consumer journey Archives - Stevens & Tate Marketing

Building lasting customer relationships is one of the key challenges affecting most companies in today’s business landscape. Many are now investing more into their customer touchpoints by visualizing the customer journey, boosting customer satisfaction, and providing a seamless experience before and after purchase.

The ideal approach to customer engagement depends on several factors but should typically involve providing value, support, and resources. It also means making it easy for customers to do business with you while solving their problems quickly and efficiently.

The customer-centric aspect of your business should be felt right from marketing, and sales, to customer service. Your goal is to drive true engagement and encourage long-term loyalty that will eventually grow your customer base. Below are three steps you can take to boost customer engagement in the New Year:

1. Use Customer Feedback to Drive Improvements

The secret to being relevant in today’s customer-centric world is to give your customers what they want. But how can you give them what they want if you don’t understand their needs? First, you should know who your customers are and the problems you want to help them solve. That’s why you should prioritize their feedback throughout the customer touchpoints.

Some popular ways to engage with customers include: conducting online surveys, engaging in social listening, making random but regular phone calls, participating in events and meet-ups, etc. Regardless of where or how you seek customer feedback, ensure that the customers feel safe enough to be open and honest with you. That said, some feedback is just there to be observed, and you don’t need customers telling you what they want.

For instance, a high abandoned cart or bounce rate on the business website is one feedback you can observe and use your judgment to respond appropriately. In this case, for instance, the shipping cost may be high and needs to be lowered. Or your customers are forced to register before buying products, which complicates their overall site experience. A high bounce rate could also indicate a poorly designed website, unclear offers, or a poorly responsive/interactive site layout/theme.

By paying keen attention to your customers and their behaviors, you can learn a lot and find ways to boost their experiences. You can also request customer feedback to help you establish and develop your brand identity and to target your ideal market demographics.

2. Leverage Modern Technologies

Another way to enhance your customer experience strategy this New Year is to use modern technologies. These technologies don’t necessarily have to be complicated, provided they make your business processes more efficient. For instance, adopting B2C/B2B marketing automation, such as chatbots, can guide site visitors and enrich their experience on your website.

The other technologies you might consider integrating into your overall business strategy to boost customer engagement include:

Virtual and Augmented Reality. AR and VR are no longer the dreaded technologies they once were. Today, businesses embrace these technologies to enable visual and more refined customer journeys. If your products are compatible with most AR/VR apps, such as Google Lens, you’ll have appealed to a larger audience.
Cloud. If migrating part or all of your customer-facing operations to the cloud sounds revolutionary, it’s because it actually is. The cloud offers several opportunities, from increased flexibility to rapid scaling capabilities. This will see you communicate and address customer issues across different channels from one central location.
Leverage data analytics. Data is one critical element that can greatly improve your business operations if used properly. You can use data analytics software to gauge customer behaviors and make high-level decisions that positively impact customer experience.

3. Create a More Customer-Centric Culture

Most modern businesses emphasize customer-centricity and great company culture, but very few practice what they preach. In fact, only a few have fully integrated a customer-centric culture into their business operations. And it’s easy to see why this is the case.

According to a recent CMO Council report, only 14% of marketers say customer centricity is a crucial aspect of their businesses, and only 11% believe their customers would agree with that statement.

Changing the key aspects of your company culture to make it more customer-centric can be challenging. There would likely be a lot of resistance, even from the customers themselves, but it’s a crucial step to building a culture that truly puts the customer first. Some key steps you can take to create a customer-centric culture include:

Sensitize everyone in your organization to understand and empathize with customers.
Hire for customer orientation and customer experiences.
Ensure employees have access to customer feedback and insights.
Link employee culture to customer outcomes.
Reward employees who focus on customers and provide great customer experiences.

Besides implementing the tips above, you should also make the customer experience everyone’s responsibility. You can further enhance your efforts by embracing the 4C marketing model focusing on the consumer, cost, communication, and convenience.

The goal is to facilitate direct interaction with customers and encourage employees to intervene directly and build long-lasting relationships with your customers.

Final Thoughts

Your customers deserve the best, and you want to create unique experiences for them. This is especially the case when they are interacting with your products and services. One critical step to enhancing their experience is to understand their needs and commit to their growth journeys in ways your competitors can’t.

The goal is often to amaze your customers and keep them coming for repeat business. It’s worth noting that there are many ways to accomplish your business goals, but some techniques are more sustainable and effective than others.

For example, it’s often easier to use customer discounts to keep customers, but it may not be a sustainable strategy. However, implementing a customer-centric culture may take a longer time to yield results, but it can be an ideal long-term customer engagement strategy.

As a business owner, you need to know that every business has unique attributes, and you may need to combine various strategies to build your ideal customer engagement strategy. The three customer engagement strategies we have highlighted above aren’t exhaustive but can guide you to develop a solid customer-focused business.

Every consumer will go through different steps of consideration and purchase throughout the life cycle of a brand or service. In the past, the consumer buying cycle was explained by four stages: awareness, interest, evaluation, and purchase.

Modern marketing strategies put more emphasis on the emotional relationship brands have with their customers and how this relationship is developed throughout time. This new approach raises the importance of understanding how consumers move through different stages that will influence their behavior. As such, consumer journey mapping is a vital part of your marketing strategy.

Why is Consumer Journey Mapping Important?

Journey Mapping is a technique used to map out the journey of an average consumer throughout their buying cycle. It can help you uncover your UX gaps, identify weaknesses in your strategy, or even find ways of improving customer retention.

Journey mapping is an opportunity to think critically about how your customers discover, experience, and interact with your brand. Consumer journey maps can be complex, but the basic premise behind them is simple: visualize the entire customer journey through each user touchpoint (channel) imaginable.

What are the Stages of the Consumer Journey?

The following are the five stages of the consumer journey and the strategies you should implement to engage and nurture consumers through each stage:

1. Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is where consumers learn of your existence. There are multiple strategies that you can employ to generate awareness of your brand. Running TV commercials, publishing print ads, maintaining a social media presence, optimizing your website for SEO, and building relationships with influencers can all help to generate awareness.

The entire point of the awareness stage is to introduce your brand and what you do to those who aren’t familiar with it, whether they’re looking for a specific solution right now or not. Either way, it helps set consumers up for the next stage.

2. Interest Stage

It’s during the interest stage that consumers begin doing research into the problems or challenges that they have. At this point, they are simply looking to educate themselves. They may not be aware of what the solution to their problem looks like. In fact, they may not be completely clear about the challenge that they have.

To address consumers in this stage of their journey, you need to have information available that can help educate them. It’s why many businesses host a website blog and regularly publish content that educates and advises potential leads. By creating such content, you not only help nurture consumers through this stage, but you also help establish your brand authority, thereby building trust in your business.

3. Evaluation Stage

During the evaluation stage, the consumer will start thinking about what solution best fits their needs. The decision at this point is still up in the air and they’re weighing their options. At this stage, consumers may be more open to hearing about your products and services, which they may be comparing with those of your competitors.

To reach consumers during the evaluation stage of their journey, you need to showcase your unique value proposition. You can do this through content creation (by publishing white papers and ebooks, or by filming product demonstrations) or through offers (such as free trials or discounts on products).

It’s crucial that you establish a stellar reputation at this stage as well since consumers will be looking at reviews. As such, encourage past customers to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, and other review sites. Additionally, set up a testimonial page on your site.

4. Purchase Stage

At this stage, the consumer is close to buying your product. You’ll want to make it as easy for them as possible to make a purchasing decision. If you have an e-commerce page, make the checkout process as easy and streamlined as possible. Use an online chat feature that allows them to get in touch with a salesperson as soon as possible. Send automated email reminders to consumers who have abandoned their carts without checking out.

You should make it as easy as possible for consumers to make a purchase — and remove any roadblocks that can prevent the purchase.

5. Post-Purchase Stage

The consumer journey doesn’t end with a purchase. In fact, it will never end. You’ll want to make sure that they become long-term customers, which is why you’ll want to continue to nurture them using an email marketing campaign to build brand loyalty. You can even set up a brand ambassador program to help strengthen your relationship with consumers post-purchase.

Mapping the Consumer Journey is Crucial to Your Success

Mapping the consumer journey is important because it gives you a better understanding of how consumers act and how you can help nurture them towards a purchasing decision. By mapping out your consumer journey, you’ll be able to personalize your engagement with them more effectively and identify vital touchpoints that can help improve your conversions.

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Customer Engagement Strategy