Your target audience has 10 tools similar to yours to choose from, so what can you do to ensure they select you over others?

Deliver unmatched customer experience.

But how do you do that on an enterprise scale and that too consistently?

The answer is Customer Experience Automation (CXA).

CXA is a comprehensive approach that makes your entire CX mechanism resilient & persistent, helping you revamp your business to a new level.

In this article, you’ll learn each aspect of CXA and how to automate yours to make every customer feel valued.

What Is Customer Experience Automation?

Customer Experience Automation (CXA) consistently automates one-on-one customer interactions across touchpoints. It drives personalization at scale, thus impacting the entire buyer journey of every customer—from awareness to conversion and even extending to post-conversion customer support & service.

Adopting customer experience automation should begin with spotting repeatable tasks across touchpoints throughout the buyer journey. Then, deploying CXA applications can turn slow, repetitive, and error-prone tasks into positive interactions that drive top-notch customer engagement & experience. That way, you know what bottlenecks could be in delivering excellent CX.

Why CXA?

ActiveCampaign surveyed B2B brands using CXA and discovered a 110% hike in customer leads 92% in deal win rates, and 109% in sales effectiveness.

CXA works out so well for B2B companies as it expands the horizon of opportunities. Since it expedites the processes, makes them real-time, and elevates expertise, engaging customers becomes easy.

In today’s hyper-competitive space, only having the best solution in the market doesn’t cut it as long as you don’t deliver a stupefying CX. And, with so much to take care of, marketers have to automate certain things on their plate to keep the CX wheel rolling without any break—and that’s why CXA!

How Automation Helps Better Customer Experience

Every customer feels valued

Integrating all of your customer interactions and clearing their doubts & queries in real-time through automation instantly makes your customers feel immensely valued. Without automation, you cannot possibly be there for every customer round the clock, and the more you delay in responding, the more your CX level drops.

CXA deepens your relationship with your customers, creating more opportunities for your brand and driving customer loyalty.

Opens doors for constructive feedback

Customer feedback is essential to improve and grow as a brand. Automation opens the doors for constructive feedback and reviews from customers on a large and consistent scale. Automating the request & response process through RXM platforms leads to better consistency and fewer errors. You also witness a pool of data and improvements to optimize your product/services, brand image, and other customer-facing processes.

You ace personalized communications

72% of customers will only engage with customized messaging. (SmarterHQ)

You already know the power of personalization; with CXA, you can unleash and leverage that potential. Automation ensures that you word precisely tailored messages across channels based on customer needs, interests, and behaviors.

With personalized product recommendations, targeted ads, and transactional emails set off by specific actions, you keep your customers engaged and avoid them leaving halfway.

Customer retention numbers go up

You have closed your dream clients, so now you’ve got to double down on your efforts to ensure they stick with you for the long run. Targeted customer retention campaigns, social media interactions, providing real-time service & support, and exceeding customer expectations continuously are keys to retention.

With RPA, you respond in real-time to customer queries consistently, thus continuing the trust you built initially and turning them into loyal brand advocates.

And, yes, your revenue jacks up!

Most importantly, your revenue graph takes a better curve with CX automation. Delivering consistent, enhanced customer experiences across touchpoints gets you more leads, conversions, and retention; thus, your profit margins are bound to hike.

Ways to Implement CX Automation

AI Chatbots

AI/ML-powered chatbots are extremely helpful in improving customer experience since they clear the general queries of your users in real-time without making them wait for a customer service agent. These instant interactions go a long way in establishing brand trust.

Automated Emails

Emails are a major chunk of customer interactions, and how well you deliver them tells much about the CX you provide. So, automating emails is beneficial in keeping your prospects and customers engaged & interested in your brand.

You can automate different types of mail based on where a customer is in the buyer journey:

• ToFu: For instance, to new subscribers to your newsletter, you can acknowledge their actions and introduce your brand & offerings.
• MoFu: For prospects already engaging with your brand, you can nurture them with your content assets. You can even automate abandoned cart emails to nudge users to finalize their purchases.
• BoFu: Leads at the bottom need a push to cross the conversion line. You can automate emails to deliver personalized offers and relevant case studies to make them convert.
• Existing clientele: For your existing customers, you can keep them engaged with your brand & product developments through automated mail. Password reminders, account activity updates, purchase confirmations, and related transactional emails can also be handled using automation.

Targeted Ads

Content marketing is, undoubtedly, one of the pillars of delivering enhanced customer experience. Automation entering into content marketing makes it more robust by taking care of redundant, costly, and time-taking tasks using NLP and related technologies.

For example, Facebook Automated Ads and Google Ads can craft customized ads based on search queries, behaviors, and other factors, put them in front of qualified prospects, analyze the metrics, and optimize accordingly.

Automating expedites content marketing and shoots up engagement, leads, and revenue.

Surveys

Customer feedback and reviews show how satisfied your customers are with your brand & offerings. Automating customer surveys helps you get insight into every interaction a customer has with your brand—from website & shopping experience to product satisfaction. Add analytics to this gathered data, and you’ve got unique insights to pivot your brand for the better.

Takeaway: Automate CX to Excel

No matter how excellent your product/service is, if you fail to provide a positive, continuing brand experience, your brand won’t excel. CX automation tools make your task of being there for every customer possible and too efficient. On top of that, you cut down on your costs, errors and get to understand your audience better.

Marketing has always been a surefire way for businesses to cut through the noise and establish themselves as brands the world can’t get enough of. But, marketing has never been as complex as it has evolved to today.

While the skills of a marketing team are significant to success, technology has a vital role in the game too. Here’s where marketing technology, or martech, as it is popularly known, comes in.

Even though marketers have been using martech for quite some time now, a question keeps making rounds—how to build the perfect martech stack?

Today, through this article, you’ll get the answer to this question and more insights into the martech world.

Let’s roll.

Martech Stack – What and Why?

What Is a Martech Stack?

A martech or marketing technology stack is a set of tech tools marketers use to streamline, optimize, and enhance their marketing processes to make them more efficient and effective.

Although a martech stack can be used for numerous purposes, at the primary level, it does the following:

• Automate tasks and processes
• Process & analyze data to derive marketing insights
• Measure performance to enhance effectiveness and cut down costs

Why You Need a Martech Stack?

Modern marketing is no less than a race against time; marketers must identify, attract, engage, and retain customers through multiple channels and take care of their daily tasks too.

You cannot expect your marketers to do all these without technology and achieve the desired results. A martech stack not only helps automate and expedite the task of marketers but also enhances their campaigns and generates better results.

With the right tools in your stack, you can:

• Drive better traffic
• Enhance engagement
• Generate more leads
• Increase conversions
• Boost customer retention

How to Build Your Martech Stack?

Set Right Your Marketing Objectives

Your marketing challenges and goals should determine your technology stack, not the other way around. More often than not, marketers and brands pick up marketing tools because they are popular, something their competitors are using, or within their budget. This way, some tools may, by luck, prove to be useful for you, but you wouldn’t reap the full benefits of your entire stack for sure.

If you are still trying to figure out your marketing targets, you should finish figuring them out; that way, you will eventually design your martech stack that gives precise results.

Another scenario could be that you already have a stack in place. Then, you need to analyze the effectiveness and efficiency of the tools and decide whether you need any alteration or upgrade in the current system.

Ensure There’s Compatibility Among the Tools

Since a martech stack is a set of separate tools you’ve brought together to enhance your marketing strategy, it’s crucial to ensure that they act as an integrated system, available right at the disposal of marketers.

Often brands buy marketing tools apt for their marketing initiatives, only to discover that those lack integration capabilities with other systems and require technical expertise. So, ultimately marketers remain heavily dependent on IT, the processes slow down, and most importantly, the fundamental objective of having a martech stack remains unaccomplished.

To avoid such situations, ensure that the tools you pick can be integrated among themselves (and with your existing stack if you have one) so the marketing operations are fueled with accurate data & insights and frictionless. Also, ensure there's enough technical expertise within your marketing team so there’s as little dependency on IT as possible.

Factor in Your Budget

While you must examine various factors before deciding on or optimizing your martech stack, you cannot overlook one of the most crucial factors—budget. It all boils down to how much of your budget you can spend on martech tools. Some tools are economical, and then some tools are quite pricey. So, if you have several requirements that can only be solved when you have multiple tools on board, but your budget is limited, you have only one way out—prioritizing. 

Prioritizing your marketing needs and determining what challenges you want to be resolved immediately and what can wait for another six months or a year will help you.

For example, you have two challenges at hand—one, bettering your SERP rankings, and two, enhancing your outreach through emails. However, you have budget constraints and can either pay for SEO software or invest in an email marketing tool. So, the decision finally rests on you, depending on what’s more urgent to you right at that moment.

Essential Components of a Martech Stack

In 2023, martech tools are present left, right, and center; there are multiple tools available for each of your marketing requirements.

While every brand and marketing team has a unique set of needs, here’s a collection of software common in current martech stacks:

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

A CDP collects customer data from different sources and stitches them together, creating a database of unified customer profiles. Brands using a complex martech stack with disparate systems often get a CDP tool.

Segment, Salesforce, Insider, and Bloomreach are among the most used CDP tools.

Content Management System (CMS)

As marketing in 2023 is synonymous with content, CMS tools have emerged as powerful software to facilitate content management & marketing. These tools help manage the entire content mechanism—creation, editing, collaboration, publishing, storage, and optimization.

WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Hubspot are some top CMS vendors in the market.

Social Media Management

Social media is another significant chunk of today’s marketing. You cannot think of a brand touching the peak of success without a digital presence. So, no wonder social media software solutions are a must-have in current martech stacks. They help create, manage, automate, track, measure, and optimize your presence on various social media platforms.

Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Tailwind, Social Pilot, etc., are only a few big names in this space’s long list of tools.

Analytics

Your marketing efforts and the results you derive from them need constant tracking, analysis, and optimization. Analytics tools enter the scene here; they keep an eye on your digital campaigns, measure their success or failure, and come up with reports and insights so you can fix the loopholes in your efforts.

Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Semrush, Hotjar, Supermetrics, etc., are some preferred analytics tools.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Being the first SERP result on the first page of Google doesn’t happen by chance; it requires a well-drawn SEO strategy, effective execution, and a set of best SEO tools. SEO tools help with something as basic as keyword research to more critical things like website audit, link building, and rank tracking.

Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, Semrush, Moz, and Ubersuggest are widely used SEO tools.

We could go on for another hour and still wouldn’t cover the vast spectrum of martech solutions.

Still, here’s a brief list of significant martech tools you might need:

• Email marketing & automation 
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Project management
• Ad management
• Digital Asset Management (DAM)
• A/B testing
• Lead generation & management

Takeaway

You know one thing by now—there’s no defined way to design your martech stack. Your business, marketing needs, and objectives are unique, so how can your martech stack be like that of some other brand?

To build a working martech stack, you need to know each aspect of your business inside out. Your way is the best way!

As a marketer, you already know the importance of data and how it can better improve a business’ growth curve. Today, given the implausible degree of interactions that happen every second, the data generated due to it is colossal.

For a marketer, this data holds the potential to work wonders. The fact that even the majority of the data is either fragmented, incomplete, or available in a form that’s gibberish for a marketer brings big data to the table.

Big data, simply put, is a collection of data sets available in larger volumes, greater varieties, and more velocity. These massive chunks of data sets, when fused with big ops, i.e., cutting-edge AI/ML algorithms, automation tools, analytics software, etc., foster insights which can boost most, if not all, business processes.

Today, in this article, we will focus on how big data & big ops can help marketers optimize their efforts to bring new customer experiences.

Firstly, let’s learn about the data types critical to upping the CX game before we lay down the perks of big data.

Let’s roll.

Types of Data to Proactively Collect and Exploit

Transactional Data

This data primarily comprises invoices, payment options & channels, payment timings, and other related data that reflects a customer’s transactional behavior with a product/service. These subtle insights help improve the financial aspects of your product/business so it appeals to your audience.

Behavioral Data

Better customer experiences can be highly attributed to the collection and utilization of behavioral data. How a prospect interacts with your brand across touchpoints, what they do post those interactions, and what triggers them to move a little closer to conversion—all these qualify as behavioral data.

All these insights, when fused with AI/ML and other cutting-edge technologies, help serve personalized experiences to leads, thus easing the way to conversion.

Social Media Data

As the name suggests, any insight collected from a person’s social media activity is social media data. Given the soaring use of social media, the data collected may be hard to analyze and draw insights from, so it becomes critical that you employ sophisticated analytics tools to cut through the chunks of data you gather and bring you the insights that lead to clear improvements in customer experience.

Customer Service Data

Customer service data is not just beneficial for your sales and customer success teams; your marketing team can leverage it, too.

How, you ask?

More often than not, customer service data is brimming with personal information such as email addresses, job profiles, addresses, mobile numbers, etc. All these valuable insights often remain in CRM, untouched by marketers. However, if marketers have this data, they can use it to drive CX to great extents.

First-party Data

First-party data is not something you acquire from only one particular interacting medium with your audience but rather qualifies as everything you collect from direct interactions. It may include behavioral data, transactional data, and other forms of data.

Quality is the most crucial part of first-party data that determines its usefulness to your marketing efforts. The quality of the data can be defined as its organization, free from silos and redundancies; the better the quality, the better would be your marketing efforts, and thus better CX levels.

How Big Data Helps Improve CX?

An Enterprise Data Center

The more the data, the more challenging it is to have a comprehensive, transparent view of your customers. To get past this hurdle and have an accurate idea of your customers, having a data hub or center that serves as the single source of truth for your entire organization is imperative.

Victor Cobo Ramirez, Director, Customer Portfolio and eCommerce Product Owner at Manulife, during the Global Virtual MarTech Summit - APAC, says, “Size of a business doesn’t matter when integrating big ops. Small companies with relatively smaller data assets need big ops to generate better CX and enhance business processes. What matters the most is how a company gathers, organizes, and integrates its data.”

A data center is a perfect answer to the above requirements. Not only it empowers your teams with real-time and accurate insights, but it also ensures you exploit staying within the boundaries of data regulations applicable to your business. So, your CX shoots up, your compliance is on point, and your brand hops by leaps and bounds.

The Fabulous Circle of Data

Once you start fueling your customer interactions with relevant audience data, you immediately forge a link with your prospects. From now on, what you collect from the further interactions with your audience is more relevant & specific insights, advancing your CX to new levels.

This creates an ongoing data circle and empowers you with the customer-centric mechanism. With the data hub we discussed, you exponentiate the power of this big data to unfathomable levels, creating a commanding force of personalization.

Spotting New Product Opportunities

While market research can provide you with insights needed to improve your product/service by unraveling the emotions behind customer decisions, it still struggles to bring you new product opportunities.

Big data, however, help you identify market gaps where you can push completely new products. Given the immense volume of big data and the predictive analytics capabilities of the big ops tools, businesses can very well unravel where their audience (and even the respective vertical) is heading, thus earning a competitive moat for themselves by creating a brand new product that thrives without any rivals in the immediate future.

Acing Omnichannel

Akanksha Rastogi, Head of Data & Insights at foodpanda, during the Global Virtual MarTech Summit - APAC, says, “Big ops can be integrated into applications and websites to drive personalization and enhance the CX levels. This helps increase the stickiness of platforms, acting as a subtle marketing move.”

Your target audience is scattered all over the web, so truly understanding the entire buyer journey is growing more complex by the day. To stitch all these little yet significant crumbs of data is a pre-requisite to creating an omnichannel experience and orchestrating each part of the journey.

Big data is the solution to this seemingly daunting task.

Big data captures the various interactions of your audience across the web, organizes them into a single place, pinpoints the touchpoints where you need to focus most of your efforts, and even the loopholes that make the customers ditch the journey.

All these intricate details reveal the true nature of a lead's journey and the hurdles that keep them from converting; now, you can create a fully integrated, data-driven omnichannel mechanism that eases the path from awareness to conversion.

Takeaway

To make the most of the overwhelming amount of data, you need to first equip your business with fitting applications, IT teams, and people who have a working knowledge of the data and apps they lay their hands on. Once all these requirements are in place, you can effectively utilize big data to gather customer-centric insights and leverage the same to deliver tailored, real-time customer experiences, forging a unique marketing move altogether.

Organizational shifts are happening at an alarming rate nowadays, as data-driven demand generation practices are replacing traditional business tactics. Organizations are striving to meet the demands of their customers, while an increased emphasis on technology is pushing new tactics in their businesses. In 2022, 69% of marketers indicated their demand generation budgets will increase between 1% and 20% (Demand Gen Report). At first, demand generation covers the initial efforts designed to get your target audience to join your mailing list. It also encourages your audience to interact with your content, attend events, etc.

Demand generation aims to guide the target audience through the buyer’s journey until they are considered qualified leads. To accomplish this task successfully in a paced way, here are the top trending demand generation strategies to implement immediately!

Personalizing Content

One of the most critical aspects of demand generation is the personalization of content. 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides a personalized experience (Epsilon). This report backs the statement that consumers are more inclined toward personalized services and communication. Consumers tend to engage more with businesses that attend to their needs and choices. This demand generation strategy will break the barrier of simply sharing content with prospects. Businesses will soon crack the preferred content formats and the type of device that consumers use. This understanding of content will be useful in optimizing their content to approach consumers on their preferred platforms.

Conversational Marketing and Chatbot

Conversational marketing is one of the most interesting demand generation tactics for the future. Customers want their queries to be addressed and resolved quickly, or else they move on to some other option.

To avoid this situation, businesses have adopted conversational marketing and chatbots. 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots because they provide instant responses (Salesforce). The AI chatbots thoroughly understand user behavior, communication patterns, and intention. It also adopts their communication patterns, responds to them, and aims to resolve queries in minimal time.

Taking a Step Towards ABX

Account Based Experience is referred to as ABX. While ABM primarily concentrates on marketing and sales, ABX also focuses on the customer experience. It ensures that consumers’ journeys are smooth once they become your clients. ABX is not replacing ABM; rather, ABM is evolving towards ABX.

ABX is a fundamental, customer-focused reimagining of how businesses approach their target markets. With a strong foundation and focus on the customer at every point of the purchasing cycle and the use of intelligent insights to determine when, how, and what to speak to each account, it combines the manageability of inbound marketing with the accuracy and targeting of account-based marketing.

Intent Marketing

Intent Marketing has worked miraculously in contemporary times. It helps in upskilling the accuracy of your marketing campaigns and connects you with the right buyers. Almost 40% of businesses spend more than half of their marketing budget on intent data, and 70% plan to increase Intent Marketing provides several benefits, and some of these are as follows:

· Create more relevant content: after understanding where targeted customers are in the buyer’s journey, you can gain the information you need to create content according to their preferences.

· Bringing more qualified leads: after gaining potential customers, the sales team can engage with these leads with the trust that they have already shown their interest in the services, qualifying more leads.

· Enhancing content marketing campaigns: With the intent data, marketers gain the advantage of learning about the content types that users find interesting and engaging. This helps in devising better content marketing campaigns.

Voice Search Marketing

Voice search strategies are bringing a revolution in the methods of people searching for products and services. It gives users the leverage of speaking rather than typing the entire question to find answers. 90% of people think voice search is easier than searching online and 89% also think it’s more convenient, and 87% think it’s faster (PWC). Voice Search has the potential to become a massive part of every B2B demand generation strategy. There have already been a large number of voice search users, and the number keeps increasing daily. Marketers are optimizing their websites for people who prefer voice search.

Providing Free Access

Prospects are eager to read information and fully comprehend your product and service. When individuals are interested in learning more about your company, free content resources work like a charm. They can make better decisions if they have more information at their disposal. Make sure to offer them high-quality material that satisfies their needs. They might do their research first, then get in touch with your sales team.

Wrapping Up

It is evident that demand generation will become more data-driven and customer-centric. The usage of technology will expand at an exponential rate. Organizations must adapt their old business strategies to incorporate technology and focus on improving customer experience.

Want to know how to correctly implement these demand generation strategies to boost your business?

Connect with us!

From monolithic systems to microservices, we have come a long road & explored a variety of architectural patterns that have both benefits & drawbacks. Composable commerce aims to minimize the downside by shedding the ‘sizeism’ of a particular vendor. 

Composable Commerce is not just a factor that differentiates the frontend and backend elements of a commerce platform, but it is also helpful in adapting to the various market dynamics essential to keep the business updated and running. Moreover, it utilizes modern technologies like MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, and Headless) and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) to adapt to the volatile marketing dynamics.

Did You Know?

Gartner coined the term “composable commerce” in research from June 2020. That was how it all began. (Source: Gartner)

Now let’s delve into an insightful idea of composable commerce.

Composable Commerce in B2B Context

B2B is evolving, and it needs a mechanism that can be molded according to the needs to provide the utmost performance and upgraded functionalities.

Composable commerce is the right strategy that can enable a B2B organization to constantly upscale digital commerce experiences by combining numerous best-of-breed providers into a full, business-ready solution. Here’s why! 

Benefits of Using Composable Commerce in B2B

Better Customization: Composable commerce provides you with the freedom to design your platform as per your unique needs and create a unique solution that would help you maintain the top position.

Greater Customer Experience: 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a firm that offers personalized experiences (Source: Epsilon). Composable commerce becomes a perfect platform for your customers to access their accounts and orders as well as receive personalized offers.

Low-code Capability: Low-code feature diminishes the obstacles associated with integrating various technologies, and enterprises may interface with various software silos more effectively and efficiently.

Unlimited Scalability: Without being updated with the proper and latest solutions, there is a high chance for your website to slow down or crash due to limited capacity. Composable commerce has the upper hand in ensuring infinite scalability using cloud-based architecture.

Points to Remember While Developing Your Composable Enterprise?

Things to consider while creating a Composable Commerce strategy:

· Business architecture may be used to foster innovation while transforming the business and operations.

· Utilize adaptable working habits and co-creation methods.

· Use the power of information to make better decisions and provide innovative services.

· Modify the digital and technological platforms to allow for transformation and rapid deployment by integrating current with new and emerging technologies.

Wrapping Up

Composable commerce provides you with a platform to boost your growth curve on an economical and developmental scale. After switching to and adopting a composable solution, your B2B business experience will get even smoother.