Optimising the customer journey

If you're a marketer, you've likely heard about marketing automation for optimising the customer journey. And you might've researched a few of the available solutions and you may be advanced enough to be using one.

If you tick any of those boxes, you might be in the minority. Marketing automation (or "MarTech" as some are calling it) is fairly new. Also, it's related to another solution you're more likely to be familiar with; CRM (Customer Relationship Management). What's more, you can safely to assume most of us are familiar with CRM systems. Specifically, the giant in this arena is SalesForce, but there are plenty others including open source options with some excellent features.

So, marketing automation software is what fits in between lead generation and when they become your customer.

Marketing automation is the perfect CRM companion.

If you have a CRM, then you're halfway there to utilising marketing automation and therefore optimising the customer journey. We use the open-source system, Mautic. You can read why we do that here.

For the majority, their CRM collects data about their customers. For example, you might've inputted leads originating from your contact us section on your website, maybe from an event and, of course, your existing customers. Consequently, these are pretty common. The person responsible for sales will dip into the CRM to search for leads or an account manager might go in there to "connect" with existing customers. The problem here is that's a bit convoluted.

You've got two very different groups being handled in one place. Different actions are happening. You might send an email shot to your cold leads then update an existing customer record with something new you've learned about them. It becomes hard to distinguish a warm lead from an account you should be nurturing. Any marketer will know the basics of customer touchpoints and that you shouldn't be saying the same things to these two groups.

The crux is, both tasks require your time. This is where marketing automation steps in. It takes repetitive and timely tasks out of your day and still delivers a personalised approach to the people you're targeting based on scheduled events and their engagement behaviour.

Automation does not mean something isn't personal.

You may have scheduled a tweet or email, but that doesn't mean you didn't take the time to write it with the recipient in mind, based on what they want or need. That message is still coming from you, too, not a machine.

Involving CRM

You begin with marketing automation. This will track your visitors, activity on your website, social media and interactions with emails - or other online locations - at this point the user will be considered as a lead.

This kind of tracking isn't novel; it is essentially what Google Analytics does. That being, providing basic information for each of your leads. For example, things like how long they stayed, what pages they went to, what they clicked on. Easy enough.

Marketing automation is what takes the leads and guides them into your CRM. It will nurture those leads until they are your customer, and thus have a place in your CRM.

What techniques does marketing automation use in optimising the customer journey?

Landing Pages

You can create landing pages with your own branding within your marketing automation system. You can use these to collate more in-depth information about your website visitors ("leads", hopefully).

Your landing pages live on your domain, in your website. This gives the user a consistent and familiar flow. You don't want to scare them by sending them off to a third-party location.

A good landing page has a clear call to action. Maybe you want them to download a case study or whitepaper and you ask for their contact details before you grant access to it. Giving something of value back to your visitor in exchange for this information is really vital.

Profiles

Once they have given you some personal information, your marketing automation system begins building a profile for that visitor. Here is where the cool stuff starts happening. You get to know the person. You can see a history of how they've interacted with your site, what they're interested in and other information you can use to personalise their experience with you. It gives you the key to offering them something of value.

The moment a droplet hits a body of water

Drip Marketing Campaigns

Firstly, once you have some known leads you can put them into drip marketing campaigns. Then these allow you to direct relevant and valuable information toward your leads. Their responses trigger the next step in the campaign.

Secondly, your marketing automation system will allow you to decide these paths, the possible decisions to make and therefore the actions stemming from those decisions. A bit like a create your own ending comic book. You can set the timing of all of these elements, too.

You might want an action to happen as soon as the decision is made or perhaps you want your lead to have a little more time to process. For example, you might want to send an abandoned cart email from an e-commerce site within an hour or two of leaving. On the other hand, you might want to wait a couple of days before approaching a lead that filled in a form and downloaded a PDF.

Do you see what's starting to happen here?

Marketing automation is nurturing your potential new business leads and guiding them along the sales journey without you having to be hands-on. You can assign a point system to the actions so you can easily distinguish brand new leads from those further down the line.

Converting Leads into Sales

The final part of optimising the customer journey via marketing automation involvement is converting these much-nurtured leads into new customers. They've been weighted with points and you now have a comprehensive profile on them. You can now define given triggers that will engage at different stages.

This is where your CRM needs to suit up.

When your lead achieves a certain number of points or reaches a certain stage, they become a qualified lead and your marketing automation system should hand them over to your CRM. Now your CRM only contains quality leads who are expecting (and welcoming) your call.

Finally, you can use your marketing automation to maintain communication with your existing customers, too. Plus, you can keep them abreast of products and services that would be valuable to them.