The journey that a customer makes. Via different channels, on different devices and at multiple locations. Sometimes this takes a few minutes, sometimes a few months. From the first introduction to a company up to customer retention. What does a customer’s journey look like and how can a company respond to it?
Many different models are known that describe this journey. Yet they all come down to the same thing;
Reach the right people
First of all, we as a company must reach our customers. To let them know who we are, what we offer and why we are better / nicer / faster / cheaper / etc than anyone else.
Motivate them to do something
The next step is to motivate these people to do something with our product, service or brand. This can be, for example, an insurance calculation, filling in a contact form or following a company via social media or the newsletter.
Activate them to buy something
If we have the attention we will proceed with the action. That can be a purchase in a webshop or taking out an insurance policy, for example. We are talking about converting.
“Pamper” them to keep them
Many models that describe a customer journey stop here. We have received the attention of the customer, he has done something with our product, our service or our brand and has proceeded to the “purchase”. But it really only starts here. We are now talking about customer retention or loyalty. “It costs us 5x more to find a new customer than to keep an existing customer!”.
It would be a shame not to take that final step. We have made a new customer happy, how can we best keep it?
Reach → Motivate → Activate → Keep
Study the customer journey
One of the success factors of the use of online marketing is to take into account the journey that your customer makes. The big challenge is to always be relevant in communication, rather than irritating. What this customer journey looks like will vary per product or service but also per person.
So there is no standard solution that is applicable to every company. However, we can work out what we want or can communicate in each phase. We then look at the results and investigate what works well and what doesn’t. Thanks to all the insights we receive, we can better align our online marketing approach with the (information) needs of our target group.
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