Blast Evolves to Help Brands Deliver More Optimal Digital Experiences

December 9, 2021Joe Wuelfing

We’ve got an exciting development to share. Recently, Blast introduced a new brand — BlastX — to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation and address customers’ increasing demand for more timely, relevant, and personalized online experiences.

We call this digital experience optimization (DXO). Our identity, positioning, and promise is a bold yet natural move that builds on our strong heritage of analytics consulting while addressing the rapidly evolving needs of today’s digital world.

Drive Customer Engagement and Long-Term Loyalty

In accelerated fashion, customer experience has taken center stage, and if your business strategy hasn’t kept pace, you’re at risk of losing out — and losing customers. Consider that 84% of customers say customer experience is as important to them as the products they’re purchasing, according to Salesforce. If you don’t meet their expectations, they have other options.

But if you do, you create engagement and loyalty that keeps customers coming back — and telling other people about their great experience. They’re more likely to keep purchasing from you, and more likely to consider your new products and services. Important point: Digital experience is no longer transactional, or about the immediate conversion; it’s about the ongoing customer relationship, with loyalty being the valuable metric.

Digital experience is no longer transactional, or about the immediate conversion; it’s about the ongoing customer relationship, with loyalty being the valuable metric. Click & Tweet!

Digital Transformation is Happening — Now

2020 and 2021 have been game-changers, accelerating what many executives already knew: digital transformation is happening, and it’s happening fast. This has sparked an increase in focus and investment on enterprise-wide digital transformation — one that’s more customer-centric than ever. Because today, customers demand relevant experiences in real time on any device, and digital transformation isn’t waiting. You need to update your approach, your processes, and your technology to be able to deliver seamless digital experiences in the moment.

What are some of the digital marketing trends changing the playing field?

• A direct-to-consumer model that embraces personalization at scale
• First- and zero-party data strategies, with an end to third-party cookies
• People-centered digital transformation
• A digital customer journey that demands marketing agility
• Increased digital ad spends

Read about these trends in detail here.

Your Brand is More than Sacred

Your business lives or dies based on how customers perceive your brand. At every touchpoint, every interaction with a customer, you have the opportunity to create a positive result — or to end a customer relationship forever. That’s why digital experience optimization must be at the heart of your business strategy. As customers’ expectations continue to rise, with the bar set higher and higher, the personalized digital experiences that your enterprise delivers make all the difference.

Forrester research makes the numbers clear. Digital experience optimization delivers an astonishing 242% return on investment (ROI), with a 1.9x return on ad spending, a healthy 1.7x customer retention rate, and a revenue growth rate of 35%. No wonder smart companies are leaning into DXO to harness the power of unified customer data and marketing tech in building transformative digital experiences for customers and future customers alike.

Give Customers a Voice

Because customers are driven by all-too-human emotions, your company must treat them as the individual people they are. To connect with customers, you must bring them into the conversation to provide their unique insight, not just “think” that you understand them based on limited data. (The latter approach is what causes an empathy gap.)

Success occurs when you deliver the personalized experiences your customers not only expect, but that they’ve directly communicated to you. DXO is the link between these two sides of emotion-driven customer experience that builds brand loyalty.

Getting Started

Digital experience optimization doesn’t have to remain a mystery. You can begin by leveraging the key elements of DXO:

• Data unification – Standardizing the data that you collect from customers is the first step in leveraging that information to inform their digital experience.
• Listening (zero-party data) – Optimization occurs by marrying existing data collection with zero-party data to understand and deliver on what customers want.
• Customer segmentation – Through granular customer segmentation and customer profiles, you can deliver the personalized experiences customers demand.
• Personalization – By knowing your customers and treating them individually, you can deliver personalization at every stage of the journey, across all channels.
• Marketing technology – Digital marketing tools can streamline your workflow in real time so your customers see the content you want them to see at every touchpoint.

Ready to Evolve and Optimize?

BlastX offers the digital experience optimization (DXO) expertise you need to take your brand — and customer relationships — to the next level. Read the full version of this article to learn more about how we’re helping brands accelerate this transformation.

About the Author

Joe Wuelfing

Joe Wuelfing is a versatile business leader with 25 years of experience helping organizations execute strategic marketing and communications. As Director of Strategic Marketing & Communications at Blast Analytics, he is responsible for activities that position Blast as an industry leader, optimize the customer experience, and drive company growth.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn. Joe Wuelfing has written 3 posts on the Blast Digital Customer Experience and Analytics Blog.