Wondering how to create a consistent brand experience to make a lasting impression of familiarity and trust?

In a saturated SaaS world with tons of alternatives, a consistent brand experience can make you a recognizable brand. It creates a sense of reliability among the customers, fosters trust, and encourages product adoption and loyalty.

In this article, we’ll see what it takes to build a consistent practice and some best practices you can adopt.

What is a brand experience?

A brand experience encompasses every interaction and perception customers develop and carry with a brand throughout their journeys. This comprehensive concept covers the emotional and psychological connections customers form with a brand.

Brand experience vs customer experience

There are distinct differences between brand experience and customer experience.

Brand experience is a broader concept that involves creating and maintaining emotional connections and shaping brand perception. This perception includes the visual identity and how customers perceive the brand itself. It is about how customers think the brand’s product or service better matches them than that of competitors.

On the other hand, customer experience deals with a comparatively narrower concept. Customer experience focuses on each interaction a customer has along their journey. For example, how the customers feel about the customer service interactions or the onboarding process.

Why maintaining brand consistency is important?

Keeping a consistent brand experience is a smart strategy that can make a real difference and go beyond just looking good or communicating the brand promise. Brand consistency is about building trust, recognition, and a loyal customer base.

By maintaining brand consistency, you’ll be able to:

• Help customers easily recognize and remember your brand amidst a sea of options. Research shows that 62% of people now expect brands to provide a consistent experience. So, consistency across different platforms and interactions lets you fulfill customer expectations and be their choice.
• Reinforce brand values by being consistent in messaging and every action you take. However, 42% of customers believe that brands deliver a consistent experience. By keeping a consistent brand experience and aligning it with your actions, you can build trust among these customers.
• Build customer trust and loyalty by showing your brand is reliable, as it’s determined to serve the customers. Research shows around 20% of customers feel that brands aren’t meeting their expectations when it comes to a consistent brand experience. You should work to lessen this gap to create solid customer loyalty.

How to deliver a consistent brand experience?

Let’s see how you can deliver a consistent brand experience to your customers.

Develop your brand identity

Developing your brand’s identity is the first step to delivering a consistent brand experience. This process involves creating a comprehensive brand representation that aligns with your target audience.

You should also define your brand message and values to uphold your brand identity and make a brand reputation. It should have the words you use, the emotions you’ll channel, and the value you’ll offer the customers. You need to align your messaging and offered customer experience with your brand’s core values.

For example, Userpilot is for product growth, and its features include in-app engagement, product analytics, and user feedback. So, Userpilot’s brand identity revolves around these core offerings.

Establish brand guidelines for your business

Establishing brand guidelines is the next step in delivering a consistent brand experience. Brand guidelines are clear and detailed instructions that outline how your team will present the brand to the customers.

The brand guidelines are how you represent your brand to the customers with brand assets, like logos, colors, palettes, fonts, imagery, etc.

It should have guidelines about:

• How to use logos on different backgrounds
• How brand colors should go with other complimentary colors
• What size or resolution for font and logo
• What image size for different platforms or post type

For example, let’s look at an example of Userpilot. Userpilot’s main brand colors are purple and pink, so it has a set of complementary colors for word patterns on different backgrounds.

Create a cohesive brand experience across platforms

A cohesive brand experience means consistency in elements, tone, interactions, etc., with various touchpoints across multiple channels. You must maintain the core brand elements in the customer interactions across your app, website, or social media posts to give customers a familiar face.

For example, you can provide consistent customer support across numerous sales channels by offering them timely responses, knowledgeable assistance, and personalized experiences.

Ensure in-app brand messaging consistency

In-app messaging is a critical aspect of branding since it’s within your application that your users engage a lot with. You should leverage in-app messages to give your customers a contextual and consistent brand experience.

You can ensure consistent messaging for your brand via content, tone, voice, brand colors, font, etc. For example, you can build tooltips while keeping your brand consistency in mind by integrating the brand’s colors and tone into them.

Seek feedback to understand customer expectations

In-app surveys help you understand customers’ expectations, desires, and pain points. You should trigger in-app surveys throughout the customer journey to collect customer experience feedback. For example, there may be feedback surveys after specific interactions, like onboarding, or a period, like monthly or annually.

After gathering the feedback, you can use a tool, like Userpilot, to analyze customer feedback from the surveys and identify common issues for actionable insights. These insights will help you understand your customer’s expectations on a detailed level.

Then, you need to take action to close the customer feedback loop. You can proactively reach out to customers or trigger follow-up messages.

Measure customer satisfaction to identify improvement opportunities

You should measure customer satisfaction to see where to improve to build a consistent brand experience. You can use in-app Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to assess how well your brand delivers a consistent experience.

Analyzing the NPS survey responses enables you to identify the passives and detractors. You can do this by tagging NPS responses with specific labels such as “detractor,” “passive,” or “promoter,” based on their scoring.

The insights about the passives and detractors’ dissatisfaction show you where your brand experience may fall short. Their feedback guides you toward specific touchpoints that need refinement. Then, you can focus on those areas to enhance customer satisfaction with the brand experience.

Practical tips for creating positive brand experience

We’ll now go through some practical tips to help you create a positive brand experience.

Offer personalized onboarding experience

The onboarding process is your brand’s first interaction with users – a moment that sets the tone for their entire journey. So, offering a personalized onboarding experience helps you create a positive brand experience from the get-go.

In the SaaS industry, it is common to use welcome surveys to gather important data about your new users. The data may include their work roles, company size, jobs to be done (JBTDs), etc. Then, you may trigger onboarding flows for each use case by aligning them with your brand experience.

However, you should be careful about avoiding bombarding customers with many features. Instead of overwhelming users, you should focus on what meets their immediate goals and offer those by aligning with your brand experience.

Use customer journey analytics to find and remove friction

Utilizing customer journey analytics helps you create a seamless journey, which is at the core of a remarkable brand experience. To begin, you need to map brand touchpoints during customer journeys. It lets you observe and understand how your users progress and move through your offerings.

As you have a broad view of customer interaction and progression, you’re better equipped to identify any possible frictions. After identifying the friction points with customer journey analytics, you should proactively eliminate them.

Implement a self-service center to enhance customer experience

Empowering users with the resources to find answers independently contributes significantly to a positive and consistent brand experience. You should make the self-service center in-app, as it offers contextual help for users to troubleshoot and solve issues without leaving your product.

The self-service center should include multiple help formats to acknowledge the different learning preferences of different users. You may help your customers with content in text, video tutorials, articles, and other formats.

Conclusion

As every click, tap, and scroll competes for attention, building a consistent brand experience has become necessary. You should focus on building a brand experience that’s more than good-looking and actually builds trust and recognition among users.

Want to get started with building a consistent brand experience? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can use the brand experience to enhance your business’ performance.