How to use digital experience analytics to make customers loyal

The Lumiere Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train (L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat) shocked audiences when it came to the silver screen in 1896. Although the reports of audience members fleeing the theater have been exaggerated, the new world of cinema was revolutionary and bewildering to 19th-century viewers.

How would a modern audience react to The Arrival of a Train? Would they react at all? In the digital age, simple footage of a train arriving at a station would be so unremarkable that modern audiences wouldn't even recognize it as being a movie, despite at one time it being the forefront of innovation.

Digital experiences and experience management have evolved parallel to cinema: features that were previously groundbreaking and revolutionary are now so commonplace and mundane that a modern audience may not even recognize them as features. For cinema to stay relevant, it has to evolve and entertain, and for digital experience management to stay relevant, it has to innovate and engage.

Digital experience management is a powerful tool for businesses today, but harnessing this dynamo of loyalty requires innovation, which is why digital experience platforms like Optimizely are paving the way for a new generation of loyal and engaged customers.

Key Takeaways:

• Digital Experiences are an essential part of business in the modern world.

• Analytics lets businesses identify pain points and optimize bottlenecks in their digital experiences.

• Optimizely can help you take your Digital Experience Management to the next level.

What is digital experience analytics?

At its most stripped-back, a digital experience is simply an interaction between a user and an organization facilitated by technology. Digital experiences range from social media messaging to online seminars, from email newsletters to online retail spaces and many more new interactions made possible every day with digital technology.

Digital experience analytics are systematic ways of analyzing data and statistics about users' digital experiences.

Why are digital experiences important?

Technology has been evolving at a wildfire pace for decades, but consumer behavior took a major leap forward during COVID-19 and beyond, outpacing even the breakneck speed of growth that was already customary.

During the migration towards remote work, it wasn't just workers who were logging on—customers were shopping online more than ever before, and many users who previously may have considered their digital experience with a company to be secondary to their in-person experiences were now seeing companies as digital-first and brick-and-mortar second.

A great deal of thought and planning goes into the layout of a retail establishment. From the volume of music to the layout of departments, brands meticulously engineer every detail of a successful retail space to maximize positive results.

It's time for that same attention to detail to translate into your most important location: the digital space. As many organizations are making leaps and bounds toward paperless workplaces, automated marketing and big data analytics, it's time to sink or swim for digital experience management.

Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times more likely to retain customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable, so digital experience isn't just a tech buzzword. It's the currency of the future.

image source

How do digital experience analytics improve customer loyalty?

Once upon a time, users of the internet were willing to wait hours to download a song on dial-up internet or days to receive an email reply, but the exponential speed at which technology has developed is constantly pushing the bar higher with each generation of users.

There is a reason that realtors want open houses to smell like fresh cookies, shopping malls want popular music playing at all times, and dentists want to send young children home with a toy. Customer experience is developing faster than ever before as more and more organizations strive to make their customers not only spend time on their site but enjoy their stay.

The difference between a digital experience that a customer is willing to withstand to do business and a digital experience that makes a customer want to do business is the difference between a missed opportunity and maximized profitability.

Customers are loyal to experiences, which is why technology is an essential tool to improve customer experiences.

Case study: Multi-click

Whether it's a papercut, a lost penny or a long red light, sometimes the little things irritate people more than expected.

In the case of digital body language, one of the key identifiers of a frustrated user is multi-click: the behavior of rapidly clicking or tapping on an element of the digital experience. They direct this behavior toward a non-responsive element, such as a paragraph of text that the user clicks to vent their frustration, or a responsive element, such as a button that the user repeatedly clicks in frustration over it not working fast enough for their liking. 

Using digital experience management analytics, data scientists can view digital body language indicators such as multi-click to identify what parts of the user's digital experience create frustration. By using digital experience analytics to identify pain points, experience managers can alleviate their users' frustration by focusing on optimizing those pain points.

In case multi-click sounds like nothing more than a trivial annoyance, consider these sobering statistics: the average completion rate of a form plummets from 77% to between 14% and 17% for users demonstrating multi-click behavior. Identifying these frustration bottlenecks and taking the pressure off customers isn't just bells and whistles. It's an essential activity for digital experience managers.

image source

How can Optimizely help you achieve your digital experience goals?

Digital experiences aren't second billing to your brick-and-mortar operations anymore.

In the information age, people are conducting business online, consumers are shopping on social media, and the standard of acceptability for a digital experience is getting higher with each passing day. Digital experience management can seem impossible, but it doesn't have to be.

Optimizely is a digital experience management platform specializing in taking the complex technical systems of content management and digital experience management and making it streamlined for you and your customers.

Whether it's marketing planning, CMS creation, or managing e-commerce platforms, Optimizely helps you take charge of your digital experiences and upgrade your business to the modern age without guesswork. If you're ready to see what they can do for you, get started today to take your digital experiences to the next level.