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With outstanding customer experience at the heart of any successful marketing strategy, marketers need to be wary of these common pitfalls that can undermine customer relationships before they even begin.
Working with thousands of companies over more than two decades has helped us understand why some succeed and others fail. One of the most essential ingredients in the recipe for success is the creation of one-of-a-kind customer relationships.
But nobody said success would be easy. Delivering a personalised, cross-channel experience at every step of the customer lifecycle can be challenging.
According to the latest State of the Connected Customer report, 80% of customers say experience is as important as products or services, and 66% expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
To ensure a great, personalised customer experience and therefore meet customer expectations, marketers must deliver digital experiences that are highly relevant, timely and tailored to specific customer needs. To do that successfully, they must avoid six common mistakes while creating 1-to-1 customer journeys.
Don’t underestimate the power of setting a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goal to define your path and determine your success.
To set your first goal, get in that New Year’s Resolution frame of mind — define the point you want to reach, then figure out each step of how you will get there, breaking down that lofty goal into manageable, measurable steps you can tick off as you go. A high-level goal will direct the development of your journey and help you focus your efforts, and can be refined as you learn more.
From there, define exactly what you hope this journey will achieve. Your SMART goal will also help you to clearly define success post-launch. For example, if your goal is to launch a new product, but you also need to continually acquire additional customers after launching it, a SMART journey goal might be to acquire 25% more new customers for that product in each quarter after launch.
Take a tailored approach when thinking about your audience, as the goal of building a customer journey is delivering a 1-to-1 message.
Taking the time to understand what matters to your customers and what they want from you (and what will make them love their spam filter) will yield high rewards.
How do you develop a deep understanding of your customers? In the Salesforce 50 Pro Marketing Tips for 2021 e-book, Salesforce Global Innovation Evangelist Brian Solis says to put time aside for deep listening.
“We saw the true value of voice of customer (VOC) last year, when operations and consumer expectations were both flipped on their heads,” he said.
“When I spoke with Super Retail Group for example, the whole organisation had used VOC to prioritise, launching curb-side click-and-collect at lightning speed, adapting online environments to replicate in-store experience, and designing a user-generated content campaign that ended up on morning television.”
“That success came from using the VOC to guide every decision.”
Dig a little deeper and see if there are any other accessible data points you can use within the journey to personalise elements. In addition to an email address, look for postcode, gender, last purchase date, preferred location and so on.
How do you go about collecting additional data?
Both in-journey content (delivered in the message itself) and out-of-journey content (which a subscriber would navigate to with a click) can be extremely powerful when used in tandem.
How do you make sure you have both? Audit what content you have available today, plan what you need to create in the short-term, and create a strategy for future content that will delight your audiences.
Knowing exactly what you want your customer to do and keeping a laser focus on calls to action (and resulting landing pages) will allow you to be helpful, supportive and resourceful to your customers along their journeys.
It’ll also mean you’re focusing your energy where it should be — actions that will generate ROI.
Instead of messaging your audiences in the channel you want them to be on, identify the channel they are already on, and therefore want to communicate with you on, and engage them there.
Ask yourself: are your customers desk-based and completing a web form? If so, using email makes sense.
However, if they are on the go and seeking brief information quickly, SMS may be appropriate.
Consider how ride-sharing service Uber uses different channels for pre, during and post-ride messaging: a combination of push, SMS and email. Now consider how it would impact your journey if you received the ‘Your driver is two minutes away — track them in the app’ message via email.
Tailoring channel use to both audience preferences and audience actions creates one seamless engagement path for customers, no matter what channel the customer is on.
In the 50 Pro Marketing Tips for 2021 e-book, Renee Milkop-Kerr, General Manager Customer and Marketing at IAG New Zealand, describes how a complex insurance issue such as a claim might best be resolved via a phone call. But for something simple such as paying a premium, customers expect a quick and easy online option.
“It is critical to strike the right balance between engagement preferences and the best channel for the particular situation,” Milkop-Kerr said.
Once you understand your goals, audience, relevant data points and strategic content, you will be ready to create a customer journey. But remember not to bite off more than you can chew.
Think of a successful customer journey as having three versions:
If you currently have a monthly EDM and limited ability to segment your audiences, your crawl version shouldn’t be a multistep, multichannel drawing that spans five whiteboards. A great starting point could be a single automated touchpoint with two reminders for non-openers.
Similarly, if you already have that multistep, multichannel journey up and running (good for you!), your run version shouldn’t be limited to data and content from the past, but should be stretched to incorporate real-time data and predict future customer needs.
The best journey mapping mindset allows for testing, learning and iterating while actively servicing your customers.
Effective email is often the core of a great customer journey, but it doesn’t just happen. It takes data-driven decisions as well as a thoughtful touch: a perfect blend of data and emotion. To master this balance, we’ve assembled 50 tried-and-true tips to guide you.
