When I’m asked the question, “How do I use automation throughout the customer journey?” the first thing I respond with is, “It’s not as difficult as you think”. Now let me explain to you more about Marketing Automation and why Automation Throughout the Customer Journey is not as difficult as you think
Some background context
The customer journey is the process by which a new lead takes a journey through all the touch points with your business, to becoming a customer, then staying for a long time (or as long as you want them to remain).
This isn’t just a few emails offering a product and asking for a sale.
This isn’t just a pretty website with beautiful images and lots of excellent copy promising everything you want, yesterday.
This is so much more than that.
The journey, you see, is the ENTIRE journey from when they first see your business to when they’ve been with you for a long time.
Most businesses don’t even view it as a journey; they want to focus on the sale.
However, the smart businesses, at the top of their niche in their industry, (look at Disney, Zappos, Apple) know exactly what this is, and they have mastered it beautifully.
Your job as a Business Owner, Marketing Manager or General Manager, is to become very clear about what that journey is – so that you can use some smart technology to automate parts of it and make life easier for you all.
Who are you talking to?
You’ve got to consider who you’re talking to, or your Automated Customer Journey will become a lot of hype and hot air that lands in the inbox of people who don’t respond in the way you want them to. (They may even mark your emails as spam).
If you haven’t done this already, you need to work on creating your Ideal Customer Avatars, so that you know precisely who you are addressing, and everything about them.
Once you have your Customer Avatar dialed in, you can look at the journey of how to nurture them.
The Automation Process
There are many tools on the market to help you set up automation throughout the customer journey, so I won’t go into that today. As I said earlier; it’s not as difficult as you think!
There are so many articles and websites you can research – you could get lost in the web for the next week, reading about them all and what makes them ‘better’ than the others!
The key thing here is having the map or plan of your customer journey laid out, so you know what the process needs to be.
Using your automation tool, you need to map out each of your journey flows for your ideal customers. If you don’t have an automation expert on your team to do this, then you must outsource it to an expert.
Note: this will save you months of wasted energy and pent up frustration!
The automation build will be optimised once you follow your Map/Plan of your customer journeys and ensure each one is built out according to the plan.
If you’re unsure about what you’ve created, the best thing to do is test it!
Build, Test, Optimise
My recommendation is to do the following:
1. Create your plan (from your customer journey).
2. Build one journey for the most frequented process in your lead nurturing process.
3. Drive traffic to that new journey that’s being run by the automation (whichever one it is).
4. Test it, tweak it, optimise it.
Once you’re used to how the technology flow works following your plan, you then need to focus on the other aspects of your customer journeys.
Build them all out until your entire end-to-end customer journey is set up, using your internal systems worksheets and the automation tool you’re using.
Test it from end to end, ensuring it all works functionally.
Then test it using your ACTUAL leads coming into the funnel, and watch them at every step of the journey, ensuring that they are experiencing it exactly as you had planned.
Test, tweak and optimise.
This entire process could take you as little time as a few months (if you already have your Ideal Customer Avatars created), or as long as 2 years.
It depends on your dedication to getting it done properly and doing the work to ensure the steps are followed, and everything is tested and optimised.
So, as you can see, it’s not as difficult as you think!
Using Automation throughout the Customer Journey is one of the smartest things you could do in your business, and when done well, it will bring you great rewards.
Let me know how you’ve gone with building your automation throughout the customer journey in your business!
I look forward to hearing your comments and feedback below.
Happy Journey-creating!
If you need help with automating your customer journey map, feel free to contact us!
