Field Guide to Customer Journey Awareness: Understanding Customer Behavior for Better Retention

In a landscape of shifting brand loyalty, customer journey awareness is the key to winning customer retention. Unfortunately, in today’s digital landscape—littered with hundreds of touchpoints that make tracking difficult—customers become a moving target. However, marketers have access to solutions. Here’s a field guide to understanding customer journeys to increase loyalty and retention.

Customer Journey Awareness

First, let us define a “customer journey”:

Customer journey awareness, therefore, is viewing the entirety of that journey from every stage and touchpoint. But it doesn’t stop there. Brands also need to meet customers at any touchpoint when the opportunity for conversion presents itself.

Here are three takeaways to help you win and retain customer loyalty:

1: Customer Journeys Vary in Length

The traditional customer journey used to be linear and short. A casual shopper would see an ad for a product on TV and later buy it off the shelf in the nearest big-box store. Now, shoppers see ads on TV, websites, mobile devices, social media, and print in a dozen different ways. Consumers interact with brands on new platforms, do their own research, compare products, and buy items from all over the world without leaving their sofa.Additional factors complicate and lengthen the buying cycle. These include product/service price, consumer attitude and behavior, market competition, and more. It’s safe to say that the customer journey has become a multi-faceted and even circuitous process that would frustrate the most dedicated marketer. Therefore, marketers need to track customers’ movements from one touchpoint to another to understand why a customer’s journey ends in failure or success. Only then can customer behavior be interpreted within the proper context in order to apply the appropriate action to win loyalty.

2: Customer Journeys Vary in Conversion Points

Another wonderful thing about customer journeys is that conversion exists beyond a physical counter in a brick-and-mortar store. Consumers can complete purchases and actions of commitment on various platforms in innovative ways.For example, recent breakthroughs in touchless technology unveiled smile-to-pay and wave-to-pay systems. Instead of using a pin code or password, customers can now complete purchases using biometric credentials on a POS equipped with facial recognition technology.In this hyper-connected digital environment, customer journey awareness again becomes critical to every brand’s marketing campaign. Marketers can better anticipate where customers will convert with an omnichannel view coupled with real-time updates. Predictive analytics and behavior tracking will prepare brands to meet customers anytime and anywhere in the journey.

3: Decipher and Orchestrate Customer Journeys

Omniscience may sound like a tall order for a marketing department. However, tools and solutions are available to help brands achieve an omnichannel view and real-time tracking of customer movement.And there’s more good news: Once marketers obtain an omnichannel view of consumers and their position within the customer journey, they can take advantage of crucial moments to propel them towards conversion. Smart orchestration tools make this possible by establishing customer identity, using predictive analytics, and applying consumer insights through intelligent recommendations.In summary, customer journey awareness gives marketers visibility into customer movement and behavior across all touchpoints. This omnichannel view enhances the understanding of customer motives and attitudes, preparing marketers to seize crucial moments to guide them towards conversion. Customer journey awareness is difficult but not impossible to achieve.

Start Your Quest to Customer Journey Awareness

Treasure Data CDP is the key to customer journey awareness and orchestration. In tandem, Treasure Data Journey Orchestration is an omnichannel-first solution that enables marketers to obtain a comprehensive view of the customer journey AND create meaningful experiences at scale.Treasure Data Journey Orchestration enables you to:

• Identify audiences along the buying cycle
• Activate campaigns and channels based on individual customer behavior
• Follow customers wherever they go (including service and sales)
• Build no-code customer journeys with drag-and-drop features
• Automate segmentation and retargeting
• And more

Treasure Data Journey Orchestration offers an attractive visual and no-code canvas for marketers and customer experience managers. Marketers can use our customer data platform to optimize personalized journeys for each customer.Here are some use case examples for customer experience (CX) marketers:

• Create a journey to orchestrate interactions with consumers to drive business KPIs (such as engagement, purchase, or conversion).
• Optimize ROI by targeting profiles with low-cost activations (in-game & email) before higher-cost activations (FB/Google Ads) by setting up wait steps and multi-channel campaign activations.
• Track the state of profiles and activations so you can see if your journeys are effectively progressing customer profiles toward your goals.

To learn how to start your quest for customer journey awareness and orchestration, consult an expert today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call 1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information.