Understanding Customer Journeys
If you work for a marketing team in a company that sells a product or a service, then you know how hard it is to convert browsers into customers. Many of your potential customers spend hours or even days looking at your store, trying to decide whether they should buy the product or not – and sadly, most of them just don’t. That’s why you need to keep communicating with them across channels until they convert. Let’s understand what Customer Journeys are and why we need them in our marketing campaigns.
Understanding Customer Journeys
Table of Contents:
- What is the Customer Journey?
- Customer Journey Stages
- Benefits of Using Customer Journeys
- What Netmera Does Differently
- Start Your Journey Now
What is the Customer Journey?
The Customer Journey consists of actions your customers take before and after they make a purchase. Customers usually do not purchase instantly right after they find out about a product or brand for the first time. Many look at the product, search about the brand or review their options before deciding to purchase it or take action.
With Netmera’s Journey Builder Tool, you can prepare and optimize your conversions for all these steps and post-purchase activities. It allows you to create personalized and engaging customer journeys, therefore enhancing the overall customer experience and boosting conversions.
Customer Journey Stages
Now that we know what the customer journey is, let’s move to a broader chapter of customer journeys: the five stages of a customer journey.
Awareness
The first stage of the customer journey is the awareness stage. In the awareness stage, customers become familiar with the brand or the product through advertising, word-of-mouth, or social media. It is also the stage where the customer realizes that they have a problem, or a pain point, to solve in some time.
In almost every case, the awareness stage begins in the customer’s head even before they know it themselves as customers enter this stage as soon as they see a product or a brand on social media, from an influencer, with word-of-mouth, or through an advertisement. In this stage, website blogs, social media, or search engines are where the “potential” customer starts to search for the product or the brand.
Consideration
The second stage of the customer journey is the consideration stage. In this stage, the customers have done all the necessary research for the product or the brand they have encountered in the awareness stage.
Now, the customers realize that they actually need, or want this product or the service. So it is time for comparing brands or searching similar products from the brand, and their offerings.
What brands should be doing at this stage is to help customers make the decision about whether or not to buy the product. At this stage, your website and blog, search engines, and social media can be helpful for you to guide your potential customers to a final decision with product comparisons, advertisements, or if you are a B2B company – customer success stories or case studies.
At the end of this stage, your customers will have an answer in mind about whether they are ready to purchase or not. If they choose to purchase, our third stage of the customer journey begins. If not, the brand can keep pushing its potential customers into making the final decision with offers that are directly related to making a purchase. Product promotions can be helpful for converting potential customers into buyers.
Purchase
At the purchase stage, the customers have decided to purchase the product. Whether they use an online shopping website or prefer a physical store, we have successfully converted a potential customer to a regular one. If the purchased product is a service, then the customers have started their onboarding process, which means that 1:1 meetings, support, and success teams will be helpful for the customer to have a smooth onboarding experience.
Retention
You may think that the journey will end with the purchase stage but it never does. The retention stage comes after the customer purchases the product or service, and uses it for some time, and it is actually one of the most important stages for brands.
At the retention stage, the brands fight their way into making their customers stay with the brand and ensure that they don’t churn. Yes, we have successfully converted a browser into a buyer, but why stop there while we can convert them into a loyal customer?
At this stage, the customers’ thoughts about our service, our product, and everything we have done from the first stage to the fourth stage are important. For lower churn rates, companies can use survey & feedback products to know how the customer experience was from beginning to end and make improvements to their services. For services that the customer has purchased, a good onboarding process may be the key to lower churn rates, and good customer success management can also help companies to understand their weaknesses to fix and opportunities to grow.
Advocacy
The advocacy stage is the stage where the customer speaks about their experience with the brand or the company, whether it is positive or negative. At this stage, the customer will promote the product or service to their family and friends, colleagues, or followers – or they will do the complete opposite.
If your customers are not happy about the product, they can do many things: they can communicate with your customer experience teams, sales representatives, your social media accounts, or simply call your company. It is important to create 1:1 experiences during this stage and ensure that their problems are fixed for good.
If your customers are happy with the product, you can work your way into navigating them into new purchases with discounts and promotions, monthly newsletters, and keep communicating with them through various channels like mobile and push notifications, e-mail, sms, or pop-ups.
Benefits of Using Customer Journeys
Personalized Customer Experience
A journey builder tool will help you deliver personalized customer experiences based on customers’ needs and preferences. You can easily share the right message at the right time with each customer and capture their attention to boost your sales and revenue.
Enhanced Customer Loyalty
Using a journey builder tool for your campaigns will help you boost your brand loyalty with individually crafted customer journeys. It enables continuous customer interactions, helps you empower customer relationships, and therefore fosters brand loyalty.
Optimizing the Journey Flow
Once you set up your journey builder tool and start your customer journey flows for your brand, you can check out the data and leverage it to optimize the customer journeys at different stages. You can also identify weak points, and make the necessary adjustments for a maximized customer experience. Moreover, making improvements will enhance customer satisfaction and optimize conversion rates for your brand.
Integrating Omnichannel Marketing Strategies
Having a journey builder tool will help you engage with your customers through various channels and unify your marketing strategies. With a journey builder tool, you can deliver the right message at the right channel and even A/B test these channels to provide your customers with a consistent experience.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Journey orchestration will also help you gain better insights into your customers’ behaviors and preferences. It helps you make data-driven decisions, develop more effective marketing strategies, and achieve better results.
Save Time & Resources
Using a journey builder tool will help you automate your marketing campaigns individually for your customers and save you time and resources by automating your campaigns rather than manually running them.
What Netmera Does Differently
Unlike many other customer journey tools, Netmera has no limits or boundaries for the number of users in your journeys. You can include millions of users and create interactions without any limitations. Netmera gives you the ability to create an unlimited number of journeys.
With Netmera’s user branch feature, you can add conditions to your journey steps based on users’ standard or custom profile attributes. For example, after a specific step in the journey, you can create a journey branch where users who have reached that step and belong to segment X are presented with a campaign tailored to that segment, while those in segment Y continue with a different journey.
With Netmera’s A/B Testing feature, you can also test your journey channels, and measure which flow generates better conversions. This will allow you to instantly view your results, and create the most effective journey flows for your customers.
Moreover, Netmera’s Delay feature gives you the ability to add delays between your journey steps. You can easily create complex journey structures the way you desire. This feature offers a more personalized and efficient way of engaging with users and results in improved user experiences and increased campaign effectiveness.
Also, while building your journeys, you can trigger the timing at a specific date or time, recurringly, or according to specific user actions. Netmera also has the ability to trigger actions based on time, action, or API. Plus, you can perform a user update within Netmera’s Journey Builder Tool.
For example, if you have a campaign scenario that will be valid starting from Thursday morning until Thursday evening every week, you can use this feature to implement the campaign. This feature will allow the user to benefit from the campaign once a week, and prevent users from benefiting from the campaign over and over again.
Start Your Journey Now
Now that we have covered everything you need to know about Customer Journeys, you can start building perfect journeys that engage with your customers however you like. To learn more about Netmera’s Customer Journeys, you can visit our page or read our article about Netmera’s Journey Builder Tool. And if you want to get more conversions right away, you can contact us to schedule a meeting with one of our team members or get a demo.
