Today, customers prefer the brands they share an emotional or personal connection with. However, marketers and advertisers have been leveraging a strategic emotional perspective to render a great effect.

With the advent of new technological advancements, however, the bar to raise personalization of customer journey standards in the online landscape is quite high. If businesses want to survive in the foreseeable future, there’s a need to adopt a realistic personalization strategy to appeal to customers as individuals and create online interactions.

It ALL Starts with Mapping the Customer Journey

Contrary to misguided perception, the customer journey is not as predictable as most people think. Businesses, for instance, want to utilize more resources and tech tools to accumulate more customer data by using a CDP (customer data platform) from companies like Epsilon to get the intended results wanted for support of the business.

The trick, however, is to combine collected information to render a personalized journey for each individual customer. And this is where the mapping of the customer journey comes into the picture. It highlights key areas that would be advantageous throughout the personalization process.

What Does it Mean to Get the Personalization of Customer Journey Right?

v Take Care of Customers Stuck in Your Sales Funnel

Allow your customers’ engagement via your sales funnel as easier as possible. For instance, you can conduct a consistent analysis of your marketing funnel and understand the nature of each event that might present more opportunities throughout the engagement process.

The characteristic you need to look for in a sales funnel should be to ask when users came onboard on different channels. Similarly, find out which customer came back repeatedly but never moved on to the next phase.

Timeframe Adjustments

The real challenges surrounding the timeframe are more than enough for a marketing analyst to stress out and frustrate. When it comes to reconstructing an entire customer journey from scratch (i.e., raw data), timing can make all the difference.

Sure, the present data doesn’t have to make sense instantly. Without patience and broadmindedness to set the right timing adjustments, you might make a mess of your sales funnel. Fortunately, so long as you apply the workflow strategies throughout your customer journey, you can significantly increase conversions.

For instance, businesses have solutions to gather and use specific customer preferences and avoid customers being overwhelmed. Email newsletters are a common example where weekly, quarterly, and monthly frequency of adjustments are necessary, as this article on email list hosting explains. Simultaneously, make the most out of collected behaviors throughout customer journey processes to make better-scheduled campaigns.

Make Connections with Customers on Specific Preferred Channels

Even if you have similar audience segmentation, you will have to make connections on multiple preferred channels where customers are most present. It is one of the reasons data accumulation from voice assistants and chatbots are high in demand.

Whether or not you can measure the impact on a channel, focus on omnichannel experiences to capture everyone’s attention. In essence, personalization is mostly about making connections with targeted customers the way they prefer.

Set Notifications and Reminders

Think of it as an aspect of personalization that requires due-diligence and careful consideration. And that’s because there’s a thin red line between being informative and being annoying. For example, when it comes to mobile experiences, text messages and push notifications can improve your overall customer journey. The same rules, standards, and benefits apply to time-oriented services and processes.

Concurrently, don’t forget to reward customers who hop aboard faster. It means to streamline your primary customer journey for users who continue to come back. Customer effort and time-to-purchase will always be vital considerations to design any type of offering.

Align Segmented Content to Understand Personas

Currently, content and digital strategies have mastered the art of creating customer personas. However, it takes a user-specific mindset to optimize content that bears context relevance. Consequently, you would be able to eliminate communication gaps in targeted messages as well as improve the customer journey. In fact, even data collection requires innovation that helps brands authenticate their preconceived persona assumptions.

Patience and Digital Profiling Process

Businesses have to think of personalization through the lens of the digital context. However, the digital revolution will continue to bring new windows of opportunities for brands to further improve the personalized customer journey.

In hindsight, digital profiling allows businesses to execute creative ideas and monitor an ocean of customer activities. Nonetheless, more companies have gradually come to realize just how fast their customers are embracing the modern digital behaviors.

Therefore, it makes sense to calibrate customer journeys that meet their desired expectations. It does, however, takes rigorous research to develop basic insights about your customers. During digital profiling, focus on device preferences, channel preferences, and expectations of customers.

Consequently, you will be able to segment customers into various digital profiles better. In this regard, you can think of leveraging existing customer data through which you will be able to understand different digital profiles. For example – by applying insights from demographics and psychographics, detailed customer personas can be modelled, which can help in driving customer engagement.

In fact, you can even form a clear picture as to how a particular customer may react to different service strategies. Besides, you can always make adjustments in the customer journey as per digital profiles. Also, there’s no end-point when it comes to the digital journey because it requires constant reassessment.

The Popularity and Effectiveness of Salesforce

The cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) software pushes new boundaries to bring companies and customers together. Businesses now have unique opportunities to connect with their customer base without too much effort. However, that’s not where the story ends.

The cloud computing SaaS company continues to find new ways to build CRM initiatives. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a multitude of businesses has come to depend on Salesforce to monitor customer activity in real-time through analytics and market numerous services.

Salesforce Journey Builder, on the other hand, is one of the most successful marketing cloud products. It practically helps businesses to create multiple customer journeys that cater to business needs. The best aspect of the Salesforce Journey Builder is the avoidance of generalization, which often leads to dissatisfaction. You can devise specific customer journeys during customer onboarding or customer re-engagement.

Personalized Customer Journey: What Lies in the Future?

Despite continuous IT revolution and digital advancements, the human element will always exist in personalization. As much as AI-based bots, business intelligence and big data are crucial to segment personalized experiences, savvy brands understand the relevance of “smart” personalization. Memorable customer experiences, after all, are the key to gain high conversations. It’s the “wow” factor and feel-good experience that improves customers’ trust and esteem for a brand.

Customer Journey and Data

Through personalization, you can utilize what you are already knowledgeable about your individual customers and make intelligent adjustments to heighten their overall customer experience. However, the human touch has to be there despite newfound AI-based technologies.

In fact, it is the marriage of technology and creative human ingenuity that leads to a powerful strategy and offer more sophisticated personalized customer experiences. Contemporarily, businesses can use a vast amount of data through integration platforms, plus tools like reverse ETL to connect the data to the relevant software, in order to create personalized experiences for customers.

Conclusion

Once you figure out the “Who,” “When,” “What” and “How” of personalization, you can orchestrate flawless customer journeys. It is one of the reasons more brands want to cultivate online customer relationships for the sake of multiple interactions over time.

Half of the solution lies in knowing what your customers want at what time. Of course, you have to combine your creativity with analytical tools to render the best possible customer experience. From increased retention to customer satisfaction to customer loyalty, personalization undertakes a series of tactics to ensure customer journeys convert into seamless customer experiences.