Since launching Journey Builder several years ago, Salesforce has helped many of the world’s leading brands and retailers succeed at delivering customer journeys. Journeys, in fact, have become the way direct to consumer businesses create compelling and delightful shopper experiences, the leading path to competitive advantage today. Per the State of Marketing - Retail, 74% of marketers who have adopted a customer journey strategy agree that it has positively impacted overall customer engagement. Journeys have some key requirements such that they be personalized, timely and connected. As the path to purchase has become more complex, the ability to connect with shoppers at any stage of the lifecycle on any channel at any touch point is a foundation for brands to connect with their shoppers in a whole new way.

With all this experience under their belt, Salesforce Strategic Services and Product Marketing teams put together a framework that kick-starts the journey process. With worksheets, example journey maps and a four part blog series, anyone can take the learnings and develop a clear plan for their journey mapping.  To summarize, regardless of lifecycle stage, a journey map requires that you consider five key factors before getting started: goal, audience, data, content and channel.

Perhaps the most difficult phase of the customer lifecycle to journey map is acquisition. In this conversation, acquisition is gaining permission to engage further and build a relationship. That nurturing should ultimately result in a sale and a relationship that is both long and valuable. Yet, since the one on one connection has not been created, how is one expected to create a journey map that is both thorough and measurable? The consumer is essentially unknown and only reachable through media, making it difficult to create triggered, direct and personal experiences. While today we live in a world where marketing and advertising is much more trackable, not all interactions can be orchestrated. That doesn’t mean a journey map isn’t valuable.

To develop a journey map, you need a goal, preferably one that is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Time-Based). In a broad sense, the goal is to acquire permission to engage further and guide the shopper on the path to purchase. Taken to the next level, that goal becomes more specific.  For retailers and direct to consumer brands operating today the most effective engagement strategy continues to be email. Email capture, while tried and true, continues to be under-utilized. Nothing is more tried and true than cart recovery journeys. A new twist is that today’s smart marketers are using “cart save” without account creation as a method to acquire ongoing permission to engage. Increasingly, mobile messaging, particularly SMS has shown to be promising.  While on the topic of mobile, social is now the leading activity on mobile devices – so getting likes and, especially, follows can be a valuable goal. Apps, while less valuable for commerce, are becoming the de-facto vehicle for delivering loyalty programs. Getting shoppers to download is of value.  Yet, all these examples appear to be digital and we live in the physical world. Any of these goals can be encouraged in-store or even in print. Here’s a good example.

Every Friday The Montclarion appears in the driveways of homes throughout the hills of Oakland, CA. It’s published by a local newsgroup and is a hyper-local publication, serving a few thousand households. For as long as time, there has been a Fry’s Electronics circular on the back page. It was the fairly typical grid layout with a hero banner and big “sale” call to action, and a grid of specific product offers. In the past several months that has changed, gone are the product offers. The weekly circular has a new call to action – sign up for the Fry’s email offers list to get the best deals of the week.

The Fry’s example provides a great path to thinking about the next element – audience.  Every journey starts with a target audience.  Who exactly should this journey be attractive to? One thing is clear, these should be new customers. From there, creating specific and clear audience segments with Salesforce for Advertising (Salesforce DMP + Advertising Studio) that can be targeted via the world’s leading publishers allows expansive reach to fill the top of the funnel. The audiences can be based on customers who fit certain traditional RFM criteria or those that have purchased certain categories of products or Einstein based – those who have been determined to be likely customers based on the world’s greatest data science platform.  Think further, is this audience going to be in-store or at a sponsored.  Where you target in the physical world might be your best indicator.

Building the audience, of course, isn’t possible without data – the next element in our journey mapping exercise. One element that gives retailers who have connected commerce to the store a competitive advantage is the accumulation of actionable intelligence. Data helps the marketer build the profile of who to attract and help differentiate store vs. on-line prospects. Additional data is also critical. Source and location attributes will help drive Einstein smart splits. Having universal access to product information (from the online store into email, for example) is a huge factor to consider when thinking of “cart save”. And, third party data is helpful. For example, IBM Watson allows marketers to understand the weather and other environmental elements of an interaction, making the way you interact during the journey more engaging.

Engaging is even more difficult in this always on world of billions of connected devices – making the content delivered more important – the next phase of the journey mapping exercise.  In the acquisition phase, the content starts with an ad, flows to a landing page and a sign up (ideally). If the initial action doesn’t result in acquisition, what’s displayed is often displayed outside of the marketers controlled environment on different media properties. The content is often “re-targeting” – showing the consumer the products browsed on digital properties everywhere. Considering that the consumer is new, might other content be more valuable? Some ideas that come to mind: testimonials and star ratings (either on the store or on the products in question). Additional touches could include content related to the items browsed without being an explicit sell, demonstrating your interest in serving, not selling.

As alluded to above, channel choices, the last element of journey mapping in a retail/direct to consumer acquisition journey will make it such that orchestration is difficult. If the initial on site, social or mobile engagement doesn’t result in permission, much if not all of the journey will be on media properties. Where you target will be determined by the quality of your data advertising partner. For a retailer selling outdoor products, for example, it will be valuable to have access to second party data from leading outdoor publishers AND the ability to target on those properties. More often than not, the channels will be predicated on your audience.

For more insights into how to map customer journeys for retail and direct to consumer businesses, join Ron Pereira and Kandice Carlson for the webinar Mapping Journeys That Drive Sales: A Digital Marketing Field Guide on July 18th at 1pm ET.