These days, whenever you need to buy pretty much anything, thereās a dizzying amount of choice on offer. Generating customer loyalty today is more challenging than ever before. If you canāt compete on price, how do you keep your customers coming back for more?
By creating genuine, personalised customer relationships at scale. And the best way to do this is through interactive brand experiences.
Create customer loyalty with personalised journeys in Stornaway.io – an example interactive brand experience for investors in commercial propertiesĀ
Interactivity > Personalisation > Trust: the best route to customer loyalty
Interactivity: the key to quality data
Thereās no better customer data than that acquired directly from the individual. Itās powerful stuff. In the race to scale and collect bigger and grander data sets, many companies have forgotten this. Itās time to rediscover the huge mutual benefits of genuine brand-customer relationships.
For brands to achieve these genuine relationships, they need to listen as much as they speak. Give customers the space to share their preferences. Enquire about their interests and needs. Ask them for experience feedback.
This is where interactive brand experiences come into play. Offering your customers the opportunity to give you information in a way that’s far more engaging than a feedback form.
Personalisation: a mutual benefit for brand and customer
Interactive brand experiences can create huge advantages for both customers and businesses.
Individuals get:
- Control of the customer journey.
- An experience that is more relevant to them.
- Their desired products in front of them faster.Ā
- Better product or service recommendations in a more seamless experience.Ā
- The knowledge they wonāt get hounded with ads for things they donāt want when they are trying to enjoy themselves.Ā
Not much to argue with there.
Businesses get:
- More engaged customers
- The knowledge that their audience has actively asked to receive communications so they are open to marketing and receptive to their products.Ā
- To know which customers are most likely to be interested in each new product or service that they release.Ā
- A better method of adapting to change and disruption as they know customers on an individual level.Ā
Not much to argue with there either.
Credit: SmarterHQ
Trust: the final ingredient that pulls it all together
The last few years have seen a lot of focus on data privacy – and rightly so! People are increasingly sceptical about whether they can trust brands, especially with something so valuable as their data.Ā
However, the appeal of convenience is too strong for most. Recent research put the percentage of people willing to share behavioural data for a cheaper and easier brand experience at 90%. (If you have a Netflix account, this includes you!)
It turns out that trust is the key to unlocking better customer relationships. Deloitte recently found that trustworthiness is the emotion most commonly linked with an individualās favourite brand.Ā
As customers’ trust in a brand increases, they are more likely to share personal information. The more personal information the brand has, the more relevant and personalised it can make the customer experience. The better the experience, the more likely the customer is going to return and repeat it. The more repeat customers, the quicker the growth. Everyone wins.Ā
This virtuous cycle is a one-way ticket to customer loyalty and advocacy. And itās all held together by trust.
So what does an interactive brand experience look like in the real world?
To get your creative juices flowing, here are three examples of how interactive brand experiences can make all the difference.
Create an immersive experience
Picture the scene. Beer in hand, youāve sat down to watch the pre-match buzz and are asked to select which team you support. You then get a personalized dashboard with a highlights reel, squad updates, and detailed analysis tailored for your interests. The dashboard means that you are in control and can choose your experience as you wish. Select the highlights reel that is three not five minutes long but go deep into the punditās pre-match analysis.Ā
Team personalisation in Stornaway.io
Itās easy to see the benefits for customers here. In exchange for a little data, they get a personalized experience that they can actively control. Where once customers would have to sit through commentary equally weighted between the teams, they now have an entirely tailored and relevant experience. Thereās also no AI trying to predict their interests or actions, they are fully in control.Ā
The brand gets data. They know who the customer supports, so all future content they serve this customer will be for their team. This simple personalisation will reduce churn and boost customer loyalty.
Find out why you should make your own immersive experiences using Stornaway: Create Unforgettable Experiences.
Guide your customers through your product catalogue
Itās not (yet) possible to smell and sample consumables like coffee digitally, so how do elevate the buying experience from just reading text? By getting the expert roaster himself to give you a personal recommendation.
Find your Flavour – Manaka Coffee – a personalised brand experience where the viewer can learn which Manaka Coffee is best suited to them.Ā
An interactive brand experience like this one from Manaka Coffee guides customers through the product catalogue. Viewers knowingly share data to produce a personalised recommendation. This is particularly valuable for new customers who may not know where to start or which blend to choose first.
And thereās plenty of value for the business too. Aside from the cross-selling opportunities, it gives the company a general sense of the customer’s flavour preferences and purchasing criteria. This means they know which customers may be interested in new releases or specific content and can personalise future messaging with this in mind.
Communicate important (but potentially challenging) messages
Industries such as banking and finance can find it challenging to engage their customers with communications, even when itās really important information. Legal jargon and reams of tiny writing take a determined mind to read. Companies that translate this into easy-to-digest formats will inevitably build the most trust and loyalty with customers.
Take Texan Bank Extracto for example. They needed to communicate to their customers that free checking accounts were being removed. However, rather than send out a wad of legal jargon, they set up an interactive brand experience to find out more about each individual and their banking setup. Using the answers, Extracto could explain how this was going to affect each customer and then give immediate personalised advice on how customers could reduce the monthly fee. This eased customers through the transition and achieve a good retention rate.
The personalised advice based on freely shared data had a clear value to the customer and increased the levels of trust and customer loyalty.
Use Stornaway to make interactive, on-brand, personalised demos and explainers – giving your audience the information they really need: Interactive Explainers and Deep Dives.
How can you create an Interactive Brand Experience like this in Stornaway.io?
A simple way to ensure your audience is getting the information most valuable to them:
- Use the initial videos to set the scene – allow the viewer to tell you what they want to know more about.
An example interactive brand experience for investors in commercial properties – create customer loyalty with personalised journeys in Stornaway.io.Ā
- You can then offer up the information that is most relevant to the viewer.Ā If there are lots of options, it may be useful to include our either/or feature.
If you wanted the viewers to see all of the information – and the initial questions are simply working out what is most important and therefore what comes first, there are a couple of simple ways to do this:
- Option 1 – Create different edited versions of the same video for the next sequence. Each contains all of the footage but with different starting points. You could then use our tabs feature to upload and select each of the options.
An example of a tabbed island – different versions of the same video exist on each of the tabs. And the tabs keep your map organised and easy to follow. Don’t get lost – use tabs in Stornaway.io!Ā
- Option 2 –Ā If you wanted to keep the videos on their own islands – perhaps there would be other ways that people could get to these islands or maybe you would be uploadingĀ different material to these islands over time – then the way to do this would be to use the “default path“,Ā “hide” choiceĀ & “either/or” featuresĀ to ensure that the viewer sees all three islands.
An example of how option 2 may look on your map. Useful for your own project? We can share this example project with you – get in touch.Ā
Get started with creating your interactive brand experiences
Identify the best moment in the customer journey to introduce an immersive experience
Which business need are you are looking to improve? Where are the sticking points in the path to purchase? What kind of personalisation could create a more seamless experience?
Then put yourself in the customerās shoes
Speak directly to the audience and think about what their concerns might be and what they would want to know. Consider how to communicate your data request – focus on how the customer will benefit.Ā
Jump into Stornaway and map out the experience
Open your free trial account and get Mapping!
Guest blog from Brock Horning.