Understanding how customers interact with your brand and what drives their behavior is essential for making informed business decisions that can positively impact your bottom line.
In this blog post, we'll explore the benefits of gaining visibility into customer journeys and provide tips for getting there.
What is a Customer Journey?
A customer journey refers to a customer's entire experience with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. It encompasses all touchpoints with your brand, including your website and pillar pages, social media channels, customer service interactions, and more.
By understanding the customer journey, you can gain insight into:
- What motivates your customers
- How they make purchasing decisions
- What barriers may exist that prevent them from converting, upgrading, or sharing positive experiences with their networks
Why is Visibility into Customer Journeys Important?
Gaining visibility into customer journeys is crucial for several reasons:
- It allows you to identify pain points: By understanding the customer journey, you can pinpoint areas where customers may encounter friction or dissatisfaction. This insight can help you improve your customer experience and reduce churn.
- It helps you make data-driven decisions: Understanding customer behavior provides valuable data that can inform decision-making across multiple departments, from product development to marketing and customer service.
- It can drive revenue growth: By optimizing the customer journey, you can improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and ultimately drive revenue growth.
Tips for Gaining Visibility into Customer Journeys
- Map the customer journey: The first step in gaining visibility into customer journeys is to map out customers' touchpoints with your brand. Start by identifying all touchpoints, understanding the customer's mindset at each touchpoint, and documenting any pain points or areas of friction. These templates can get you started.
- Collect and analyze data: To gain insight into customer behavior, you need to collect and analyze data across all touchpoints. This includes tracking website interactions, paid and organic social media engagement, customer service interactions, and more. Unless you are using a tool that combines all of these data sources, you may need to consolidate them from Google Analytics, social media channels, your ticketing tool, etc.
- Use analytics tools: Many analytics tools can help you gain visibility into customer behavior. These tools can help you track customer interactions, identify patterns, and gain insights to inform decision-making. Whether you use one tool or many, make sure they are properly set up to track as much relevant data as possible.
- Implement customer feedback mechanisms: Gathering feedback from customers can provide valuable insight into their experience with your brand. Consider implementing customer feedback mechanisms, such as surveys or customer reviews. This will help you gain first-hand experience about the customer journey.
- Collaborate across departments: Gaining visibility into customer journeys requires collaboration across multiple departments, including marketing, product development, and customer service. By working together, you can develop a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior and identify opportunities to improve the customer experience.
Understanding your customer journeys in a hyper-detailed way enables sales and marketing teams to provide more value, be more strategic with their communications, and have more transparency into which tactics and channels are working best. But, you need the proper infrastructure to generate the level of visibility that incites action.
Are You Set Up for Success?
Ask yourself, does your CRM or marketing agency provide at-a-glance information on:
- Goal tracking: How are you progressing against your target MQL, SQL, opportunities, time in pipeline, customer acquisition costs?
- Campaign tracking: Do you have a detailed view into which campaigns are performing the best and most precise campaign tracking that can be associated with a specific company or contact record?
- Heat mapping: How much visibility do you have into your website traffic? Do you know what forms or modules on your site convert most? Do you know where your site’s friction points are or where visitors may be dropping off most frequently?
- Historical visitor tracking: If a visitor comes back to your site multiple times, can you easily stitch together those insights to formulate a comprehensive user journey?
- Ad retargeting: Are you able to easily retarget prospects with relevant ads once they leave your site?
- Google Keyword Rank Tracking: Do you know where you show up in the search results, or what keywords you should be zeroing in on to generate more qualified traffic to your site?
If you don’t have access to these insights, you’re missing out on at least some of your total addressable market, which can negatively impact your bottom line. But, if you have a data intelligence system in place to capture each click, it becomes easier to understand your prospects and customers: their interests, hobbies, purchase history, buying behavior, and more. By capturing this information, you can start to build complete customer profiles at a one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many view, pulling out prospects that map back to your ICP most directly.
Want Agency Help to Illuminate Your Dark Customer Journeys?
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