- Touchpoints and Journey Mapping: Dictating the Brand Experience
- Triggered Journeys and Personalised Messaging
- Creating meaningful moments in store
- Enhancing live events
- Optimizing mobile touchpoints
- Powering offline interactions
‘Customer Journey’ is the term that dominates the landscape of consumer marketing – and with good reason. The customer journey not only dictates how likely a customer is to follow through with a purchase but also how likely they are to come back again. Customers now want to be engaged with immediate and tailored experiences at every touchpoint, and for a brand to stay relevant, it’s fast becoming important that the overall customer journey is even more personalized.
Being able to map out a customer’s journey presents an invaluable opportunity to see things from their perspective. Ultimately, a customer journey defines how well the overall customer experience is received, taking into account every time someone comes into contact with your company and your brand. With this in mind, it’s in every brand’s best interest to improve the customer journey as much as possible by thinking about the customer experience at every touchpoint.
This may sound like a large task, but it highlights why automation is such an important tool in marketing. Automation allows brands to step up the customer experience with the use of so-called triggered journeys that work by building out an optimized customer journey through automated messages initiated by specific events. Triggered journeys are changing the face of customer journeys and marketing automation, bringing the two together to become an invaluable way of successfully engaging the masses at every touchpoint.
Touchpoints and Journey Mapping: Dictating the Brand Experience
Before we discuss the merits of triggered journeys, however, let’s take a look at the power of touchpoints. A touchpoint is any point of contact between a consumer and a brand, be it through email, notifications, in-app experiences, or even in person. These instances will dictate how well a customer experiences a brand. This being the case, it’s important to make sure the interaction is a positive one.
An optimized touchpoint will help make sure your brand is chosen over your competitor’s by having clear, relevant and engaging messages which place your customer at the center of every operation. The most effective strategy is, after all, a customer-centric one. With personalization being so highly valued by customers nowadays, it only follows that good customer experience is a personalized one. By identifying when and how someone interacts with your brand, you can build up a detailed customer profile and start mapping out the customer experience, enabling more meaningful messages to be sent out.
This is particularly necessary for this day and age when there are even more ways for a customer to interact with a brand, adding increasing demand on companies to better understand customer behavior and deliver tailored experiences accordingly. There is a myriad of touchpoints along any given customer journey, from a customer’s first awareness of your company all the way through to after a transaction occurs and ideally, a brand needs to create a positive experience at every single one of these.
Identifying touchpoints at each customer stage is also a key step in creating an optimized customer journey map. Mapping the customer journey will not only give you a better idea of your customers, but it can also help to highlight any bumps in the road and smooth them over with the optimization of touchpoints, ensuring you’re providing the right customers with the right information, at the right time.
This is where triggered journeys can become particularly useful. Automation has allowed triggered journeys to evolve – by automatically instigating parts of the customer journey, you can not only ensure that every customer is receiving enough information through touchpoints, but also that the information is relevant to them and their experience.
Triggered Journeys and Personalised Messaging
Triggered journeys are journeys that are initiated by a particular event or customer’s actions. In essence, they act as a real-time personalization tool. For example, if a new customer or subscriber joins a mailing list, this could be used as the trigger for the automatic sending of welcome messages. Likewise, if someone enters or exits one of your pre-defined customer segments, this could trigger the automatic sending of unique and targeted marketing messages; for example, emails designed to push an upsell when a customer becomes a VIP member or, on the other hand, a re-engagement email if a customer has lower than usual activity with your product.
Triggered journeys can be implemented and changed depending on the needs of the marketing campaign, but ultimately provide a great opportunity to easily customize the journey depending on customer actions. As mentioned, personalization is now the key to marketing and triggered journeys can help with this on a larger scale. By ensuring widespread messages can be sent out in response to specific customer behaviors, triggered journeys now allow marketing activity to be tailored more efficiently. This doesn’t just mean virtually either; triggered journeys also have the potential to benefit in-person interactions as well.
4 Further Uses of Triggered Journeys to Improve the Customer Experience:
Triggered Journeys Use #1. Creating meaningful moments in-store
Triggered journeys can be used beyond mass messaging purposes in order to create meaningful moments — helping to keep the customer experience at a best-in-class level. Take, for example, a customer who has expressed an interest in a certain shirt, only to find it is out of stock. The next time the stock is replenished, it would be useful to be able to send a notification out. By utilizing a mixture of customer data, inventory and location, a triggered message can be sent to the customer next time they’re in-store, informing them that the shirt is back in stock. Triggered journeys allow personal touches to be implemented on a mass level, ensuring every single customer is receiving a tailored experience.
Triggered Journeys Use #2. Enhancing live events
The same sort of principle can be applied to instances like concerts, conferences or sporting events. Brands can use triggered journeys to interact with customers when they make purchases, offering them discounts and special offers before, during and even after the event in question. This goes a long way in the name of improving the customer experience. At the end of the day, customers want to feel like they’re valued, and personal touches like this let them know that they are.
Triggered Journeys Use #3. Optimizing mobile touchpoints
In turn, this should also increase brand loyalty by keeping customers engaged with unique, triggered experiences. This can be pushed further by using triggered journeys to create a game-like aspect to touchpoints like apps. For the purposes of this example imagine you are a brand with a mobile app, it would be possible to use your app to instigate various challenges that will trigger rewards when completed. Not only is this a relatively simple way of keeping customers interested, but it’s also a good indication of the power and versatility of triggered journeys.
Triggered Journeys Use #4. Powering offline interactions
Digital marketers are gradually realizing the power of direct mail. What some may dismiss as a slow, manual marketing channel is becoming an even more useful way of reaching out to customers with the help of direct mail automation. Using a directly mailed postcard means two things:
a) The information isn’t hidden behind an envelope
and
b) Brands can engage with customers without having to cut through a crowded email inbox
Whilst sending tonnes of mail to someone is never going to be effective, tailoring postcard campaigns to customer behavior is. In this respect, triggered direct mail is just the same as any automated online channel.
For instance, when working at a trade show or conference, brands are faced with numerous new sign-ups. Rather than triggering an email, these sign-up forms can be used as the trigger for direct mail postcards. When received, these cards remind the new sign-up of the event and, of course, your brand.
Postcard campaigns also work well for re-engagement and present the perfect opportunity to reach out to customers with low activity in order to re-capture their interest with directly mailed offers. If you’re interested in triggered direct mail, reach out to Inkit’s 24/7 support for a demo and consultation.
About the Author / About TAP London
To learn more about how you can improve the customer experience via digitization, talk to TAP London. As an expert in the Adobe Experience Cloud, TAP London helps brands organize data to provide meaningful insight and memorable customer experiences. Find out more at wearetaplondon.com“
