Talk to most marketers and they’ll tell you that creating a winning customer experience is good for a brand’s bottom line.

It might surprise you, then, that less than 5% of marketers think they’re delivering on that goal.

So, why the gap?

We recently hosted a webinar with Adam Figueira, Product Marketing Director at Monetate, and Bill Aicher, Chief Growth Officer at Musicnotes, to explore that gap and to offer a four-pronged approach to bridging it.

The gap, said Figueira, lies in the fact that marketers are struggling to understand their goals, and are equally unsure of how to reach them.

To help them calibrate those goals, Figueira presented the Customer Experience Pyramid, a four-pronged approach to delivering customers experiences that are relevant, valuable, authentic, and timely:

• Structure. Before you can deliver to someone a useful experience, you need to make sure your experience is useable. And that means ensuring structural integrity across devices. Think responsive design; it’s your ticket to entry.
• Product. Once you’ve created a more useable experience, you can begin taking actionable steps toward creating better site experiences. This can be done in a number of ways, including testing improvements around site functionality, navigation, site search and recommendations.
• Priority. The problem with action, though, can be that you don’t know where to start. Prioritize your ideas based on impact—not all opportunities are created equal. Don’t necessarily focus on what is easy; focus on those ideas that can deliver the biggest bang for your buck.
• Audience. Once here, you can begin segmenting your visitors based on a breadth of data points. But to create the most contextual, relevant experiences, you need to draw on data that’s both in-the-moment and historical. This will help you deliver the right experiences to the right customer at the right time.

To illustrate the Customer Experience Pyramid in action, Aicher presented two case studies: one on how Musicnotes increased its conversion rate with new customers originating from Google search, and one on how Musicnotes increase its conversion rate with customers on mobile devices.

In each, Aicher said, Musicnotes was able to listen to its customers, find the “noise” in their experience and eliminate it. Now, Musicnotes is focused on fine-tuning the overall user experience for its visitors using the same principles.

“A lot of organizations include user experience testing as part of their web teams, and as part of their efforts to have responsive design. But there are fewer organizations that are ultimately doing relevancy testing,” Figueira added. “We’re stronger at the bottom of the pyramid with that user experience testing than we are at the top with the relevance testing. And I think that gives us something as marketers to aspire to.”