Understanding consumers and delivering an engaging experience is important to marketers, especially those that want to boost brand perception. According to October 2015 research, improving the customer experience is what primarily keeps CMOs and marketing leaders up at night—at least when it comes to their marketing objectives.
A survey by Korn Ferry Institute revealed that more than one-third of US CMOs and marketing leaders said that creating sustainable and engaging customer relationships and improving the customer experience was a primary objective that keeps them up at night.
Making sure the overall consumer experience is good was not the only thing keeping them up, however. Indeed, 24% of respondents said that the ability to demonstrate marketing’s ROI was another issue they face. And 23% of CMOs and marketing leaders said that staying ahead kept them awake.
It’s important for marketers to become more customer-centric—and they’re increasingly working towards that. In fact, marketers are measuring customer engagement. Research from the CMO Council found that more than a third of marketing executives in North America said that revenue metrics, like customer lifetime value, were the primary ones they used to measure consumer engagement.
And measuring this is important because negative customer experiences affect online conversion rates. A May 2015 survey from UserReplay found that the largest share (43%) of UK and US ecommerce decision-makers said that a key consequence of a suboptimal digital customer experience was the effect it had on their digital conversion rates.