Aligning your marketing to the customer journey is a frequent topic in webinars, marketing conferences and industry chit-chat. And the idea is relatively simple: by adapting your marketing to your customers’ unique needs, you’ll grow conversion and retention. But if it’s your first time assessing how your marketing meshes with the customer journey, knowing where to start can be a bit daunting. Below are tips we provide Ascent360 clients to get them on their way, focusing first on email marketing. The great news is this process can be repeated across your marketing channels and efforts.
Start by whiteboarding the big milestones your customers go through when interacting with your company. Detailed customer journeys can have dozens of milestones, but for now, focus on the foundational milestones that are relevant to your company, such as those listed below:
Once you’ve listed each of the milestones along your company’s customer journey, go back and take note of the following under each milestone:
End your customer journey mapping by listing a Strategic Imperative for each milestone. A Strategic Imperative is a summary of the action(s) you believe your company should take to best meet the needs of customers based on their Actions, Motivations, Barriers and Cues at this milestone. For example, at the Experiencing milestone, your Strategic Imperative may be to get customer feedback so that you can send an upsell offer to highly satisfied customers or rectify issues with dissatisfied customers.
Now that you’ve got a customer journey laid out, it’s time to overlay your email marketing efforts. Looking at your Strategic Imperative, identify the email marketing efforts best able to meet those objectives. You may already have some of these efforts in place and need to implement others. Remember that the goal is to be more targeted in your marketing by sending relevant messages to where customers are in their journey. For that reason, a generic email newsletter is unlikely to be a strong strategy, say, for a customer who is at the Research milestone and just signed up for your emails. Instead, consider a Welcome email that is tailored to the Motivators and Barriers you identified for the Research milestone.
With your email marketing efforts outlined, it’s time to start building out content. As you draft your content, keep referencing your Strategic Imperative as well as the Motivations and Barriers for customers. It’s important to write focused content and avoid trying to accomplish too many steps at once. Think about the immediate action you want the customer to take to move to the next step in their journey and orient your content to that action. Once your content is ready, setup your email marketing efforts to deploy when your company sees the Cues that you listed.
Automation is key. Instead of a batch and blast of approach where you send emails to all customers who are at a given milestone, look for ways to use the Cues that you listed for each milestone to trigger automated emails. The easiest example is sending a welcome email immediately to a new email subscriber versus waiting to send all welcomes emails at once on a periodic basis.
Getting your email marketing efforts in place for your foundational customer journey does take some initial legwork. But once you’ve been through the process and everything is in place, you’ll find that the work was worth it because it will become easier to fine-tune and evolve your emails and processes. And you can also move onto other important steps, such as the following:
If you have questions about customer journey mapping for email or would like to see how Ascent360 can help you more easily capture data, build segments and send messages that matter, request a demo below.