Digital Experience Strategy Guide

A digital experience strategy is a plan for how an organization will deliver digital experiences that are engaging and meet the needs of users. The goal is to create a consistent, positive experience across all touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, social media, and more.

The goal of this article is to walk you through the process of developing a digital strategy guide from beginning to end.

To start off, you need to understand several key terms to begin planning out your strategy.

What are digital experiences?

Digital experiences (DX) are any interaction that consumers have with your brand online. This could be visiting your website, using your mobile app, or even interacting with you on social media.

These interactions can also be called digital touchpoints.

A touchpoint is any point of contact between a customer and a brand. In the digital world, this could be your website, your mobile app, or even your social media profiles.

What is an example of a digital experience?

A great example of a digital experience comes from Amazon. Amazon has a website, a mobile app, and even a physical store. They also have an extensive social media presence.

Each one of your interactions with Amazon is an individual digital experience. It may start with an experience where you see an ad come across your feed. That ad is a digital experience that, if clicked, leads you to a new DX for the product listing on the website. If you like the product enough and the DX is effective, you add it to your cart and head to the checkout process, which marks a third unique digital experience.

As you can see, each individual digital experience is a point where the user has the ability to make a decision. When put together they form the digital customer experience, which is the sum of all your band’s digital experiences and your consumers' reactions to them.

What is digital customer experience?

Digital customer experiences are the totality of a customer’s interactions with a company or brand that take place online. They can include everything from a customer’s first visit to a website to their ongoing engagement with a brand on social media. 

Creating positive digital customer experiences is essential for businesses that want to build strong relationships with their customers and create loyal fans.

There are a few key elements that go into creating positive digital customer experiences:

First, businesses need to make sure their websites and other online channels are easy to use and navigate. Customers should be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and without any frustration. 

Second, businesses need to create content that is interesting, informative, and useful. This content should be tailored to the specific needs and interests of the target customer base. 

Finally, businesses need to ensure that their online channels are responsive and provide a seamless experience across all devices.

Digital Experience Strategy: Where to start?

As customers increasingly demand more seamless, personalized experiences, it's becoming clear that companies need to step up their digital experience game. But where to start?

Before you jump right into designing your digital experiences, you need to develop your digital experience strategy. This process starts by defining your target audience and then designing to meet their needs.

Here are four different categories of digital experiences to focus on when developing your digital experience strategy:

1. Seamless and personal experiences across all touchpoints

One of the most important things customers want is a seamless, unified experience across all touchpoints, both digital and physical. They don't want to have to start over every time they switch from one channel to another; they want their interactions with your company to feel cohesive, no matter what.

To provide this type of experience, you need to have a clear understanding of your customer's journey and design your various touch points accordingly. Every customer interaction should be designed with the goal of moving the customer closer to their desired outcome.

2. Contextual and relevant experiences

Customers also want contextual and relevant experiences, meaning that the experiences they have with your company are relevant to their individual needs and interests. This can be a challenge to achieve, but it's worth it—customers who receive relevant content and experiences are more likely to convert and continue doing business with you.

To create relevant experiences, you need to first understand who your customers are and what they need. Once you have that information, you can design experiences that speak to them directly. This could involve personalization at different levels, from simple things like using their name in emails to more complex tailoring of content and product recommendations.

3. Timely experiences

Similar to relevance, timeliness is also important to customers. They want to know that you understand their needs and can provide solutions in a timely manner. This means being quick to respond to customer inquiries and proactively addressing potential issues before they become problems.

To create timely experiences, you need to have systems in place that allow you to quickly gather data and take action on it. This could involve something as simple as setting up real-time alerts for customer service inquiries or using data analytics to identify trends and address them before they become problematic.

4. Engaging and interactive experiences

Finally, customers want engaging and interactive experiences. They want to feel like they're part of a conversation, not just a transaction. This means providing opportunities for two-way communication and interaction, such as customer forums, social media, and live chat.

To create engaging experiences, you need to think about how you can make your customer interactions more interactive and engaging. This could involve adding features like chatbots or live chat to your website, or creating customer forums where customers can interact with each other.

Ideally, you should gear your digital customer experience strategies to include all four of the points covered above.

How Do You Develop a Digital Customer Experience Strategy?

Now that we've gone over what customers want from their digital experiences, let's talk about how you can develop a digital customer experience strategy for your company.

There are four steps you should take:

1. Map the customer journey
2. Develop digital experiences to match each step in the journey
3. Collect feedback and improve continuously
4. Look for opportunities and repeat

Now we will take a deeper look at each of these steps.

How Do You Map the Customer Journey?

The first step in deploying your digital experience strategy is mapping the customer journey. This means understanding the various touchpoints your customers have with your company and how they interact with each of them.

To do this, you need to consider both digital and physical touchpoints from the customer's perspective. This process of empathizing is essential to your strategy because you need to truly understand your customers' pain points before developing experiences that can meet their needs.

After you understand their perspective, you must understand every single step that your customer goes through or else there would be points of friction where customers drop off. Once you have a clear understanding of the customer journey, you can start to design experiences that meet customer needs at each stage.

How Do You Develop Digital Experiences?

The next step is to develop digital experiences. This involves creating engaging and relevant content, as well as designing interactive touchpoints that encourage two-way communication.

This process could be as simple as a post on social media, but it could also be something like creating a new mobile friendly website.

For the more complex digital experiences, it helps to use a digital experience platform (DXP). Digital experience platforms are programs that help you design, build, and optimize digital experiences. They provide a suite of tools that make it easier to deploy complex experiences quickly and efficiently.

Lumavate is a great example of a digital experience platform that gives users powerful tools to make hundreds of mobile experiences personalized to countless consumers without writing a single line of code.

Collect Feedback and Improve Digital Experiences Continuously

After you've deployed your digital experiences, it's important to collect feedback and use it to improve your strategy. This means constantly monitoring customer engagement and using data to identify areas of improvement.

It's also important to encourage customer feedback and use it to improve your experiences. You can do this by adding features like live chat or customer forums to your website, or by actively soliciting feedback through surveys and other methods.

Look for Opportunities to Make New Digital Experiences and Repeat

Finally, you should always be on the lookout for new opportunities to improve the digital customer experience. This could involve adding new features or functionality to your website, or it could be something as simple as changing the way you interact with customers on social media.

Whatever it is, always be looking for ways to improve the digital customer experience for your customers. 

Remember, crafting an effective digital experience strategy is an iterative process.

What to Remember When Developing a Digital Experience Strategy?

To develop a successful digital experience strategy, organizations need to consider the following:

• The needs and wants of their target audience
• Their business goals
• The available technology
• The resources needed to implement and maintain the strategy

When developing a digital experience strategy, there are a few key questions that organizations should keep in mind:

• Who is our target audience?
• What are our business goals?
• What technology do we need to deliver the experiences our users want and need?
• How will we implement and maintain our digital experience strategy?

Organizations should also consider that a digital experience strategy is not a one-time project. It should be seen as an ongoing effort that evolves along with the needs of users and the organization.

What are the benefits of a digital experience strategy?

There are many benefits to developing a digital experience strategy, including:

• Improved customer satisfaction: A good digital experience leads to happy customers who are more likely to do business with an organization again in the future.
• Increased revenue: If you can effectively utilize digital experiences you can convert on more leads and increase sales
• Improved brand reputation: A strong digital experience can help improve an organization's reputation and make it more attractive to potential customers.
• Differentiation from competitors: A well-executed digital experience strategy can help an organization stand out from its competitors.

What are the challenges of a digital experience strategy?

Developing a digital experience strategy can be challenging, and there are a few key considerations to keep in mind:

• It's important to strike the right balance between meeting the needs of users and achieving business goals.
• There needs to be a clear understanding of the technology required to deliver the desired experiences.
• Organizations need to have the resources in place to implement and maintain the strategy.

What is digital strategy example?

A digital strategy is a plan for how an organization will use technology to achieve its business goals. This could include anything from developing a new website to launching a social media campaign. A good digital strategy will take into account the needs of the target audience and align with the overall business goals of the organization.

Here's a hypothetical example of a company trying to build its digital strategy:

Tim's Hardware is trying to develop a digital experience strategy to increase their online presence to reach younger families moving into the neighborhood.

To start they build out the target audience and found that the best target is young dads aged 26-34 with children aged 2-5.

Once they defined their target, they looked at what they wanted to achieve with their digital strategy. Their goals were to:

Generate awareness of Tim's Hardware in the neighborhood

Increase website traffic by 50%

Increase online sales by 10%

After defining their goals, they looked at the technology they would need to deliver the experiences their target audience wanted. They decided they needed:

A new website with a focus on delivering an excellent user experience

A social media presence on Facebook and Instagram

Digital advertising targeting young dads in the neighborhood

A mobile app focused on building a rewards program for frequent customers

They also looked at the resources they would need to implement and maintain their digital strategy. This included hiring a part-time social media manager and dedicating a budget to digital advertising.

Finally, they created a plan for how they would execute their strategy. This included launching their new website and social media accounts, and running a digital advertising campaign.

What is a good digital experience?

A good digital experience is any experience that achieves the goals established while planning your digital experience strategy. Generally speaking they will leave customers happy and satisfied with their experience. 

Some other features of great digital experiences include:

1. Easy for customers to find what they're looking for
2. Engaging and relevant content
3. Interactive touchpoints
4. Opportunity to provide feedback and improve continuously

If your digital experiences have these qualities, you will be well on your way to providing impeccable digital experiences for your customers.

What are the types of digital strategy?

There are many different types of digital strategy, some of the most common ones are:

• Increasing online visibility
• Generating leads and sales
• Improving customer loyalty or engagement

Depending on the goals established in the planning stage, one or more of these strategies will be used. Each type of strategy will use different tactics to achieve its objectives.

Some common tactics that are used in digital strategy include:

SEO – optimizing website content to rank higher in search engine results pages

PPC – using paid advertising to promote products or services online

Social media – using platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to connect with potential and current customers

Content marketing – creating and sharing helpful, engaging content to attract and retain customers

Email marketing – sending targeted emails with valuable information or special offers to subscribers

Developing a strong digital presence is essential for businesses of all sizes in today’s increasingly connected world. An effective digital strategy can help you reach your target market, build brand awareness and improve your bottom line.

How do you measure success with a digital strategy?

There are a few different ways you can measure success with your digital strategy. These include:

• Website traffic: This can be measured by the number of unique visitors to your website or the number of page views.
• Engagement: This can be measured by the number of social media interactions, such as likes, comments, and shares.
• Sales: This can be measured by the number of online sales or the value of online sales.
• Customer satisfaction: This can be measured by customer surveys or Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Brand awareness: This can be measured by brand recall or recognition studies.

As you can see, the metrics you use to determine success depend on the strategy you choose from the onset.

Now that you have a deeper understanding of digital strategy and the role digital experience strategy plays in it, you can start planning your own. Remember to keep your target audience and goals in mind, and you'll be well on your way to success!