Experience Management vs Campaign Management: The Benefits of Becoming Customer-Centric

Are You Keeping Up With the Pace of Change in CXM?

We’re in an era of customer-centric marketing, and buzzwords abound. Customer journey orchestration, personalised marketing, experience-led growth, experience management—just to name a few. But let’s not get caught up in the terminology.

What really matters is how you bring these concepts to life. How you deliver customer experiences that engage your audience and drive sustainable business growth.

That’s exactly what we’re unpacking in this guide.

The Changing Landscape of Marketing

Marketing campaigns have long been a cornerstone of business growth. But in recent years, experience management has taken centre stage as the go-to strategy for enhancing customer-brand relationships. It’s all about delivering relevant, personalised, and high-quality digital customer experiences that connect across touchpoints and evolve throughout the customer journey.

This evolved, customer-centric approach is a direct response to what modern consumers expect and reward. Which means experience management isn’t a passing trend. It’s now a must-have for staying competitive. Getting it right allows businesses to reap serious rewards:

• Loyal customers generate 2.5x more revenue than new customers on average.
• A 5% increase in loyalty can boost profits by 25% to 95%.
• 32% of loyal customers will abandon a brand they love after a single bad experience.

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is important for most businesses, both in the B2B and B2C space. It acts as a lever for growth, allowing businesses to fulfil their customers’ needs at every stage of the journey, from pre to post-purchase.

But how exactly do you pull this off? Many marketers and business leaders believe that expensive martech is the solution for impactful customer experiences. Although tech is part of the puzzle, it’s far from the only component in effective experience management. In reality, long-term customer loyalty—the kind that builds successful businesses and carves out a permanent place in a competitive market—begins with the organisation’s commitment to customer centricity.

Here’s how to take that lofty concept and make it an actionable, everyday activity within your team.

Campaigns vs. Experiences: What’s the Difference?

Campaign management revolves around planning and executing marketing initiatives, typically focused on specific products or events, to achieve short-term goals.

Experience management, on the other hand, is about orchestrating personalised experiences that enhance every interaction, evolve throughout the customer journey, and connect seamlessly across touchpoints.

These definitions, though simplified, illustrate that shifting from campaign management to experience management isn’t just about tweaking your tactics. It’s about adopting a whole new mindset.

• Product-led organisations manage campaigns.
• Customer-centric organisations manage experiences.

In our experience, it’s often the marketing team that leads the charge toward customer centricity within a company.

Campaign Management Looks Like…

• Brand-centric: Focused on promoting the brand or its products/services
• Batch-oriented: Planned and executed on set schedules.
• Segment-driven: Targeting pre-defined customer segments based on historical data.
• Linear and discrete: Following a funnel based on buyer phases and product lifecycles.
• Channel-specific: Tailoring messaging and creative to each communication channel.

Campaign management is all about broadcasting marketing messages. Whether the tactics are broad or highly targeted, they typically reflect an inside-out (aka product-led) perspective. Campaigns still have their place. Like during major announcements or when building broad awareness. But they struggle to keep pace with the demands of modern consumers.

Experience Management Looks Like…

• Customer-centric: Placing individuals at the centre of marketing strategies.
• Always on: Engaging in real-time based on customer-initiated events.
• Segments of one: Offering personalised experiences tailored to each customer using sophisticated workflows.
• Persona and goal-focused: Aligning strategies with the goals and needs of audience personas.
• Omnichannel: Ensuring consistency and continuity so customers experience a seamless journey.

Experience management is about aligning product, brand, service, and channel experiences to create cohesive customer journeys that foster brand loyalty. It’s about meeting customers where they are and using each interaction to enhance the next one.

	Managing Campaigns	Managing Experiences
Data usage	Relies on historical data for segmentation	Uses real-time data (and advanced tech like AI) to personalise experiences
Effectiveness	Effective for short-term goals and promotions	Contributes to long-term customer loyalty and sustainable business growth
Engagement strategy	Inflexible, pre-planned strategy	Highly flexible, adapting in real-time to customer actions and preferences
Focus	Product or event-focused	Customer-focused
Messaging methods	Broadcasting to a broad audience	Engaging with individuals
Outcomes and metrics	Campaign-specific metrics	Measured by long-term satisfaction, loyalty, lifetime value, and brand-specific engagement metrics

	Managing Campaigns	Managing Experiences
Focus	Product or event-focused	Customer-focused
Messaging methods	Broadcasting to a broad audience	Engaging with individuals
Engagement strategy	Inflexible, pre-planned strategy	Highly flexible, adapting in real-time to customer actions and preferences
Data usage	Relies on historical data for segmentation	Uses real-time data (and advanced tech like AI) to personalise experiences
Outcomes and metrics	Campaign-specific metrics	Measured by long-term satisfaction, loyalty, lifetime value, and brand-specific engagement metrics
Effectiveness	Effective for short-term goals and promotions	Contributes to long-term customer loyalty and sustainable business growth

 

These principles apply to both B2C and B2B customer experience contexts. While customer journeys may differ, the need for a human-centric approach remains constant. Companies that shift from aggressive product marketing to value-added, seamless customer experiences are the ones that will thrive.

Building the Capacity to Manage Experiences: Practical Steps

Experience management is about aligning product, brand, service, and channel experiences to create cohesive customer journeys. It’s about meeting customers where they are and using each interaction to enhance the next one. It’s about fostering long-term loyalty and customer lifetime value, not chasing a quick buck. 

1. Set and Share a Clear Vision
   

Customer centricity is a game-changer. But it needs to align with your business objectives.

• Clarify how an experience-led approach will drive long-term business growth.
• Define what will change for customers and why those changes matter.
• Communicate the importance of the evolved strategy to key stakeholders and secure buy-in from leadership.
  

This often requires tweaking marketing KPIs. While revenue remains important, experience-led organisations look at customer lifetime value (CLV) holistically. The result is that marketing becomes a revenue centre that’s more integral for achieving organisational goals, rather than a vehicle for delivering product messaging.

2. Embed Customer Experience in Your Culture
   

Marketing might be the loudest advocates for experience management, but CXM isn’t a single department’s responsibility. It’s everyone’s job—at least to some extent. After all, everything comes back to the customer, regardless of which department you work in. However, the link between daily tasks and customer value isn’t always immediately obvious Here’s a few organisation-level suggestions that can help:

• Replace sales commissions with CLV target bonuses.
• Align individual job performance with broader business goals.
• Create cross-functional customer success targets.
• Share data freely between teams.
• Reward CXM leadership.

Aligning sales and marketing is a good start. Once those teams are synced on customer lifecycle priorities, bring operational and post-sales service departments into the fold.

A customer-centric culture not only drives better outcomes but also boosts employee engagement by giving their work purpose.

3. Re-Engineer Your Organisation

To truly focus on customer satisfaction and retention, you may need to rethink your team structures and processes. This puts the previous concept into action, ensuring that the systems and workflows in use every day are engineered around experience management.

• Redesign process flows with customer experience as the core focus.
• Eliminate roadblocks and information silos.
• Translate organisational goals into customer-centric targets.
• Assess your customer intelligence and CXM capabilities.
  

Some businesses try to shortcut this by relying on martech to solve silo issues. If only it were that easy. Martech can certainly help to operationalise collaboration, but it can’t bridge gaps that form at the root of outdated processes.

4. Enable Success with Technology

Experience-led organisations have a complete picture of the customer journey. They know where customers come from, how they interact with the brand, and what keeps them around.

• Review how you collect and manage customer data.
• Map customer journeys and identify gaps.
• Connect platforms, whether through API integrations or new bridging systems.
• Experiment with automations like offer decisioning or dynamic content.
• Scale these automations across all channels.

Often, the best martech solution is the one you already have. Auditing existing platforms can be more cost-effective than investing in new ones. However, there are valid reasons to consider a unified data platform, such as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), which builds real-time customer profiles to help orchestrate complex journeys.

5. Measure, Optimise, Predict, and Pinpoint

Measuring the success of customer experiences is more complex than tracking campaigns, but it’s far more valuable in the long run.

• Compare different attribution models to see what’s working.
• Trace customer experience KPIs to broader organisational outcomes.
• Transition to centralised, progressive, and shared customer profiles.
• Maintain high data quality and reliability.

The next frontier is using predictive analytics to enhance customer experiences earlier in the journey, driving long-term growth through deeper relationships.

Real-Life Success Stories: Start Small, Scale Fast

Transitioning from product-led to experience-led doesn’t have to mean a massive overhaul. Let’s look at two real-life examples that show how ambition, vision, and a commitment to customer centricity can deliver outstanding results.

giffgaff: A New Approach to Welcoming Members

Sim-only telco giffgaff significantly boosted retention by overhauling its welcome programme, retaining an estimated 17,000 additional subscribers annually. While it might sound like a simple tweak, the real magic happened behind the scenes: understanding customer behaviour, defining custom journey workflows, setting up automations, and refining processes.

Hachette: Personalised Content at Scale

Hachette UK’s newsletter subscribers now receive content that’s much more in tune with their interests, thanks to a deep dive into the company’s data. This ongoing project has shifted Hachette from broad, product-led batch emails to highly segmented, personalised communication, catering to a 150k-strong subscriber base.

Evolving to Experience Management

CXM is moving at lightning speed. The shift from product-centric campaign management to customer-centric experience management approach is essential for brands that want to stay ahead. But it’s more than just new strategies or technologies. It’s about crafting personalised journeys where every interaction counts, every moment matters, and every customer feels valued. It’s about fostering long-term relationships. Creating personalised experiences. Looking beyond one-time transactions. Making this shift might require a challenging and comprehensive rethink, but it’s worth it.

Some changes can happen quickly, while others might need more time or a more significant transformation. We’ve just scratched the surface in this guide to give you an idea of what the shift means for your business.

Get in touch

If you’re ready to dive deeper into experience management or want tailored advice on how to mature your CXM strategies, let’s chat. We’re here to help you navigate the journey with confidence and success.