Market trends are booming. Your target customers have become more selective with smartphones in their pockets. They want alternatives, variety, and personalization — in short, they have higher demands than ever.
That’s right! Technology has made the business scenario more complicated, more nuanced. But it always shows a way to untangle the situation and move ahead toward success.
Organizations strive to tailor their marketing efforts uniquely and effectively to connect with their target audience on a more personal level. Result: leveled up conversions, close-won opportunities, and repeated business.
Time to think. What comes in handy when you think about marketing? Customer journeys. When you do have your customer’s accounts in your business software system, the process becomes way more manageable. Based on your firsthand data and analytics, you can clearly articulate your existing and targeted customers’ expectations that hold greater probabilities of success. Several marketing automation tools use drag-and-drop customer journey automation builders to make it smoother.
Now the problem is whether your organization has a clear view of your customers’ journeys. A lack of this valuable data point can restrict your business’s potential that you can expand with marketing automation.
This blog delves deep into the different aspects of marketing automation with customer journey mapping. Let’s suit up!
Simple answer: a quality CRM software – one that is as good as Zoho CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. As the name suggests, it sticks to its job and walks an extra mile for you. It is designed to help you cultivate a customer-centric culture for your business.
The cloud-based Zoho CRM efficiently documents all your customers’ information in a centralized space from where you can retrieve information at any time. It streamlines customer data and presents it to you in different molds, making it easier for you to have a visual representation of the steps your prospects take through your marketing funnel.
It takes a series of steps to map out your customer journey. Let’s get into it.
Think of customer journey maps to be your guiding path toward successful marketing objectives and KPIs. These maps are crucial for you to shape goal-oriented marketing strategies from the performance perspective. For instance, let’s say you identify a particular marketing strategy that has acquired repeat business with existing customers or even new ones, you can focus and advance the current momentum to gain more business. One of the strongest mediums of marketing is email campaigns. You can leverage this marketing point to increase personalized customer interaction with automation, rate your leads, and focus on them as per demand urgency.
Each customer calls in for unique attention. Now as a business person, you have to handle several clients simultaneously. Hence it is not always possible to approach your clients on a personal level. The best solution here is to create a buyer persona.
You have hundreds of clients, agreed. Your first step should be to segment your customers with characteristic specifications within your CRM. Zoho CRM software is a powerful tool that can extensively help you analyze which particular marketing channels generate most of the quality leads and the niche audience that benefits the most from your products/ services. You can get an in-depth understanding of your ideal customers from their social media engagement with your business page, the time invested in your website, and so on. You can have all the veritable data at your disposal which will help you create your ideal buyer persona and evaluate the overall performance of your marketing strategy.
Industry experts always recommend we choose applications that are flexible enough to adapt integrations – not for nothing. What if you want to advance your business operations? Would you rather replace the whole system or integrate it with third-party applications or extend APIs without migrating all your centralized data? I think we all know the answer here.
When you integrate Zoho CRM for your business operations, it works like a parent console that is abundant with data documented from different platforms. You can analyze and comprehend customer journeys without togging in between different screens. Zoho CRM is open to collaborating with various third-party applications from Google or Microsoft and other Zoho apps. The best part is that you can automate the whole system so that all the data is correlated and updated in real-time.
Automating your marketing efforts – that’s an easy way to say it. Do you use only one channel to land up meeting customers? It cannot be. You need a platform that centralizes all your marketing tools like one for Campaigns or another for Social.
Zoho offers you a marketing automation platform that you can integrate with your CRM to automate specific marketing actions for your target customers. This unified space for marketing helps to offer omnichannel communication to your customers while engaging them with personalization.
Today, customers have become more demanding than ever before. And this demand wave is only to increase by the day. Most millennial customers today prefer quality products and services on one hand while weighing personalization on the other. Exports report that it can take up to 8 interactions for a quality lead conversion. So you might have irresistible offers to provide them with, but if the communication is not proper, you won’t get the number of customers you expect.
However, when you have a customer journey map in place, you can offer them relevant products/ services on different communication channels to make them feel that their queries or pain points are being addressed. You are recognizing them and providing possible solutions that they might fit. The communication must be neat and always in sync across all channels so that they do not need to repeat their queries. For example, if you run a training provider company and perhaps a learner has completed his/her course. You would then want to recommend other relevant courses to upsell your product based on their previous purchase – following the customer journey map. This way, you can personalize your interaction with them and boost your sales.
With strong marketing automation tactics, you can track your audience’s activity to understand what they are looking for, capture leads, rate them with BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline) parameters, and streamline every communication touchpoint. This way you can nurture engagement with a personalized approach and drive more conversions.
Further, getting hold of accurate customer journey maps implies understanding customer expectations – a stepping stone toward meeting what they expect in reality. You can optimize the sales process, abort areas where you know they can face roadblocks, and resolve the issues if they spring up.
Acquiring customers costs 5x times more than retaining them. Hence, your job does not really end right after you close win an opportunity. Here loyalty programs add great value to your customers. You can easily determine the thresholds of minimum purchase frequency or average order spend so that you can reward your customers with points. The nest step is to upgrade your top buyers to premium status and send promo codes to share their experience with you to increase customer loyalty.
You can attract your audience with offers and promotions communicated through marketing mediums like email campaigns or social media and create up-sell or cross-sell your products. This way you can speed up your sales cycle, drive repeat business, and grow more revenue.
To be honest, it’s already difficult enough to reel in customers from the beginning. But if you do, leverage them to increase your revenue growth. Instead of approaching them with one-size-fits-all solutions, you can record your customer journeys to understand their preferences and requirements as individuals and provide personalized experiences. Increase lifecycle value by upselling and cross-selling newer opportunities that you know they might find beneficial. Customer lifecycle marketing gives you a better chance to engage through various communication channels and foster high value at each stage of the customer journey.
Making the right decisions at the right time to ultimately scale your business takes a bit of luck. With customer journey maps the job becomes much easier. All you need to do is optimize these maps as per performance. You can segment your customers, add new action points or workflows to target them with multi-channel marketing campaigns and scale your business. This will help you acquire greater quality lead conversion at more or less the same cost.
People will instantly like you when you offer products relevant to their needs, even before they ask for them. That’s what customer journey maps can do for you when you leverage the same with marketing automation.
If the current business climate demands personalization, you should prioritize that first. The foremost sector that you should focus on is your website content. You must adjust your content as per the seasonal demands. For example, if you run a travel agency company, the tariffs on different accommodations and facilities vary with the season. Or suppose, you have a real estate agency, the price points of your properties might vary as per location or amenity demand.
Zoho SalesIQ is highly recommended when it comes to website landing pages. When you target a niche audience, it’s a given that you will study the market. Based on your market research and expertise, chalk down the most frequently asked questions and can them up in the live chatbot with appropriate answers. Cut to the next step: Zoho SalesIQ proactively strikes up a conversation, answers their queries, and embeds the chat transcripts on the CRM. you can then easily browse through the same and take over the conversation to nurture the lead.
Product recommendations open huge doors for upselling and cross-selling opportunities and repeat business with existing customers. With documented customer journeys, you can recommend products banking on their purchase history and put forward attractive offers and discounts.
Your business goal is to serve your customers. Everything you do – every strategy that you follow revolves around your customers. They are the core of your business. Likewise, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software lies at the core of your business operations. It comes with abundant features that collectively help you manage every avenue of your business. You can create customer journey maps and automate marketing tactics for company growth. Most importantly, it is flexible enough to integrate with third-party applications to become a parent console to advance your business.
Have questions about Zoho CRM? Click on this gateway to the industry experts!