Jul 9, 2024
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Email marketing playbook
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As artificial intelligence (AI) enables an historic influx of real-time customer insights, the following best practices can help your team capture and benefit from the vast amount of data now at your fingertips.
Customer journey mapping continues to be an essential element of successful experience design. The role of AI and machine learning (ML) in mapping journeys increases the ability of organizations of all sizes to benefit from a wealth of real-time insights informed by extremely specific user interactions. Deciding how to act on journey data, however, can be an overwhelming task. Enabling an internal journey mapping culture is an important first step toward helping your teams do “more with more” (e.g., more data, more channels, more integration).
Over the past decade, we’ve seen three distinct evolutions of journey mapping as an industry tool. The first phase was the acceptance of journey mapping as a product design best-practice, wherein organizations of all types rushed to document “baseline” customer journeys for their key audience types. A second evolution occurred in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when re-visiting journey maps became critical due to dramatic shifts in customer behavior, as cohorts previously resistant to digital communication were suddenly forced to embrace it.
The third and most recent wave is the introduction of AI to model journeys in real-time, including the advent of so-called “journey orchestration engines” and other tech aimed at actioning on customer insights as they happen. While this new frontier of data holds promise, prioritizing a journey mapping culture ensures teams can integrate learnings seamlessly.
- Nail the basics. While technology gets increasingly complex, the basics of journey mapping remain the same. Focusing on what customers “think, do, and feel” across their interactions with your brand helps you find successes and areas of opportunity. Be transparent with your team about how and when you gather data to help them incorporate feedback on an ongoing basis. For example, are you using customer satisfaction or NPS surveys, site analytics, employee feedback, or a combination of several sources? How are these results gathered and communicated out? Your measurement strategy doesn’t have to be perfect, but it’s important to identify where you have gaps and establish a plan to address them.
- Consider a journey atlas. This is a big one, particularly for large or more complex companies with a lot of data, more diverse audiences, or more mature journey mapping practices. A journey atlas helps standardize the lens and process by which your brand analyzes multiple customer journeys. Think of an atlas as a large index of all the maps you have organized by customer type and business unit. The ability to contextualize multiple user journeys in the same atlas is a systematic way to avoid bias; eliminate silos; and create alignment on priorities, roles, and responsibilities.
- Avoid boiling the ocean. Broadening the scope of your journey documentation helps avoid feeling overwhelmed by details. An atlas allows your teams to focus on one key customer persona at a time and work iteratively to “fill in the blanks.” Being overly generic, while tempting, can strip away the valuable insights found in the more granular details of the customer journey. Properly define your “actors” one at a time and prioritize key personas to gain the greatest strategic benefit.
- Look beyond the happy path. It is tempting for teams to over-index on their idealized version of the customer journey and how it might look when everything goes perfectly. Embracing pain points in journeys can provide the biggest long-term lift in customer satisfaction scores. According to the 2024 Forrester report, The ROI of CX Transformation, when companies deliver a good service experience by solving customer problems quickly, their customers are twice as likely to stay with them on average. When analyzing customer journeys, try to focus on the most probable version to account for complexities, pain points, gaps, and successes. Set aside the over-simplified best-case scenario and lean into the real ones.
- Democratize journey data. Creating journey maps in a vacuum will only hinder your results. Engage various parts of the business to get the most accurate results and ensure broader awareness, reach, and usage. Consider an interactive journey map that connects to an “insights hub” to catalog qualitative and quantitative research findings and make them accessible throughout the organization.
That may sound like a lot, but it doesn’t have to be. Our experts can jumpstart your journey mapping efforts and develop a customized journey atlas to optimize your marketing initiatives across channels. This holistic view helps uncover how customers move into greater participation with your brand and informs marketing initiatives that propel customers to deeper emotional loyalty, resulting in bottom-line impact for your entire business.
Interested in hearing more? Let’s talk.
