The First Step to Successful Marketing Automation: Customer Journey Maps

Selecting a best-in-class Marketing Automation Platform obviously involves evaluating the technical features and capabilities such as omnichannel marketing, lead management, integrations (i.e., CRM, ERP, Social, Commerce, POS, CMS/DAM), workflow automations, analytics & reporting, embedded AI-driven functionality, and more. All of which are provided to facilitate the process of acquiring new customers, retaining existing ones, and creating a seamless customer experience.

Technology is the enabler but not the driver of successful Marketing Automation. The main driver is having a good understanding of the process that a customer goes through when engaging with a company known as the customer journey. The process to visualize the representation of the customer journey is called the customer journey map. This illustration can help companies understand their customers better, which will promote the successful execution of marketing automation that in turn will lead to enhanced customer experiences and alignment of strategies with business goals.

To better explain what it is, let's review some of the key components of a customer journey map and the essential steps to create one.

Key Components of a Customer Journey Map:

1. Customer Personas: Personas represent different segments of your customers classified by demographics, behaviors, interests or needs, and pain points. Having clearly defined Personas helps to identify what stage of the journey the customer is a part of.
2. Stages of the Journey: A common example would be awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty.
3. Touchpoints: Specific interactions between the customer and the company throughout the journey. Examples include website visits, email communications, customer service calls.
4. Customer Actions: Specific actions that a customer takes at each touchpoint (e.g., searching for products, making an online purchase, contacting support).
5. Pain Points: Issues, challenges, or frustrations experienced by the customer at each stage of the journey (e.g., broken email links, irrelevant or non-contextualized messaging, bloated forms).
6. Opportunities: Areas for improving the customer experience. Examples include progressive profiling, personalizing marketing messages, and ensuring the timeliness of delivery of the messages.

We covered some of the key elements of a Customer Journey Map. Let’s look at some of the key activities involved in creating one and how they can help support your marketing automation efforts and goals.

Creating a Customer Journey Map

1. Define Clear Objectives: The very first and most important step is outlining the purpose and goals of the customer journey map. What are you aiming to achieve? Create new engagement opportunities to enhance the experience. Or prioritize marketing strategies to help maximize ROI. Setting clear objectives can help identify the KPIs that can be used to accurately measure the performance and success of automated campaigns such as website visits/registrations, Average Order Value (AOV), and conversion rate.
2. Research and Collect Data: Gather insights about your customers motivations, concerns, and satisfaction levels through qualitative and quantitative research such as surveys, interviews, and customer feedback. Use data from various sources such as web analytics, CRM, eCommerce, social media, and Customer Service requests to reveal behavioral and interaction patterns. These data-driven insights can be used to refine and optimize automated campaigns. Understanding customer behaviors and preferences can facilitate the automation of loyalty programs to provide exclusive offers such as free product demos or VIP access to tradeshow events.

3.  Define Customer Personas: Create Customer Personas representing different segments of your target audience using data collected from step 2. Having a clear definition or criteria of who your customers are can help drive personalization. Messages can be made more relevant and contextualized to address specific needs or concerns of a customer at each stage of the journey. This will ultimately increase engagement and conversion rates.
4. Define Journey Stages: Outline the key stages of the customer journey from awareness to loyalty. This allows for greater alignment of marketing efforts and resources to each customer’s unique journey stage enabling more targeted and relevant automated campaigns.
5.  Identify Touchpoints & Interactions: Record how customers interact with your company at each touchpoint and channel (e.g., email, phone, chat). This can help automate messages at each stage of the journey. For example, triggering an email nurture campaign when a customer lands on a product page for the first time that includes a link to an educational webinar to learn about the key benefits that the product offers.
6. Identify Pain Points & Opportunities: Highlight areas where customers face challenges or issues and look for ways to add value or improve their experience. This will help discover new processes or process improvements and introduce opportunities for automation to enhance the overall customer experience.
7. Visualize the Journey: Use customer journey mapping tools to create the visual representation of the customer journey. Mapping personas to the different interactions and stages of the customer journey, helps to create a consistent and cohesive experience across the various touchpoints and channels. It also promotes timely and accurate communications ensuring that customers receive the right messages at the right time.

8. Implement Changes: Use data from the journey map to create an action plan to address the identified gaps, challenges, and areas of improvements. The plan should include resources, timeline, responsibilities, and the technology solutions needed to support the changes.
9. Validate, Refine & Iterate: Once changes have been implemented, it's important to continue to collect data and feedback from your customers to validate the primary goals of the customer journey map and iterate if necessary to make automation more efficient and effective.

By creating a customer journey map, you can visualize how customers interact with your company across the various touchpoints and channels, providing valuable insights about the customer’s motivations or common pain points throughout the experience journey. This enables companies to deliver more targeted, personalized, and effective marketing automation by prioritizing their efforts and resources to each customer’s unique journey stage.

The VASS team has helped many businesses map their customer journeys to lay the foundation for marketing automation success. We can help you too!  Connect with us to get started today.