Do you want to win over new customers or improve customer loyalty?
In the digital age, customers are looking for the best experience.
They have become demanding, mobile and informed.
They know what they want from a brand – and what they don’t want to find during their buying journey.
In this environment where it is the customer who decides, beware of bumps and irritating interactions.
Just as loyalty takes time to build up, you can also lose customers in a single click!
So, how do you design a seamless, bespoke customer journey?
How can you optimise it to delight your customers and put them at the heart of your brand universe?
Media performances offers four tips for a successful customer journey.
1- Set objectives
First tip: clarify your objectives.
This is an essential foundation for building your customer journey.
What is the primary objective of your branding strategy?
Recruit new customers or build loyalty?
Penetrate a market or generate additional sales?
What is your scope of action?
Isolating specific paths (use cases) will give you greater precision and relevance when it comes to analysis.
What are the stages in your customer journey?
Finding the answers to all these questions will help you to frame your activities and adapt your customer messaging with the right information.
Your approach must be cross-functional, involving all staff members and departments, as well as your business partners.
2- Gather and analyse your data
Who are your customers?
What do they want?
To build a customer-centric strategy in line with your customers’ expectations, it’s essential to know your customer profile(s).
This means collecting as much data as possible on their personality and behaviour.
Using targeted, segmented databases or your CRM will help you to refine your targeting.
You will be able to find what motivates them to buy, what their interests are, what their needs and desires are, and what problems they want to solve.
Collecting feedback, whether positive or negative, is essential to fill out your knowledge of your customers.
This will enable you to make a very detailed analysis of their needs.
You will know what your customers are saying, what they are thinking and how they are reacting at every stage of their journey.
To retrieve key information, you can use:
- social media
- your website
- traditional channels such as telephone, e-mail or newsletter
- satisfaction surveys
Last but not least, the analysis of in-store behavioural data can be particularly instructive, especially in the retail sector.
Because the customer journey is both digital and physical.
For example, you can analyse the hot and cold zones in your sales space.
How do customers move through your store, and what attracts them?
Tracking tools such as Wi-Fi or video surveillance will help you to analyse traffic and behavioural data and better define your ideal customer path.
3- Model your customer journey
By collecting and analysing existing data, you will be able to map out your “customer journey” and significantly improve your customers’ experience during their buying journey.
The customer journey is the map of your customers’ path.
It represents their journey before, during and after their purchase.
It is punctuated by crucial interactions between your customers and your products, your brand.
Analysing these interactions (touchpoints) will reveal their expectations at a specific point in their journey, as well as their associated emotions: joy, pleasure, satisfaction, disappointment, irritation, etc.
You will then be able to better understand their expectations at every stage and provide the right answers at the right time and in the right place to improve their buying experience.
4- Use the right marketing levers
So, you’ve mapped your customer journey.
You know your customers’ expectations, their behaviours and the most important touchpoints.
Now you can rely on appropriate marketing activities to guide customers through their journey and encourage them to buy your products.
With this in mind, an omnichannel approach is essential to leverage digital media to reinvent the in-store experience.
Levers need to complement each other to offer a richer customer experience at the point of sale, since most shoppers still appreciate going to the store to make their purchases.
Médiaperformances helps France’s most influential brands, such as Danone, Coca-Cola and Nintendo, to reach their customers from their sofa to their supermarket or click & collect purchase.
Here are our tips for optimising the customer journey at every stage.
– Leverage data and mobile to better target your buyers, capture their attention and encourage purchasing
Using qualified data allows you to target buyers who are in tune with your products and to engage them via their mobile devices before and during their purchases, offering them customised and consistent promotions across all channels (mobile, click & collect and in-store)
– Use video to tell your brand story and influence the in-store buying journey.
Coupled with shopping data, video can be used to broadcast relevant campaigns in real time to activate shoppers inside a store.
– Combining digital and point-of-sale advertising
POP advertising is an excellent way to highlight products and trigger impulse purchases on the shelf.
An effective display as close as possible to the act of purchase will encourage conversion.
