Almost every day, you must have heard people talking about Digital Transformation. You must have seen many small & big businesses trying to ride this digital Transformation wave as well. However, many businesses or marketers still struggle to understand their customer’s entire journey.
Reason?
Constant changes in customer expectation, preferences, and buying behavior!
Now to understand your customer’s mindset, it’s essential to study their entire customer journey.
But what is a Customer Journey?
Every day, customers interact with businesses in dozens of ways. The way, the time, and the order in which every customer interacts on various media and with different technologies to select the right product or service vary. This entire process of walking through multiple channels to interact with businesses to select the best outcome is nothing but Customer Journeys.
A customer journey is an entire interaction a customer has with a company. Every customer lifecycle encompasses various customer interactions across all channels, devices, and touchpoints.
The customer journey can be divided into several stages. Each stage represents a person’s current stage of decision-making. So, let us explore the five stages of the customer journey in detail.
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Awareness
Customer awareness is the first stage of the customer life cycle. The potential buyers have no prior knowledge of you. It’s your job to teach them about what you do and how you do it. The goal is to generate more interest in your brand and demonstrate how you can help them.
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Consideration
This is the point at which the user considers purchasing your product. This is the point at which they may begin to compare your products to those of competitors. Brand awareness, familiarity with the brand, known history, and perceived quality and service can influence a sale to the more familiar or preferred brand. In this stage, try to raise brand awareness.
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Purchase Decision
This is the decision stage! Now your prospective customer is ready to select from their options and purchase. Make it easy for your prospects to locate you! An in-person/virtual personalized demo is a great way to speak with candidates interested in your complex B2B tool. As you walk them through your prized product, this will help you build a solid relationship and answer any questions they may have.
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Retention
When a customer makes a purchase, many businesses believe that the customer journey has ended. However, this is an entirely false assumption. Customers and businesses move into the retention stage together after making a purchase. Following the customer’s purchase delivery, this stage focuses on keeping them happy. Customer loyalty is built through constant communication.
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Advocacy
Last but not least, the customer journey ends with becoming a brand advocate who is happy to promote your business through word-of-mouth marketing. So, it is important to pay attention, stay connected and respect people who make your brand successful.
Nowadays, there are various advanced tools and technologies available in the market. Using these tools and technologies, marketers can build, capture, & study their customer journeys, taking their business to the next level. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder is one such tool that can assist you in this situation. It gives you more control & insight into the customer journey and analyzes data to improve the customer experience.
Now the question is, what is Salesforce Journey Builder, and how can it benefit your business? So, let’s take a closer look at it!
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder
Salesforce Journey Builder is a feature of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud that manages the customer life cycle: the sequence of steps a customer takes when considering, purchasing, using, and remaining loyal to a brand.
It’s a marketing automation platform for creating consistent 1-to-1 customer journeys based on Marketing Cloud data. Not just that, Journey Builder also allows marketers to personalize interactions at each stage based on customer needs.
Do you want your customers to install the app on their phones?
Do you want to allow your customer to go through all the available variants of your products?
Or do you want them to make successful purchases and not abandon shopping carts? Or if you’re going to address many such situations?
Then Salesforce Journey Builder is the solution for you!
Salesforce views interactions as a journey through the stages of customer relationships, including reaching, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty. All though we can say Journey Builder is used to tracking the customer journey, let’s go through some of the specific areas where journey builder can help the marketer/businesses:
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Higher Customer Engagement: Journey Builder enables you to improve campaign performance by utilizing a multi-channel approach and accelerating customer engagement in various ways.
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Real-Time Tracking marketing campaigns: You can easily administer your campaigns with campaign version control, check interactions and feeds in real-time, track and test all campaign elements, and measure results over days, weeks, or months.
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Personalized Customer Experience: By tailoring specific customer interactions based on real-time individual behaviors, you can deliver timely and relevant content to customers when, where, and how they want it. Send personalized messages in-app, through various connected devices, or any other channel.
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Simple Drag and Drop Configurations: Using random split-testing, estimating progress toward campaign goals based on specific customer facts, and visually evaluating which channels and mediums produce the best results, you can evaluate your marketing strategy.
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Identify Diverse Touchpoints for Increased Engagement: Imagine and manage a customer journey at every possible touchpoint. The drag-and-drop method enhances the customer experience by directing them based on their behavior.
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Broader Customer View: Using integrations such as email, SMS, mobile push, or Predictive Intelligence, you can get a 360-degree view of your customer and send the right message at the right time. You can even broaden your reach through channels such as in-app messaging, call centers, connected devices, and so on. You also save a significant amount of time by having direct access to individual customer journeys.
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Integrate data from all Salesforce instances: Journey Builder is linked to other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem, including the Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud, which helps save all of the resources required to feed information and migrate data from other Salesforce wings.
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Save Time: With direct access to individual customer journeys, you can amend and strategize your existing marketing funnel, saving time that would otherwise be spent filling gaps created by a lack of specific analytics.
Today’s customer interacts through hundreds of digital channels at all hours of the day. Therefore, marketers must have a high level of connectivity to understand their customers better. Journey Builder meets all these requirements, which provides a convenient road map for customer acquisition and targeted marketing.
Thus, Journey Builder can help you create a path on which you can walk along with your customers, understand them better and do better!