Understanding Customer Journeys

It may only take two to tango, but a party worth remembering is a completely different story. Including its share of drunk uncles, scary mothers-in-law, supercilious grandfathers and loud kids. Yet, while some may prefer sticking to their own class, it’s exactly the diversity that makes us great.

How smart are your lead nurturing and marketing processes? Are you intertwining your website into your marketing and vice versa?

We’re strong believers that your website should be a tool for your business and not just a fancy piece of public-facing media. It should assist your business in introducing leads and should integrate with your marketing and sales efforts to nurture leads and turn them into customers.

Your website should have its own sales funnel and you should have an understanding of your customer’s journey through that funnel. You should also be able to identify the points at which you can re-market or re-engage with your customers or leads to nurture them into a sale.

To give you some food for thought, we thought we’d share an example of what you can do with data from your website and how it can be used to re-engage and nurture leads. The example we’ll talk about is from one of our clients who run an online eCommerce store selling coffee pods, beans and coffee pod machines.

They have numerous customer journeys depending on if someone buys 30 pods, 100 pods, 1kg of beans or just a single machine. The thing they have in common is that they all go on a journey before or between purchases. Whether it be a mum and dad who buy a single coffee pod machine or an office who purchases 5kg of beans a month.

We’re going to have a look at the customer journey of someone who just buys a single machine. This customer journey has been simplified a little for the purposes of this blog (our customer journeys literally have arrows going each and every way!) but should provide enough insights to give you some ideas about creating your own journeys.

If you’re not familiar with customer journeys and mapping, you’re probably thinking at this point that this looks like a heap of work that you probably don’t have time for! The good news is that most customer journeys can be automated to a point. In fact, in many cases, there is little point in getting a ‘warm lead’ sent through to your sales or business development team until the potential customer has already been on a certain journey or completed certain touchpoints or goals with you first. The cool thing about automating your customer journey marketing is that you can encourage customers to follow a certain path and move them along (add them to a warm leads list or even assign them to your sales team) when they have completed what you identify as requirements to become a ‘warm lead’.

Using automated marketing with specific customer journeys can work amazingly well not only because they nurture leads, but because they also help set your customer segments for future marketing and future customer journeys.

With Christmas almost here, now is a great time to start considering your customer journeys and how you can begin engaging with them at certain points to assist in the decision-making process. Get started by grabbing a whiteboard or big sketching paper and draw out a customer journey from a certain action (ie. What happens when a customer joins your mailing list? What about when they click something on your newsletter? Etc, etc ? There are hundreds of customer journeys you can consider). Draw out where you want to interrupt the process ? what it means (and what you will do) if they do or don’t react to the engagement. Draw out when they can be added to a segment list or sent to your sales or BD team. Your imagination really is the limit when it comes to nurturing sales through customer journey mapping!

Need help? If you’re interested in finding out more about mapping out your customer journeys and automating your marketing efforts in line with your customer journeys, ask us! We’d love to talk through your business and what type of customer journeys you could consider.