What Is the Role of Product Experience?

Product experience plays a huge role in the success of any marketing campaign. It can spell the difference between a mediocre business that struggles to get by and a thriving, successful company with strong brand loyalty and a steady stream of new customers.

What Is a Product Experience?

As the name implies, product experience is the term used to describe a consumer's experience with one or more of your products. However, the full product experience meaning isn't only about someone touching, smelling, viewing, or tasting your goods. It can also refer to someone's experience with digital products, or experiences with physical products sold online. What's more, the product experience continues even after a person buys one or more of your goods, as it includes product set-up, assembly, and long-term use.

What Is the Role of Product Experience?

The purpose of product experience management is to ensure that each person who interacts with your products has a positive experience along each step of the buyer journey. It starts from the time a potential buyer is considering your products for sale. For example, if you run PPC ads, these ads should link directly to the page with the product for sale. If you have a product catalog, it should be up-to-date, include clear product images, and provide important information about dimensions, benefits, and price, so shoppers can make an informed purchase decision. Product listings on e-commerce websites should contain clear images that users can zoom in on to get a better view of your products. A walkthrough or how-to videos for large or complex products are effective in helping people better understand what you're offering and can boost your sales. Custom product recommendations help customers find related items in case they want accessories to go with their main purchase or are looking for similar products with different features.

Another aspect of creating a positive product experience is making it easy for people to find what they're looking for quickly and easily. If you have a large product line, your website should have search features allowing users to sort items by product line, price, features/benefits, and other criteria. If you have a brick-and-mortar outlet as well as an online store, printing flyers with QR codes can help people who come to your store find additional product information online.

Creating an ideal product experience for each customer starts with identifying your target audience. You need to know which group or groups of people are most likely to buy goods from you to craft experiences that meet their needs and expectations. You also need to understand what your unique business proposition to these customers will be. Are you the cheapest, most luxurious, most convenient, or most eco-friendly brand? Why should people buy from you and not a competitor? Identifying both your selling points and your audience will enable you to create product experiences that will increase sales, improve customer retention rates, and build brand loyalty.

What Is the Difference Between Customer Experience and Product Experience?

Product experience is a subset of customer experience, albeit an important one. Customer experience encompasses all interactions a customer has with your brand. It includes conversations with employees, payment processing for purchased items, shipping, customer assistance with setting up or assembling items, and product returns. It also includes interactions consumers have with your brand, either online or offline.

Both product experience and customer experience are important. Even the best product experience can't make up for a bad customer service experience. If your company doesn't provide friendly, efficient service, consumers will take their business elsewhere. However, the product experience and customer experience difference shouldn't prevent you from focusing on improving product experience as much as possible. Even companies that offer stellar service have to make it easy for consumers to find product information to make sales.

What Is a Good Product Experience?

A good product experience is relevant to the consumer. It meets the individual's needs at his or her particular stage in the buying journey. Consider the following positive product experience examples:

• Consumer A is looking for a living room sectional sofa but isn't sure which one to pick. She sees an ad in Google's search engine results and clicks on it. The ad links to a landing page with sectional sofas. There is a search function to make it easy to sort sofas by color, size, and price range. This makes it easy for Consumer A to find sectional sofas that match her search criteria. It also enables her to learn more information about each sofa, so she can make an informed purchase decision.

• Consumer B wants to order food from a local restaurant. He scans the QR code on the restaurant's flyer. The QR codes take him to an online menu listing food options and prices. When consumer B clicks on a dish, it shows additional information such as ingredients used, calories, and food type (i.e.; vegetarian, vegan, kosher, etc.). Comparing dishes is a breeze and Consumer A quickly places an order for his preferred food items.

In both cases, users have had a positive product experience because the experience was designed to guide them through their buyer journey. When people are looking through your products for sale, they don't need detailed information about each item. On the other hand, when people are comparing two or more products, they need as much information as you can provide on each product to choose the one that will best meet their needs.

How can you know if you're providing consumers with optimal product experiences at all times? Lumavate product experience management (PXM) software can save you a lot of time and hard work by providing you with detailed analytics on how customers are using your product experiences. Lumavate product experience management software also gives you the tools you need to improve customer experiences without increasing your workload. The platform can update online catalogs and product descriptions. It can add visuals and file attachments to product pages. It comes with a full product experience management suite that helps you create engaging online and offline marketing tools. It can also offer custom product recommendations based on previous user interactions with your site. Furthermore, it includes a Product Information Management (PIM) system that enables you to keep all product information stored in a single, safe location so your customer service representatives can use this information to offer improved customer service and assistance. Get in touch with us to find out more about what we offer or schedule a free demonstration at your convenience.