Drive ROI growth with personalization and customer journey mapping

Highlights

You’ll learn how personalization and customer journey mapping can drive ROI:

• Enhanced engagement: Customers prefer tailored experiences
• Higher conversion rates: Tailored content builds trust and improves conversions
• Increased loyalty: Personalized journeys foster long-term relationships
• Data-driven decisions: Analyze customer data to make the right decisions

Google reports that 61% of customers expect brands to personalize their digital experiences and interactions. Hence, businesses must tailor digital experiences to match customers' expectations. Customers will likely engage more and become brand loyalists when they do that.

But how can organizations get to that point? It starts with mapping the customer’s journey.

Understanding customer journey mapping

Tracking a customer’s interaction with your brand is helpful for many reasons. It gives you deeper insight into the customer's needs, pains, emotions, etc. It also provides insight into the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

Customer journey mapping is a visual flow that brands use to track a customer’s interaction with them. This process puts you in the consumer’s mind to better understand their processes, needs, and perceptions. It lays out all the touch points a customer has with your brand and enables you to access:

• Insights – how to understand them better.
• Impact – how to apply changes that lead to a better experience.
• Issues/opportunities – what to add, improve on or do away with.

Ultimately, you must learn from the process to create personalized experiences that drive conversions and business growth.

Key components of a customer journey map

Businesses must go through some essential components in mapping a customer journey. This enables them to understand how best to serve their customers. Here are the components of a customer journey map.

• Touchpoints: Interactions between a brand and the customer that inform their perception.
• Personas: These are fictional characters of different product or service users.
• Thoughts and actions: The feelings of customers at every phase. 
• Actions: What the customer is doing at every phase of their journey.
• Phases: These are the timeline of a customer’s journey.
• Pain points: Factors that inhibit their experience.

When businesses understand these components, they can then create a realistic map of a customer’s journey. That enables them to deliver more personalized experiences.

The role of personalized customer experience

Here is what the data says. 90% of marketers believe that personalization drives business profitability. Strategic personalization drives customer engagement and loyalty. When customers feel valued, they are more likely to remain loyal to a brand. 

Personalized customer experiences go beyond addressing customers by name. It is about tailoring the entire journey to meet the needs of the customer. Personalized customer experiences drive:

• Higher conversion rates from targeted campaigns.
• Tailored content and offers.
• Brand loyalty and long-term relationships.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Higher return on investment (ROI).

Miami Heat delivers personalized digital experiences to its fans via Contentstack. The headless CMS feeds content to their app, giving them access to a tool with personalization features. That allowed them to visualize customer needs and run targeted campaigns, leading to a 100% increase in app open rate and sales growth. 

Summary of the steps to map customer journeys

Mapping a customer's journey involves many processes, but it can be summarized in three steps.

1. Set clear objectives: Ask yourself why you are creating a journey map. What are you trying to get to, who is it for, and what experience is it based on?
2. Develop customer personas: Create detailed profiles that represent your customer segments. You can get customer feedback through user testing and survey questionnaires. This ensures you develop personas based on real data.
3. Identify touchpoints: Identify where interactions occur and evaluate their impact on the customer experience. This can be your website, social channels, paid ads, etc.
4. Take the journey yourself: You want to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. This gives you a first-hand idea of potential drop-offs, roadblocks, etc.
5. Create journey maps: Visualize the entire customer journey, including the emotions, actions, and pains of customers—and identify opportunities for strategic personalization.
6. Implement changes: Finally, implement changes to the entire experience based on the data and your knowledge of the customer journey.

With these steps, businesses can optimize customer interactions and enhance engagement.

Strategies for implementing personalized experiences

Brands can deploy various strategies to create personalized experiences for their customers. Here are strategies they can start with:

• Data-driven personalization: Use the data from customer interactions to tailor experiences in real time.
• Omnichannel marketing: Ensure that customers can move through multiple channels without any inhibition.
• AI and machine learning: Brands can implement AI algorithms to predict customer behavior and personalize interactions.

These strategies enable businesses to deliver engaging experiences that drive loyalty and increase ROI.

Measuring the impact of personalization

To assess the effectiveness of personalization efforts, businesses must track KPIs, such as:

• Engagement rates: This tracks how customers interact with content. For a website, brands can look at bounce rate, page views, form conversions, etc.
• Satisfaction scores: This evaluates feedback from customers to determine if they are satisfied. The net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) are key metrics to track.
• Conversion rates: Track the percentage of customers who take a desired action after experiencing personalization.

Case study

GetYourGuide

GetYourGuide provides travel content and opportunities for its customers. With over 500,000 daily visitors, they have to employ multiple marketers and content creators to keep it. However, their website had a limited bandwidth, which created a bottleneck in their workflow. Hence, they struggled to adapt to new travel trends.

GetYourGuide switched to Contentstack to address the issues. The API-first headless CMS, connectors, and marketplace services offered a seamless way to deliver content. These enabled them to personalize content experiences for over 500,000 unique website visitors. They also deployed content faster by 90%, and content support and approval times were reduced by 75%.

Hear from Pedro Torres, the product manager. "With Contentstack, we can deliver on -- and exceed -- what customers are expecting, regardless of device, and consistently deliver those experiences as soon as new travel opportunities become available."

Read more about how GetYourGuide used Contentstack to personalize and enrich travel experiences.

FAQ section

How do you personalize the customer journey?

Analyze customer touchpoints for relevant data, create a persona, and tailor interactions to the needs of the customers. Ensure that you address their pains and create unique experiences that resonate.

What is customer personalization?

It is the process by which brands create tailored experiences by ensuring that products, services, and interactions align with customer needs.

What is a personalization strategy?

It is an outline of how a business will use customer data and insights to deliver tailored experiences that enhance engagement and loyalty.

What is an example of personalization?

An example would be when an online retail brand sends offers or recommends a product to a user based on their browsing history and previous buys.

Learn more

Mapping the customer journey and delivering personalized experiences are critical for businesses looking to drive growth. However, statistics show that only 6% of organizations have the right tools to consolidate customer data to deliver personalized experiences. There is a real opportunity there for businesses to take the lead and move ahead of their competitors.

Contentstack offers automation that enables you to personalize content and drive revenue growth in the process. The brand-relevant AI tracks and predicts customer behavior, ensuring you can adapt interactions, offers, products, and services to their needs. Talk to us today to learn more.