Customer Journey

Understanding your customers’ journey is key to sending them the right message at the right moment. It’s essential for building relationships with your audience, and it helps you pinpoint when, how, and why key performance indicators (KPIs) fluctuate.

The customer journey tells the story of a prospect encountering your business and the steps they take toward conversion, or purchase, and beyond. It’s not necessarily a linear journey—not all customers follow the same path from one step to another. They may encounter obstacles that delay or prevent them from making a purchase. They might also receive marketing content that propels them toward a purchase, subscription, brand loyalty, or another end goal for your business.

When crafting an email marketing strategy, it’s essential to understand your business’s customer journey.

Start with these 5 stages

Customer journeys often align with the 5 key stages in lifecycle marketing, and this can be a great place to begin mapping:

1. Acquisition. Acquiring customers is vital for any business, and it’s essential to attract contacts to your audience. Signing up for your email marketing or following one of your social media pages typically comes after a customer has learned about your business. At this point, they may be researching your brand alongside several others. So, it’s vital to make a good impression with an automated welcome series. Use this moment to share what your business offers, set expectations about what you’ll send them, provide discount codes, and gather more information about them (like their birthday or preferences). Here are some more email marketing campaign tips to get you started.
2. Consideration. The consideration stage is when a person thinks about moving from a prospect to a customer. For example, a customer may browse your e-commerce store, adding items to their basket. Then, for whatever reason, they close the tab and abandon their cart. Adding items to their basket brings them close to a potential transaction, and that sale can still happen with a timely reminder. Automated abandoned cart emails are a highly effective way to bring customers back at this stage in their journey. If items in the basket are going out of stock, create a sense of urgency by telling them that there are only a few left, or include customer reviews to convince them.
3. Purchase. Marketing doesn’t end when a customer makes a purchase. Marketing is about communication and communication is very important at the point of sale. Be sure to send order notifications, thank you notes (especially to first time shoppers), and product follow-up emails. Include product recommendations in personalized emails.
4. Retention. Keeping customers is essential for all businesses. There are many ways to build loyalty, like offering discounts to your best customers, acknowledging important dates like birthdays, and asking customers for their feedback. If you want customer feedback, send emails that remind them to provide it and thank them when they do. These engaged customers are extremely valuable, so you should treat them accordingly. Consider offering them exclusive content, like the latest offers and sneak previews.
5. Re-engagement. Even inactivity can be a touchpoint on a customer’s journey. There are many opportunities to strengthen your relationship with your audience, even when some contacts haven’t interacted with your business lately (or ever). Highlighting the anniversary of a contact’s subscription can help bring them back. You can also re-engage a customer by sending them special offers. It’s important to remind unengaged customers how important they are to your business.