Did you know it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one? And the probability of selling to an existing customer is a whopping 60-70% compared to a 5-20% chance of selling to a new customer. So why is it that brand experiences as marketing tools are often more focused on prospecting than retention? That’s where having a thoughtful brand experience strategy comes in.

In today’s competitive market, holding onto existing customers is paramount to your company’s success. At Imprint Engine, we’re focused on creating strategic brand experiences that positively impact the way people perceive, engage with, and feel about your company. Because brand experiences are about way more than just the cool, tangible stuff; they’re about fostering an emotional connection that underscores your customers’ journeys and influences their decisions and loyalty.

Need to Skim? Key Takeaways:

  • Keeping your current customers is smarter and more profitable than constantly chasing new ones. Selling to the loyal ones is easier and more rewarding.
  • A robust brand experience starts with knowing your audience, defining who you are, pinpointing critical touchpoints, and weaving a seamless story through every interaction.
  • Regularly collect and analyze customer feedback to make informed decisions, tackle pain points, and fine-tune the brand journey to boost engagement and loyalty.

Table of Contents

What is a Brand Experience Strategy?

Before we get into the strategy part, a brand experience encompasses everything customers or employees feel during their engagement with a brand. It is made up of every interaction that someone has with your brand to ultimately form an emotional connection. Your strategy is the effort you put into creating an environment that invites people to feel part of your community — and to stay awhile!

Establishing strong brand loyalty and differentiating yourself from the rest of the market relies on a strong brand experience strategy. This strategy includes every customer service interaction — both online and offline — as well as your social media presence, brand messaging, and outreach efforts. Your strategy should align all of these elements and tell a story that consistently delights and impresses your customers and employees. 


Crafting Your Brand Experience Strategy

Building your strategy requires foresight as well as a lot of background information. Here are four tips for developing a clear and effective brand experience.

Understand Your Audience

In order to make a memorable impact with your brand experience, you first must know your audience and what kind of experiences that would mean the most to them. Customer personas and journey mapping are useful tools that outline who your audience is, what they need, and how they connect with your company. 

Customer personas are fictional archetypes that you create to represent your audience. They can help you understand customers on a deeper level by envisioning what motivates them or what evokes certain emotions. Personas also provide you with awareness of what different customer journeys look and feel like so that you can improve them. 

A customer journey map is a visualization of each persona’s experience during their customer lifecycle. You’ll need contextual information from your customer personas such as goals, pain points, and motives before you can properly map their journeys. Journey mapping begins with outlining a series of actions into a timeline, then filling in the timeline with the customer’s emotional process, and rounding it out with a condensed narrative of their overall journey. These maps should include your personas’ descriptions, their situations and goals, high-level journey phases, mindsets and emotions, and opportunities or insights gained from mapping.

Personas and journey maps provide a holistic perspective of the customer experience. By addressing pain points and opportunities throughout these fictional journeys, you will be able to better understand your real-life audience.

Define Your Brand Identity

Brand experiences communicate your brand identity and help it resonate with others, so first, your identity must be clearly defined. Brand identity includes not only the visible elements of a brand, but its core values, mission, and voice. These elements work together to help people recognize you out in the wild, in their inbox, or on their doorstep, so consistency is crucial in establishing long-term customer loyalty. Read more about how to build customer loyalty here.

Identify Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the instances throughout your brand experience in which customers encounter and engage with your company. One of the first touchpoints is often your website or social media, but other touchpoints include in-store or in-person experiences, advertisements, newsletters, direct mail, or indirect interactions such as positive reviews or press articles. 

Identifying your company’s most common and impactful touchpoints will help you plan an effective brand experience strategy.

Design Cohesive Experiences

Regardless of which touchpoints you’re using to execute each step of your brand experience, the tone, design, and messaging should remain cohesive. A good brand experience should resonate with customers’ needs and emotions without losing focus on your brand identity in the process. 

For example…Imprint Engine helped Gopuff build a national Back to College campaign that ensured every touchpoint across every participating campus delivered the same, cohesive experience. Read more about that here.


How to Improve Brand Experiences in 4 Steps

Once you have an understanding of your audience, have established your brand identity, and identified which touchpoints are part of your customers’ journeys, you can lay a stronger foundation for effective brand experiences. Building a brand experience requires structure. The fun stuff is important, like brainstorming appreciation gift ideas and executing experiential marketing tactics, but you should consistently evaluate what’s working so you can optimize the overall brand experience. Here are four steps to improve your brand experience strategy: 

  1. Gather customer feedback
    • Identify pain points or needs by collecting unbiased insights from customers. If you conduct a survey to collect feedback, ask pointed questions regarding customers’ interactions with your brand and allow them to respond with open-ended answers. 
  2. Analyze the data
    • Using AI text and sentiment analyses tools, you can identify patterns as well as compare and contrast different types of feedback like survey results or online reviews. Once you have identified consistencies in customer feedback, you can dig deeper into the “why” behind them. 
  3. Make data-driven decisions
    • Once you’ve analyzed the data, apply what you’ve learned to your brand experience strategy. Prioritize customer pain points that require immediate resolutions and make sure to apply your changes to every customer journey touchpoint. 
  4. Continuously evaluate and iterate
    • Continuously evaluating your strategy’s performance based on customer engagement, retention, and revenue will allow you to pivot as quickly or as frequently as needed in order to keep up with your competitors. 


Craft Memorable Brand Experiences with Imprint Engine

We wholeheartedly believe that great products come and go, but great experiences live on. So much so that we’ve sort of made that concept our entire personality. If you want to craft the kind of brand experience that not only attracts new people, but compels them to stay for a long time, contact us and we’ll help you bring it to life.