How to evaluate your own customer journey
As marketers, it’s our job to know how to attract our target customer. When we need to launch or change a marketing campaign, we are easily paralyzed by indecision. Customers make so many decisions! How do we understand them? How can we find them?
Enter - the customer journey map. We distilled the customer journey into three primary stages that we evaluate together with our customers. Keep it simple, and let’s put ourselves in our customers’ shoes.
Careful! Due to the pandemic, your customers’ journey may have been completely upended. Don’t worry, marketing tactics may be changing, though the fundamentals of marketing have not.
Sit back, relax, and envision your ideal customer.
What are they wearing? Where are they working? What shows do they watch on Netflix? Do they still have cable? Wait…they only have cable?!
(We’ll talk about developing customer profiles in a later article, so for now, let’s continue).
“Before you market someone, walk a mile in their shoes.”
- Said no one ever, except us.
Developing empathy
The well-known adage of “Before you judge someone, walk a mile in their shoes,” is a simple reminder to develop empathy with other people. Understand their experiences, thoughts, and emotions, before you judge them. As marketers, we must have empathy with our customers or we will not be able to speak to them appropriately, at the appropriate time.
As marketers, instead of selling to our customers, we need to help them buy.
How can we help them make the best decision? By putting the customer at the center of the experience, we unpack their connection to our brand. Suddenly, we clearly visualize how our customers interact with us, and then evaluate where our marketing falls short.
3 Customer Decision Stages
After visualizing yourself in your customers’ shoes, you need to follow their footsteps. How did they hear about you? When did they really get interested? Answer these questions by outlining 3 key decision-making stages.
Step 1 - CONSIDER
Your customer is introduced to your product.
You need to:
Nail that first impression
Make sure it’s memorable
Make sure you’re (re)introducing yourself multiple times to remind your customers that you exist
How do your customers base their decisions in this stage? Primarily based on their emotions.
Your message or advertisement will need to reach them on an emotional level. Your audience may not be able to articulate why they’re intrigued by you, though they may feel a gut instinct on why they’ll give you a second chance.
Step 2 - EVALUATE
Your customers evaluate whether or not your product is the one they need.
You need to:
Convince your customers why your product is the right one for them.
Understand your competition so you know what your audience already expects from you.
Know what other people are saying about you and be ready to respond to those concerns.
How do your customers base their decisions in this stage? Primarily based on their rationality.
Your customers will look at your pricing comparisons, reviews, competitors, read comments and testimonials, and evaluate the pros and cons. When you successfully transition someone from the Consider to Evaluate stage, be sure to affirm or reward that decision. You'll be surprised how often turns a lead into a customer.
Step 3 - CELEBRATE
Your customer buys your product, and celebrates.
You need to:
Seal the deal!
Reduce all friction.
Make it a moment so your customer feels the love (i.e., “remembers” the love).
People want to enjoy your product. It’s your job to make them so happy that they want to tell all their friends, and buy again in the future. If you do it right, they will skip one and two in the future.
How do your customers base their decisions in this stage? Primarily based on their emotions.
The ease and emotional success of your purchasing process will not only impact the success of a purchase, but also the memory of your brand and likelihood that your customer will make another purchase. Any additional event that went “above and beyond,” to make them feel special will help you gain customer loyalty. It can be as easy as a 20% discount code, a nicely designed proposal, or a handwritten follow-up note.
While we prefer subtle moments driven by empathy and support, this “buy & celebrate” phase also benefits from psychological tools such as “the law of scarcity.” Although your customer took many steps to get to this point, subtle tools can bring them home. Adversely, a very small hiccup can send them off course and they’ll never come back.
How do we use these 3 customer stages?
Write down of the three customer decisions stages: Consider, Evaluate, Celebrate
Write down everything you know about each of these customer decisions.
Don’t where to start? Talk to your sales team!
Ask for customer feedback. Provide surveys or interviews if your customers are willing.
Write down your marketing tactics within each customer stage.
Remember - nearly all of your digital tools provide some sort of trackable metric (ad clicks, to viewed pages, time spent per website session etc…)
What’s working and what’s not?
Correlate your tactics with the your customers’s decisions, and improve or remove what doesn’t work.
For marketers, this is the fun part (and also the hard part.) Strategy becomes design, copywriting, and marketing execution.
Once you decide what to do, check back in after a few weeks or months to make sure it’s still working. You’re never finished listening to your customers.
Get at it! You got this.
Still don’t know how to start reviewing your customers’ journey? Here are some questions to get you started:
Where is the first place that your customer comes in contact with you?
Is it an online ad?
Is it a referral from a friend?
Is it in social media?
How long does it take to make a buying decision?
Do they visit your website?
Do they follow you on social media?
Do they look at your reviews or ask their friends?
What else happens before they’re influenced to buy?
When they make a purchase, what happens?
Is it an easy process?
Is it a long-contractual engagement?
Do they purchase again?
Bonus: Quick take on the “sales funnel”
Like many marketers, we at Wimbly Stoke don’t love the traditional “sales funnel” analogy, because the customer journey is not shaped like a funnel. However, we’ve never found another visual tool that’s simpler and more helpful than the sales funnel. However, there are many useful alternatives to the funnel, so if you’re interested, look up these tools: “customer journey mapping,” “customer lifecycle,” or the “customer decision journey.” We adore these tools and use them often, though we find ourselves resorting to our three, easy-to-follow steps.
Once you truly dig into your customer’s journey, there is no limit of layered complexity. People are complicated, so your customers will be complicated too. Many “customer journeys” have at least six or seven steps, and most likely many, many more.
At Wimbly Stoke, we believe the magic of marketing arises when you can simplify what you’ve learned about your customers and apply it in a creative and persuasive manner.
Good marketing does not need to be complicated.
Start with these three customer steps - Consider, Evaluate, Celebrate - and become the expert on your own customer. (They may not be anything like you.) By allowing customers to influence your decisions, you will never become outdated.
And of course, if you need any guidance, we’re happy to help. Just give us a call!