Understanding the Customer Journey; A Strategic OmniChannel Framework for Mapping Out Success
A long, winding and often, unpredictable road – every customer’s journey is unique. Imagine if you had the POV of your customer, you gain invaluable insights into their world. Customers are poised with multiple micro-decisions between interacting with a brand for the first time and becoming repeat customers based on their needs, emotions and expectations.
It is therefore imperative to uncover critical touchpoints in a customer’s journey that can significantly impact their satisfaction and loyalty. With customer journey mapping, brands get to wield THE ‘magical compass’ that guides the creation of personalized and relevant content, offers, and interactions in managing a customer’s experience in their lifecycle.
At eTail Australia Connect, Negar Mokhtarnia, Director of Product at Pet Circle and Alison O’Loughlin , Head of Digital Marketing & Data at AAT Kings Group, had a ‘Fireside Chat: Mapping out your customer journey and lifetime value - How can you develop a personalised omnichannel strategy that drives customer engagement, sales and loyalty?’ and we’ve managed to collate some key touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for innovation and improvement. After all, proper analytics tracking can help identify and retain the most profitable customers $$ - the brand that understands and adds most value to their customers lives will win!
Are you looking at predictive analytics and how are you approaching this?
Negar: We try to predict the future needs and behaviours of our customers. For example, we look at the last 6 months of purchase of Dog food to predict what size dog they have and based on that when they are running out of food, treats and need Flea and Worming medication. We also include price sensitivity to know which customers are most likely to purchase during a sale and which are most likely to join subscriptions so we can nudge them in the right direction.
Alison: We are working with our media agency on our attribution model and using weighted analysis of each channel and historical revenue from all channels (online and offline) to see if there is a correlation between upper funnel or increased spend in mid to lower funnel and an uplift in overall sales. If the model is accurate then we will be using this to forecast revenue based on our channel budget splits.
If you had to invest in only one area of the consumer journey, what would it be?
Negar: For us it's always onboarding! We know that customers who onboard well with us are more loyal and profitable in the long run. We invest in a comprehensive welcome journey taking the customer from first contact to 3 purchases and after that use the data we have collected to ensure they are in the right segments for our ongoing engagement campaigns.
Alison: It would be customer service! For an experience led business it’s vital that we exceed guest expectations when they are on tour. This would be the one thing that would assist us to drive loyalty and repeat guests, as well as word of mouth referrals and awareness.
How do you drive hyper-personalisation consistency across multiple channels like website, email, social and search for any particular customer?
Negar: We use the same customer ID (mostly email) to cross pollinate email, website and app. This enables us to send the same offers across these channels and ensure our targeting is consistent. The social channels are a lot harder as many customers use a different email address for their social login and are harder to match on social.
Alison: Assuming data privacy compliance, looking at the data you have, how you store and access it, are there ways you can use the data in more meaningful ways that will elevate your customer journey? Once you know what data you have, how can you segment it into cohorts which make sense for your business and then how do you deliver the content those personas are searching for at the right time in their journey? Consistent messaging and branding across all segments and channels is important for brand trust. Test and learn and adjust your messaging and personas to consistently improve conversion metrics over time.
What are your thoughts about third party cookies 🍪 and how do you effectively do prospecting?
Negar: With the deprecation of 3rd party cookies, we have invested more in identifying first time visitors on our site and we use a mix of IP addresses and browser IDs to ensure we create a consistent experience on site.
Alison: This will impact audience targeting; however, it gives you an opportunity to connect with prospects with more trust and relevance. We often work on co-op campaigns with relevant brands and are looking at brand aligned influencers to drive our messaging to new audiences, create lookalike audiences based on first party data and work to leverage our own database and grow our social media following through engaging content.
How do you personalise if you are only using CRM data? What about the other 90% + of visitors you don't have in your CRM
Alison: We personalise ads via dynamic retargeting to show relevant offers and ads to website visitors based on their browsing history and overlay this with first party data to show loyalty offers to past guests. We are also working on building out our abandoned cart emails and personalise to past guests and our trade audience of retail travel agents with completely different content tailored to their needs
Negar Mokhtarnia, Pet Circle Alison O’Loughlin , AAT Kings Group