5 Tips for Creating Customer Journeys
One of the most critical responsibilities a marketing organization can have is designing, building, and implementing successful digital campaigns. These digital campaigns, or Customer Journeys, focus on growing relationships between a company and its customers.
Thanks to a bevy of technology on the market today, this work is easily achievable through tools like Marketing Automation Platforms. These tools provide marketers with the ability to attract, understand, and execute on highly sophisticated marketing campaigns – tied to their customer’s needs and the company’s goals.
5 tips for building digital customer journeys:
Always position your customer in the center of your campaign design. Meaning, don’t lose focus by what your internal stakeholders request or what new feature is available in your platform stack. Ultimately, your marketing should serve the customer and how they prefer to engage with your company and its products.
Track the customer’s engagement. This includes their behavior throughout their customer journey with your company, which you should be analyzing regularly. Use those findings to then tailor/optimize the program and its touchpoints.
Start conversations early with key subject matter experts across the company. This includes IT teams or technical resources responsible for implementing the customer journey in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, its connected CRM platform, or any other tool being leveraged in the campaign (e.g. an external database like Snowflake). That way, technical feasibility analysis occurs at the start of the program (vs. later during implementation, when they can be blockers or delay your launch timeline).
Plan ahead before starting execution in the platform itself. This means having clearly defined (and internally aligned) customer journeys, and appropriate buy-in from each key stakeholder group. How many touchpoints will the customer receive? How does the audience for the campaign flow in, and is it regularly refreshed? At what point does the customer exit the campaign; through their behavior or is it time-bound?
Start simple with the campaign goal (but be comprehensive in how you activate within that campaign). Instead of building a highly robust campaign with multiple customer types, focus one campaign on one persona (“new customer”) and build out different engagement workstreams and content types, driving toward one goal. (“sending a series of personalized emails, and one follow-up by an account manager, with the goal being getting the customer to run their first report with our product.”)
In regard to the platform itself: for reference, the most popular marketing automation platforms ABC has helped stand up, implement, and optimize are Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo (Adobe), and Oracle Eloqua. Each of them have their own pros and cons, though more recently we’ve been working with more Salesforce Marketing Cloud clients.
To learn more about designing intelligent customer journeys, watch our video on demand here (where we break this down using Eloqua).
Takeaway: Designing customer journeys (and implementing them in marketing automation platforms) doesn’t have to be overly complex, or require countless resources or budget. If you’re not sure where to begin (or which platform to leverage), let’s chat!