Easy Steps to Optimize Your Customer Journeys for Better Customer Engagement and Conversion

Conversion is the goal of any advertising campaign. Then, there is customer engagement, which involves cultivating relationships between a company and its customers that go beyond mere transactions.

Conversion and customer engagement can only be achieved by optimizing your customer journey. Whereas optimizing your customer journey begins from understanding “Who you are targeting?” That is your buyer’s persona or alternatively, referred to as a customer avatar.

Basic Step to Optimize Your Customer Journey

You must first prepare the foundation for an excellent customer journey by following these steps:

1.    Understand Your Buyer Persona

A buyer persona or avatar is a thorough profile of your potential customer which includes having detailed answers to the following questions:

• Who your customers are?
• What are their habits?
• What are their interests and unique desires?
• What are their aspirations?
• What are their pain points/problem?

Once you have answers to these questions, you will be in a better position to direct your marketing efforts in the right direction and ensure your value proposition resonates with your customer base. For example, you will offer something that helps your IDP (Ideal Customer Profile) solve an existing problem e.g Amazon offering subscriptions to reduce purchase friction and time spent shopping for busy parents.

2.    Review Data to Identify Gaps

Knowing everything about your customer allows you to determine where the gaps are. Once you are aware of the gaps, you can develop a better strategy to overcome those gaps.  As mentioned frequently in our blogs, one of these data points is customer lifetime value. This will inform your marketing spend and customer acquisition journeys.

Further, you should understand your average consumer lifecycle, purchase value, and churn rate to further establish your journeys.

3.    Establish Your Key Performance Indicators

To improve your customers’ journey, know that what’s “measured” can be managed and improved.

But, with so many customer data point available, you may feel overwhelmed by what to measure and what to track. This requires you to identify/shortlist and then enlist metrics that indicate if the business is meeting its ideal customer journey goals.

To get started on your KPI journey, please refer to this blog

Actions to Improve Your Customer Journey

Now that you’ve laid this foundation, let’s look at what actions you can take to improve your customer journeys and increase your customer conversions.

1.    Identify Your Touchpoints and Create a Better Sign-up Process

You want to deliver a great product but a poor touchpoint like a sloppy website or off-target advertising may turn customers off. The good news is that most of these touchpoints are within your control.

a.     Qr Code at the Register

Registration can be made seamless and convenient for customers by using QR codes. A registration QR Code allows you to create a template that customers can use to send you an email as a way of registering. Your customers can scan the QR Code, fill in details, and click send once they’ve scanned the QR Code. This increases your data accuracy and reduces your checkout time at the register.

b.    Mobile

Many customers interact with your brand using their mobile devices. Therefore, if your sign-up process is not mobile-friendly, you will end up losing potential customers. Make your sign-up process easy for those who are interacting with your brand through their mobiles phone.   Some customers also prefer to interact with your brand via text message.

c.     Website

You can think of your customer’s website journey as all the interactions customers have with your website as they move toward their desired outcome. It’s important that your website is easy to navigate, has high loading speed, an easy signup process as well as payment options. Further, it is important to have clear calls to action to drive customer behavior.

2. Reward Customers for Giving You Demographic Information

Know that when you have more demographic information about your customers, you can market your products in a better way. But why should any customer give you more information? You can initiate some form of reward or discount or a free coupon program in return. These discounts and reward also help you provide better customer engagement and establish brand loyalty through personalization.

3. Create Multi-Channel Communication

Multi-channel communication helps in establishing customer engagement and keeping them well informed about your product, and upcoming offers. Multi-channel communication also works well as a reminder for customers so that they can benefit from a time-bound discount offer or an event.

• Email

Using email as your primary communication channel with your customers, you can nurture your leads into customers and increase sales. In addition, companies also email campaigns to maintain a continuous relationship with their existing customers by providing them with useful information and personalized content.

• SMS

SMS is the most direct, most personalized, and most reliable form of communication with your customer. Almost all top brands use this communication mode for a better customer experience and to ensure a higher open rate.

• Alerts

about important information offers, news, and discounts are also essential for customer engagement and conversion. Alerts can be staff or customer facing and are intended to directly impact purchase behavior when transacting.

4. Automate your Communication

To maintain healthy communication with your customers, technology integration and automation are essential. Automating your communication can help you optimize your customer journey in various ways such as strategically following a lead nurturing process, staying organized in establishing relationships with your customers, giving a personalized touch to your communications, and making informed decisions.

For example, you can automate your processes to do the following;

• Birthdays

Send your customer automatic messages on their birthday that can trigger them emotionally and they may decide to stay loyal to the brand. For example, you may initiate campaigns to offer discounts to customers on special occasions such as their birthdays.  Starbucks is a great example of using a birthday marketing framework to increase purchase frequency.

• Lapsed Customers

The average company loses between 20 and 40% of its customers per year, according to research. However, you have a much better chance of winning business from lost customers than from new prospects. According to research, the likelihood of successfully selling to lost customers is 20 to 40 percent, but the likelihood of making a successful sale to brand-new prospects is only 5 to 20 percent.

By automating the process, you can create a special discount campaign to attract lapsed or inactive customers. For example, a discounted product/membership for all those who haven’t made a purchase for the last three months.

• Abandoned Cart

The abandoned cart occurs when the user adds a product to the online shopping cart but doesn’t complete the purchase. Approximately 80.68 percent of retail shoppers abandon their shopping carts after adding items for to a variety of reasons. Communication with this customer can be automated to influence them to resume their buying process. This form of automated communication needs to be effective since there is a great chance of conversion.

 Conclusion

Understanding your Ideal Customer Profile, their purchase path, and what motivates them is critical to marketing success.  Automating your customer journeys and marketing efforts will enable you to attract, engage, and understand your IDC more efficiently and help increae your revenue.  Although all the above-mentioned steps and processes can help you achieve this objective, it is only a starting point to a sustainable, customized customer journey.

Please request a demo, or contact our sales team at sales@bloyal.com for more information.