These days, people search for products and services on the web, make electronic purchases and conduct transactions with online retailers. As customers have gone digital, businesses must also create digital experiences for their customers. The new market reality encourages companies to step up their marketing initiatives and leverage digital media. Otherwise, they risk losing customers and revenue to more digitally savvy competitors.
What is digital customer experience?
As the name implies, digital customer experience (DCX) refers to the touchpoints of the customer when interacting with a brand online. It involves a series of actions, including searching for information, evaluating alternatives, requesting products, and, most importantly, making a purchase. The DCX approach is different from traditional CX. In brick-and-mortar e-shops, the atmosphere of the site, the quality of customer service, safety concerns, product presentation, and many other factors can influence customer satisfaction. In the virtual space, there are several factors that affect the customer's experience and purchasing decisions. These include website aesthetics and speed, mobile responsiveness, ease of navigation, language, quality of information, etc. The digitized customer experience is more important than ever, especially considering the increase in home media consumption due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Why is it important to digitalize the customer experience?
Customers adapt and evolve with technological advances and market trends. They learn and adopt such things, not because they are afraid of missing out (FOMO), but because they want to satisfy their needs.
In the current digital age, customers will have fewer bricks and more clicks. The lack of human contact is not a bad thing, however; it's quite the opposite. Although digital marketing channels lack human contact and face-to-face interaction, they allow companies to interpret customer data sets more easily than other traditional media. Web performance, for example, can be measured using analytics tools like Google Analytics (GA). With this web analytics tool, marketers can examine website activity and understand customer behavior.
Digital metrics for websites
Here are some digital metrics for websites that businesses should leverage to create a positive digital customer experience:
Traffic: the total number of site or page visits in a given time period.
Page views: the total number of page views; it includes repeat views of the same page.
Unique page views: the number of visitors who saw a specific page at least once during a visit.
Average time on page: The average time users spend looking at a specific page or screen or set of pages or screens.
Bounce Rate: the percentage of single-page visits or the number of visits in which users left your website from the same page they visited.