A customer journey visually shows what a customer experiences as they move along the sales and marketing funnel. It’s an incredible tool to help organizations get into the mindset of the customer and understand their perspective with the ultimate goal of improving their experience and increasing the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts. Ideally, a journey will show the interactions and touchpoints that a typical customer in a given segment will go through.

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, customer journeys are orchestrated to guide a prospect through a predetermined, flexible path toward a preset end goal. Whether this goal is buying a product, scheduling a discover call, or closing a loan, a customer journey is easy to create and personalize to the needs of a segment, which may be thought of as a demographic, or group, of people who share similar characteristic. In Dynamics 365 Marketing, segments can be established by using natural language, such as “customers who filled out X form and live on the west coast.”

Customer journeys consist of actions and content in “tiles” that are laid out much like a map that determine what happens along a journey. They can include branching pathways based on various customer actions  – such as email greetings, products purchased, and more – and can be personalized as they are sent out. A simple journey may send a series of emails every two weeks, and based on what the customer did with that email (it was opened, a link was clicked, or the email was ignored), the journey can branch out into different paths for additional actions, such as further emails or scheduling a discovery call. All journey setup is finalized ahead of the journey going live and personalization is automated based on prospect data, allowing marketers to get ahead of the game, save time, and reallocate that effort to other business pursuits.

When creating a customer journey, you want the most value for your efforts. Here are six practices that can lead to more effective customer journeys.

Do market research and carefully consider your target audience (segments) and what they need/want

A tenant of any writing or marketing is to understand your audience. How else can you give them what they want and need? Ask your audience directly via surveys, reviews, one-on-one interviews (when possible and applicable), and on social media. You can indirectly see your audience’s interests and desires through website analytics and social media analytics. Though it may feel overwhelming to begin with, all this data will start to form into a narrative for what your audience wants or does not want, what they are engaged or not engaged by, what social media platforms they use, when they open emails, and how often/where they look on your website, etc.

Surveys are a special and personalized form of feedback you can send out periodically—say, after a purchase or delivery. It’s important, though, to ensure your surveys yield the most accurate results by using survey best practices.

Only by understanding your audience’s preferences can you begin to market to them effectively!

Set goals for each journey and each part of the journey

Another tenant of writing and marketing is to have a defined purpose – or goal – for the journey at large, as well as individual goals for each part of the journey. These goals should be based on the market research you have conducted as well as internal goals for the company, and they will help guide every decision you make. What does my audience want? What do they already know about our company/product, and what do we need to make them aware of? What do I want to achieve through this journey? What small goal am I trying to meet with this email/text/etc.? Do I want to increase revenue, customer loyalty, advertise a sale, gauge interest in a new product, gain prerelease orders? These questions will tell you the topics, approach, tone, and content that is likely to attract your audience. You can then plan your journey and each step with this knowledge.

A/B test your design, content, etc.

Once you have set goals for your journey and each element within it, what next?

Ever been to the optometrist? They’ll ask “Can you see better through lens A or B? Okay, now B or C?” And so on? They are testing how your eye sees through various lens strengths. A/B testing is exactly the same. You create iterations of the same marketing content by changing one thing (such as an email body, title, design, etc), send it to a small portion of your target audience, track how effective each version is, and then use the winner for the customer journey. A/B testing is a great way to tweak your marketing and incrementally improve your results.

For instance, you already know your target audience will likely be engaged by X topic, and you’ve written what you believe is an engaging, entertaining, informational email, but now what title should you use to get the audience into your email so they can read that great content? You won’t know if email title A or email title B will grab your audience’s attention better unless you try it.

Don’t overdo it

We’ve all experienced it – being berated by emails that come every day or several times a week from brands or companies that we were once curious about. But we’re not curious anymore! Curiosity changes to annoyance if a brand batters their prospects with too much communication. So, don’t go overboard with your customer journeys. It’s likely your audience won’t want an email every day, or multiple times a day. If your audience doesn’t open or click on links in your emails for several months, it’s probably time to close the lead and leave them alone. They are more likely to be interested in your company/product later if you back off now than if you keep dumping emails into their inbox that they don’t want to see. 

But how much is too much, and how little is too little? This will depend on who your audience is and what type of engagement they are looking for. To know what your audience wants, do your research!

Track and analyze KPIs

Follow the yellow brick road of data, and you will be lead to the all-knowing wizard. Or, track those metrics that are most important to your business—the ones that show how all your marketing efforts are going.

What do you track, and how? Check out our blog on measuring success in your marketing efforts.

Adjust your journeys accordingly

Does this go without saying? You’ve done your market research to understand your audience, you’ve A/B tested various parts of your customer journey, and you’ve gathered data for your KPIs and organized it into clear data visualizations. Now comes the transformation. You must use all that knowledge to adjust your journeys to gain higher ROI with your efforts.

A growth-mindset will set you free here. By continually adjusting your customer journey content based on the insights from research and KPIs, you will ensure that your customer journeys are always performing as highly as they can based on the knowledge you have. This means your previous work will pay off even more.

Free infographic: A Guide to Customer Journeys

Still acquainting yourself with customer journeys? Download our free infographic that walks you through an example customer journey while explaining tiles, branching paths, and other features of customer journeys within Dynamics 365 Marketing.

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Dynamics 365 Marketing is a robust, cloud-based CRM solution for all marketing needs, including social media planning, event and vendor management, customer journey orchestration, analytics, lead and opportunity management, and more. Fully operational out-of-the-box, it’s also highly customizable to the unique needs of your business and industry.