These days, customers are bombarded with information the second they open a browser on their phone or laptop. Consequently, marketers are having a more difficult time than ever breaking through the noise. But there is possibly a solution: Placing a greater emphasis on the customer journey map.
The customer journey map helps your business address many of the fundamental questions as marketing, such as how customers are learning about your business and what motivates them to purchase your product or service instead of your competitors. Until only recently, these questions often went unanswered. After all, how could you tell whether a customer learned about your business from a TV or newspaper advertisement unless you commissioned an expensive survey?
But that’s no longer the case. Nowadays, businesses have much more insight into what shapes a customer’s perceptions of a brand and what considerations drive their purchasing decision. It’s simply a matter of possessing a system to visualize the customer journey map and act based on a customer’s position on the map.
In case you’re interested, below you’ll see a visual overview of the customer journey map.
If you’re still not convinced, here are a few other reasons your team should be thinking deeply about where individual customers are in their own journey.
- It Helps You Build Segments Based On Buyer Personas
All of us shop differently. Some of us take our time to research a product or service and go back to a website multiple times to gather more information. Others make the decision in the moment and can’t be dissuaded, regardless of the pressure put on us by others.
Despite all of our differences, there often exists a number of similarities between customers. Modern business software can help identify these areas of overlap. For example, you could discover a certain group of customers only respond to messaging in a specific cadence. Maybe they respond if they receive a social media ad followed by an email but not the opposite.
Over time, the system collects enough data from customer interactions to predict with a reasonable degree of certainty what cadence the prospect will respond to based on their own past interactions with your company’s marketing messaging.
Rather than sending out the same messaging to all prospects, your marketing team can be much more targeted. Over time, this approach will almost certainly prove less expensive and more successful.
- It Can Help You Identify Areas Within Your Business In Need of Improvement
From building awareness of your brand to encouraging referrals among members of your current customer base, marketing teams have a wide range of responsibilities as your customer proceeds in their journey. A system capable of tracking the customer journey can help your leadership team determine which areas of marketing are thriving—and which are in need of additional support.
Take, for instance, a situation in which the rate of new visitors to your company’s website increases by a significant rate month-over-month. At the same time, however, fewer and fewer of your customers are renewing their subscription or returning as a customer after an initial visit. Under such a scenario, you could reasonably conclude your efforts at building brand awareness are going quite well, but retention is struggling mightily.
In response, you might allocate more in the budget toward retention efforts, or even shift personnel from one team to another. No matter what response you choose to take, the ability to easily access the data needed to make such a move in the moment underscores the importance of adopting modern approaches to monitoring the customer journey.
- It Allows You to Prioritize Your Most Profitable Customers
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a popularly discussed concept in modern MBA programs. And it’s easy to see why.
Not only does CLV give you an idea of what customers provide in terms of revenue to your business, but it also gives you an understanding of how much it costs to acquire and hold on to them. Once this information is readily available to your marketing team, there’s so much you can do it.
To start, your leaders can begin to devise means to hold onto and increase the value of promising customers. You could, for instance, create a premium service of some kind or offer customer solutions strategists to help your customer consistently realize new value for your product or service over time.
On the other hand, the system can help you identify which customers cost a lot to acquire. By knowing who will take a lot to bring on, you can be much more particular about who makes up the audience for your company’s messaging.
Microsoft Dynamics can help your company become much more thoughtful about the customer journey. From the moment they hear about you to the second they refer you to one of their partners, you can feel confident you’re giving them the attention they deserve.
Contact us today for a free consultation!
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