Understanding the Customer Journey Toward Brand Loyalty

A customer’s path to purchase has never been as long and complicated as it is now. With hundreds of potential online and offline touchpoints, customers have ample opportunities to interact with brands throughout their journeys. Let’s examine each of the customer journey stages and discover how businesses can make the most of each step.

Customer Journey Stages

Unraveling the customer journey stages helps establish a baseline for customer journey analytics, insights, and strategies. First, let’s define the customer journey as a whole:

The journey often begins with a brand’s desire to sell and a consumer’s desire to buy. How they come to meet, interact, and transact is made up of a collection of many different points of engagement that shape customer experience and direct the customer journey. While no two consumer stories are truly identical, most marketers agree that the customer journey is typically characterized by the following stages:

Let’s take a closer look at each stage to find opportunities brands can use to move customers closer to conversion.

Lead Generation and Awareness

This initial stage is characterized by a potential customer’s awareness of a particular product or service. Brands often take the initiative at this stage and reach out to target audiences through lead generation. Businesses can choose from several methods to generate leads via outbound marketing (cold calling, direct email, etc.) and inbound marketing (search engine optimization, content creation, etc.).

The first step of the journey doesn’t seem to provide brands much leeway; after all, potential customers haven’t committed much. But having the right tool—like a customer data platform (CDP)—can give brands an early edge through the following functions:

Derive Insights. Customer insights help companies analyze behavior, assess responses to campaigns, decode consumer needs, and realign marketing strategies. Brands can derive insights from a CDP’s 360° customer profiles, which it creates from a combination of first-, second-, and third-party data sources. These unified profiles give anonymous consumers a permanent identity (WHO) and enable brands to follow their actions (WHAT). A 360° view makes it possible for brands to develop deep insights to optimize targeting and marketing.

Design Marketing Actions. As brands gain a deeper understanding of their target audiences, they can plan marketing actions that will help move customers down the funnel. CDP tools—such as Treasure Data’s recommendation engine—can help marketers choose the activations best suited to guide prospects toward conversion based on their behaviors.

Deploy Across Channels. Lastly, CDPs like Treasure Data’s empower marketers to deploy insights-based activations across all channels with a few clicks. This creates a consistent experience across interfaces and keeps customers engaged wherever and whenever they choose to interact with brands.

With the right target audience matched to the right marketing actions, it’s time to move on to the next stage.

Engagement With Intermediate Brand Touchpoints

At this stage, leads—or potential customers—explore intermediate touchpoints to see if the brand is a good fit for their needs. These touchpoints can be accessible in both digital and physical landscapes. Thus, prospects can browse a website, visit a physical store, or engage on social media without yet committing to a purchase. Brands can leverage a CDP at this stage to realign their marketing strategies and improve engagement with specific audience segments.

Evaluate Campaigns and Engagement. Advanced CDPs like Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud enable brands to assess and adjust campaigns based on consumers’ real-time responses. Treasure Data’s Audience Studio offers A/B Testing to compare the performances of different campaigns between different audience groups. This tool also helps marketers identify the most effective marketing strategies for particular targets.

Recalibrate Strategy. Brands can apply CDP-derived insights and predictive analytics to refine marketing strategies on a continual basis. This enables businesses to adapt quickly to customers’ needs. Treasure Data, in particular, has the near-instantaneous capability to change a target audience’s characteristics and corresponding touchpoints to increase the chance of conversion. Treasure Data’s enterprise CDP also allows marketers to recalibrate specific omnichannel experiences to different audiences.

Update Profiles. Customers’ responses, recorded as positive vs. negative, action taken vs. no action taken, etc., can be fed back into a CDP’s system to update the customer data foundation. As individual profiles and audience segments are updated, a CDP becomes more accurate in its analyses. This, in turn, enables the CDP to produce fresh, relevant insights on demand to optimize customer engagement.

As leads continue to engage with brands in intentional ways, CDPs like Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud can orchestrate customer journeys to help inch prospects closer to conversion.

Check out this Treasure Data CDP Retail Demo video to see how it works: