Understanding Your Customer Journey

Do you understand your customer? It’s a widely accepted fact that it is cheaper to retain than acquire a customer. A Retention Marketing Survey from 2015 shows that 70% of respondents achieve better ROI by investing in relationships rather than acquisition marketing. Moreover, optimizing your customer experience is one of the best ways to foster customer loyalty. So why is it that only 41% of marketing executives employ customer engagement data to inform their marketing strategy?

Understanding your customer is essential to achieving your core business goals. Whether you are trying to build the customer journey, creating content, or merely trying to increase sales, understanding your customer is the key to success.

Here are five techniques you can implement to understand your customer better than they know themselves:

1. Use Intelligent Customer Engagement

Optimizing your customer experience is crucial to revenue and retention, and when you get it right, it also adds value to giving you customer insights.

Thanks to new tools and software, the ability to engage with your customers in real-time has never been more effortless. Messenger applications have become a widely popular customer service channel while also allowing you to speak directly with your customer as they browse your website. Not only do these programs offer a great way to stay in contact and answer questions immediately, but they also serve as a means to collect data on customer insights. When working in tandem with customer service teams, these messenger tools give you the ability to react quickly to the insights you come across.

Furthermore, communicating directly with your customers as they are searching allows you to understand better the customer journey by now identifying their pains, needs, and challenges. When you know these challenges, you begin to build a two-way street where you can create more sophisticated buyer personas.

A great way to facilitate these interactions is to encourage customers to share their thoughts and opinions through customer satisfaction surveys.