Designing Customer Journeys for MAPs
Whether you’re using Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or one of the (many) other automation tools on the market: knowing how to design best practice Customer Journeys (also known as CX Journeys) using your Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) is critical.
What are customer journeys? Essentially, they are a visual representation of your customer’s relationship with your company, and all the interactions that occur throughout that customer’s lifecycle.
With Marketing Automation Platforms, that visual representation can be brought to life. This is because MAPs allow marketers to build these customer journeys inside their system, and activate them as interactive campaigns that monitor and take action on customers — based on that customer’s needs, stage of the buying cycle, desires, preferences, demographics, and real-time behavior.
Sound easy? It can be, but there are some basic rules to follow when designing your customer journeys:
Keep Things Simple
You may want to take advantage of every bell and whistle your Marketing Automation Platform has to offer, but you’ll have to walk before you can run.
You can start by focusing on single rules and objectives, like a welcome sequence or a thank you follow-up email — identifying which audiences perform well with which piece of content.
Designing and executing complex MAP journeys at the start of your customer journey strategy can actually create the opposite effect of introducing too many variables for you to measure success.
Plan it Out First
This tip should go without saying, but it’s crucial to design and align the customer journey itself before starting to build inside your Marketing Automation Platform.
This includes bringing all relevant stakeholders to the table, and getting alignment on what your customer’s journey actually looks like. Product owners and account managers are a gold mine of information during this time, as they’re close enough to your product and customer to provide critical feedback.
At this point, you can identify the customer touchpoints you’d like your MAP to deliver (e.g. “sending an email after a visit to a tradeshow booth”) and the metrics your organization can use to measure campaign success.
Start Small
One of the best ways to become familiar and comfortable with using Marketing Automation and building customer journeys is to begin by creating single triggered emails, or a straightforward 3-touch nurture (with standard wait steps in between) with a small audience.
Using a simple journey to test your plan and retrieve basic metrics can be helpful before diving into more complex journeys, with other variables (like A/B testing).
Be Timely with Your Data
When it comes to designing customer journeys, the length of the journey is key, as is the cadence between touches.
However, also important to take into consideration is the timeliness (or “freshness”) of your data.
If your campaign relies on a customer’s behavioral input to determine the next touchpoint (“if customer has visited website, send email”), make sure you allow adequate time for analysis before the next step is taken. For static data points (“check job title”), have your campaign refresh customer data before each touchpoint occurs.
Adding this level of data due diligence ensures your customer always receives the right messages at the right time.
Want More?
We break down CX Journey Basics and Building Intelligent Journeys here.
Reach out to us today and let us help you get started with automating your customer journeys: contact@abuiconsulting.com