How to map the customer journey to email marketing- the complete guide

Over the last 24 months, the world has experienced plenty of disruptions across business models, consumer behaviour, and digital transformation. Customers are re-evaluating their loyalty towards a preferred company. This time it is around new priorities and re-written experiences. The unique considerations will influence what customers choose and what is their customer journey going to be like, i.e. how they pick.

Companies should re-align their user journey map to different facets of marketing – both online and offline marketing.

1. Digital marketing includes paid marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimisation and email marketing.
2. For Offline marketing, consider physical stores, newspaper advertising, OOH advertising, and radio campaigns.

Companies will have to go back to the drawing board once again, map out buyers’ journey and design marketing campaigns – a slight difference in approach produce vastly different results.

Harvard Business Review

As per a Harvard Business Review survey, “companies that have adopted different approaches to the customer journey and offered a personalised customer experience, have seen more than six times growth in profitability Y-o-Y.”

As a result, online to offline marketing will be burgeoning in the post-pandemic era. Consumers will visit your brand store after online purchase trials or existing customers or if you have a product differentiation between the online store and offline shop.

What is the application of Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey map is a visual blueprint of how your potential customers, partners, suppliers interact with your brand, from being unaware to becoming a customer. The buyer’s journey isn’t linear and impacted by factors like a marketing campaign, customer interaction, awareness stage and more. The recent eCom sprint has pivoted marketing strategy to a different level. Therefore, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) has replaced COD and become the most sought mode of payment across all product verticals.

It would be best if you used journey maps for two reasons. One is to identify the weak links in your marketing campaign, impact your customer retention or new acquisitions. The other is to record the high points in your customer behaviour and repeat them across different stages.

If you haven’t created your customer need journey, you can follow the below mapping process:

• Define your customer persona – who is your customer
• The buying process – touchpoints with your brand, online, in-store, direct-selling
• Marketing touchpoints – at each stage – website, social media, Email
• List down all resources – who interact with the customer – customer service, sales team, retailer
• Emotion and Pain-points – customer complaints, customer drop-out, disqualification. Happiness, compliment, testimonial
• Conversion Levers – what moves a prospect to customer, brand endorser or a detractor

How is Email Marketing and Customer Journey related?

As more and more brands shift towards customer-centric values and business models, the marketing campaign is mapped to buyers’ journeys. In email marketing, the customer journey provides you with valuable data like a user persona, user research, stage of buying, etc. that allows you to connect more personally with a niche audience.

Marketing strategy is different across B2B and B2C companies, so is their buyer journey. As a result, different segments of customers associated with your organisation will also have unique journeys.

Design your company’s customer interaction strategy to communicate with your potential customer and existing customer on an as-is-where-is basis. Which makes the customer experience personal and relevant. A fundamental principle of marketing STP (Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning) will surface in context to the stage of the customer journey map.

Segmented data and analytics data for each customer cohort across the entire customer journey – will offer insights into how different groups behave at a specific point of the customer lifecycle.

1. For B2C journeys, use targeted emails across multiple events like welcome Email, transaction email, cart abandonment, etc.
2. In B2B customer journeys, Insights, Product Demo, Case-study and testimonials, Surveys, etc., can be part of the email marketing strategy.

Remember, an email marketing campaign must be holistic and compliments every marketing channel (paid marketing, social media, search engine marketing, customer service and public relations).

Let’s take a detailed look into more such use cases below:

What are the various types of email marketing campaigns across customer journeys?

What are Brand Awareness Emails, and how do they help?

Brands that inspire own brand loyalists from the beginning of the customer journey. For example, I will be regularly engaging with Tesla’s emails and Instagram communication, even if I may not be able to afford it now.

For the lesser-known brands, pushing Email marketing at the Top of the Funnel results in spamming and forced promotions. Yet, Email has a vital role at the top of the funnel.

Here are the set of brand awareness email campaigns for Top of the Funnel Activity ~

1. Branded emails create a professional and polished brand identity in all your correspondence at the awareness stage of buyers’ journey.
2. Tie-up email campaign with social media marketing and invite users to subscribe to regular updates via emails
3. Welcome series email campaigns are apt for new prospects and subscribers in the awareness and consideration stages. And if users find value and relate to your brand, they continue to subscribe to your campaign.
4. Use brand emails for building buyer persona and segmentation for email campaigns for the onward customer journey
5. If you don’t have an extensive captive database, you can identify a publisher who is a specialist in your industry and offers email newsletter sponsorship opportunities.

What are the different types of Lead Acquisition Emails?

Qualified Lead is a valid identity of a prospect – name, email ID, and some insight into his interaction with the brand (website visit, email open, CTR or any other engagement metric). It is a starting point to a sales cycle.

The sales cycle is a set of actions that moves a potential customer from the brand awareness stage (Qualified Lead) into becoming a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). The prospect at this stage is between the Middle of the Funnel and the Bottom of the Funnel. The goal is to encourage familiarity and consideration and convert him into a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). As a result, offering an incentive to clinch a sale.

Follow the below email strategy for lead acquisition emails ~

1. Lead Nurturing Emails basis user interest and earlier interactions
2. Discount offer on recent product search
3. Announce sneak-peek into sales
4. Free / Trial membership
5. Free product trial and demo – has worked very well for our ISV and SAAS clients

For B2b customer journey, email nurture tracks need to be highly contextual. Otherwise, you will lose their attention.

1. Welcome Email is their consent to interact with your brand – use it wisely and give them a wow experience
2. Welcome Email is about them and not you – make it contextual to the campaign they signed up for
3. Invite them to a conference or a webinar with your existing customer – a live testimonial always works better
4. Give them free product trials – like most of the social media automation tools offer you for automating B2B marketing
5. Email user guides industry reports to your prospects who sign-up on your landing page or register on your blog – users stay away from negative probability in any high-value investment

What is the email strategy for Research Emails?

Search engines and social media are sources for brand discovery across the customer journey. Unfortunately, email campaigns can’t be indexed on search engines like Google. On the other hand, email campaigns can be customised to users’ questions on these platforms.

The time between research and actual purchase varies between a low involvement, low risk and quick to consume products like booking a meal, buying a pen, hiring a cab for a day. But, users will do more research for services like cloud hosting and software, hiring a digital marketing agency. More is the risk more is the research involved.

Brands must have a list of users’ queries during the product and brand evaluation and accordingly, send them the relevant information in advance over an email campaign.

Latest Google updates ranks-up those pages that have content based on user intent. Look at the bottom of the Google Search Result Page for related search terms based on your search query. An example below ~

1. How to Emails are good for user intent – for example, how to select a service provider, how to decide a destination for a holiday, how to select a service provider
2. What are the tool’s features, product and colour options – Apple sends wonderful emails that answer the elements, product version, and product variety questions. When Apple users search for an idle gift for their Valentine, the below email campaign drops in at the right time.
3. Customer Testimonials, Coupon Codes, Sales Announcements, Free Service Camps, and a plethora of other emails that can be sent to users during their research stage.

A real estate client, who is dealing in commercial real estate. We found that decision-makers were searching for various pieces of information around the location of their prospective office – location advantage, safety, parking, hospital. And our email campaign was about different location advantages – email open rates went up by 55% and sales got a more significant number of enquiries.

What is the email marketing strategy for users in the consideration stage?

At the consideration stage, the buyer is aware of your company. He is weighing his options. Price, quality, service and maintenance, are the top criteria for his decision making. This is where your marketing strategy should convince the audience of your competitive advantage.

What are the emails that should be sent to your prospects during this stage?

1. Direct to consumer brands you must send emails like, competition comparison checklist, offer discounts, free-trials and even help them with a Buy-Now-Pay-Later offer. BNPL has revolutionise the ecommerce industry driving sales conversion by 44%
2. B2B companies if you have an experience centre where users can avail a free demo – or experience the going to be released feature – send susbcribers an email from your R&D head and invite them over.
3. Subscription confirmation emails are used to confirm user’s subscription to a newsletter, software, content website. A soft purchase where there is going to be a recurring billing – an email confirmation has become a mandate

Post Purchase emails generate pride of ownership

“Options create doubt” – this is the biggest reason your new customer seeks validation. This is the time to shine with your brand. Targeted emails for a customer in the purchase stage will do wonders for your brand reputation.

Now, let’s show your customers that they have made the right decision.

• Which begins with the transaction confirmation email. Customers want to promptly receive a confirmation that their order has been received and is under processing. Send them a realistic timeline for the delivery of their order.
• Package tracking emails with live updates have become a norm in the online service industry. The actual status of the package is updated in real-time when a customer opens an email.

How should SAAS companies use email marketing?

SAAS companies achieve a reasonable CLV (Customer Lifecycle Value) throughout a license sale. Existing customers have already been acquired, so their acquisition cost is essentially a sunken cost. Incorporating CLV into your email marketing strategy means you know what your customers want and how to offer solutions to their every need.

1. “User Manual and How to Use” videos – send these emails to your existing customers and help them overcome the shiny object syndrome – that 30-day free return policy could hurt your bottom line
2. If you are dealing with kitchen machinery like microwaves, air friers, juicers, most of these gadgets bite dust after a few uses. Send new recipes, cooking tips, and associated product benefits to enhance the customer experience and enjoy incremental customer satisfaction.
3. Customer support has moved to social media. Check most common customer queries on social media channels about your product, like warranty, repair and support, user manual, and customer service number. All these queries can be sent to users via an automated campaign.
4. B2B companies must assign a customer success manager to each of their accounts. It is like a relationship manager in parlance for a bank. Begin with a welcome email. After that, the relationship manager must be in constant touch with his group of customers via email.

Email campaigns are valuable for small purchases too.

A medicine brand that sells prescription drugs and OTC products like vitamins and supplements. An email campaign to guide them through the seasonal flu and product recommendations will help users repeat purchases, understand product benefits, and establish customer satisfaction.

Can you up-sell and cross-sell via emails?

Email Marketing thrives on its success in helping marketers up-sell and cross-sells their services to existing customers. Data for B2B companies SAAS companies show there are a 60% to 70% chance of closing a sale to an existing customer. Compared to a 5% to 20% chance of selling something to a new prospect.

Creating the right customer cohorts is the first step to creating a profitable up-sell and cross-sell plan. Segmentation should be done from the long-term view of the customer. As you better your segmentation, it will give you to highly engaged vs a dormant customer base.

How do you assess between these two customer cohorts? Is that your question too ~

1. Segment from the long-term view of the customer
2. Allocate spending on marketing that will maximise new customer acquisition and customer equity
3. Focus on customers in a way that is profitable in the long term

These emails don’t need to be manual and do marketing automation by mapping your users’ actions (on your website, social media pages, in-store, emailer). For example, Automobile dealers can invite subscribers for a free check-up camp. A clinic can call its patients for a free dental or health check-up.

Note: when you offer something for free, make sure it is worth the value. Otherwise, consumers have plenty of these free offers to ignore right away.

What are the most important KPIs to measure effectiveness of email marketing campaigns?

You may be sending lakhs of emails. Are you measuring the hundreds of dimensions?

As the first step, categorise your email campaigns in line with the campaign segments ~ Lead nurturing, up-sell or cross-sell, research emails.

Step two, note down the business and marketing goals and make sure these are aligned to the email marketing goals ~ improvement in a database, higher engagement, traffic to a website, new orders, repeat sales.

Step three, here are the critical email metrics and how to use them to assess your campaign’s performance

Delivery time: How healthy is your database? What’s the rate of your emails getting bounced?

Open rate: How well do your email subject line and sender name capture recipients’ attention?

If you’re looking to optimise the click-through rate, check if people are doing that. You’ll want to strive toward a goal and benchmark, which is a challenging start.

Click to Open Rate: How many people open and interact with your Email at a given time? What has been the evolution of this throughout time? Is it changing at all? What was your Email’s subject line or body copy which resulted in high bounce rates?

Subscriber Acquisition Cost: SAC tells you how much it costs to acquire new subscribers. These subscribers have the correct email address mobile number and belong to your target business segment.

Advanced Email KPIs

Subscriber Lifetime Value (SLV): CLV is used for measuring the total revenue throughout the life of a customer. Whereas, SLV is the average engagement/time spent by the user on email campaigns before unsubscribing.

Conversion Rate: Percentage of people that opened your Email and then acted after you asked them to do so (also known as the conversion rate). How many of them purchased, read an article, or schedule a follow-up contact with a sales representative? Areas of improvement when the results are below average?

Contact Nurturing: How did your Email help a user continue their journey? Evaluate the marketing touchpoints on users’ pathways to determine what’s affecting them or what’s having the most influence on their choice to convert.

Leads/MQLs: How many leads were generated because of sending your Email? Align with your CRM database and CRM team to measure this statistic by tracking form submissions from your email activities.

Opportunities: Of the leads you produced, how many turned into a meaningful opportunity for your business?

The bottom line: Does your email marketing strategy meet your company’s revenue targets?

Return on email marketing expenditure (ROEMS): How much does your email strategy cost? Map it out like you would with sponsored search/media and ROAS.

Revenue per subscriber: Calculate the profit generated by each subscriber. This metric allows you to track your growth rate and benchmark it with the best in the industry.

It has taken us 10 million emails to understand the dynamics of mapping email strategy to customer buying journey. While KPIs may remain the same, each industry has its unique buying cycle and business goals. It is imperative to have a professional approach, especially to this marketing channel, because your audience doesn’t want one more degree of unrelatable distraction.

Metaphorically,

It is like an earthquake caused by a sudden slip on a fault. Customer Journey is like tectonic plates, slow-moving, but they get stuck due to friction posed by external events like pandemics, war, political upheaval. Eventually, the stress overcomes the conflict, and businesses could feel the release of energy.

Logically,

Please speak to us. At DINTW investigate your existing customer journey, assess business and marketing goals, and then create a customised email marketing plan. Click here if you want to know more about our services.

The post How to map the customer journey to email marketing- the complete guide appeared first on DINTW Digital Marketing Shots.