Setting touchpoints along your customer journey
The customer journey is a powerful tool for business owners and marketers. It can help you identify the steps that customers take from awareness to purchase and beyond into retention and loyalty. In this post, we'll explore each step along the customer journey so that you can create strategies that will increase sales for your company!
The Importance of using the Customer Journey
The customer journey is a framework for designing and implementing a customer-centric marketing strategy. It’s based on the idea that your whole audience will take the same journey through the stages of awareness, consideration and purchase before they go through retention and become loyal customers.
The customer journey is an important tool in helping you understand your customers better as well as identify key touch-points along their path from awareness to loyalty.
The customer journey.
8 touch-points to Purchase
The first 3 stages of the customer journey will lead to a purchase. On average your customer will come into contact with your brand 8 times before reaching this third stage. Therefore, designing these 8 touch-points is an important task. Doing this effectively gives you the ability to push the customer down the stages and keep track of where they are on their journey. Let’s have a look at how to design your customer journey for the first 3 stages.
Awareness
The first stage is awareness. In this stage your customer is just learning of your business. They might see a post on social media or a poster in the city center. They might start to become aware of the problem your brand fixes but they’re not actively researching solutions yet.
Channels
Social Media profiles, print advertising, paid online advertising, and website.
Content
Content at this stage should focus on key product features. Keep it general. The customer is not looking for anything specific yet. Fun and informative posts always do well.
Also make sure that the customer has a good experience when browsing. When they find your Instagram page, the customer might navigate to your website link in the bio. What will they find when they get there? Whatever it is make sure your key offering is clear and that the page contains social proof and a call-to-action to move the customer down on their journey.
Tip: Even when tracking is difficult due to technical limitations or increasingly strict regulation, you can still approximate at what stage of their journey your customer is. If they are clicking the link in your Instagram bio, they might still be in the awareness stage. However, if they are visiting from a link in a downloadable white paper, they are definitely in the consideration stage. Make sure to tailor your landing pages to different sources of website traffic.
Consideration
After the awareness stage comes consideration. At this point the customer is aware of you and your competitors and they’re researching further to see whose offering suits them best. When a customer enters this stage they may be looking for a quote or exploring consumer price comparison websites. Here it is important to distinguish yourself from the competition and prove that you are the brand they should go with.
Channels
Paid online advertising, phone calls, live chat, email marketing, and website.
Content
Content at this stage should focus on differentiating yourself from the competition and using information from the awareness stage to build a relationship with your customer. Did they download a white paper about your product range? Send them an email offering help with selecting the right features for their purposes.
On your website you can offer a free consultancy call to talk with your customer and see how you can be of service. You can use the same strategy in your targeted paid advertising. Start advertising products they favorited on your website or specific features the customer showed interest in.
Tip: Targeted paid advertising at this stage appears only possible if you are collecting very detailed data on your website but this is not always true. Customers start looking for different things on search engines when they enter this stage. A customer in the awareness stage might look for “cloud storage” while in the consideration stage they might search for “cloud storage with team collaboration”. This second search shows that they are aware of specific features and have started comparing options that offer exactly what they’re looking for. Targeting these search queries with pages tailored to the consideration stage may be a good strategy.
Purchase
You’ve made it to the purchase stage. Congratulations! This is a crucial moment in your customer journey. You might think the cat’s in the bag, but a lot can go wrong at this stage.
Channels
Phone calls, chat, and website.
Content
This stage needs to be as frictionless as possible. If you’re running an online store make sure the stages of your checkout process run smoothly and reassure your customer that the their payment information is used securely. Speed is of the essence, do not let the customer get distracted with a ton of forms, automatically fill out whatever information you already have and keep everything else down to the essentials to fulfill the order.
Tip: Just before making a big purchase the customer may want to double-check that everything is as they expect / agreed to. At this stage they may want to get in touch with your over the phone or using a chat function on your website. Make sure you’re ready to answer any last-minute questions. Another way to do this is by putting an FAQ section at the bottom of the checkout page or displaying important product information in little information boxes.
Retention
At this point your customer can just start their journey anew when looking for their next purchase but providing them with the right communication can help them keep you top-of-mind. It is always more expensive to get a new customer than to sell to an old one which is why retention is an incredibly important metric of your business. It's not just about customer service, it's about product quality and value.
Channels
Email marketing and targeted paid campaigns.
Content
Email marketing can be used as a great way of staying in touch with customers over time. Check in with them occasionally: "How's it going?" or "What can we do better?" A simple question can go a long way toward building trust between you and your customer base. Using Email or targeted advertising you might also offer additional products or services that complement their previous investments. Remind them of your maintenance kits or offer the possibility to upgrade to a newer model.
Loyalty
Loyal customers are valuable assets. They’re more likely to spend money with you, recommend your product or service, and even refer others to your business.
Channels
Email.
Content
A great way to encourage loyalty is by providing special deals or freebies on certain occasions (like birthdays). These types of incentives can help build relationships between businesses and their customers that could lead them down the road towards becoming long-term clients or even lifetime partners! Also ask loyal customers for input. Allowing your customer to have a voice when it comes to new product features or CSR campaigns can foster real dedication towards your brand.
Conclusion
The customer journey is about creating a relationship with your customers. As we’ve seen, this starts with awareness and consideration before moving on to purchase, retention and loyalty — it may seem obvious, but remember that the path to keep customers loyal isn’t always. By thinking of all touch-points along their journey in advance, you can create customer experiences that are more tailored to their needs, which will keep them coming back for more!
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