What is a Customer Journey?

Customer journeys encompass the relationship that a company endeavors to make between themselves and their niche audience.

In other words, it is the journey that your lead takes from being a stranger to your product or service to becoming a loyal customer.

The websites are his path, the product or services his destination, and you, the marketer, are the guide. Traversing uncharted or precarious paths can lead a traveler astray. This is why it is your job to direct this poor wanderer to his final destination safely and quickly.

The Importance of Customer Journeys to Your Marketing Campaign

Your marketing toolbox has all the road signs you need to navigate the prefect campaign. But you must accurately map out this specific lead’s journey or you might accidentally send him into the depths of the jungle (or worse, other parts of the World Wide Web).

This is the art of crafting a customer journey. That is, your end goal can’t only be to make a sale. Otherwise customers will sense your self-serving motives and look for service elsewhere. Instead, your marketing must be driven by a desire to meet your customers’ needs, fulfill their desires and genuinely help them out of a negative situation.

The way to do this is by crafting customized marketing based on your lead’s individual behaviors, patterns and preferences. This is the importance of customer journeys.

The Journey Begins

Understanding is the cornerstone of action, but it’s just the beginning. Building a customer journey is an integral part of marketing that will allow you and your team to evaluate the lead’s present position and predict future actions, enabling you to accurately deliver the appropriate marketing tools needed for him to complete his journey (by becoming a full-fledged customer).

Journeys begin with triggers that will set off some kind of action from within your system. The triggers are what get the journey started; the action is what the system will do (i.e. what form of marketing will be launched); and the conditions you set are the requirements a lead needs to meet in order for the action to be applicable to them. Take a look at this concrete example to help clarify the process:

Visitors to your website who have placed items into their carts without purchasing for more than 24 hours should receive a reminder email, perhaps including a free shipping coupon.

The trigger? An idle shopping cart.

The action? Let’s send them a reminder email.

The condition? The cart must be loaded for 24 hours before the customer gets the reminder.

All three elements can be anything you define them as, and they can be as broad or as specific as you like.

Once you’ve begun utilizing customer journeys to optimize your marketing schemes, it will baffle you that you ever used any other method. Experience the difference that an organized, optimized and intuitive Optinize leads database can have on your overall ROI this year.