a memorable product experience is a necessity for any business that wants to generate social media buzz and earn word of mouth referrals.
A product cannot exist without a great product experience meaning that a product that doesn’t clearly showcase its best features and sell itself to consumers won’t stand out in the marketplace. The product experience is just as important as the product itself. Without a cohesive and integrated product experience strategy, the product just sits on shelves or on websites, never to be truly discovered.
The product experience is all-encompassing and requires extensive planning from the business selling the product. That’s why the first step of a good product experience strategy is mapping out the entire customer journey, from when they first hear about the product to their eventual purchase, to well beyond the sale. This is the only way to truly understand the customer’s path to purchase. When you are aware of the decision points facing the consumer as they navigate their process, you can make sure you are providing an experience that moves customers forward, as opposed to turning them away.
A good product experience makes customers happy, but it does much more than that. It also plays a massive role in lead generation, customer acquisition, customer retention, onboarding, and revenue for the company. Therefore, product experience must be at the forefront of every marketing strategy.
The single most important part of the digital experience is the same as any other form of marketing -- listening to the voice to the customer. It’s a bit different digitally since you can’t see customers and they can’t touch the product. However, the electronic nature of the digital experience opens doors that would not be available via in-person marketing.
Mapping out each stage of the customer journey enables you to focus on every interaction along that journey. It allows you to focus on key decision points, and it helps you to see what people need at that moment. The fast-paced nature of digital communication allows you to send out the materials that a consumer may need to see, at the exact right moment. A text, a push notification, or an email can be the difference between a lost sale and a satisfied customer.
Of course, shoppers don’t always know what they want. It’s important that you give consumers the tools they need to assess their needs, express their pain points, and start to believe that your product might be the solution. At the same time, consumers need a seamless experience that answers their questions, without becoming too overwhelming. Digital activity-based metrics are very helpful in this area. You’ll instantly know if your approach to the digital product experience is working. If it’s not working, you’ll know exactly what to fix to get people thinking more favorably about your product.
The good news is that you don’t have to track all of these metrics on your own. Services like Lumavate can help you to access analytics regarding your product experience, illuminating the areas in which your marketing is working and where it’s falling short. This information is essential in not only crafting your product experience, but fine-tuning it as consumer demands and expectations change.