The desire to understand customer journey can lead marketers and business owners to search for more effective methods in their marketing strategies to increase in sales and customer satisfaction.
In accordance to Thunderhead Blog and some researches, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) will be the one of the main focus for marketers in 2017. Why is that? In our previous blog post, Integrated Marketing Stack ( IMC) has introduced the benefits for setting up Customer Journey profiles, highlighting ways of data implementation and process methods. Bearing the common motive with the previous post, this article will aim to run through ways of integrating the customer journey analytics with their marketing plans.
Understanding Customer Journey Analytics (CJA)
Customer Journey Analytics refers using a CRM and marketing system data to find out a group or individual customer journey over time.
Firstly, by understanding the basis of a customer’s journey, marketers will be able to predict an individual customer journey patterns, so the marketers can tailor specific marketing campaigns or promotions to what may appeal to the targeted customers.
Communications with customers always comes as priority for business owners and our society becomes more driven by the web and social media, so it drives the marketers to reach out to bigger audience group by placing their brand/business on the web. The web has become competitive as the real world, and by making your services/products available online simply isn’t enough. Marketing campaigns and advertisements remains essential, yet to stand out from different competitors, marketers need to have some effective strategies in maximizing the business’ exposure. Social media marketing have proved to be a major factor in boosting brand exposure and sales, and many marketers aim to reach out to more potential consumers by adapting social media.
Thought Process & Scenarios
Marketers will need to pinpoint their consumers’ thought process prior the purchase decision, i.e. what made the customer search for this particular service/product, what are their alternative choices and considerations? In many cases, longer customer journey usually revolves around products with a higher price point, whereas shorter customer journey belongs to single purchases usually with a lower price point. Through comparison, customers who are motivated by desires instead of needs tend to spend a lot more.
For example, Ben wants a new car, his current one is rather old but still fully functional. At this point, what motivates Ben of his purchase decision as his car is still fully function. At this point, what motivates Ben of his purchase decision even his car is still fully function. Before making the purchase decision, he began to research what are available on the market. Thought the process of the research, he needs to consider whether he wants to go for something different that will suit his lifestyle or go for his regular choices. He will weigh in the pros and cons of whether to go for electronic or petrol, hybrid or regular, finance, rent or lease etc. Every time he sees a pro, he will weigh in the con to see which is the best cost for his money, and as natural consumers we all go through that. With CJA mapping out customer profiles, marketers can appeal to consumers like Ben before he even begin his research.
Creating Customer Dashboards
Based on the previous example, from mapping out individual customer journeys like Ben’s marketers are able to predict future interests and patterns of Ben’s life cycle as customer. For instance, marketers may be able to predict when is the best time to appeal to Ben, based on the information of when he had purchased it. This prediction depends entirely on the product, therefore when applied to other products such as mobile phones, the life expectancy of the product is much shorter.
Through identify segment groups and gathering more customer profiles, marketers can set up dashboards that not only summarized groups of individual customer journeys, but also with insights and comments that allow marketers to customise and generate solutions that appeals to individual customers. Based on these touchpoints, marketers will be able to get an update and further understanding of their target audience, allowing them to re-position themselves in the market to appeal more.
Conclusion
Consequently, with all the information gathered through CJA, marketers can adapt the appropriate methods to their customer groups. These insights are pivotal to future marketing activities, and the more you gathered the more connected you customers will be. At the end of the day, all marketers have same goals in maintaining and strengthening customer relationship in maintaining customer bonding and their loyalty.