How UX and marketing drive better customer experiences

Summary

Insights Unlocked Podcast Summary
Episode: How UX and Marketing Drive Better Customer Experiences
Release Date: March 17, 2025
Host: UserTesting

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Introduction

In the March 17, 2025 episode of Insights Unlocked, UserTesting curates a compelling compilation of insights from three influential leaders: Emily Carrion, CMO at Entrepreneurs Organization; Katie Carr, Senior User Experience Designer at Workiva; and Christy Morrison, Director of Digital Marketing at F5. This episode delves into the synergistic relationship between marketing and user experience (UX) in crafting exceptional customer experiences. By exploring diverse perspectives, the episode provides actionable strategies for breaking through digital noise, optimizing customer interactions, and leveraging user testing for continuous improvement.

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Understanding Customer-Centric Marketing

Speaker: Emily Carrion, CMO at Entrepreneurs Organization
Timestamp: [01:01]

Emily Carrion emphasizes the timeless essence of marketing: deeply understanding customers. She states, “Always and forever it'll be our job to deeply understand our customer. Like, what do they care about? What makes their life easier? What pain or challenge can we solve?” (01:01). Emily highlights that the core mission is connecting customer needs to how a product can benefit not just the individual but the broader community, especially within mission-driven companies.

A significant challenge Emily addresses is the "explosion of channels and they're getting noisier and noisier" (01:01). To combat this, she advocates for authentic, intimate knowledge of the customer, enabling marketers to create resonant content that stands out amidst the clutter. By aligning incredible content with a deep understanding of customer preferences, marketers can effectively bridge the gap between product offerings and customer needs.

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The Role of UX in Marketing

Speaker: Katie Carr, Senior User Experience Designer at Workiva
Timestamp: [02:24]

Katie Carr shifts the narrative by positioning UX not just as a product-centric role but as a critical function within marketing. She asserts, “It really doesn't matter how great the product offering is if we're not communicating the right message up front to get users to see the value” (02:24). Katie underscores the importance of integrating UX principles in marketing strategies to ensure that messaging effectively conveys the product’s value to potential users.

Citing recent studies, Katie notes that “around 80% [of SaaS buyers] do their research upfront before they even talk to sales” (02:24). This statistic highlights the necessity of representing the voice of the customer early in the buyer’s journey. By embedding research foundations and UX insights into marketing efforts, teams can provide clear, accessible information that aligns with user expectations and needs, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

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Collaborative Efforts for Enhanced Customer Experiences

Speaker: Christy Morrison, Director of Digital Marketing at F5
Timestamp: [03:04]

Christy Morrison brings to light the intricate connection between every customer interaction and the brand's perception. She states, “Every good experience that you create with your customer is part of your brand. So is every bad experience” (03:04). Christy emphasizes the importance of not overlooking the small, seemingly insignificant elements that can significantly impact the customer journey.

She discusses the necessity of regularly analyzing data to avoid inadvertently creating frustrating experiences through over-optimization. Utilizing tools like flowcharts and abandonment rates, Christy ensures that minor functionality issues, such as non-clickable buttons or unclear copy, are promptly addressed. Additionally, she highlights the value of collaborative efforts, involving writers, designers, and creative teams in weekly testing meetings. This multidisciplinary approach ensures comprehensive testing and optimization, fostering a unified and effective customer experience.

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The Importance of User Testing and Iterative Improvements

Speakers: Katie Carr and Christy Morrison
Timestamps: [04:55], [06:43]

Katie Carr:

Katie elaborates on the cost-effectiveness of making changes during the development phase rather than post-launch. She explains, “We always try to build in time to validate with our target audience prior to launch” (04:55). By conducting user research and validating messaging frameworks before going live, Katie’s team achieved a “30% increase in the clarity of our messaging” (04:55). This proactive approach not only enhances brand clarity but also generates more qualified leads and improves ROI across marketing activities.

Christy Morrison:

Christy introduces the concept of viewing user testing as a two-sided coin. The first side involves UX teams collaborating with design and development to build optimal user experiences and validate designs before allocating development resources. She mentions, “User testing allows us to validate our hypotheses, validate the designs that they are creating” (06:43). The second side focuses on post-launch iterative improvements using technologies like Adobe Target. This dual approach ensures that both the foundational design and ongoing user interactions are continuously optimized for better performance and user satisfaction.

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Building Credibility through Customer Feedback

Speaker: Emily Carrion
Timestamp: [08:04]

Emily concludes by highlighting the power of customer feedback in establishing credibility. She remarks, “Sharing customer feedback is the fastest way to do it, because you can't dispute customer feedback as a data point” (08:04). By transparently sharing authentic customer experiences and feedback, marketing and customer success leaders can build trust and credibility, reinforcing the value and reliability of their products and services.

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Conclusion and Key Takeaways

This episode of Insights Unlocked masterfully illustrates the intertwined roles of marketing and UX in delivering superior customer experiences. The key takeaways include:

• Deep Customer Understanding: Fundamental to effective marketing, involving continuous research and authentic engagement.

• Integrating UX in Marketing: Ensures that messaging accurately reflects product value and meets customer expectations.

• Data-Driven Optimization: Regular data analysis and user testing prevent minor issues from escalating and ensure seamless user interactions.

• Collaborative Efforts: Involving diverse teams in the testing and optimization process fosters comprehensive and effective solutions.

• Iterative Improvements: Combining pre-launch validation with post-launch optimization maximizes both initial impact and long-term user satisfaction.

• Leveraging Customer Feedback: Transparent sharing of customer insights builds credibility and trust, essential for sustained growth and loyalty.

By adopting these strategies, marketing and UX professionals can create cohesive, customer-centric experiences that not only resonate with users but also drive measurable business results.

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Listen and Subscribe: For more insights, subscribe to Insights Unlocked on your preferred podcast platform and explore additional resources at usertesting.com/podcast.

Transcript

[Host]

Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we are bringing you a short compilation of insightful moments from three past episodes. You'll hear from Emily Carrion, CMO at Entrepreneurs Organization, Katie Carr, a senior user experience designer at Workiva, and Christy Morrison, director of digital marketing at F5, as they dive into the intersection of marketing, UX and customer focused optimization. From cutting through the digital noise to refining customer experiences, these snippets pack a punch. So sit back, tune in and enjoy the show.

Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world. From concept to execution.

[Emily Carrion]

There'S some things in marketing that never change. I think always and forever it'll be our job to deeply understand our customer. Like, what do they care about? What makes their life easier? What pain or challenge can we solve? And then our job is how do we connect that to how our product can help them help their company and hopefully help the greater good. If we landed at a mission, you know, mission driven company, which thankfully I have, and then what changes is how do we deliver that message? So the channels or the mediums that we have, I mean, one of the things I think that is both fun and really challenging about being a marketer is there's an explosion of channels and they're getting noisier and noisier. So how do we break through the noise? And I think the best way to do that is really authentically knowing what our customer like, what do they most care about? And how do we match incredible content with knowing them, like, really intimately. Right? Like, we know what you care about. We know we have people like you. Like, we are in this together. And those messages are hard to ignore, but I think that's our challenge, right? Like, the world is so noisy and yet we have something that can make your life better. So how do we make those connection points to do that?

[Katie Carr]

I think we really think about UX as being a product role, but it's really so much more and it's a critical function of marketing now too. So it really doesn't matter how great the product offering is if we're not communicating the right message up front to get users to see the value. And there's a lot of recent studies showing that a lot of SaaS buyers do their research upfront, I think around 80% before they even talk to sales. So making sure that we're representing UX on the marketing side, represent bringing in research foundations, early really helps represent the voice of the customer early on in the buyer process. So we can make sure that users are really getting the information they need and that it's all accessible to them on the website.

[Christy Morrison]

Every good experience that you create with your customer is part of your brand. So is every bad experience, so is every frustrating experience. And you talked a little bit about the simple things. I think sometimes those are the easiest to overlook. Like, you focus so much on creating this big, beautiful customer journey and you forgot that the button, you can't click on it or the copy, you have to click on the button and not the copy or whatever. You know, it's not as functional as one would like. It's so easy to just kind of overlook that stuff because you're so focused on the big things. So looking at our data regularly and interrogating that data to make sure that we haven't missed something, that we haven't accidentally optimized our way into a really frustrating experience. And you can see that using, know, different visuals and things like flowcharts and, and abandonment rates and things like that through the process. But also you talked about the creative aspects of it. So working with your designers, working with the people who create the copy and the, the writing, which is how your brand comes to life on the page. Right. Is making sure we're also bringing those folks in. So in our weekly testing, just as an example of how we do that, we have a weekly testing meeting where we've got folks from, we've got writers who are there with us. I've got designers that are there with us. I've got creative folks that come in and they all weigh in on every single test we do, whether it's. Even if it's just to weigh in and say, yes, I approve, or to champion something like, actually, have you thought of this problem in this way, or have you thought of this implication of this decision that you're making and how it might impact for good or for worse. But it really is a collaborative effort because there's no way that me, that myself, I'm going to able to represent all of those different, you know, professional areas so that collaboration really becomes super key all, all in the testing conversation. And so we get everybody involved. There's no, no man left behind on that one.

[Katie Carr]

We all know that it's less expensive to make changes up front than if we're doing it after we already go live. And really, whenever we make major sweeping changes on the website, we always try to build in time to validate with our target audience prior to launch, just so we're going to the market with confidence that we're providing the right value to our users. So, setting the scene for this project, we realized the messaging we were using wasn't really resonating with our audiences, so we needed to shift that messaging framework. So, working with our product marketing teams and our content teams, we've been working on updating that throughout the website and our marketing materials, which would really impact everything that we produce as a team. So prior to launching the brand new updated messaging, we knew it would be a great opportunity to conduct user research and validate a lot of the assumptions that we had made. So we went into it with the goal to really evaluate how clear and effective our new messaging frameworks would be so we could pivot if we need to and reduce the amount of rework before going to market. Our results really showed that the updated messaging was resonating better with our target audience, which was such a huge confidence boost for us and the team internally. So because we were able to tap into those huge human insights that were pulled from the platform, we were able to quantify almost a 30% increase in the clarity of our messaging. We have continued to update it since then too, and we're seeing that continuous improvement as we move forward to tell that platform story in a more concise and helpful way, really speaking to our customers in their language. The ability to really test and optimize our messaging before we launch just removes the guesswork and really provides peace of mind internally. So in addition to proving the value of UX that this sort of research can do and bring up front, ultimately it just creates further brand clarity and more qualified leads. And really we see an ROI increase in all of our marketing activities that.

[Christy Morrison]

This influenced, I think of testing kind of one coin, two sides of the coin. So user testing largely falls onto one side of the coin. So I've got a ux, UX folks on my team who are looking at building experiences, partnering with design, partnering with the dev to make sure that we're building out the best possible experiences. And user testing allows us to test a lot of those designs and test those functionalities before we ever go and invest dev resources into creating them. As a lot of people probably can relate to. Dev resources are often hard to come by. So we like to use them intelligently. And user testing allows us to do that, allows us to validate our hypotheses, validate the designs that they are creating, engagements that are what we are trying to create. Like we're creating purposeful engagements. So that's half of it. And then the other half is using technology like an optimize optimizely, in our case Adobe Target to make iterative improvements. Once all of that work is borne out is live in the production environment, then we can test and iterate from there. Whether we're trying to tweak conversion rates or trying to make sure people are getting to the content down at the bottom of the page or whatever, the little problem is that we're trying to solve that we can do iterative testing on the front end to make sure that we're optimizing that experience.

[Emily Carrion]

The way I think about it is that if you want to build credibility as a marketing product or customer success leader, sharing customer feedback is the fastest way to do it, because you can't dispute customer feedback as a data point.

[Host]

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