Author: Simone Somekh

Are you planning to launch a new product? The first step you must take is to conduct a competitive product analysis to compare your product with the other similar products available in the market.

Around 30,000 new products are launched every year. When designing a new product or revamping your existing product, you must ensure that you have a competitive edge over your rivals. 

In this article, I will explain why it is essential to know your competitors and conduct comprehensive competitive product analysis. I will also discuss some great examples of competitive product analysis to gather actionable insights from it. 

Ready? Let’s start!

What Is Competitive Product Analysis?

Competitive product analysis is the process of evaluating your competitors’ products to find their strengths, weaknesses, and current position in the market. It lets you analyze the current demand for your product and helps you plan appropriate strategies to outperform your competitors.

The most basic value proposition canvas for competitor analysis divides customer behavior into three types: fears, wants, and needs. A customer buys a product for fear of losing it, for the luxury of having it or the need to use it. It also separates the product into three parts: benefits, features, and experience. Customers prefer to purchase products after comparing the features, understanding the benefits, and evaluating the previous or current experience with the business selling the product.

Doing a product competition analysis helps identify how your competitors’ products help your target audience overcome their fears and fulfill their needs.

Competitive product analysis also includes analyzing your competitors’ sales and marketing strategies. By doing this, you can implement robust business strategies that are better than the approach used by your current competitors. 

When you have full knowledge of your competitors, it becomes easier for you to defeat them and acquire the largest market share.

Why Is It Important To Know Your Competitors?

Competitor analysis is a crucial part of every business strategy. You need to set a USP and offer a price that your rivals can’t match. To do that, you must identify the products currently selling in the market and why they are selling so fast. Competitor analysis lets you do that.

Here are the top advantages of competitive product analysis:

• Minimize Bottlenecks and Optimize Customer Experience: Knowing your competitors helps you identify the problems that the customers are facing in your target market and adjust your product features accordingly. When you optimize your product experience and minimize bottlenecks, it becomes easier to acquire more customers. 
• Uncover Market Trends: Competitor product analysis involves working with lots of data. Predictive data analysis and forecasting help you uncover the future market trends so that your product remains on the top-selling chart for years to come. 
• Analyze Competitor Strengths and Weaknesses: Competitive analysis helps to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals. You get to know what makes their product a success and which features need improvement. This allows you to capitalize on things their product lacks and make your product even better. 
• Learn From Their Mistakes: When launching a new product, analyzing your competitors could prevent you from making blunders that they had made in the past. You would also be able to save money that you might otherwise invest in the wrong features or technologies.

Now that you know why knowing your competitors is vital for you to succeed, let’s find the products for doing competitor analysis.

Define the Problem and Find Competitors’ Products to Analyze

Necessity is the mother of invention. Every product that sells on the market has a demand for it.

Before conducting a competitor product analysis, you need to define the needs that your target audience has and how you can turn it into a business opportunity. 

You need to examine your competitors’ products to find out the problems that the current product has. You need to define the exact problem and identify the need for a better product.

Identify your top three closest competitors and get answers to these questions.  

• What are their current product offerings?
• How much do they charge? Do they offer a free trial? 
• What is their current market share?
• How do they differentiate their products from their competitors? 
• Why do people trust their product?
• How do they market their products? 
• What are the features that are liked the most? 
• What are the features that the product lacks that are in demand? 
• How often do they add new features to their product? 

Here are some ways that will help you to get answers to the above questions:

• Conduct an in-depth analysis of their website and note down the details of the product, including all the features, pricing, product documentation, and product videos. Gather as much information as possible.
• Watch the videos uploaded by customers, bloggers, or influencers about the products. Often, people discuss the best features of the product or mention the problems they face while using the product.
• Pick some of the followers of your competitors’ products from social media and get in touch with them. Request them to answer a short survey to gather customers’ opinions.
• Take the help of sites like CNET, Google My Business, MouthShut, Capterra, TrustPilot, Yelp, and others to gather real customer feedback.

At this stage, you will have some of your competitors’ top products along with a list of problems that the customers are facing while using those products. Now, we will move on to the next step.

Find UX Issues with Competitors’ Products

The next step is finding UX (User Experience) issues in the products you listed in the step above.

Finding UX issues in your competitors’ products can help you learn from their mistakes and offer a better user experience. This, in turn, will have a positive impact on your product conversion rate. 

Follow these ways to find UX issues in your competitors’ products: 

• Buy the product or sign up for a free trial to start using their products. When you step into the shoes of your competitors’ customers, it will become easier to pinpoint UX issues that other customers might be facing. 
• Look at their onboarding process. Does it involve too many steps and feel frustrating, or is it easy?  
• Test the mobile-friendliness of the website. Does the site offer a better page experience? 
• Measure the speed of the site, and check other factors that impact UX like HTTPS, bounce rate of the product pages, product reviews, product ratings, product comments, etc.
• Determine the kind of tone they use in their product’s messaging. 
• Check the features that might not be useful to your target audience. You can eliminate such features in your product and offer a better product price to your customers.

Make sure to analyze the UX of all the top three competitors of yours and note down all the aforementioned things for each of them. 

Find Product Listing Issues With Competitors Products

Product listing is a catalog of all the products a company sells. All the products have a separate landing page that contains complete information about the item, such as title, price, images, and description. 

When analyzing your competitors’ product listings, try to get answers to these questions:  

• Have they listed their product under the right category and sub-category? For example, if they sell t-shirts, they should be listed under the relevant category (i.e., t-shirt) and sub-category (e.g., polo, round neck, or v-neck).
• Is the product information in the listing page complete? Have they copied the description provided by the manufacturer?
• Does the product listing contain screenshots? If yes, are they clear and easy to understand?
• How often do they update the product description?
• Is the pricing correct?
• Have they mentioned the stocks left in the product description?
• Which third-party sites have they registered? Did they miss any primary product listing website? 
• Have they optimized their product listing to rank higher on other relevant websites? If yes, which keywords have they used? 
• Are there any misspellings on their product page? 
• Have they listed the price publicly on the other relevant sites? If yes, is it the same as they have on their website?

Answering these questions will help you find some common product listing issues, such as price mismatch, missing information, bad CTA, and copied product description. 

Find Product Reviews Issues With Competitors Products

Reading reviews of your competitors’ products can tell you a lot about how satisfied their customers are and what opportunities you have.

Let’s say you sell portable speakers. If a lot of your competitors’ customers complain about the sound distortion when playing songs via Bluetooth, you would want to ensure your product works perfectly fine even at 100% volume. 

Here are some great ways to find product reviews issues with competitors’ products and use them to your advantage. 

• See the reviews posted on the competitors’ site. For example, Under Armour sells its products through its website. Here is a screenshot of the reviews of a T-shirt on their site. You can read the reviews with 1-star and 2-star ratings to find issues in your competitors’ products. 

• Monitor comments on Google and other third-party review sites. Tools like Easy Reviews sends you a daily update of the Google reviews received by businesses that you choose to monitor via email. 
• You can also use Google Alerts to get informed every time customers mention your competitors’ product or brand names. Using Google Alerts, you will be able to stay on top of what their customers are saying about them. 
• Leverage social listening tools like Awario or Mention to identify what your competitors’ customers are saying about them and their products on social media. 
• Analyze both the positive and negative reviews about the products. The positive ones will help you determine their strengths, while the negative ones will help identify their weaknesses. For example, the positive review for a coffee maker helps discover its pros, such as easy to wash and an option to make different brews. The negative reviews of this product indicate its cons, such as very loud when brewing and not durable. 

• See the testimonials to get a better idea of what loyal customers think or say about their product. 

You can find your competitors’ product reviews by Googling it directly. Search for “[brand name + product name] + reviews” and see which site comes up. 

Additionally, check popular review sites, such as Yelp, Capterra, G2 Crowd, TrustPilot, or GetApp to find if their customers have left any feedback on these websites. 

For example, I visited the G2 Crowd to see if customers have given reviews to the product “Asana.” I found that there are thousands of customer feedback, which can help find issues in their product. 

I recommend looking at 1-star and 2-star reviews first because this will help us find problems that people face while using the product. One of the reviews states that Asana is very glitchy, and the user has to spend too much time updating the tasks. There is also no default to who the task belongs to or what date it is due. 

Here, the Asana team is active, and they have replied to the customer’s problem with a solution. The response from Asana Team is, “there’s a new Rules feature that allows setting a default assignee and due date for each task.” 

It might be possible that your competitors’ are too lazy to respond to customer problems, and this is where you can capitalize and create a better product for your potential customers.

Analyzing reviews like this will keep you updated with the issues in your competitors’ products as well as the new features that they add. 

Use the insights gathered from your competitors’ customer reviews to enhance your product and provide a better experience to your users. 

Competitive Analysis For Product Design

The product design and color palette can entice prospects to convert and leave a great impression on your customers. 

When designing product interfaces, associate an action to a color to guide customers and improve their user experience. For example, in product design, contrasting colors are usually implemented to break the screen into different sections. The color for the CTA buttons should also be chosen to encourage specific actions. 

Colors play a huge role in your branding. Begin by analyzing what colors your competitors are using to differentiate your products from them in terms of design. 

Here are some ideas to conduct a competitive analysis for product design. 

• Check what colors they use on their landing page. Is there any specific reason for using that color?  
• See where they have placed the call-to-action buttons. Is it obvious, or is it difficult to find? 
• Test how the platform looks on different devices. Is there any difference in their product’s mobile design when compared to the desktop version? 
• What are the different features of the product, and how do they function together? 
• How well the product performs as compared with other similar products in the market?
• Analyze the tone and copy of the competitor. How effective are they in persuading a customer to try or stick to their product? 
• Check the wait or load times in their product. 
• Look if the design can be customized as per the customer’s preferences. 
• Find design flaws in the industry. For instance, in the 1990s, whenever someone bought an electronic gadget, they would read a sticker that says, “charge before use.” Tony Fadell, one of the Apple iPod’s original product team members, saw this as an opportunity to change the customer experience. Apple was the first company to package its gadgets fully-charged and ready to use out of the box. 

What Should a Competitive Analysis Include?

Your competitive analysis should include anything that can help you improve your product and generate more sales. 

You must include the following things in your product competitive analysis. 

• Company Overview: This gives you a summary of who your competitors are, what resources they have, and how many customers they have. Also, go through their website’s career section to identify who they are hiring or which teams they are expanding. Knowing this will give you a fair idea of the steps they are about to take. 
• Product features: Analyzing all the features of your competitors’ product will allow you to make your product unique and better. 
• Pricing: Check how much they charge. Do they offer their product as a one-time purchase or as a subscription-based model? Analyze if their pricing plans don’t satisfy a segment of customers. For example, if they offer plans for large businesses only, you can offer a plan for small companies or startups.
• Perks: Do your competitors’ offer an additional product or service with their product? It could be anything from a free tool to a discount coupon of another product. 
• Share of voice: Share of voice is the percentage of exposure a product gets on the web and social media. Tools like Brandwatch can help you measure the share of voice of your competitors’ products. For example, the below screenshot displays the share of voice of the top five airlines. Jet Airways has the highest share of voice (32%), followed by Royal Airways (27%), and Air Atlantic (21%). This will help in determining which of your competitors are dominating the market. 

• Sentiment Analysis: It is the measure of how satisfied customers are with a particular product or brand. Measuring sentiment analysis can help you find the real sentiments of the customers as happy, sad, or neutral. 
• Geography: Which markets are your competitors’ focusing the most on? This could help you find both established and emerging markets for your product. 
• Social media platforms: Analyze which social networks they use the most? What kind of posts are they publishing, and how frequently? 
• SEO: Check whether your competitors are doing SEO for their products. If they are, then what aspects of SEO are they focusing on most? 
• Blogging: Are they publishing blogs or articles on their website related to their product? Check the topics of their blog posts and the engagement level of the audiences. 
• Video marketing: Determine if your competitors are creating videos or conducting webinars to promote their product. If they are, watch the videos to determine whether video marketing is feasible for you and how you can make it unique.
• Paid Ads: Tools like SimilarWeb show whether your competitors are running ads, and if they are what are the top keywords they are targeting. For example, Salesforce attracts the highest-paid traffic from the keywords “salesforce”, “sales force”, “CRM”, “quip”, and “salesforce certification”. 

• Customer acquisition process: Check whether your competitors’ have created different ways to acquire customers, such as referral programs, affiliate strategy, or other unique ideas. 
• Sales: It is crucial to understand what sales strategy your competitors are using. The best way to analyze it is by trying and booking a demo yourself. Do they provide free product demos? How long do they take to respond to your demo request? How many fields do they require you to fill before you can book the demo?
• Net Promoter Score: NPS determines how likely a customer is to recommend the product to people they know. If the NPS for your competitors’ products isn’t high, you will have an opportunity to target a larger market. You can find the NPS of your competitors’ products by conducting a survey.

Including all these things will give you a 360-degree view of your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to capture the market. 

How Do You Analyze Competition?

There are two basic ways to analyze your competition:

• Using a tool 
• Manually 

Using a Combination of Tools

Tools are the easiest way to analyze your competition. However, you will need more than one tool to get a better view of your rivals. 

Pi Datametrics

Pi Datametrics allows you to measure your competitors’ performance. It enables you to identify the “what” and the “when” by analyzing market trends. You can track the audience’s intent and tweak your marketing message to persuade your customers to try your product instead of your competitors’. 

The following graph shows the search volume for different auto brands in the U.S market. It also displays the trend in branded search volume. This helps in determining which of your competitors’ products are in demand now. 

SEMrush 

SEMrush is an excellent tool to research your competitors’ marketing strategy. Just enter your competitor’s website URL, and you will be able to check things like their organic and paid traffic, sources, devices, location, and top pages. 

You can also check your competitors’ top pages and the keywords they use. If you have published your website online, you can use SEMrush’s keyword gap feature to find phrases that your competitors use, but you don’t.

The advertising research feature of SEMrush helps identify the top paid ads of your competitors and the keywords they are bidding on.

BuzzSumo

You can find the top content of your competitors using BuzzSumo by entering their website URL in the search bar. You can also filter the search results by publish date, content type, and shares across social platforms. 

Feedly

Feedly is a news aggregator site that can help you stay on top of your competitors’ product releases, PRs, or other updates. You can add Feedly’s browser extension to add sites you want to monitor quickly. 

Prisync

Prisync helps you to keep an eye on your competitors’ prices. If you are aware of your competitors’ pricing strategy, you can adjust your pricing accordingly to acquire more customers. 

How Do You Write Competitive Analysis?

Now that you know what to include in a competitor analysis report, it’s time to gather all the insights in one place. 

The best way to do so is by creating an excel sheet that consists of all the things about your competitors in an organized manner. It should be your go-to page every time you need any information about your competitors’ product. 

Here is an example of how to write a competitive analysis. The list contains elements like 

• Company name
• Product name
• UX issues
• Product listing issues
• Percentage of positive and negative reviews
• Product design issues
• Key features
• Missing features
• Price
• Perks 
• Share of voice
• Sentiment Analysis
• Pros of the product
• Cons of the product
• SEO details
• Social media metrics
• Content marketing
• Sales and customer support

You can access the template here and use it to gather competitive product analysis information in one place. 

When writing competitive analysis, make sure to include all the information suggested above. 

Competitive Product Analysis Example

Let’s conduct a demo competitive analysis of products manufactured by different companies. This example is meant to help you better understand the competitive product analysis. I have only compared the features of the products so that you can get started. 

Headphones

Let’s say Sony (a Fortune 500 company) wants to launch a wireless headphone. The first thing Sony will do is analyze its competitors’ products. In this example, let’s consider Sony examines “Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700”.

Using these insights, Sony can build a wireless headphone that offers much more battery time, doesn’t slip during workouts, has fast charging features, and is pocket-friendly. 

Coffee Making Category

Let’s say, Nespresso wants to manufacture a new coffee making machine. Nespresso would first want to know what other options are available to the customers. Let’s consider Nespresso analyzes “Keurig K-Elite Single Serve Coffee Maker.” 

After analyzing these insights, Nespresso would want to create a coffee machine that has all the features as in Keurig K-Elite Single Serve Coffee Maker plus froth milk feature and options to prepare lattes and cappuccinos. 

SkinCare

Let’s say, L’Oreal wants to manufacture a facemask. The first thing they will do is analyze the existing products to ensure they make a better facemask than what’s already present in the market. In this example, let’s consider L’Oreal examines “Estee Lauder NightWear Plus.” 

With these insights in hand, L’Oreal would want to prepare a facemask that refreshes dull and tired-looking skin within three minutes, offers long-lasting effects (of at least a week), and doesn’t have any side effects on sensitive skin. 

Conclusion

Competitive product analysis can help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You can then use the information to make your products better and increase your chances of dominating the market. 
Make sure to gather the right insights and capitalize on the opportunities that your competitors have ignored. Use our competitive product analysis template to collect all the data in one place.

Why Is Brand Innovation Strategy Important?

According to Forbes, brands need to constantly innovate and evolve in order to survive in an ever-changing market. A major way to stay ahead of the game is Brand Innovation. Products and services are constantly adapted to suit customer requirements and maintain relevance. But, how can you make sure the changes you make will improve sales and earnings? And what about marketing strategies?

In this article we’ll look at Customer Centric Brand Innovation. We will cover what is Brand Innovation, discuss its importance and explore innovative marketing solutions.

What is Brand innovation?

Brand Innovation is usually defined as anything new a brand does – like launching a new product or making changes to an existing one. Think about Apple launching its first Iphone or Disney adding computer animation to its repertoire. Of course, all brand innovation is accompanied by extensive marketing strategy planning.

Brand Innovation relies on several components:

• Intention – Identify brand’s intent. Long-term marketing strategy design depends on setting clear goals and Marketing opportunities analysis.
• Information – Understand brand’s market. Customer experience (CX) analysis can give valuable data for understanding targeted customer groups.
• Articulation – Explain and express brand’s innovation concept. Connections need to be established between existing products and services to new ones.

Successful Brand innovation is achieved by embracing new ideas and encouraging creativity whilst corporating them in an organized data driven decision making.

Why is product innovation important?

Brand innovation is the driving force behind brands that have been running for decades and is an imperative aspect of brand marketing. 

Brands need to demonstrate innovation to keep customers interested and engaged. By launching new products or services, businesses feed into the infamous “FOMO” (Fear Of Missing Out) that has become a major driving force in today’s market. Customers will make repeat purchases and form a loyalty to a brand that provides them a feeling of novelty and product evolution.

Additionally, innovative brands are perceived as having groundbreaking products. If a brand differentiates itself by constantly innovating it can establish a sense of uniqueness, even if their product or service are similar to the competition’s. This creates an image of expertise that attracts customers to a brand. Buying “the best” or the most “professional” product builds trust and confidence with customers that often increases sales.

How to find innovative ideas for branding?

Well, maybe the obvious answer is to use your head. Brainstorm ideas with others. Marketing teams are there for a reason. But basing your marketing strategies on bright ideas alone won’t provide you with customer centric branding ideas. You risk missing customer groups and hurt sales and earnings. 

Customers will often let you know what they like to see improve in a product or service. Online reviews and social media posts are a gold mine of brand innovation ideas. Moreover, customers will appreciate brands that notice and pay attention to customer’s suggestions and desires. 

Combining CX analysis with creative ideas helps develop an intelligent marketing strategy. Customer feedback analysis can provide you with a better understanding of customer sentiment and improve brand innovation. Data driven brand innovation and marketing will allow you to tailor your new product or service to customer needs.

How do companies use social media for innovation?

Social media is an essential tool for Brand Innovation. Social media posts provide a glimpse into customer attitude towards a brand, also called Social Sentiment. Posts can contain valuable insights on customer satisfaction or critique of a product or service. The information also contains clues into what customers are missing in the current market, like certain products and new features customers would like to see in an existing one.

Social Media Monitoring allows you to gather Social Sentiment. Businesses use specialized software to monitor social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) activity and automatically detect all comments, posts and tweets mentioning their brand. The data is analyzed and classified as “positive,” “neutral,” or “negative.” 

This information helps track customer feedback and used to design brand innovation strategies.

Relying on social sentiment analysis helps brands to make an informed decision as to how and when to launch a new product. The analyzed data can also identify competing brands and market vacuums that can be filled with innovative products.

How to combine product innovation with brand identity?

Brand identity is the brand’s visual representation – color, design, and logo. For brand innovation to be successful it has to match this visual identity. A brand has to be consistent in visuals and concept, or it might confuse and alienate customers. 

Consistency in packaging, labeling, advertising, etc. is crucial, especially when adding new products. Customers need to identify a product with an established brand. If customers cannot identify the brand they won’t be able to build a sentiment to it. 

Granular customer sentiment analysis aids in keeping brand innovation consistent with the brand’s identity. Innovative marketing strategies benefit form CX analysis that explains customer perception of a brand. A clear picture of customer sentiment informs data driven marketing, improving brand innovation success rates.

How can Revuze help with Brand Innovation?

Highly granular Customer Sentiment analysis is at the base of successful Brand Innovation.  Human driven CX analysis technology often takes a lot of time and resources. So, businesses often rely on a single feedback sources and use a singly analysis tool. This provides a restricted view of customer sentiment that can hinder brand innovation.

Revuze developed the first self-training, low touch AI technology that collects and analyzes customer feedback automatically and serve back valuable consumer insights. 

This innovative AI technology collects data from a variety of sources simultaneously, like online reviews, social media monitoring, emails, surveys, call center data, and more. The data is scanned and analyzed automatically by self learning algorithms. 

The end result is highly granular CX analysis that informs Customer Centric Brand Innovation and marketing strategy design.

CX Salaries: How Much Does Working in Customer Experience Pay?

Customer experience (CX) is a rising field, as it has been exploding over the past few years. With that in mind, you might be wondering about CX salaries. How much does a research analyst make? What would the Head of CX’s salary be? It’s important to know your worth and get the salary you deserve, whether you’re an entry-level market researcher or a senior research analyst. Anyone in a CX position is very valuable thanks to the skills and insights they can provide, and around the globe there’s a trend of rising salaries and benefits that might peak your interest.

Additionally, given the ongoing “Great Resignation,” it’s important to remember that droves of employees have been leaving their jobs, and oftentimes pay is not the main reason for such a drastic decision. Company culture, growth opportunities, and the popular need for more flexibility are also important factors to keep in mind when joining a new company. 

What Are the Most Common CX Positions?

CX isn’t a linear field, there are many side branches with specializations from digital methods to front-facing CX needs. Each is necessary if you want to get a well-rounded CX team, however each business will have different needs and therefore different skill sets across teams. Overall, these are some of the most common CX-specific positions:

• CX Digital Specialist
• CX Analyst
• CX Associate
• Head of CX
• Director of Customer Experience

The Digital Specialist deals with the digital side of things, emails, apps, websites etc. They’re more at home with computers than customers. Consumer Analysts work with data and analytics, keeping things flowing in the background. The CX Associate, the entry level position and jack of all trades types, have more direct contact with customers than the other two. In general, the two specialized groups will make more than the associate would, owing to the needed skill set and often more experience as a result. These positions can be at varying levels of seniority, all the way from entry level to upper management.

Oftentimes, senior-level customer experience positions are paired with roles related to digital transformation.

What The Data on CX Salaries Shows

While the specializations mentioned above can have an impact on your salary, seniority and experience is the key. Senior CX positions offer far more than junior ones, owing to the insights gained while working in the field. CX isn’t something that you can learn from a textbook, as it’s dynamic and therefore constantly evolving. With that in mind, let’s dive into the data.

CX Associate Salary

A CX Associate, the entry level position, can expect to earn around USD $39K a year in North America. This is the average of course, with what you get being dependent on experience. A rough estimate for starting salaries is around USD $18k, some earning as high as USD $50K.

The rest of the world is slightly more generous, with the UK offering an average of almost £20K a year. 

Bear in mind however, that these numbers are not adjusted for power of purchase or cost of living, and as such cannot be taken at purely face value.

CX Analyst Salary

The CX analyst, data focused and far more number-crunching than the associate, can expect to earn an average of USD $70K a year for full-time work in North America. Owing to the specialized nature of their job they can often be found in higher positions up the career ladder, and as such would require much more experience than an entry-level position. 

Elsewhere in the world, the UK offers £35k on average, interestingly lower than their NA counterpart. This data is an average of course, and is likely skewed by the high number of mega-rich organizations with the pockets to hire the best from all over the world.

CX Manager Salary

A CX manager, the person in charge of a CX team (or in the case of smaller organizations, the entire department), using resources available to them to direct CX efforts. They naturally have a higher salary on average than the associates below them. North America offers an average of USD $73k a year, which is actually lower than that of a specialized consumer analyst. 

The UK offers £37k, however this figure likely represents the smaller scale of many businesses in the UK compared to North America, and therefore comes with less responsibilities.

In short, if you want to make the big bucks, head to the two CX hubs of the USA, California and New York.

Digital CX Manager Salary

A digital CX manager is exactly what it says on the tin, a CX manager with a digital flair. This type of work is often more intensive and more demanding than customer-facing CX, owing to the use of data and analytics in order to make decisions. Digital managers can be in charge of entire departments or merely teams within them.

In North America, an average salary of USD $110k per year is found, again showing the higher skill requirements for the position. 

In the UK, a salary of around USD $63k equivalent can be found. Once again this is likely due to the relative size of the organizations, with managers in NA earning more simply because their teams or departments are larger.

CX Director Salary

A CX director is one of the most senior positions on this list, with a higher salary on average. North America offers USD $103k and the UK £101k, representative of the position being above that of managerial level. Owing to the nature of the position requiring a large department with many teams the data from the UK is small compared to that of North America, which likely accounts for the sudden decrease in gap between the two. 

In short, only the big corporations with large CX departments will have this position, leading to salaries naturally being skewed towards the higher end of the scale. 

Head of Customer Experience Salary

In the US, this position can expect to earn a base salary of USD $130k a year, with the UK coming behind at £71k. This is a very senior role indeed, one in which you’ll be expected to set the direction of CX for your entire organization and understand deeply what it is you’re trying to achieve.

Chief Customer Officer Salary

While not strictly entirely CX based, a CCO will have heavy involvement with the CX department and their techniques. The US offers an average of over USD $200k, with the UK offering £107k, a similar amount to their CX directors. This can once again be mostly attributed to the differing sizes of organizations within Europe/North America, as well as a smaller sample size for the UK owing to there being fewer corporations based there.

Conclusion

To summarize, while higher positions do grant higher salaries, it’s specializations and being able to use the necessary CX tools that will really get you the leg up. There aren’t many managerial positions available compared to associate or analyst ones, but specializing and knowing how to use the data that’s pulled from your interactions with customers will make you far more valuable without waiting for a promotion to become available.

Understanding your clients and their sentiment is the key towards Customer Value Optimization. In this article we will understand a few basics such as – what is customer value, why it is important, and the steps you should take after reading this blog to start optimizing your customer value.

What is Customer Value?

A click, a purchase, a review, a subscriber – it’s what it’s all about – the customer. That’s who you cater to with your products and tailor your strategies to. However, not all customers are created equal in terms of customer value.

Customer Value: the cost investment into attracting/retaining a customer vs. the revenue return of their loyalty.

Customer Value is usually grouped into 3 categories, but can be adjusted to fit your company’s goals:

•  Low Value: the customers that bring in minimal profit – don’t buy very often, and only buy low-margin products, return products, etc.
•  Mid Value: the general majority – one-off or occasional customers, with an average spending and return rate.
•  High Value: the ideal customer profile – repeat buyers or high-margin spenders, satisfied and loyal.

The goal is to turn as many low- and mid-value customers as possible into high-value ones. Read on to find out how.

Why is Value Optimization Important?

Customers aren’t created equal, but they are all equally important to consider. By employing strategies that optimize (and maximize!) customer value, the business model becomes more efficient cost-wise, channeling spending into approaches that create the most useful outcomes while bringing in a profit that you can re-invest. For this to be successful you need to accurately determine the value of each customer and provide the appropriate response for each.

RFM

The first point of action is to analyze customers according to the Recency – Frequency – Monetary Value (RFM) Model.

• Recency: How long has it been since a customer’s last activity? (i.e., purchase, interaction)
• Frequency: How often does a customer engage with the company? (i.e., number of transactions, loyalty)
• Monetary Value: What is the average spending commitment of a customer? (i.e., Average Order Value (AOV), transactions value)

Keeping in mind the specifications of your business, you may have to adjust the way you measure, allowing for average or desired customer lifecycle, frequency, and product value margins in your industry.

The next step is to apply these measurements to your advantage.

Optimizing Your Customer Value

The strategy of extracting the maximum value from your existing customers by transforming them into a growing base of high-value customers is called Customer Value Optimization (CVO).

CVO & Jay Abraham

When talking about CVO, you’ll often hear references to marketer Jay Abraham and his theory that a business can only be grown in three ways:

By increasing:

1. The number of customers
2. The average transaction value per customer (Monetary Value & AOV)
3. The number of transactions per customer (Frequency)

This model also effectively connects with the components of a high-value customer base – many customers who buy a lot and return often.

So where do you start with building a Customer Value Optimization system? There are several clear steps to take, making sure to delight customers at every checkpoint of this well-known and well-used funnel.

The 7 Steps

1.  Find the Fit

The first step is to align the Product/Market fit.

Figure out what your market is and where your product fits in – what is the problem that your customers have and how is your product a solution?

Define in detail both your target market and product relevance, and from there work through understanding what your customers want at each value level. In this way, you can optimize your marketing to address their needs better, focusing especially on the mid- and high-value level customers.

If you want to go further, determine how your product is the best solution out of all the competitors. The wider the gap between your target customers’ concern and the state of satisfaction when it is solved by your product, the more value your product holds for them – which can be reflected in the pricing.

2.  Target Traffic

The second step is to narrow down your most effective traffic sources.

There are many traffic sources and platforms available, both paid and unpaid. Spreading efforts across many inefficient sources can be hard to manage and measure, which becomes a waste of time and resources.

Focus on the traffic sources that bring the most value. Your aim is to filter and attract the prospective and most engaged customers and drive them to the rest of the CVO funnel; have the correct tools and metrics in place to measure the value of the traffic.

Measuring the value is incredibly important, as your aim is to track engagement and relevant data of the traffic to understand what is working and what isn’t. With the proper targeting, the resources you invest into the traffic source (and each visitor or click) should be eventually providing a reliable return on investment in the form of a high rate of attracted visitors turning into engaged customers.

When you get to a point of stable growth from your traffic source, you might find that you may well be able to afford investing even more than the face value of the traffic, because you have established a stream of proven conversion down the line.

3. Lure in with Lead Magnets

You can look at Lead Magnets as the customer hook, where you offer useful products for free in exchange for contact info.

Lead magnets are usually placed on landing pages or squeeze pages to attract attention and ask for names and emails in return. By receiving the customer’s info, you are officially opening up an avenue of direct marketing, where you can follow up and further engage.

Lead magnets should be valuable to the customer and free of charge. If they are useless, vague, or misleading, they will be ineffective at convincing customers to volunteer their info and open up mutually beneficial communication.

Ebooks, courses, guides, templates, discounts are all lead magnets. Offer various lead magnets of interest to your target market, segmenting them by topic or type. Specificity in Lead Magnets helps encourage a high conversion rate as their appeal is in being highly tailored to your target audience’s needs.

4. Tease with a Tripwire

A Tripwire is a low fee product offer with the aim of converting leads to paying customers.

This is the first financial transaction in the funnel, where your audience is presented with a valuable offer at an irresistible price, encouraging them to make the transition to buyers, and drawing them in to higher priced products.

The Tripwire must be and a proper taste of your product or services on a low-cost or discounted scale – depending to the industry you’re in, this could be products, books, special introductory prices, free trial access. The aim of this transaction isn’t to generate profit, it is a way to get customers over the hurdle of hesitance.

You can publicize your Tripwires on your website, but they are most often used in the direct marketing stage with the contact info obtained earlier, when your Lead Magnet has made a positive impact. This is also where your Customer Service and Experience should start shining through, making communication a delight for the customers.

5. Prepare the Core Offer

This is the main event, where the Core Product comes in: the flagship products or services of your business.

Hooked and reeled by the Lead Magnet, and over the hurdle and happy with the Tripwire, your customer has been primed for continuing the relationship with the brand. If they have been satisfied with the service, quality, and value so far, customers will be more interested and inclined to buy into your higher-value core items.

You offer them your core product – clearly advertised and thoroughly marketed – your specialization in what is most valuable for your customers, the features they should invest in and keep coming back for. Customers are much more likely to buy at this point after having had several different positive transactions and experiences with the business than if the Core Product was marketed via cold campaigns.

And although this part can be profitable, usually the main money usually comes in the next step…

6. Provide a Profit Maximizer

Profit Maximizers are extra products that complement and enhance your core offer.

Would you like fries with that? Every purchase is a customer experience with a product and items or services that enhance that experience are usually where most businesses make their profit. These products are usually offered during or after the sale of the Core Product. By working enticing Profit Maximizers that are useful to the customer into your plan, you can create a rich brand ecosystem.

Upsells, cross-sells, recommendations, accessories, bundles, subscriptions, premium tiers, memberships are all examples of profit maximizers… Think of the adage whereby cinemas make most of their profits on selling popcorn rather than the movie tickets.

7. Retain with a Return Path

As a customer goes through this Customer Value Optimization system, their value increases. Step-by-step they are turned into high-value customers, buying at high margins and returning often. Maintaining an ongoing relationship with your customers is crucial to keeping them high-value.

Use a Return Path to gently direct existing customers to the start of your CVO funnel.

Incentivizing customers to return is key to continuing the cycle of providing value and receiving profit. A Return Path restarts the process of overcoming hesitation and easing them into their next purchase. This reinforces you work through the steps of the RFM model – increasing the frequency and monetary value of interactions with your customer base.

Loyalty programs, discounts, exit offers, personalized email marketing, ad retargeting, social media, and other incentives are all ways of maintaining contact and reengaging.

Recap and Conclusion

By understanding how your customer base works and measuring it with the correct metrics, you can use Customer Value Optimization to increase the potential of your customers.

By applying the Recency – Frequency – Monetary Value (RFM) model to your customer segments and following the 7 Steps of: Product/Market Fit, Lead Magnet, Tripwire, Core Offer, Profit Maximizer, and Return Path, you can streamline your inbound business model, making it cost-efficient and extracting the maximum value from each customer while providing top-quality service to meet their needs.

The marketing landscape has undergone tremendous changes, as now customers have several ways to express their feelings and pain points whenever they have a negative experience with a product or service. Online reviews are one of the most common ways for consumers to express their disappointment, and therefore it’s no surprise if you notice you’re getting negative reviews on your product.

Reviews typically come in the form of unstructured data and businesses need real-time sentiment analysis of these reviews to categorize them into positive, negative, and neutral to properly analyze them.

While businesses obviously strive to get positive reviews, there are good chances that customers may review a product negatively. Negative reviews can hurt or damage the reputation of a brand, but that does not mean that they will outrightly lead to the failure of the business!

Negative reviews, when handled properly, can be a useful insight for a business to improve its products or customer service and reposition itself in the global market. Negative reviews should kick-start businesses into improving their customer experience. They should serve as the indicator of understanding what the competition is doing better. Since customers can give a business negative reviews, it becomes imperative that you must know how to respond to negative reviews as well as how to also discover fake reviews to mitigate any damaging consequences on your organization. 

According to a survey of U.S. online customers, 92% of respondents said that negative reviews made them less likely to purchase products from a local business. Here are some examples of how to respond to negative reviews:

Real-time response

Customers want to be heard, and they want it to be done in real-time. Negative reviews will generally put you off, but that is not the way to go about it. Where you may need to cool off, time may be a very important factor in retaining or losing your customer.

Since the review is negative, you must be clear-headed in responding. Fortunately, you have the opportunity of accessing your customers’ data, so you can tailor your response accordingly. A template for responding can be:

Dear John, Mary, or Paul, we appreciate the time you took to share your experience with our product. We are sorry to hear that you had a poor experience, and we promise to do better in the future.

Please reach out to [CONTACT INFORMATION] if you would like to elaborate on your experience or share any suggestions on how we can do better. This will be a great opportunity to address your poor experience and make up for it!

While the above template may not be helpful every time, it will assuage the feelings of your customer that has had a bad experience with your product, however, it must be done in real-time to be effective. As a starting point, it can be very handy.

The voice of the customer (VoC)

Customers like to receive personalized messages; they want you to hear their pain points and want them to be addressed promptly. The generic, “Dear customer,” will not cut it. Address your customer by name.

That shows that you know your customers and care for each of them individually. VoC (Voice of the customer) includes their opinions, comments, expectations, sentiments, and reviews of your product or service.

It’s not enough to just listen to the voice of the customer, you must also know your customer. For instance, one customer may say, “I don’t like this product,” while another says, “I’m disgusted with this product,” these are negative reviews, but do you really understand the exact pain point each of the customers is experiencing with the reviews?

You have to get to them individually to understand their different pain points. An attempt to treat all your customers as one may backfire; you must personalize the messages you send across to your customers.

By listening to the voice of your customers, you are enabled to improve your products and your customer service. VoC is an opportunity to turn negative reviews into positive reviews, an effective way to retain customers, have them recommend your product through word of mouth, avoid churning, and ultimately build brand loyalty.

Applying a smart VoC solution means taking real-time action and responding to negative reviews.

Show appreciation and remorse

It may sound strange to thank somebody that has given your product a negative review, but this can be the magic wand. While you may find it difficult to say thank you, your customer will not expect such a polite gesture from you.

You should not only stop at appreciation, but you need to properly apologize to the customer. Customers want to know that you care for them and feel more comfortable with you when they realize that you are human enough to own up to your mistakes. 

The problem they encountered may not necessarily be your fault, but that is not what you go about arguing or making excuses for. When you apologize, rather than being weak, you are actually putting yourself in a position of strength and establishing a strong bond with your customer.

Try to keep whatever you say short and simple.

You can use the following templates:

“It’s unfortunate that our product didn’t meet your expectations. Please accept our sincere apologies.”

“We are so sorry for the poor experience you had with our product or service.”

“We pride ourselves on our excellence, unfortunately, we’ve erred this time around and sincerely apologize for your poor experience with our product.”

Take the conversation to a private place

The Internet has made it possible for everybody to access information online, and that obviously includes negative product reviews. Your best option is to take the problem to a private place such as email or phone. This allows you to treat the issue directly with the particular customer without others contributing. You can enhance this by providing direct contact information for customers in your review response.

This is a template you can use:

“We appreciate your feedback about our services and would like to promptly resolve the issues you have raised. Kindly reach us as soon as it’s convenient for you at [Email Address] or call our team at [Phone Number].

Responding to Google reviews

Customers’ reviews on Google usually appear in two places: Google Search and Google Maps.

Before you can respond to Google reviews, you need to be logged in to your Google My Business (GMB) account. Click on the Reviews tab from your GMB account.

To come up with a response for any review, you click on the “Reply” button below it. The current Google review policy allows you to edit your response when you have made a typographical error or given any inaccurate information, however, you must endeavor to minimize such mistakes.

Google gives notifications to customers via email whenever you respond to their online reviews. While Google publishes your response immediately, the customer will be notified after five minutes; the difference in the time of publication and notification enables you to edit your response if that is necessary.

You will be notified of new reviews through your GMB notifications if you don’t operate in more than 100 locations.

Conclusion

Negative reviews may hurt your feelings, but if they are not fake reviews, they give you the opportunity to understand your customers’ pain points and ultimately reposition your business in the global market; knowing how to handle and address negative reviews is a big plus to any brand.