On the surface, the customer journey is a simple concept – you develop a product, and your customer buys it. The customer journey is becoming increasingly complex, with technological advancements redefining how consumers connect with brands. Learn about the facts and perils of unconnected customer data. Then, discover how, with the right tools and a single view, you’ll save time and money with your marketing efforts and focus your spending on acquiring the right customers. That’s why mapping a buyer’s journey is essential to ensuring a great experience – for every individual customer.
A stitch in time saves (and makes) dimes
The problem
Despite all the talk of digital transformation, many organisations still struggle to connect their physical operation with multiple digital presences. Without a single view of customer data, it’s near impossible for marketers to understand their customers and make educated decisions on how best to target their marketing effort and spend.
Here are some of the typical challenges marketers are facing:
- Unable to stitch together offline and online customer data in different systems quickly
- Relying on third-party cookies to link different domains
- No common user ID on a mobile app and website experiences
The consequences
Until all these data sources are stitched into a single coherent view of the customer, businesses will continue to waste money on:
- Targeting existing customers with acquisition experiences
- Leads that will never convert
- Experiences that drive away even your most loyal customers
The ideal scenario
One of the most important adages of modern digital marketing is “Know your customer.” Organisations empowered with a single view of all customers and shared data insights will be able to:
- Send relevant messages to their customers
- Know the best time to talk to their customers
- Invest in the right channels to acquire the best-fit customers
- Waste less time and money on marketing to existing customers
- Have lower acquisition costs
All of this is easily achievable when you invest in the right tools and services to develop a single view of customers.
The solution
For organisations to create a single customer view (SCV) with enough information to deliver the insights needed to inform better decision-making, there are three considerations:
1. The only way to ‘improve’ is to ‘know’ your customer
Total customer knowledge (TCK) means identifying individuals at every touchpoint in their customer journeys – before and after they become actual paying customers.
Doing this can require capturing new information to complete the customer data you already have. For example, they must sign up with an email address or mobile number before proceeding through the purchase journey. These customer insights may inform new experiences, touchpoints and opportunities to continue to evolve TCK data.
2. Modernise your data acquisition and tracking infrastructure
Infrastructure may be entirely lacking for many organisations, and for others, it may be underutilised. However, for most, it exists in separate data sets, and organisations typically lack the infrastructure to effectively stitch these data sets into a single unified customer view.
Some will work around this manually by throwing a data analyst at the task, but the smart ones will look for software platforms that can do this for them, such as a customer data platform to help untangle the customer journey analytics.
3. To ‘move the dial’, you must embrace a journey-based mindset fully
Engagement is not measured by volume but rather by the quality of each customer’s experience. Only once a customer experience culture is firmly embedded in your organisation – and SCV delivers truly compelling, relevant and timely experiences to your customers – will the benefits of TCK be fully realised. This is why the customer journey mapping process is fundamental.
Get in touch today to see how n3 Hub can deliver results to your marketing team.