The Importance of the Digital Product Experience When It Comes to Marketing

Every day it seems like there are a plethora of digital products launched. As the world of digital products continuously grows, so does the competition between the product creators. If you enjoy a challenge, you should see this as a great marketing opportunity. Quality marketing can stand out above competitors and bring more users to your product.

However, to create effective marketing strategies and grow your user base, you first need to understand your customers and how they interact with your software. Once you have that information, you can put that data to work.

What is Product Experience?

Product experience refers to a customer’s thoughts and behaviors when engaging with a product. It encompasses their entire user journey, based on their flow of clicks, time spent, and feature usage. 

For example, Spotify and Pandora are both music streaming services, each with different functionalities and design. The uniqueness of their features fosters different product experiences. One user might prefer Spotify because they like to create playlists, whereas another user might like the variety within a Pandora-created playlist. 

Furthermore, two listeners can have a different product experience, even when using the same service. With Spotify, one user might like to listen to playlists other listeners made while another user creates their own. This can indicate whether the users like to be in control or if they are creative. Whether they skip songs or not might tell you a user is adaptive and easy going. 

Analyzing product experience data, like with the music example, can help you get inside of your customers’ heads so you can create successful products and marketing campaigns.

How Can You Manage the Digital Product Experience?

Product experience is a unique factor to measure in the sense that it is usually difficult to understand exactly what a user is thinking at any given moment. On top of this, understanding one user’s thoughts on a product doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what the entire fanbase thinks.

However, this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make informed decisions regarding the product experience. By collecting data on how users utilize certain products, you can find commonalities and trends regarding what users like and don’t like—subsequently allowing you to tailor the product experience to fit your target audience’s needs. 

There are many types of software available that can aid in managing your users’ product experience, like Gainsight’s product experience software. This tool and others like it track your customer’s entire digital journey with a product, including but not limited to:

• Clicks
• Adoption Rates
• Session Duration
• Use of Specific Features, like a 24-Hour Chat
• Retention Rates
• Abandonment Rates
• Satisfaction

Using a tool, you can go back to compare engagement from now against a baseline level or visualize the data with helpful graphs. It will not only keep a record of your entire user base or a select segment, but it can also narrow down on individuals. This allows you to identify users that need special attention.

Ultimately, your personal preferences determine the product that you choose to use, so we recommend you research to see which products are available before committing.

Why Does the Marketing Team Care about User Product Experience?

It may seem obvious that developers and product teams utilize product experience data to make informed data-driven decisions for the product itself. As a marketer, why should you care? As briefly stated above, understanding how your users interact with your product can aid you in producing better marketing that draws more users. 

Marketing teams should have access to product experience data so they can understand what users are looking to get out of the product. With this data, you can create narrow target markets with advertisements that grab their attention. The data might also indicate how users found your product, which might give you an idea of where to market, whether that be on social media, billboards, or television commercials.

A Final Note

If you already have a solid product experience with little room for improvement, your happy customers might begin a word-of-mouth marketing campaign based on positive reviews. This free advertising might help your product go viral, or at least get a few new people interested.

From marketing to sales to customer support, product experience data can be beneficial across departments. When you know everything about your buyer, you build trust. However, it is not smart to attempt to gather the data on your own. This time-consuming task could be done completely in the blink of an eye with the right PX software. With the right tool, you’ll be improving your product experience in no time.