4 Typical Customer Journeys & What You Need to Make Them Work
If you’re using multiple channels to engage with customers, you’ve taken the first step towards a winning customer experience strategy. That’s because you’re meeting a real need for multi-channel engagement among today’s customers. But with more channels comes more complexity. Fortunately, you can turn the odds in your favour by integrating your most used touchpoints with automated customer journeys.
Businesses that use customer journeys effectively can expect revenue increases of between 10 and 20%. That’s because these automated pathways are shown to nurture customer relationships better.
In this piece, we’ll take a wide view of customer lifecycle management (CLM) and dig into four common customer journeys. We’ll discover why they’re important and learn how they can be optimised to get customers moving through them – followed by a few examples of how they can be applied.
Common Customer Journeys
Onboarding
This is where your relationship with a new customer starts, and it’s a process that sets the tone for all future interactions. In the digital banking space and many other industries, quick and seamless onboarding can help businesses retain customers for longer. Fortunately, onboarding works well as an automated journey because it involves many different but related steps with one common goal.
Global real-estate group Century 21 used Everlytic’s multi-channel journey automation platform to drive a 13-week agent onboarding programme. The result was an engaging journey that encouraged new agents to start selling properties off the bat. This approach also helped Century 21 track agents’ individual performance and programme engagement.
Up- and Cross-Selling
Both up- and cross-selling are techniques businesses use to persuade customers to buy more products or services, especially when they’ve already made a purchase. Getting this right means more revenue for your business, and increased customer loyalty because you’re adding more value to an already beneficial relationship.
Additionally, Deloitte found that great customer experience often means customers become more willing to buy additional products and services. So, if your customers are already on a journey, and they show brand loyalty, you should be able to up- and cross-sell to them more often. Boost these techniques by tracking customers’ purchase history and using a product-recommendations engine to recommend offers they may be interested in.
That said, these techniques work best when customer satisfaction is at a high.
Re-Engagement
Re-engagement happens when you reach out to inactive or dormant customers to incentivise them to do business with you again. It’s important because feedback from these customers can help you iron out customer experience issues – and increase your all-round revenue when they become active again.
Ideally, you’d like to contact these people directly to test the waters and make a personal connection. But due to POPIA regulations, this isn’t always possible.
The next best option is to create a journey that slowly builds an authentic connection with them through personalisation and cleverly positioned incentives. Because you probably have data on these folks already, this should be easier than starting off from zero.
By combining existing customer data and email marketing best practices, lifestyle platform Hyperli harnessed database segmentation and message personalisation to drive re-engagement. The resulting email campaign got above-benchmark engagement rates from previously dormant customers.
Customer Win-back
Poor customer service could be costing businesses up to $75 billion a year in lost opportunities and customer churn. To stop this leak and reduce the impact of lost revenue, businesses rely on win-back journeys to regain ex-customers.
To get this right you need to get personal, thoughtful, and diligent in your comms. And winning these folks back is good for three reasons.
- They probably still need your product or service.
- They’re familiar with your brand and way of doing business.
- You may already have detailed data on their buying behaviour.
A quick note on data from ex-customers. When using this information, you must be crystal clear on what’s acceptable when it comes to data compliance. Basically, you should always keep POPIA in mind when dealing with this type of info.
But once you have a clear picture of what can be done with existing data, you can personalise a journey that entices these customers back into business with you.
Data & Customer Journeys
As mentioned above, you’ll be more effective at engaging customers if you have data on the ways they interact with your automated journeys. According to Boston Consulting Group, 63% of millennials are willing to share data to get a more personalised customer experience. This stat alone is enough reason to compliantly collect customer data and use it to optimise your automated journeys going forward.
To close off, we’ve explored some of the major benefits of using automated journeys in your customer experience strategy. We’ve also shown how specific types of data and incentives can help you drive desirable customer behaviours.
Our hope is that you’ll grow your customer experience strategy from one based on stand-alone digital touchpoints to a more resilient and effective approach built on mutually beneficial customer journeys. And if you’re already embracing this powerful technique, we want to introduce you to other technologies that will make it even more effective.
To learn how marketing automation and machine learning can be combined to support your business’ customer lifecycle management, book a seat at our CEM Africa workshop on 23 August 2022 (Workshop 3E).
In the meantime, please visit our website for more information on our multi-channel message automation technology.