Episode Summary
In episode 14 of the 7 Figures and Beyond e-commerce marekting podcast, Greg and Laurel, dive into the pivotal role of customer experience (CX) in enhancing a brand’s longevity and profitability. They assert that a positive CX directly boosts customer lifetime value, emphasizing the necessity for brands to prioritize and refine CX strategies in 2024. The conversation navigates through practical insights on understanding and meeting evolving customer expectations, leveraging technology for efficient customer service, and employing personalization to foster customer loyalty. Key takeaways include the critical importance of continuous dialogue with customers, testing various strategies for tailored engagement, and adopting new technologies to streamline and enhance the customer service process. The discussion underlines the concept of “what is the next product” for the customer as a strategic approach in email marketing and highlights the ongoing need for brands to adapt and innovate in their CX efforts to maintain relevance and competitive edge.
Key Takeaways
- Customer Experience is Crucial for Lifetime Value: A primary message from the podcast is the significant impact of customer experience (CX) on the long-term value a customer brings to a brand. Enhancing CX is not just beneficial but essential for brands looking to increase profitability and customer loyalty over time.
- Dialogue with Customers is Key: Engaging in regular conversations with customers is highlighted as a critical strategy for understanding their needs and expectations. This direct feedback loop enables brands to adapt and tailor their offerings more effectively, ensuring that the services or products meet or exceed customer expectations.
- Leverage Technology to Improve Service Efficiency: The adoption of technology, particularly AI and centralized customer service platforms, plays a significant role in streamlining customer support and service. Efficient management of customer interactions and leveraging AI for common inquiries can significantly enhance the overall CX by providing timely and relevant responses to customer needs.
- Personalization Enhances Engagement and Loyalty: Personalization is not just about addressing a customer by their first name but involves using collected data to tailor experiences, recommendations, and communications to individual customer preferences and behaviors. This approach significantly improves engagement rates and fosters deeper loyalty.
- Continuous Testing and Adaptation: The landscape of customer expectations is ever-evolving, necessitating brands to remain agile and continuously test various strategies and technologies. By staying ahead of trends and being willing to innovate, brands can better meet the changing needs of their customers, ensuring a superior and more satisfying customer experience.
Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Laurel Teuscher LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laureltoosure/
Google Ads Script: https://developers.google.com/google-ads/scripts/docs/solutions/bid-by-weather
Episode Transcript
Greg: 0:27
All right, hey everyone, welcome to episode 14. We’re getting up there of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast, so it’s that time of month again. Laurel is back and she is ready to talk strategy. I don’t know if you know, I don’t know if she loves this, you know, we’ve never really had that discussion, as if, like, I’m almost kind of forcing her to do this. Yeah, a little bit.
Greg: 0:54
So one of the large strategic discussions that I like to have with our prospects and our customers is around customer experience. Why is that so? A positive customer experience directly correlates to how much money a customer spends with your brand over time. So if you want to improve your customer lifetime value, you need to improve the customer experience, and it’s really as simple as that. Actually, it’s not that simple. It’s simple in terms of execution, but it’s not simple in terms of execution, but it is simple in concept. So it’s going to be a really awesome discussion. It’s something that brands need to put more attention towards in 2024. And they need to get on board with this.
Greg: 1:47
So buckle up, all right, I think. What? Is this the third time we’ve had you on Laurel? I think so. So for any of our new listeners who are wondering who the heck Laurel is like. Why is she back? Why don’t you give us just a brief introduction? You don’t need to go into as much detail as you did the first time. Give us a little history lesson on who you are and why you are awesome. How about that?
Laurel: 2:13
Why you’re awesome.
Greg: 2:14
Great.
Laurel: 2:15
Hi everyone. I’m Laurel Tuscher. I’m the VP of services here at Stride. I’ve been at Stride almost nine years helping e-commerce businesses grow their revenue through really just improving and expanding their marketing reach. I have a master’s degree in library and information science and in my spare time I read, I travel and I’m a season ticket holder for the local NWSL soccer team and a local college basketball team. So, that’s me in an up show.
Greg: 2:47
And when she says local college basketball team, I assume that’s BYU. Is that right?
Laurel: 2:51
Yeah, yeah.
Greg: 2:52
So it’s a university, it’s not even a college, it’s just a little school here in Utah called BYU and you know they’re pretty good these days, so you’ve probably you’ve probably heard of them. They went a lot of games.
Laurel: 3:06
So they’re playing in like an hour and a half for the NCAA tournament.
Greg: 3:10
So there you go, there you go. I don’t follow BYU basketball, I wouldn’t know that Anyway. So I’ve prepared a couple of questions for our conversation today. Are you ready to jump in?
Laurel: 3:25
Yeah, let’s do it.
Greg: 3:27
All right, so let’s first take just a few minutes to really unpack what customer experience is and why it’s important for brands to focus on and to allocate resources and time Like why is that important?
Laurel: 3:44
Yeah, so customer experience like I feel like it’s really hard to explain in a digital space. So let’s talk about like retail stores, because managers, employees, are always considering the customer experience in like retail stores or restaurants. When I was a teenager, I worked in a retail store and I remember my store manager like walking me to the area that I was in charge of and like she wanted me to like look at that space and like figure out how to organize the product so that the customer could come into that space, find what they wanted and maybe browse some more and add on to their car like multiple things. And so that like was the customer experience Like in store. What did they see, what did they interact with, what did they look at Like that’s customer experience.
Greg: 4:38
Right, and that’s how that was before the internet kind of took off, right. I remember working at Chick-fil-A when I was 15. That was a lifetime ago. You know, chick-fil-a, that little fast food company that really excels at customer experience. Quote, unquote, my pleasure, you know we didn’t have to say that back in the day. That’s something new. Anyway, you know when we were trained and throughout, you know the four or five years I think it was four, four and a half years that I worked there.
Greg: 5:12
You know customer experience in that fast food setting was all about kind of how you presented yourself as an employee, how friendly you were, the speed and easiness of the ordering process, the speed of getting your food, the presentation of your food, the cleanliness of the dining room and so forth. I mean that list can go on and on. And, like you mentioned, you know being in a retail store, you know me being in a restaurant in a mall. I mean there didn’t used to be freestanding right In a mall. You know it was all in person and you could easily gauge if the experience for a customer was good or not. You could see by the way that they interacted with you if it was a positive experience or if it was a negative experience, and it’s just a heck of a lot more difficult these days to be able to gauge what that experience looks like for your customers.
Laurel: 6:15
Yeah, and the reason why it’s so hard to gauge in an online like world is because we just don’t have that like sensory or behavioral data that you know we’d observe in a retail space Like. And then their customer experience, even more, just encompasses everything. So it encompasses your website template, the platform that you use, the ease of use of your website, but then it even goes to like what your social media platform or footprint looks like, the content that you’re posting For a service, like it really captures like everything that you do is built into that customer experience. I really liked what Peter Tomasi talked about a few episodes back in the podcast.
Laurel: 7:03
Um, when he does SEO, when he looks at like site hierarchy he talked about, he thinks about the customer experience first, and then search engines are a distant second. And I think that same philosophy has to apply to your customer experience. Like, think about your customers first, how they talk, what they do, how they look at the website, before you concern yourself with what you believe is really important. Um, we’ve talked about, like we’ve talked about in previous episodes, how savvy customers are. They just know what they’re looking for, and so we’ve what we’ve seen is that customers also really like to talk about their experiences. They’ll leave reviews, they’ll get on social media and, especially if they have a bad experience, they will express displeasure.
Greg: 7:51
They will make sure customers are the loudest customers oh loud.
Laurel: 7:56
They’re going to find ways to make sure that they’re heard if they’ve had a really bad experience, and sometimes like on the flip side, if someone’s had a really good experience, they’ll share that too. So, as a business owner, you should be looking at these touch points and really trying to ensure that customers are having a good experience 90% of the time.
Greg: 8:17
Let’s be honest, it probably should. You should be striving for about 99% of the time I mean like that’s, that’s as as a brand owner and as a marketing leader inside of an organization like a good percentage of your time should be spent making sure that the customer experience is superb at every single touch point, like it’s absolutely critical. All right, let’s uh, let’s jump into our next question. So what strategies are most effective in understanding and meeting the evolving needs, because they change like so fast, right? Um, and also the expectations of your customers?
Laurel: 9:01
Oh, that’s a really good question, cause customer expectations are really pretty high these days. Amazon has trained consumers to just expect certain things like two day shipping, free shipping, free exchanges and returns. Instantaneous like customer support, problem resolution and like if you’re trying to compete in that world, it’s hard and expensive to compete, so really I like to call it the Amazon effect Right Like that’s good.
Greg: 9:33
Yeah, the Amazon effect. Like it’s just as brand owners and marketers like they’ve almost ruined it for us, even though, like they’ve created such a fantastic experience and it’s good, but like they’ve, they’ve kind of ruined it for us. They’ve made it so dang hard, yeah.
Laurel: 9:49
So the best way, I think, to start with to understand what your customers like needs are, are to talk with them on a regular basis. You know, here at stride, we are huge advocates of customer research. Nothing beats like just getting on the phone with your top customers and talking with them for 10, 15 minutes, finding out what their needs are, if they’ve changed over time and how you can better serve them. Like that’s amazing. Now, in addition to that, you can test out different offers at different times. You never know what’s going to stick or what will work.
Laurel: 10:25
We have this client that for a while has been doing a free shipping offer for their first time order. But like they finally looked at their margins and they were like we’re, we’re kind of losing a lot of money here, so they are switching to a 10% off the first order rather than free shipping, and they’re finding that the opt-in rate is even better. So for some reason, like free shipping wasn’t the thing that people were opting for, so they’re like it’s actually a 10% off. You just have to see what will work best for your business. I love that concept of being able to test different offers and different ideas with your audience Because I mean, yes, you can talk to customers.
Greg: 11:04
You can’t talk to all of them, and so what are some other ways that you can figure out, like, what their needs are? And that’s just kind of testing testing a lot of different things on your website, and so I think that’s a great idea and that’s just kind of testing testing a lot of different things on your website. So another strategy that I like to do and that seems to work really, really well in understanding customer expectations is looking at brands that are two to three years ahead of you. So deep dive right, get on their support, talk to their, you know, live chat, submit some support tickets, like, figure out how they handle their customer support, what their shipping looks like, what their exchange and returns process looks like, because, again, they’re two to three years ahead of you. They’ve learned a lot over those two to three years that you can then take and learn much quicker by just studying them and understanding them. Bonus points if they are in your industry, but again, they don’t have to be in your industry. They can be, you know, in a closely related industry. They could be in a completely different industry, but it’s good to be able to take that time and start studying those brands you know, as an example, I’ve talked a little bit about true classic on LinkedIn.
Greg: 12:34
Lately I’ve kind of turned into a fanboy of them, mostly because, well, one, their clothes are great and they’re quite affordable, which is awesome. But I feel like they do everything right and they set the gold standard for customer experience, from their website to the educational content on their website. I mean, you look at their product pages and they’ve got FAQs built out. It’s like they’ve made it so easy to be able to gather information and make an educated decision and place an order. That gives a fantastic customer experience All the way to their customer support and to their exchange and return process. Like they have it dialed in, like absolutely dialed in. It’s impressive.
Greg: 13:26
One specific example of this I ordered some shirts recently from them and I needed to return them. They weren’t the right size and when I went to start the return process, I noticed that they have a thing similar to Amazon where you get a QR code to scan at UPS. You don’t need to put it in a package, you literally take it. You show UPS the QR code, you hand them the shirts, they put it in a bag, they print out a label on it goes I didn’t even know that that was a thing outside of Amazon. This is the first time that I’ve seen a brand use a technology like this and it’s a little feature right, but it made my experience so much better and it tethered me to the brand that much stronger.
Greg: 14:14
From that one little simple thing, it just it made it so easy. So you know, if you need an example of what to do from a customer experience, I’d go follow them Like that’s the first brand that you should look at and then find two or three other brands that have it figured out and again just kind of go through that process document it, take really good notes and then come back and look at your business or the business that you’re marketing for, and figure out where are their gaps, where are the things that needed to be tested, and just start working on the business and start working on improving that customer experience at every touch point.
Laurel: 14:53
Yeah, I think it’s really good to look at, like these other businesses, and then I think it’s really important to take that back and actually test it out, like these businesses, most likely they tested it before they rolled it out, and so if you could test it out on your website before you fully implement it, like testing, you testing it out will allow you to refine those processes before rolling it out, which will make the customer experience a hundred times better, versus if you just throw it up there to test it out and see how it goes and then you have to roll back the process, like just be willing to test those things out and see what will work for your business.
Greg: 15:34
And I think it’s important to also understand that just because someone else is two to three years ahead of you and is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you, right, and that’s why it’s important to be able to go through that testing process. There’s a high likelihood that it’s probably going to work for you, especially if they’ve been doing it for a long, long time. But, yeah, test, test, test, test test. How about that? I think that was four tests. Test that’s what you got to do as a marketer and a business owner is test away. All right.
Greg: 16:11
So let’s talk about technology next. So how are smart brands utilizing technology to enhance the customer experience, and what impact has this had on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty? Because I feel like almost every day I’m being pitched by someone, right, like, come check out our new Shopify app, come look at this new piece of technology. Some of them are cool, some of them are like kind of underwhelming, but I think, as we go on, as we get further into 2024 and even in the next year, we’re going to see additional technologies emerge. So, you know, help me understand, like how, how brands are doing that right now.
Laurel: 16:55
Yeah, so a lot of the clients that we’re working with they’re big. The big way they’re using technology is to just manage the flow of information and especially when it comes to like customer service in terms of like requests that come in, support tickets, like everything that’s coming into the organization, just like managing it in a more centralized platform.
Greg: 17:18
Yeah, You’d be surprised Like how many brands I talk with in the sales process that still run their customer support on a Google email account. Right, it comes into their Gmail account. Sometimes it is a Gmail account, but you know, other times it’s a G Suite account with the domain name, but it’s like that’s not sustainable. You can lose too much information. It’s so inefficient and this is a big unlock for a lot of brands is getting on a platform and really centralizing all of that data. Yeah, so finding a platform we like to use.
Laurel: 17:59
Gorgeous. As an option, it’ll pull in all of the communication channels together in this one platform and then it can tie to your customer information, the order data, so you don’t have to like bounce back and forth, like be in the Gmail account and then like have Shopify open on a separate window to like find their order and do all of this stuff. It’s all pulled in there so that you can document it and you know then there’s a history there too and you know that customer and you can, you know, speak to them in a more personalized way. The next step is actually to use AI to help with those customer requests and kind of questions that they have. There are now, and I’m sure there will be in the future, even more sophisticated chatbots that can handle a lot of questions, and it can handle a lot of your live chats and customer support emails, especially when it comes to like consistent or those frequently asked questions.
Laurel: 19:02
I guess I know there’s a few big e-commerce businesses and companies who, like have done this, including Amazon. Amazon has like chatbots. There’s not a ton of customer complaints about the experience and it actually reduces that headcount that’s in customer support. So it’s like utilizing this techs, this technology, to help you find ways to get more efficient, cut costs and more to the bottom line. But really, at the end of the day, it’s also helping customers answer their questions, because chatbots they are built in such a way that they can respond to certain questions. People get their questions answered faster and that satisfies them, especially in this world where you know they’re trained to like get instantaneous answers.
Greg: 19:52
Yeah, can I chime in really quick on that? Yeah, go for it. You know, it was probably three or four months ago. I saw a really, really big brand on LinkedIn. One of the owners post that they had signed up for a service. I’m going to have to go back and find it because I can’t remember what that tool was, but it completely automates all of their customer support tickets with AI as well. Right, it’s not just the live chats on the website Like this.
Greg: 20:24
Ai is getting so good that it is being used for all sorts of pieces of customer service. It’s quite impressive and, like you mentioned, customers are able to get their answers a lot faster. I mean some of the brands who aren’t leveraging AI there are a few that I’ve done business with in terms of buying products from them. You know, when I have to wait three to five days to get a response from a customer support rep on a question like that’s maddening. I want to tear my little bit of hair that I have left on my bald head out. I just want to pluck those out because it’s painful. So I’m excited I’m really excited to be able to see what AI looks like in 12 months and how that can support on the customer service. Side.
Laurel: 21:16
Yeah, I also think there’s nothing better than just reviewing those customer service requests and questions at least on a quarterly basis to see if there’s anything that stands out Like are there new friction points, are there new frustrations? And then you can take those and make those frustrations, that feedback, high priority goals for the next quarter to try to solve Like so maybe it’s a shipping issue, maybe it’s quality of products, but getting invested in solving the pain points of your customer’s experience with your business is going to help improve that customer experience for not just that one customer but probably hundreds thousands, anyone who comes after them who’s also going to have that same problem.
Greg: 22:05
Yeah, I love that, and that’s another advantage of being able to pull everything into one platform, because if you have live chat and one platform, if you’re running on a Google email account for your customer support emails, it’s really hard to be able to mine that data. Now you can do it. It takes a lot of time, though, but if it’s all in one platform even some of the platforms I’ve seen have AI inside of it that can help kind of curate what those most common questions and pain points are that customers are having, so that you can then take that and build a roadmap of how to improve the customer experience. And it’s just, it’s so powerful. All right, so let’s take a few minutes and talk about personalization. So personalization is key to being able to really connect with your customers, be able to nurture them, grow their lifetime value and improve their customer experience. So can you share how some brands are personalizing the shopping experience for customers and what impact it has on their overall customer experience?
Laurel: 23:16
Yeah, I mean this is a huge topic and it should probably just be an episode all on its own for the future. Just as an FYI, I have just brainstormed for you a new episode topic. But the smartest brands collect data on their website visitors, leads, customers and then you use that data to segment and just give them more targeted content and product recommendations. So things that I’ve seen. Number one pre-purchase surveys. You can understand who the customer is shopping for. Are they shopping for themselves, their spouse, their kids, as a gift for a friend or a family member, whatever? So a pre-purchase survey can find that out. Or maybe you want to find out what they’re most interested in in terms of product categories, like are they interested in joggers, shorts, dresses, skirts, tops, sweaters, all of that and more. Like pre-purchase surveys give you that opportunity to find out why did they come to the website before they even made a purchase? What is it that they’re looking for or who are they trying to buy for? Because that’s the other part, too is, sometimes people will spend more money on somebody else than they will on themselves, and the opposite is also true. So knowing who they’re buying for can help determine okay, what do we do? What’s our next step? That data that’s collected in a pre-purchase survey can be pushed back into a platform like Klaviyo and then you can use it to segment and just deliver them information and messaging that they really need to convert. It’s so powerful.
Laurel: 24:56
I think that a lot of times when marketers talk about personalization, many people think it’s just like slapping the first name on an email Hi, first name. Like hi, joe, it’s good to see you and they call it a day, like it can and should be. So much more than that. I found there’s like scripts that you can do in Google ads that actually allow you to automatically increase your bids if the weather is good. Like this is actually a script that Google has put out and I’m sure we’ll link it in like the blog post. You don’t have to do it manually. So how cool is that? Like you can have really good weather in your location and suddenly, like we can spend more money on gardening products, like a garden bed or soil or tools, and that person who is in that warm weather is suddenly thinking I do want to garden and they start getting ads. The first is, if it’s raining or snowing and you’re indoors, you don’t want to be spending that money. Like those are good, like that’s personalization. It’s finding that right times, understanding their circumstances. Personalization is all about like speaking directly to that specific customer’s interests and buying behavior because of the data you collected about them, and I think that’s one of the beauties of digital marketing is when we know our customers enough, we can send them the best products for them.
Laurel: 26:25
I’m going to call out a store. I’m a consumer myself, and one thing like I always wish is that I get suggestions for products from certain stores, and then I would probably spend a lot more money there. So a store that I have shopped at is Sephora. They have some information about me because I provided that to them. They know my eye color is blue, my hair color is blonde, and then they have a list of all of my orders, and yet every time I get an email from them, that’s like a recommended product. It’s. It has nothing to do with like me. It’s skincare and I’m like I have never once purchased a skincare product from you, and so I’m like I would really like to know what you know eyeshadow or mascara to buy, or you know a million other things. They’ve collected a lot of data about me, but I feel like they’ve missed that personalization that would actually make me want to purchase more from them.
Greg: 27:27
That’s funny Calling out Sephora. I love it. They’ll never hear this. And the funny thing is, with the brand that big, I bet you, they have no less than two people working on their email marketing. They probably have more, more people that are working on their email marketing, so they have the resources to be able to do this and pull this off. So, sephora, if you ever hear this like you should hire Laurel to help you with your email. She can get it dialed in for you because she is your consumer. But it’s so true, right, and it’s like that was so many brands they have the data and they don’t use it properly. They’re told or might I say they’re brainwashed to think that I’ve just got to send more email, I’ve got to get the next one out, I’ve got to show my boss that I am getting stuff done and that I’m getting work through the pipeline, when that just shouldn’t be the mindset. I’m feeling like calling companies out now, mostly because they’re never going to hear this. We’re not jerks, I promise.
Greg: 28:33
But for another example, because I’m wearing a baseball hat today, I’ll call out New Era. So I’m bald, I wear a lot of hats. I buy a lot of hats. In fact, my wife gets kind of mad at me because I buy so many hats, but I just remind her that I don’t have to spend money on hair care color cuts like her each month, and that really ends that conversation real fast. Anyway, so 99% of the hats I buy are angels hats. I’m wearing one today.
Greg: 29:03
I don’t want you to send me emails for the Dodgers, especially after you poached our best player, shohei. Get lost. I don’t want Mariners hats. I don’t want Yankees hats. Stop sending me this crap. I don’t remember the last time I saw an email from them with like hey, we just launched this new line of angels hats. Huge lost opportunity right there.
Greg: 29:29
I think you know, at the end of the day, brands what they need to be doing is collecting the right data, segmenting that data like crazy and then sending the right content to each segment. And when you hit each of your segments a few times a month, what you’re gonna find out is that you’ll end up sending more email than you had before on kind of these spray and pray approaches, non-customized approaches. So you’re gonna send more email. You’re gonna hit your quotas if you have quotas internally, but it’s going to perform so much better than just sending stuff that may or may not hit, and so I think you know that’s probably one of the big takeaways of this episode. Right there, right, there’s just so much opportunity from an email perspective. So get it right, get the data segment and send the right content to them.
Laurel: 30:27
Well, I think sorry it comes back to as well, like your customer experience isn’t just what’s happening on the website, it’s not even what’s just happening on social media, but it’s your emails, like it’s everything. Every touchpoint your business has is part of the customer experience, and so are you turning people off because you’re not sending them the right stuff, or you keep sending them stuff that they’re not responding to, or are you engaging with them and showing them things that would actually get them to come back and make a purchase?
Greg: 31:03
Yeah, I love that great. Okay. So, looking ahead, what emerging trends or technologies do you believe will have the biggest impact on customer experience, and how should brands prepare to leverage these?
Laurel: 31:20
Okay, oh man, I know everyone that’s big. I know everyone’s talking about AI and we talked about it just like a couple of minutes ago, but I think it’s gonna be really helpful because, if you think about it, consumers have some same tastes and interests and AI can help identify patterns in those consumer behavior faster than we can. I mean, there’s some trained like data scientists who are able to do this, but sometimes AI can just help us do that, and then that means that as marketers, as business owners, we can plan for, execute and actually be a step ahead of the consumer, because we have that data to help us be ahead. I think we have to look beyond typical information about the consumer and what I mean by that is age, their birth date, location and really think about what could help us, what information could really help us know more about the customer to recommend to them products. So, if you’re clothing boutique, what category of products do your customers shop in most and then focus there? Are they buying specific colors all the time? Is there a pattern to what they buy and then building that into your brand and then that into your recommendations of new products or the products that you stock? We are working with one client where we built this email automation to send to people after they purchased a very specific collection of products and then we would recommend to them two more products that are the next products that that customer would meet in their journey. And it’s so interesting because that’s a different approach.
Laurel: 33:13
There’s some businesses we often talk about, like replenishment flows or subscriptions, where it’s just you know, refill what you already are getting. Like it’s not about the next product, like think about that, what is the next product that is for that customer? That could be really something to look into as well. A product recommender system Like what is it? That’s the next thing that they need, and then that opens up the possibilities, right? I just think it’s really important to start now. Start where you are, take inventory of your customer experience and then prioritize, like the steps in that experience, find the pain points, or what I like to call friction points in that experience, and fix those. And then look for the next opportunity and utilize the technologies that are coming out. Start testing. We’ve said that like 7 billion times in this episode.
Laurel: 34:10
But let’s start testing these technologies to see what works and what really helps your customers come back, make a second purchase or, you know, start purchasing for other people or recommending your stuff. I just think there is so much opportunity there.
Greg: 34:27
Yeah, I love that, and I love this kind of concept or idea of what is the next product that they should purchase. You and I started using that verbiage when we talked to my buddy, andrew, three or four years ago. I mean, that’s all he does is email marketing. He’s like your job as an email marketer is to figure out what is the next product that should be purchased by that segment, and it makes so much sense. I love that. All right, so we have a couple of minutes left, so I like to throw this question out at the end, when we’ve got some time. So what final words of wisdom do you have for our listeners when it comes to customer experience? Is there anything that you know, you’ve been thinking about, that you’re feeling really passionate about right now, that you might be able to share with us?
Laurel: 35:16
You’re asking for words of wisdom.
Laurel: 35:18
Words of wisdom, yeah, oh my gosh, for me that’s intense. There’s a lot of pressure there. No, I feel like I hope that everyone’s heard, like how passionate I feel, like we are about customer experience. That you know. I don’t think that you have to make huge changes Like please don’t go out onto your website and like redo the whole template and like buy any, like try to change everything or become like Amazon, but I think you already have a lot of the data that you need to start making tweaks to improve your business. And every quarter, I would suggest really taking a look at those pain points and figuring out, okay, what’s the next step, like what’s the next thing I need to work on? And hyper focus just in that area and little by little, you’ll see the customer experience really improved.
Laurel: 36:14
So if today it’s like I don’t talk to my best customers enough, okay, make a goal to like talk to two or three customers a week, a month, whatever it is, and find out for them Like number one, like why they purchased from you in the first place. And number two, why do they keep coming back? And number three, what are some things that would help them either want to get, like want to come back and purchase more often or like things that they’re looking for to help that you can supply and start there, like you don’t have to start at like, okay, I need to solve the shipping problem, because that’s a huge problem, I mean. I mean you may want to start there, I don’t know, but start in one place. Don’t try to take on the whole experience and try to improve each aspect of it and then go from there, because you’ll find your customers appreciate the efforts that you’re putting in to keep building that customer experience for them.
Greg: 37:14
I love that. Thank you so much. And, laurel, thank you for being with us today. I know that you know you’re incredibly busy. I probably know more than just about anyone else how dang busy you are, and taking an hour out of your week is just it’s painful, but what you shared with us today is awesome, so thank you.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
