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Nowadays, marketers simply cannot hit the baseline metrics they’re expected to achieve without considering cross-channel engagement in their overall strategy.
But just because cross-channel engagement is the new expectation doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve. After all, customer journeys become increasingly complex as people use more channels to interact with your company. So, how should a marketing team think about multi-channel customer journeys to drive engagement?
Customer journeys show how people go from being curious about your product or service to becoming customers. When created correctly, they act as a series of compelling experiences that keep folks hooked while interacting with a brand at every touchpoint.
By keeping each step of the journey captivating, you grab prospects’ attention, encourage them to buy a product for the first time, and make them come back for more. Done right, you turn them into loyal customers.
To provide cohesive and seamless customer experiences across multiple channels, you need powerful customer engagement technology, such as Braze.
Want to create cohesive and satisfying customer experiences? Consider these several critical factors when building your customer journeys.
The reality is that you can’t please everyone. People have diverse tastes, needs, and desires. And it’s simply impossible to offer everything that each individual would want all the time. Attempting to appeal to a non-specific audience often results in a diluted message that lacks impact.
Nailing down your ideal customer involves three crucial aspects:
Who are your target buyers?
Determine the demographic of your ideal customers, such as age, gender, location, profession, and income level. This information is the foundation of creating personalized customer journeys. However, demographics don’t give the whole picture of your ideal buyer. Knowing what your target consumers deeply care about gives you more insights.
What motivates them to buy?
Find out what keeps them up at night. With that, you have the single most powerful information to tailor your message in a way that resonates with your customers’ needs.
How do they buy?
Identify the channel(s) your target buyers use the most. Figure out whether your ideal customers make impulse purchases or take their time comparing options. Determine whether they prefer online shopping or in-store experiences. These insights help you develop customer journeys that match their buying behavior and invest in channels and experiences that are already resonating.
For most marketers, guiding prospects to buy for the first time is just one step on a longer set of goals related to the customer experience. Is your end goal to create a loyal army of brand ambassadors who make repeat purchases and recommend a product or service to others?
Alternatively, would an ideal post-purchase engagement be to gather customer reviews? Prospects perceive customer reviews as genuine and unbiased opinions of people who’ve already used what you offer. This can help build credibility and provide valuable insights for fine-tuning customer journeys.
Whatever your brand’s end game is, it should be considered when shaping your journeys.
You need to understand how long customers typically engage with your brand before purchasing. That way, you time your interactions appropriately.
For instance, a nurturing journey is appropriate for customers who require a longer time to make a decision. This ensures you provide the information they need to take the next step rather than pitch them before they are ready to buy. On the other hand, if they need a shorter time to take action, you create customer journeys that focus on more immediate calls to action.
At what point do leads disengage with the brand? What is the exact stage where a potential customer discontinues a process instead of taking the next step? These insights enable you to identify why customer engagement efforts are ineffective and what changes are necessary to optimize the overall customer journey.
Once you’ve considered the factors above, you can start to think about the right types of journeys you want to develop for your customers.
Customer journeys are diverse and can vary based on industry, business goals, and customer behaviors. Some common journey archetypes include:
Purchase Journey
This is the most straightforward type of customer journey, focusing on the steps a customer takes from initial awareness of a product or service to making a purchase. It involves stages like research, consideration, decision-making, and post-purchase follow-up.
Onboarding Journey
An onboarding journey guides new customers through getting started with a product or service. It includes providing tutorials, training, and support to ensure a smooth and successful user experience.
Re-engagement (Winback) Journey
For customers who have disengaged or become inactive, this journey aims to rekindle their interest. It involves targeted messages, special offers, and content to draw them back in.
Anniversary/Birthday Journey
This journey focuses on a special date for a customer, such as a birthday or when an individual first subscribed to your brand. It’s a single-message journey (per year) and usually involves personalized offers to celebrate this important milestone, with a goal of strengthening your relationship with them and driving engagement.
You can’t execute omnichannel journeys with outdated technology. Now that you’ve strategized the types of journeys you want to build and who you want to reach out to, you need the right tech to pull it off.
Enter Braze’s Canvas Flow: A modern journey orchestration tool. You can use it to quickly design, visualize, and activate any customer journey. Its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface allows you to create omnichannel campaigns quickly—no technical skills needed..
The tool also unifies all journey orchestration processes in one place, so you don’t have to switch between siloed platforms. This makes activating customer engagement efforts across all main messaging channels easy.
Canvas Flow has powerful experimentation capabilities to help you meet your customer journey needs. It allows you to test and fine-tune messaging, determine how often you reach out to your customers, and what channel best suits a particular campaign. Experimentation ensures your audience receives the right message at the right time, across any channel.
What’s more, Canvas Flow provides real-time insights to personalize journeys based on customer behaviors and preferences. As a result, you deliver hyper-relevant experiences that resonate with customers’ needs to improve engagement.
Braze's Canvas Flow is the real deal if you want a tool that makes your journey orchestration easier, boosts your campaign’s effectiveness, and equips you with innovative testing capabilities.
Need a little extra help pulling all this off? Stitch can help. Stitch empowers marketers to get the most out of their Braze investment by helping teams drive customer engagement and build their vision and strategy for the platform. Reach out to learn how we can help you streamline cross-channel customer journeys within Braze.
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