In today’s digital world consumers use multiple devices to engage with brands across multiple screens and channels in their purchase journey. As a result it is critical for marketers to develop a singular customer profile across all devices and touch-points. It is also critical to create content that is engaging and contextual for each step in the user journey. “We need to understand what our target audience might want to achieve, understand their path to doing this, see how mobile fits in, and then provide the right experiences and content to achieve these objectives.” (1)
The breakthrough has been unifying data across multiple sources to gain a full view of the customer journey. Stitching together offline and multichannel data is a great way to start. A marketer or brand could have a great website but the corresponding app lacks key features that join the two together. Understanding that consistency is key across all channels will make customers more profitable for companies. One central system is the preferable place where all of this data should be placed. “A system that can manage an all-encompassing media strategy within a single user interface, delivering integrated workflows, execution, and reporting across all channels with a foundation of identity” (2) Not only do these systems help to unify and execute data against KPI’s, they also help with personalization and identification of audiences to nudge the user further allow the purchase funnel, sometimes causing the actual conversion itself.
Tools like “Adobe Sensei” or “IBM Marketing Insights” use AI and machine learning to predict the next best action and can also make a recommendation on the best time to perform these certain actions. “The tool can go through users who are opening your company’s emails and identify those who don’t buy much or don’t necessarily convert, but who actively read the emails. A suggestion [the IBM tool] may provide is to entice these customers with a special offer that would maybe put them over the edge.” (3) After the initial data unification these tools are a great way to help improve the customer experience within the touch points of the journey. The point is to create a single personalization path for the customer all the way down the funnel of their specific user journey.
1. Do you know of any other ways that help create a personalized single customer journey?
2. Do you agree that personalized user journeys are most likely to convert customers?
References
1. Mobile Marketing Text Book
3. https://searchcio.techtarget.com/tip/4-ways-to-use-machine-learning-to-improve-customer-experience
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