How to personalize the Customer Journey with Marketing Automation? Why is it important to do this? Find out with Blendee’s 7 best practices.
Understanding the customer journey of the user in complex buying dynamics spanning online and offline is certainly one of the cruxes of many marketers. Consumers are not all uniquely price-sensitive; many of them may even forgo an exhausting search for the lowest price if the user experience offered appears more reassuring and personalized. Let’s look together at seven best practices for personalizing the customer journey with marketing automation.
Driving the customer journey and not undergoing it
In a Harvard Business Review article from a couple of years ago we find a very interesting example of how a customer journey can be guided, instead of undergone. It talks about a solar panel company, Sungevity, which chose to proactively guide the user through all stages, taking the user step by step “from one experience to the next.” The journey begins when the user receives an email from Sungevity that contains a URL, with an image of his house taken from Google Earth: the solar panels are already rendered on the roof and immediately show what the end result might look like. Another click leads to an estimate page that considers the family’s consumption, the angle, the presence of nearby trees, and how much energy the system could actually produce in favor of significant savings. With a further click, the user is put in touch with a sales person who, by viewing the same page, can answer questions, clarify economic aspects and doubts.
The salesperson can, of course, provide him or her with much more information, such as references from neighbors who have adopted the same solution. Assuming that the potential buyer wants to think about it some more, each time he returns to the Sungevity site he is recognized and can find on the other side of the screen the same sales person who knows exactly at which of the point in the journey he is (and can consequently trigger push levers, such as an email to close the deal, schedule a visit, etc…). The journey continues, but the meaning is certainly clear to you.
Sungevity has customized each step of the journey making it so simple and straightforward that it leaves no time for the potential buyer to evaluate other competitors, beating them all on time and relevance.
Best practices for building a customer journey-based experience
Let’s take a guess at how the Sungevity team might have worked to create this type of user experience, identifying some best practices that underlie the implementation of a marketing automation strategy.
1. Analyze the user’s journey
It means listing all the touch points that enter the customer journey, not forgetting any digressions (online – offline). To know which points are most decisive in the journey and understand where the action might stop-or at the same time where the user might expect something-you need to collect all the data at your disposal. Much of this is quantitative data based on web analytics. On the other hand, it is absolutely essential to interview all business stakeholders with qualitative interviews that will better help you understand “hidden” dynamics.
Segment by profiles and buyer personas
Not all journeys are the same, the approach changes a lot for example between a new or a returning customer. In the first part we saw how one might approach a lead, but certainly one should not underestimate the enrichment of complexity of profiles as well. An example? Analyze the journey of an offline repeat buyer approaching the site for the first time, driven by an urgency. Imagining these scenarios through preliminary analysis can help you build buyer personas or create new segments.
Define a strategy for the intervention
To guide the user journey, we must first define a clear goal. What should the end result be? How do we want to accelerate the transition from one stage to the next? Can we skip some of them by taking more effective and streamlined action? It is a matter of identifying a strategy that covers all paths, with the goal of personalizing not only the message but the experience itself.
4. Define the appropriate channel for each intervention: in the intermediate steps of the journey
Redundancy and repetitiveness are the biggest risks. A poorly managed marketing automation project tends to bombard users with retargeting messages without taking into account what is happening. Therefore, it is critical to define the primary channel for each actionable goal in the journey and differentiate the content strategy for each individual user.
5. Test the ability to recognize the user
If marketing automation is not centrally managed, there is a high risk of intervening inappropriately: it is very unpleasant to send a discount for a product to a customer who has already purchased it or to insist on a sale if there is some critical issue going on, such as an open ticket with customer care. To be effective, one must be sure to recognize the user and link all the information on a single identifier. Second, anti-stress policies need to be established to avoid being overly insistent on all channels.
6. Involve all stakeholders present at each touch point
For the customer journey intervention to work, it is not enough to integrate all the data, but the project must be shared with all business functions so that each is aware of its role, as well as its goal, in a broader view of the customer experience. Indeed, it is critical to map out what each function’s intervention is at each stage of the journey and to coordinate them so that they can act in concert to create a frictionless and fully coordinated user experience.
7. Continuously analyze the results
To optimize tactics and revise strategy obviously requires continuous data analysis. Both general business kpi and individual channel kpi must therefore be defined and monitored.
Marketing Automation: enabling technologies for new professions?
Marketing automation makes it possible to manage all the steps of the customer journey, but while large-scale projects are not possible without the right technology, without a clear business vision and objectives, the results cannot be satisfactory. Projects like this require a great deal of effort on the part of the company, both in breaking down business silos and in reorganizing around the concept of experience. This is why real professional figures could be introduced, destined to understand data and design guided multichannel paths, with the aim of unifying awareness, sales and satisfaction into one joint goal.
