10 Steps for Creating an Effective Customer Journey Using Marketing Automation

In the digital marketing landscape, creating a converting customer journey can be what separates a business from success and failure.

The customer's journey is the sum of experiences a potential customer goes through from their first meaningful encounter with your brand to making a purchase or subscribing to your service.

Typically, the length of the customer journey depends on the industry and sales cycle. As a result customer journey maps are essential tools for building a positive customer experience.

For example, purchasing a dress on an ecommerce website usually has a shorter and simpler customer journey than subscribing to a marketing automation software solution with a yearly contract.

The key to figuring out customer journeys lies with your potential customers’ decision-making time.

In ecommerce, there are no store employees that can engage customers and walk them through the purchasing process. The bulk of information and insights come from a Google search.

So the customer journey is typically longer, more complex, and relies more on the behavior of the customer compared to an offline store.

The purchase of new sneakers is a good way to showcase the complexity of a customer journey.

For a start

Customers have more options and can find offers from a wide variety of brands and types from all over the world. And that might make the shopping experience  and customer experience confusing.

Additionally, since most customers can’t try the shoes on, they would likely have to rely on reviews and brand reputation.

Thus, ecommerce sites need to provide the consumer with a smooth, satisfying, comfortable, and reliable shopping experience and customer journey.

Most ecommerce brands rely on new and advanced technologies in order to provide this customer experience, one of them being marketing automation software.

Using Marketing Automation to Create a Better Ecommerce Customer Journey

When you're automating your marketing efforts and letting the software do the hard work for you, there is less room for mistakes. That means more room to grow your client base and subscriber lists.

The process of building and fine-tuning an automated tool for ecommerce marketing begins with forming an in-depth winning strategy on how to use it for the best customer journey outcome.

This process of creating a customer journey will help better understand your business model and how to grow it.

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A market research study by Nucleus Research found that marketing automation drives business sales by 14.5% while also reducing marketing costs by 12%.

This explains why according to Social Media Today’s, “State of Marketing Automation Survey Report (2019),” 75% of participants responded that they use at least one marketing automation tool.

Now that you understand the importance of the customer journey, here are the top 10 steps for creating a winning customer journey that will help you stand out in the highly competitive market of ecommerce.

 

10 Steps for Creating a Winning Customer Journey

1. Identify Your Marketing Persona

The very first step to creating a successful customer journey is identifying your marketing persona.

A marketing persona is the subject of the customer journey, who are the people that might need and be interested in your product and what are their pain points.

To identify it correctly, you should use a customer journey map of attributes and behavior, including shopping habits and demographic variables such as age, location, job, and role.

Correctly identifying your marketing persona can help create a more personalized and overall better customer journey experience for your audience.

An accurate marketing persona and journey map will help you generate more quality leads in the customer journey who will also convert faster and might spend higher amounts and greatly benefit your ROI.

2. Find the Perfect Marketing Automation Software

Once you've done your market research and identified your marketing persona, it is time to find ecommerce marketing automation software that meets your requirements.

Look for features such as automated abandoned cart or follow up emails. Decision-makers in ecommerce know how important these simple tasks are in the customer journey.

The right marketing automation software will significantly reduce your workload, cut costs, and help you create a better customer journey and increase profits.

3. Build Your Marketing Messaging, Tone of Voice, and Branding

For successful marketing, you need to build a strategy that will help you create engaging and interesting content. As well as reduce the amount of time-consuming tasks you need to complete.

Identifying your marketing persona and creating content that they would find interesting will help you fine-tune these aspects to maximize engagement and guide your leads through the customer journey of becoming loyal customers.

Take a look at an example by ASOS, the popular online retailer.

Their newsletters are always on brand, with a white background, simple imagery, and they get straight to the point with huge discounts.

This is a great example of both the messaging and tone of voice which are always similar and the clean, white background with a single image as the main focus.

Moreover, ASOS stays on brand with the same messaging on the website and on other marketing channels as well.

4. Spread Your Marketing Messages Across All of Your Channels

Once you have fine-tuned your messaging, tone of voice, and branding, it is time to start spreading your marketing messages across all your channels including PPC, SEO influencer marketing, and social networks.

According to the 2019 social media report by Statista, around 45% of the global population are on social networks.

Thus, your social media marketing messages have the potential of reaching wide audiences and creating a bigger follower and subscriber list and building customer loyalty. Buy you need to post at the right time.

When using social platforms to increase potential audience growth, one should keep in mind that there are plenty of opportunities outside of PPC campaigns or ads.

A great example of an organic revenue and growth source is using influencer marketing on social sites, and building your brand's awareness using positive feedback from the new celebrities of the era.

As an example

The vitamin and supplements ecommerce brand, Sugar Bear Hair, used influencer marketing on social channels to create a massive, seemingly organic awareness of their brand.

Once audiences started noticing the brand, they quickly moved through the customer journey and to the consideration stage and then to the conversion stage.

Keep in mind that marketing automation is crucial to their customer journey success since vitamins are exhaustible products, creating business growth means reselling the vitamins.

Marketing automation software would help a brand like this keep in touch with customers after the first purchase, offering items that relate to the vitamins, or bigger packs in order to grow the revenue.

All this through one simple hashtag, used by influencers on popular social networking sites.

5. Build Your Contact/Subscriber List

According to a study, the effort of attracting new customers can be 5 times more expensive than keeping current ones.

For this reason, businesses should focus on customer retention and create valuable and long-lasting relationships with current customers as a key part of the customer journey.

One of the best ways to ensure you engage with your customers and focus on customer retention is to build a subscriber list.

When you create your list, be sure to segment as much as possible, as they will help create multiple mailing lists that are more relevant to specific groups of subscribers.

This process will help you avoid sending irrelevant messages to subscribers who might eventually unsubscribe while also create a more personal and powerful marketing strategy.

6. Create Your Critical Automations

Ecommerce businesses need to deal with large amounts of data to effectively engage with their customers. So, mapping the customer journey is no easy feat.

For example

To provide customers with the most relevant sales and offers, you need to keep track of their latest purchases and items they have added to their carts and perhaps abandoned.

Tracking, managing, and acting based on these amounts of data are almost impossible without automation.

Automating as many stages as possible throughout the customer journey will help you convert leads into advocate customers.

Start the automation process by creating the most critical ecommerce marketing automation such as welcome automation for new customers, an item that is back in stock, special sales, and other follow-up emails.

Image Source: dribbble.com 

7. Build More Complex Automation

After you have your critical automation in place, start working on more complex automations that focus on customer retention using journey maps.

Use these complex automations to engage with your valued customers and reward them with unique offers.

You can create them based on a variety of scenarios or customer’s activities to engage with them or offer them personalized rewards such as coupons and promotions.

For example

You can create a special workflow for the customers after they made a purchase, which turns into a VIP workflow after they made a second purchase.

8. Use A/B Testing as Much as Possible

A/B testing is a method for determining which content, design, or functional elements are more successful with your audience to maximize marketing efficiency in the customer journey.

You can use an A/B testing automation software to determine the best possible elements that will get the most CTR and generate more quality leads through a positive customer journey.

For example

If you try to decide between two types of banners, you can use an A/B testing tool to rotate between the two and see which one gets a higher CTR percentage.

Arono is a Danish company with a weight loss, diet plan, and workout app that uses a subscription model.

The first time they ran an A/B testing experiment to determine which background is more effective for their email newsletter subscriber form.

In the experiment, Arono rotated between both backgrounds exampled below and found that the first design had a 50% better conversion rate than the first.

This showcases how ecommerce businesses can use A/B testing and effective email marketing to drive sales with a responsive customer journey.

Image Source: sleeknote

Image Source: sleeknote

9. Constantly Tweak and Improve

Always check if your emails are performing as expected in terms of open rates and CTR.

If one of the emails on your automated workflow doesn't seem to get to the average open rates, try to determine what went wrong and how you can fix it in future emails.

The process of understanding what works in the customer journey and learning from your mistakes will help fine-tune your marketing messages and improve your conversion rates.

Image Source: pixabay.com

10. Inquire customers to determine the best marketing strategy

If a client hasn’t opened an email in a while, send them a follow up email with a survey inquiring about the reason.

Since you might end up blacklisted if subscribers keep ignoring your emails,  it is important to use a survey to understand how to improve your messages to avoid hurting your deliverability and business.

Customer satisfaction surveys are especially important in ecommerce as they can show you how customers think you are doing and how you can improve.

Customer satisfaction surveys are also great for customer retention as they allow customers to post their feedback makes them feel valued and more connected with your brand.

How do you do that?

Here is an example of an email customer survey by the streaming service, Netflix, designed to allow customers to provide feedback on how satisfied they are with the content on Netflix.

Image Source: wp.com

Image source: wp.com

Netflix can use the customer journey feedback to offer content that caters to its customers and provide a better viewing experience.

Ready to Create an Effective Customer Journey?

In conclusion, a recent report published by Cision estimated that by 2024, the size of global marketing automation will grow from the 2019’s $3.3 billion today to $ 6.4 billion.

Thus, it is no surprise that marketing automation tools are the future of the ecommerce customer journey when it comes to any new business.

Correctly using marketing automation tools to optimize your customer journey can make the difference between a struggling and a thriving business.

Use our 10 steps above to create your own winning ecommerce customer journey and propel your business to the future with marketing automation.