Your Guide on How to Create a Better CPG Experience

In the fast-moving consumer goods sector, you need to do something that sets you apart from other brands. Otherwise, you’ll find goods and products lingering longer than they should on store shelves.

So how do you build buzz and create consumer demand for the consumer packaged goods (CPGs) that you’re offering? Here’s a secret that not everyone in the CPG industry has figured out yet: You need to improve your overall CPG experience.

We’re here to help you get started. Keep reading to learn why a great CPG experience is crucial for durable goods companies and to learn about some strategies you can deploy to provide better online and in-store experiences for your customers.

What Is the CPG Experience?

The CPG experience is everything — and by everything, we mean that it encompasses every touchpoint the consumer encounters in their journey with your brand, from start to finish. If you’re mapping out the customer journey, it typically starts with the awareness phase of the journey, which is when customers first discover your brand and its products. 

From there, the CPG experience transitions into other phases of the customer journey, like the consideration phase when customers realize their need and begin researching products — including yours — to fulfill that need. 

The CPG experience goes on all the way through the remaining stages to the final one, which is the loyalty stage. By now, customers have purchased and used your product — and they’ve perhaps even had interactions with your customer service representatives or directly with your brand on social media. At this stage, the goal is to have provided such a great CPG experience that customers are willing to sing your praises to their friends, family, and colleagues.

How to Improve the CPG Experience: 4 Strategies

Improving the CPG experience is all about improving the customer journey — online, in-store, and with your packaging and products.

And these days, making those improvements often means adopting new technology that can help you collect and analyze data so that you can make refinements. Below, we’ll highlight some strategies and tools that can help.

1. Take a Holistic Approach to the CPG Experience

When improving the CPG experience, brands often make one of a couple of critical mistakes. They keep the focus of their improvements too narrow, or they take a one-size-fits-all approach to the consumer experience. Instead, they should be taking a holistic approach to improving the entire customer journey.

Consider the customer journey as a whole. What can you be doing to improve things for your customers at each phase?

• Awareness: During the awareness stage, look for ways to capture immediate attention via advertisements or social media posts. Lean on humor or create an inspiring message to not only help customers discover you but also create a lasting impression right from the start.
• Consideration: In the consideration phase, provide as much helpful — and engaging—information as possible. Help customers along with quizzes, guides, and other materials that show them how your products meet their needs or address their pain points.
• Decision-making: The decision-making phase is when customers make a purchase — and the idea here is to make the purchase process as easy as possible. For e-commerce, leverage automation in the form of chatbots or other user-friendly tools to quickly and easily answer basic customer questions, create a user-friendly checkout process, and make sales reps readily available to handle more complex customer needs. In brick-and-mortar stores, pay careful attention to the way you arrange shelf space, how well in-person customer service performs, and how you handle services like curbside pickup.
• Retention: The retention phase is all about encouraging customers to come back for additional purchases. This means not only impressing them with the quality of your products, which they’re now using, but also paying attention to other details like packaging, customer service, and customer feedback.
• Loyalty: And last comes the loyalty stage. Here, you want your customers to be happy enough that they come back for more—and you want them to tell everyone in their circle about you. You can help customers along with loyalty programs that allow them to earn rewards or even referral programs that encourage them to share your brand with others in exchange for an incentive.

As you can see, instead of just focusing on one aspect of your CPG experience—like improving your social media marketing campaigns—a holistic approach takes a top-down look at every touchpoint the customer will encounter. Always be on the lookout for ways to make improvements, even if those improvements are subtle. 

For example, even something simple like making a switch to environmentally friendly packaging can improve the experience for eco-minded customers. According to recent research, 78% of consumers say that sustainability is important to them — and many are willing to pay a little more for products and packaging that are better for the environment.

2. Dive Into Customer Experience (CX) Data

With the right CX metrics, you can learn a lot about the CPG experience — and how to improve it. Here are a few basic CX metrics that you should be tracking:

• Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT): Use customer satisfaction surveys with a numeric scale to create this score. Lower numbers indicate a need to make improvements, which means you should next look at feedback to determine which improvements may be most important.
• Net promoter score (NPS): In customer satisfaction surveys, this score comes from the “How likely are you to recommend us?” question. The goal is to improve this score so that you’re maximizing the number of people who rate you a 9 or 10, as these are the people most likely to promote your brand to others.
• Customer effort score (CES): Create surveys with a question along the lines of “This item (or brand or customer service team — whatever you are measuring) made it easy for me to resolve my issue.” Higher scores indicate customers are putting forth less effort, which makes for happier, more loyal customers.

There are many more CX metrics you can analyze to learn more about the CPG experience (and improve your customer experience ROI), but start with these to get a good indication of overall satisfaction with the experience you’re offering. Depending on your business model, you may want to also track churn, customer retention rates, customer loyalty program usage, or other key statistics that will give you insights into consumer behavior specific to your brand and the types of CPG products you sell.

3. Listen to Your Customers

Customer data is important — but don’t rely so hard on data that you overlook customer feedback, which is just as important. In fact, customer feedback will often give you insights into things that data won’t reveal. To get feedback, try the following:

• Keep an eye on what people are saying about your brand and products on social media.
• Stay up to date on customer reviews for your products, your online stores, and for each of your brick-and-mortar stores.
• Reach out and collect customer feedback with simple customer satisfaction surveys they can complete after making a purchase — and offer an incentive to encourage customers to provide feedback.

Through these channels, you can often discover fantastic insights that help you to create an overall better customer experience. 

For example, let’s say that your brand specializes in selling direct-to-consumer household products like cleaning supplies. When you dive into reviews and customer surveys, you find that a few people wish that they could purchase not only window cleaner from you but dish soap, too. That feedback lets you know exactly how you can improve the customer experience: In this case, by offering complementary products so that customers can consolidate their household cleaning supply purchases with your brand.

4. Build Brand Engagement With Personalized Experiences

A big part of building a better CPG experience is showing that you understand and care about your customers. Personalized experiences not only help you demonstrate this kind of understanding but also offer you even greater understanding in the form of zero- and first-party data.

Here are a few of the types of personalized experiences you can create:

• Real-time online product recommendations based on the customer’s browsing or purchase history with your brand
• Style match or product match quizzes designed to help customers choose the perfect product
• Targeted emails created to deliver personalized content to individual shoppers or audience segments
• Location-based marketing messages featuring customized messaging relevant to a particular store or region

With any of these methods, you can create a message that shows that you understand and value customer needs — and you can do it while collecting data as customers interact with the personalized messaging you’ve placed before them. 

For example, product match quizzes give customers a chance to familiarize themselves with your products and choose those that best fit their needs based on a series of questions you’ve developed. As they’re answering those questions, you can learn a lot about consumer behavior and preferences. 

Let’s say a skincare brand creates a skin type quiz. From the responses, they can learn which audience segments are most likely to have particular concerns like dry or oily skin — and thus, which types of products those segments are most likely to purchase.

Real-World Example: Creating a Better CPG Experience for Snacks.com

Here’s a real-world example of how personalized experiences can help you collect zero- and first-party data while creating a better CPG experience. Pepsi’s snacks.com companion widget is a CPG brand experience created in partnership with Jebbit. 

The widget’s Snack Finder Quiz builds immediate engagement through a series of fun questions that poll customers on their snacking preferences. Through it, customers learn more about themselves, their favorite snacks, and their favorite times to enjoy them. 

At the end, participants get their personalized snack recommendations — and Pepsi gets deep insights into customer behavior based on the answers provided that they can use to optimize future marketing efforts.

The results? This experience had a big impact:

• It doubled the conversion rate for snacks.com.
• There was an 85% average response rate across screens.
• Most website visitors (77%) engaged with the quiz.
• After participating in the quiz, 36% of the respondents visited the webpage for their recommended product.

Gather Zero- and First-Party Data With Custom Jebbit Experiences

Creating a better CPG experience requires smart strategies. Take a holistic approach that encompasses the entire experience rather than just one element — and be sure to pay attention to what customers are saying, too. Use a blend of customer feedback plus zero- and first-party data collected from personalized experiences to really zoom in on what your customers are craving.

Jebbit experiences make it easy to connect with customers, learn more about them, and give them what they want. Even better, Jebbit helps you deliver customized interactive content across channels, including on your website, on social media, via SMS, via email, in app, or even in store.

Ready to learn how Jebbit can help you create a better CPG experience? Schedule a strategy call today.