When you attempt to attract customers to your company, you need to create an amazing and thrilling experience for them. There is so much competition in the marketplace, so if you’re not doing everything you can to stand out—well, then, you’re not standing out. Even if you’re selling something that’s in high demand, chances are that five or ten other competing companies are selling something pretty similar to what you’re trying to sell. That’s why you have to create an amazing experience for your customers so that they will want to go to you instead of your competition. So let’s take a look at how you can beat the crowds and craft an Audience Experience that sells.

What Is The Customer Experience?

First things first, there are two different kinds of customer journey: the Guest Experience and the Audience Experience. By the Audience Experience we mean anyone who comes across your Brand for the first time, and how they interact with it. The guest experience is someone who has already purchased your services or products before. This means that anyone who gives you money is now a guest instead of an Audience member. The goal of your Brand is to turn Audience members into Guests. The question is, how do you do this?

Get The Word Out

The first thing you need to do is make people aware of your Brand in the first place. More importantly, you need to provide an experience that excites them and makes them want to run out and tell their friends and family about it. Once those people interact with your Brand and get the same experience from it, they will tell their friends and family too. This will create a chain reaction where word-of-mouth spreads rapidly about your Brand and gives it all kinds of free advertising and publicity. 

Satisfy Demand

Next up, to get people committed and attached to your Brand, you need to show that you understand their problems and demands by introducing solutions. This is what will keep people committed to what you’re trying to do. The more you help them out with their problems, dreams, desires, or whatever else they demand, the more they are going to trust you. As a result, you will have retained a loyal customer who would never even think of doing business with anyone other than you. You want to create as many of these guests as possible.

Only High Quality

If you already know your target customer base and have looked into what their desires are, then you know the products or services they need. Now the next step is to ensure that you supply them with only high-quality products or services. Don’t take the tempting cheap route and sell them low-quality merchandise just to save a few bucks. This will hurt you in the long run because those customers won’t be guests—they’ll be gone. The best way to build a Brand is to offer something that truly high-quality, even if you have to price it a little bit higher. Customers aren’t afraid to spend extra money for quality. Most importantly, they’ll associate your Brand with the experience of purchasing only the best quality merchandise. This is the mindset you want them to have about your Brand. 

Surprise Them

The best Brands do more than just satisfy customer demands with high-quality merchandise. They also surprise their Audience and delight them with things that are unexpected and generate an emotional response from them. You could have the best quality products in the world and still not reach your Audience if you are giving them a boring experience which doesn’t generate any emotion. That is why the best way for your Brand to stand out amongst the competition is to overdeliver on everything so that your customers always get more than they expected. You want to trigger as many emotions in your customers as possible when you communicate and advertise to them. 

As a small business, you have an advantage when it comes to communicating with customers on an emotional level. As the owner of your Brand, you can communicate with your customers directly and get to a personalized level with them. Do you know any big corporate CEO who can do that,    apart from very rare exceptions?  Then, after they purchase your product, you will overdeliver   by giving them more than they originally thought they were going to get.    This will be a big surprise to them and will make them trust your company a whole lot more, on a personal level. That is the way in which small Brands like yours can rise in popularity. 

 Let’s look at an example of this concept    being put into action. Suppose you’re selling an online training course which teaches your people how to do something they’ve always wanted to learn. In their minds, they expect to get access to a series of videos which teach them about whatever topic they’re interested in. However, you could go a step further by sending them something physical in the mail as a bonus for their purchase. Depending on how much time you have, it could be a personalized handwritten note in which you thank them for purchasing your product and give them your contact information in case they have any questions. Going above and beyond the customer’s expectations like this is how you keep them around for a long time. 

Originality

Originality in your Brand means creating something that no one else is creating, whether it is in your products, services, and/or advertising. Just think about the Dollar Shave Club and their silly, memorable marketing. If you’ve never seen it, one of the ads on their website is a man with an absolutely huge mustache. The point is to be funny and memorable so that people won’t forget it, and they can even tell other people about it too. You can have a lot of fun with your ads by just being a little creative. 

You don’t want to just be funny and quirky in one place, though. You want your ads to be that way everywhere: newspapers, television, internet, mobile apps, and wherever else you advertise. Try to be consistent on all media. If you maintain consistency in your Brand like this, then people will associate humor and fun with your Brand. When they go to your website to learn more about your business, you could have an email subscription form where they can sign up to receive your free newsletter. From there, you can keep up the quirkiness of your Brand and integrate it into your welcome email and all the subsequent newsletters to your subscribers. 

Let Them Customize the Online Experience

Don’t spoon-feed your guests every part of their experience; let them define it, too. Let’s say you have a Facebook Group devoted to dog collars, because that’s what your business sells. You could make a post on your Facebook Page which talks about the best ways to train your dog on how to sit. On the bottom of the post, you could have anchor text entitled “free training tips.” When people click on that link, they are brought to your Facebook Group page where they receive free access to a few sample training worksheets. After they try to access one of the worksheets, there’s another link which will redirect them to a YouTube video that has a video tutorial about teaching dogs how to sit. In the description box of the video, there is another link to a Sales Page which gives them a chance to purchase the full paid course. 

This allows the customer to navigate through the material at their own pace and choose where to go next. You would have lots of different videos linked to your worksheets with unique offers linked on those video pages. You’re building a number of different sales funnels and letting the guest define their experience (at least within the parameters you set). That way, it creates a customized experience based on where the customer wants to go and what they want to learn next.

Personalization

We’ve touched on personalization already but let’s go a little more in-depth about what it means. You want to treat customers as if you know them and they know you. This means providing your first name in all the communications you make with them. When customers sign up for your newsletter, they are already giving you their first name. This gives you the opportunity to set up your email software to address each customer by their first name when you send an email to them. So, if you send out one email to two-hundred different people on your list, the beginning of each email will have “Dear THEIR FIRST NAME HERE.” The software automatically places the first name connected to that user’s email address in place of that text.

If your website has a sign-in area, have their dashboard page greet them by their first name too. Depending on the type of business you are running, you could have your website remember what your members are clicking on. Then your email software could send them product recommendations based on their perceived interests from the actions they took on the website. Either that or you could have the recommendations given to them right on the website. But you don’t always want to be pushing products on your customers or else they might think that’s all you care about them for. Instead, you need to give them incentives to stick around for a while. 

Customer Loyalty

To give customers that extra incentive to stay with your company, you can have them join a free customer loyalty rewards program. You could offer customers special access to this program if they’ve stuck with your company for a long time. For example, let’s say you are running a membership website where people have purchased a subscription. If someone stays a paying member for four months, you could send them a free T-shirt with their name on it as a bonus gift for being a loyal member. For those who have been members for twelve months, you could send them a gift certificate on their birthday. This could be a gift certificate for a bakery where they can purchase a small cake for themselves. 

You should also keep the personalization strategy going by sending them a birthday card in the mail too. If you don’t already have their mailing address, send them an email saying “You have Won a Free Birthday Gift. Claim Your Prize by Clicking Here.” Once they click on the link, it can lead to a form where they fill out their mailing address. Not only will you have their address to mail the gift to, but you can also send postcard and paper advertisements in the future as well. 

Get Feedback

You can try your best to make your customers happy, but you will never really know for sure if they’re happy until you get feedback from them.

There are multiple ways you can approach this. The easiest way is to have a feedback form page where your customers can go there   anytime and leave feedback on   their experience with your    business. You could ask them to make suggestions on how you can improve the website or business  too. Another way to get feedback     is to ask for it after a customer purchases a product. Just wait a week or two after they have   received the product and then    email a link to a survey for them      to fill out. This survey will ask     about how happy they are with        the product and what do they      think could be improved. 

After you get all the suggestions   from the feedback, you can take     the most recommended suggestions and start implementing them into your business and/or website. The more suggestions you implement, the higher customer satisfaction will be once they see those changes they suggested become a reality. It will also indicate to the customers that you are actually taking their feedback into consideration and listening to their demands. This will create a better sense of trust from them and they are bound to stay with your company for a long time to come. 

Moving Forward…

By now, you should realize the importance of creating a unique and exciting experience for your customers. The more you create thrills and delight for your guests and Audience members, the more they will recommend your business to their friends while becoming loyal customers themselves. It may take you some time to get the hang of it, but just keep practicing and never give up. As long as you allow the customer’s experience to be your main focus in all aspects of your business, then you will succeed at creating the ultimate Audience Experience for them.