Online sales are reaching all-time highs as buyers become more comfortable with digital transactions. As the number of digital product offerings goes up, competition for customer conversions is also on the rise. If companies can create a lasting positive impression among potential customers, they can drive sales and set the stage for long-term loyalty.

What is Brand Experience

Brand experience is the lasting impression customers have of your brand. It includes thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and reactions to everything from direct marketing efforts to large-scale ad campaigns and specific product launches. It is a tangible and emotional experience consumers have while interacting with your brand.

It’s also important to understand that brand experience is subjective. While it’s possible to create experiences that produce reactions along a generalized spectrum, individual users will have different reactions to your efforts. In practice, this means that no matter how carefully you curate brand experience efforts, there will always be customers who come away with a negative reaction.

Brand Experience Design

If customers don’t connect your brand with positive thoughts, feelings, and reactions, they’re less likely to remember your products and services when it comes time to make a purchase. Here are the four critical components of brand experience:

  • Perception, the key part that includes audio, visual and tactical interactions that allow customers to connect a specific sense to an ad campaign
  • Participation, customers will walk away with a positive brand experience if they’re able to participate in some way, like ability to submit suggestions, interact with forums etc.
  • Personalization can help encourage connection across different customer segments. Personalized efforts can help create connections between consumer needs and current product offerings.
  • Prioritization of brand metrics such as positive social mentions or repeat purchases can bring experience driven results

Brand Experience Strategy

Assess whether or not you’re meeting customer expectations. Social media interactions and customer service calls can help pinpoint potential problems.

Identify areas for Improvement. While there may be more than one aspect of brand experience that could use a refresh or redesign, don’t try to do everything at once!

Measure Your Results to ensure your efforts are bearing fruit. This means tracking user views, reactions, and responses to social media posts along with the sentiment — positive, negative, or neutral — that goes along with them. This is also the time to explore and innovate by testing multiple strategies to see which one sticks.

Conclusion

The right brand experience makes all the difference when it comes to cultivating long-term customer relationships. By understanding where current efforts don’t deliver, prioritizing areas for improvement and tracking engagement metrics over time, it’s possible to build a brand experience that boosts customer connection and encourages long-term loyalty.