Why is it important to monitor Customer Journey and Customer Lifetime Value? How does it help you increase the value of the customer relationship? Let’s look at it together.
We already know how Marketing Automation allows us to aggregate different sources of information together and segment our audience. It also allows us to monitor the customer journey of the user and thus helps us improve and increase the value of the relationship between customers and the brand, let’s see how.
A premise about the customer journey
The issues that need to be addressed in a marketing automation project serving the customer experience are not only technical (data selection and accessibility, storing, platforms, etc.), but also business issues and relate to a broader strategy of managing the relationship with one’s consumer.
Therefore, at the first stage, one needs to know how to answer the following questions:
- When and how does the company meet the customer?
- Who are the people or activities that come into relationship with him?
- Where and on what channels does the interaction take place?
- How to reengage people when they no longer interact the brand?
To start a marketing automation project, you need to map the customer journey, understand where the information is coming from, determine when and how the brand intends to interact with the user. Based on this it will be possible to segment users taking into account their online and offline behavior, putting this information at the service of business objectives.
A segmentation based on the user lifecycle: from lost customer to hero.
One of the advantages of automation, as we have said repeatedly, is timing. So we are talking about the ability to go into action immediately, as soon as the user changes state, thus entering a new segment.
Let us try to identify some useful segments for managing the user lifecycle, knowing full well that each of these will need to be detailed by industry and business model.
- New: is a user who just got in touch with the brand but about whom we still have little information
- Lead: is a qualified user interested in a product or service
- Waiting: is a user who is not interacting with us, but has performed actions recently
- At risk: he is a probably lost user, as he has not interacted with us for a long time
- Lost: he is a lost user
- Hero: is a frequent buyer, high value customer who is highly engaged with our brand
- Occasional: is an occasional customer
- Repeat: is a customer who has made a certain number of purchases in a given period
- Ghost: is a customer who interacts with our brand but still anonymously.
One of the key tasks that any marketing department should do is to be able to clearly define metrics to distinguish these different types of users.
How to monitor the Customer Journey to improve CLV?
Monitoring and improving the customer journey is a key process for maximizing our customer lifetime value (CLV). The customer journey is the path of interactions that the user has with the brand, before and after the purchase; the path that takes him from discovering our brand to becoming, if we have done it right, an active promoter of it in the market through his word-of-mouth. It is an obstacle path of constant interruptions and interactions: site visits, store visits, emails received and sent, reviews read, product comparisons, etc.
When we analyze the customer lifecycle as it relates to the customer journey we take action on our ability to keep the person hooked on the brand, accelerating the sales pipeline, taking into account everything we know about the interactions that have occurred end to that moment. Let’s take a few examples:
- Send a personalized pop up to someone who has been browsing for some time(leads)
- Sending an abandoned cart recovery email in an eCommerce (waiting)
- Propose an upsell product to a regular customer who has called a toll-free number after seeing it on the site (hero)
- Doing retargeting on social after a customer has touched at least 3 touchpoints (occasional)
Today, thanks to marketing automation, the customer journey is not something we undergo, but something we can shape in real time based on the actual interactions (or non-interactions) of our customer. Driving it, along with data, must undoubtedly be strategic choices that aim to increase the value of the of the relationship with our consumer.
We can decide beforehand what kind of experience we want each user to have depending on whether they are hero or lost-this is the customer experience. Monitoring the customer journey is about knowing how people interact with the company, with the goal of continually improving and learning what the best journeys are for each type of customer in order to design new and increasingly engaging experiences.
