Email-marketing is the backbone of your digital communication strategy. They give a personal edge to your brand engagement with your customers, while other marketing channels fail to do so. Customers are demanding, choosy, and frankly, why shouldn’t they be? We are customers too. The batch style email blasts that drop into our mailboxes every week, are so putting off! Who likes being addressed and attended to like a commoner? Customer behavior has evolved and with that emails need to evolve too. What we need today is an email strategy that is more focused upon customer journeys rather than those which shout deals and offers loudly.
What is a Customer Journey?
The path a customer traverses, going past various touch points before making the final purchase is the customer’s journey.
Leveraging Customer Journey to Create Email Campaigns
Given the pace with which customers are adapting themselves to digital sophistication, it is necessary to understand how they would interact with the various touch points created on the ‘purchase pathways’. Customers want brands to be their guide and not a salesman. They don’t want to be bothered every now and then, but they wouldn’t mind a subtle hint of some scintillating offers or deals once in a while. Similarly your emails should be your ‘stand-ins’ in the literal sense.
You might ask, ‘How do you know which way the customer will go?’
Answer: The customers go where YOU want them to
That’s right. Campaigns have often been misunderstood as a steady blast of emails to promote a deal or an offer and the results so obtained are skewed. Create purchase pathways for customers to take. Decide WHAT you want your customer to do and accordingly craft your email message.
Let us look at how to create a Customer Journey
1. Define your goal
You heard it right. YOUR goal. This is the final result or conversion point which you desire. It could be a purchase, a deal, an offer, a download or a simple sign up! Decide what you want your customer to do in the end. For the sake of understanding, let’s consider this goal to be a subscription purchase.
2. Create a Journey Map
Literally. Just pick up a pencil and a paper and start drawing the path that your customer will take towards your decided goal. Ideate with your team and come up with touchpoints that your customer will come across on his way to goal achievement. These touchpoints are basically the intermittent stages in which customer will interact with your brand. That could be first the email. Then after clicking the ‘Download’ button on your email, he would be directed to your landing page. That’s touchpoint number 2. He would then be presented with details of the subscription and a short questionnaire to understand his preferences and likings.
3. Involve every department in creation of the Touch points
It’s not just the marketing department that has to do with the customer’s journey. Expertise from other departments is also required to make the customer journey smoother and lead him to the final goal at the earliest. For instance, the tech team has a huge role to play because customers can interact with the brand through smartphones, tablets or laptops. Your emails, the customer journey should be adapted by imagining yourself in the customer’s shoes.
4. Automate your emails based on the trigger and the data so collected
The touch points you create will trigger actions from the customer. Automate your emails to be shot out whenever a trigger goes off. Use the data you have collected to predetermine what those triggers would be. Eg: Send a welcome email once a customer signs up.
Conclusion
Once you align your email campaigns according to the customer journeys, you will be in a better position to build a relation with your customers. Want to create journey based email campaign? Sign up with Juvlon!