In today’s market filled with many brands and options vying for attention, getting and keeping customers has become more challenging than ever. On top of that, today’s customer is more sophisticated and has higher expectations than ever before.
These digitally savvy customers are quickly moving away from brands that don’t offer them a positive or valuable experience. A study found that 86% of consumers will leave a brand they were once loyal to after only two to three bad customer experiences.
To keep up with the competition and meet the expectations of their customers, marketers must have a thorough understanding of their needs and behavior across all channels. This level of customer insight can only be gained with clean customer data.
Fortunately, recent technological developments have made it easier for marketers to collect and use data to improve the customer experience.
7 Steps to Build A Data Drive Customer Journey
We all understand by now that customer journey mapping is essential to success in the modern market. Understanding how your customers interact with your brand before, during, and after a purchase is the process.
However, too often brands create customer journey maps without using data. This can lead to inaccurate assumptions about your customers, resulting in a less-than-ideal customer experience. Using data is the best way to create an accurate customer journey map.
Here are seven steps you can take to make your customer journey more data-driven:
1. Gather Key Data
There are some key data sources you’ll need to collect to create an accurate customer journey map. Website analytics, social media listening, customer surveys, and sales data are all essential.
But one of the biggest challenges marketers face is interpreting this data and understanding what it means for the customer journey. Raw data isn’t useful by itself. It needs to be organized, analyzed, and shaped into something presentable.
Let’s say you’ve obtained some critical data from your Google Analytics account. You know that your website’s traffic is down, and your bounce rate is up.
But what does that mean for the customer journey? This is where marketing analysts come in handy. They can help you understand your data and how it affects the customer journey. If you don’t have the budget for a marketing analyst, there are software tools that can do the job for you.
Investing in customer journey mapping software can help you organize and interpret your data so that you can take actionable steps to improve the customer experience.
2. Create Smart Segments
Once you’ve gathered your data and understand what it means, you can start to create segments. Segmentation is key to creating a personalized customer experience.
Segmenting your customers allows you to target them with the right message at the right time. For example, you might segment your website visitors by their location or the pages they’ve viewed.
You can also segment your customers based on their interactions with your brand. For example, you might create a segment for customers who abandoned their shopping carts or customers who haven’t purchased in the last six months.
Creating segments is only half the battle. You also need to make sure you’re targeting the right segments with the right message. This is where automation comes in.
Automation allows you to send the right message to the right segment at the right time. Use automation to send targeted emails, SMS messages, and push notifications to guide your customers through their journey. Tools like Mailchimp and Hubspot make it easy to automate your marketing campaigns.
3. Increase Conversion By Optimizing Your Site
Your website is one of the most important touchpoints in the customer journey. It’s often the first place customers will interact with your brand.
Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your website and increase conversions:
- Use heatmaps, lead generation funnel analysis, and user session replays to understand what visitors are doing on your website and identify user experience issues.
- Use A/B and split tests to determine what design and copy elements resonate most with your customers.
- Use customer engagement tools to keep visitors engaged and prevent them from abandoning your site.
Here’s an example of heatmap data that can help you understand what visitors are doing on your website: