Customer journeys

I was recently asked to speak at an event. Using my standard marketing jargon, I kept referring to a customer journey in my speech. “Customer journeys can be used to nurture your existing clients or even convert prospective leads into a purchase; You must remember to encourage human engagement as often as possible when designing your customer journeys; Never forget to allow your customer journey to do its job, etc.”

At the end of the talk I felt quite proud of myself, thinking I’d got that message across. But a lonely hand was raised in the audience: “Uhm, what is a customer journey?”

Shock

With that new-found insight and vigour, I decided to create enough content on the matter to help the greater public understand what I take for granted.

What is a customer journey? Why is it useful? How do I create one? How do I implement them? These, among other, questions will be answered by myself and my team in a series of blog posts and dedicated email courses we’ve put together.

This blog post is merely an introduction to all of this content. Be sure to stay tuned to this channel so you don’t miss a thing. Let’s begin the journey… 

What is a customer journey

A journey is of course a path of some sort that you embark on, with a starting point and a destination. It’s the same for a customer journey, except this is a path that the supplier/service provider sets out FOR the customer.

The standard way customers engage with your properties online is to visit your website and follow self-driven actions of interest. They don’t necessarily find all the pages that would be useful to them. Now just imagine sitting next to them and telling them which pages to visit or which items to click on because you know the product best and can share the information that addresses their needs exactly. That’s what a customer journey entails. It’s a pre-designed path that’ll lead a customer/prospect to a pre-planned destination of your choosing. 

You can lead a visitor on a journey using multiple channels such as pop-up software on your website and call to action buttons. You can even do it off-website through advertising. But the most successful channel in the market is using a series of emails. This will be the main channel we focus on in our course.

What’s required when creating a customer journey?

Vital elements to create a successful journey are:

• An in-depth knowledge of your products and services
  • Why it’s needed
  • How it sells
  • How long it takes to sell
  • Which information is needed to convince someone to buy it

• An understanding of your target market
  • What makes them tick
  • What they need
  • How they buy and make decisions
  • Which products they want

• An understanding of the engagement points you can offer
  • Telephonic
  • Email
  • Face to face
  • Teleconferencing

• Thorough planning
• A kick-ass automation tool (Headalight will help with that)
• Objective eyes and diligent reporting

We’ll focus on the above-mentioned elements in a bit more detail in the next few posts. I encourage you to make contact with me if you have any questions or suggestions. Also, if you would like to sign up for our customer journey course, please click on the banner below.