Marketing Automation through Customer Journey

One of the biggest struggles we online businesses have is we can’t track in which stage of the journey the buyer is? This is something that is can’t be judged in which stage the customers lie in. On the other hand, it’s easy for small business owners and marketers to recognize which stage their customer lies in.

But with intelligence, this job could be done efficiently with marketing automation.

Customers’ Journey

Generally, they count three stages of customers’ journey, which is sometimes also called a Buyers’ journey. The three stages are as follows:

1. Awareness, where the person gets to know about some particular product/ service is being provided in the market.
2. Consideration, here the person realizes whether he/she requires that product or service with the business.
3. The decision is the last phase of the journey. And the most important because here is the last stage where a customer buys the product/ service.

 What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is software platforms and technologies developed for the marketing departments. This up-gradation done is to market the business on multiple channels and to automate the repetitive tasks of the marketing departments and organizations.

Initially, only email marketing was considered into Marketing automation but eventually, it refers to the wide range of automation and analytic marketing tools. It broadly covers email marketing, social media, website, and especially inbound marketing.

What does Stats say?

According to the marketing automation report of TFM&A 2014, the top three reasons marketing uses the automation is:

1. It takes 36% of repetitive tasks out of their hands. 
2. It improves 30% customer targeting.
3. It helps to improve the customer experience by 10%.

So the marketing automation entirely helps to find out the stage of the customer in the customers’ journey. But the question remains the same, is how can we map that?

Here is how…

Stage 01: Awareness

As said earlier, this is the first stage, where your targeted audience is not yet got introduced to the product or service that you are providing. Also, people who don’t know anything about your industry can be also counted in this category, where you will be introducing your product/ service to them.

Approximately 96% of the people come to your website are not buying your product/ service. And that what the first stage stands for, Awareness.

You get a chance here to make people aware of your product/ service and convince them of the importance and need of your product/ service in their business no matter what business do they have.

Now the from your point of view, popping up on the various platform so that you will get introduced to people of different niche and stand chances of getting the business out of it, you need your content to be liked, shared, re-tweeted, to reach a number of people. Your social media presence is important too.

Stage 02: Consideration

Once a person comes from random browsing to a specific search then the customer has moved from the stage of awareness to the second stage called consideration. Here the person is convinced the need for the product/ service. Now the journey goes into search mode where he/she search for the same product/ service providers. And at this point free trials, articles and videos of reviews are searched more to know about who in the market provides the service better.

This is what called getting the lead. Now there is one good way to nurture the leads is by tracking the activity of the visitors. And since you know which page they are visiting and what emails they are opening, and what links they are clicking, you can make creative triggers and send the relevant messages. This will help you in transforming the lead into the next and the last stage of the journey.

Of course, hunting the lead and following the process is not a human thing, you need to take help from tools available in the market and an experienced team in this niche.

Stage 03: Decision

This is the last stage in the process, where the customer takes the decision about buying the product/service.

Only lead generation is not important, reverting on the email is equally important, too.

Support emails are a great way to be in touch with your customer and it also helps in knowing whether your customer is happy with your service or not.

 A conclusion could be drawn like you can save so much of your time with the help of automotive marketing by using various tools and you can save the efforts at the same time. Also, you can target the potential audience for your business.   

Here are some absolute helping ways to improve the customer journey with marketing automation:

1. Running Welcome Campaigns through mailers.
2. Give them targeted second purchase experience.
3. Developing Behavior-based campaigns.
4. Cross-platform programs.
5. Improve targeting using other social media platforms.
6. Carry greeting for birthday, holidays and all big days.

 

 

 

By Harshada Kumbhakarna on November 2, 2019   /   ChatterBox   /   2 Comments