Customer Journey – Do you know your customers?
How do you improve the purchasing process and ensure positive shopping experiences for your consumers?
Customer Journey is a marketing term that describes the individual cycles that a customer goes through before deciding to purchase a product or service. All points of contact between a client and a brand, product or service are counted as customer journeys. This includes not only the direct interaction points between customers and companies, such as ads, commercials or the content of your website, but also the indirect contact points at which the opinions of other consumers about your services are sought. A solid understanding of the customer journey is a key factor for customer-focused marketing and sales.
How does Customer Journey work?
With the help of tracking technologies, the customer journey is particularly interesting in online marketing, as the behavior of potential customers can be mapped very well here. A Customer Journey Analysis reveals all contact points of a prospective customer with your company and uses the resulting data to optimize your marketing strategies. Furthermore, it should also be clarified which specific contact points were decisive for the purchase of a product or whether several different ones ultimately contributed to the decision.
The Customer Journey in 5 phases:
- Awareness for a product is awakened (inspiration)
- Favorability – The interest for the product is increased (Favorization)
- Consideration – The customer considers the purchase of the product (wish)
- Intent to Purchase – The intention to purchase becomes concrete (impetus)
- Conversion – The product is purchased (implementation)
How do I apply this profitably?
Only by understanding the motivation of your customers you can structure your touch points to create an effective and successful buying process for your prospects. The tool of choice is a Customer Journey Map, which shows you the current process from the first to the last checkpoint. In this way you can see whether marketing strategies lead to success and how they can be adapted if necessary.
To finally start your Customer Journey Map, you must first collect valuable data about your clients and prospects. Thanks to your individual CRM solution, you have completely documented all customer behavior.
You must pay attention to these 3 points:
Realign your business through inbound marketing!
Instead of trying to discover your customers through outbound marketing, you can let your customers find you through inbound marketing. Expensive and inefficient outbound marketing only discourages potential prospects, as it is more likely to be perceived as disruptive and annoying and thus creates negative associations with your brand. Inbound marketing, however, is the creation of informative content that benefits the interested customer. First of all, it attracts attention and then it sells. By creating a customer journey, you can understand what your customers are interested in and optimize your marketing strategies accordingly.
Define a new target group.
Using your CRM software, such as SugarCRM, you have thoroughly documented every customer movement, making it easy for your marketing experts to identify one or more target groups for your products and services based on all the data collected.
The mentality of customer orientation!
It can be difficult for fast-growing companies to keep the customer orientation of every department high. A clear Customer Journey Map helps your company to align strategies so that the customer and therefore the profit are always in the foreground.
In our rapidly growing society, we must be able to react optimally to the slightest changes in the market at all times. With Sugar this is not a problem.