Leveraging customer journey mapping for enhanced personalized marketing

Highlights

You’ll learn about enhancing personalized marketing with customer journey mapping.

• Identify user experience gaps: Understand friction areas to improve user experience
• Optimize engagement: Tailor content and experiences for each customer journey stage.
• Increase ROI: Allocate resources effectively with insights

Opt for Contentstack Personalize to map customer journeys and gain insights for personalized experiences and ROI growth.

Picture this. A customer learns about a product and starts to interact with the brand. As that happens, they go through several emotions and processes that end with becoming customers. That summarizes the customer journey.

Tracking the entire process reveals the customers' experiences with your business, including ones that do not seem obvious. It gives you a clear picture of their thoughts, struggles, context, and what drives their decisions.

Customer journey mapping gives you deep insights into your audience's behavior, needs and expectations. Visualizing the process generates relevant data that allows you to create personalized marketing content at every touch point.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is the steps customers go through that lead to buying a product. It starts when they learn about a product, service, or brand and runs until after a purchase. It can be summarized in five stages, as follows:

• Awareness: Customer learns about a product, service, or brand.
• Consideration: Customer compares products or services from several businesses.
• Decision: Customer is ready to buy a specific product.
• Retention: Customer is satisfied with the product and sticks with the business.
• Advocacy: Customer shares positive reviews of products with peers and friends.

At each stage, a business has to engage in different ways, which allows it to personalize the engagement. So, imagine a potential customer starts comparing products; you can serve them content that shows how the product benefits them.

The role of buyer personas

You cannot discuss journey mapping without buyer personas. By creating fictional representations of your ideal customer, you equip yourself to solve their problems.

Benefits of customer journey mapping in personalized marketing

When you map the customer’s journey, it helps with personalized marketing. It also helps you:

• Identify pain points: A customer journey map shows the frictions that distort the user experience. That allows you to go in and improve it, ensuring customers enjoy their interaction with your business.
• Enhance omnichannel marketing: When you map the customer journey, you can create consistent and on-brand content on all channels. That ensures customers enjoy a cohesive experience as they interact with your business. 
• Improve customer engagement: It ensures you can always create relevant and targeted interactions. That leads to a more engaged and better-satisfied customer base.
• Improves marketing ROI: You can allocate resources more effectively with a clearer picture of the customer journey. You also create engaging content that leads to higher conversion rates and potentially higher revenues.

Strategies for effective customer journey mapping

Businesses can consider several strategies to map the customer journey to make the most of the process. Here are tips.

• Set clear objectives for your mapping efforts.
• Define and profile your target customer personas.
• Identify all touchpoints across the customer journey.
• Gather data and take the customer journey yourself.
• Create a visual map and analyze the results.
• Update your map regularly to reflect changes.

The role of personalization

Personalization allows you to serve relevant content at each stage of the journey. When you understand a potential customer’s problems and processes, you can help them with content that eases the process. 

Benefits of personalized content

Delivering personalized content at different stages of the customer journey can:

• Improve the entire customer experience.
• Improve conversion rates due to targeted content.
• Drive higher customer lifetime value through repeat purchases.

Using AI to map customer journeys

We often see that businesses know how these things work but lack the tools to bring them to life. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play. Here are other reasons to integrate AI in customer journey mapping.

• Enhanced data analysis: It can collect, analyze, and identify patterns in vast amounts of data. These patterns are often hidden, making them difficult for data analytics to find.
• Real-time personalization: ML algorithms can track customer interactions as they happen. That allows you to adapt to required changes, ensuring a highly personalized real-time experience.
• Predictive modeling: AI can recommend content and offers based on a customer’s purchase history and current interaction with a brand. This allows you to tailor content and offers more proactiveally.
• Automated segmentation: AI can group your customer base into separate segments based on behavior, preferences, and social factors. This enables you to target each segment with the right personalized marketing content.

Despite these benefits, integrating AI can be costly and require extensive development, especially if you are building one. Contentstack’s ‘Personalize’ addresses this, giving you a one-stop shop for your personalization solution.

How Contentstack Personalize supports customer journey mapping

Contentstack Personalize can be used to map customer journeys. It allows you to optimize personalized marketing using precise segmentation and data-driven insights. Here is how it does it.

• Precise segmentation: Contentstack Personalize segments your audience based on behavior, preferences, and other relevant factors. This allows you to deliver highly targeted personalized marketing content. Furthermore, you can deploy demographic targeting to ensure your marketing messages are focused on the customer segment with the highest conversion potential. 
• Data-driven insights: It tracks customer behavior on all platforms, giving you relevant information to understand and optimize customer journeys.
• Real-time customization: You can also personalize content and experiences in real time. Its dynamic approach adapts content and offers based on the customer's current context and behavior. 
• Audience preview: When you create personalized marketing content, you can preview how each customer segment will see it. This allows you to see the experience from your customer’s point of view. 

Case studies

Leesa

Leesa’s old system was slow, lacked support for dynamic content, and also relied on long hours of development work for updating and publishing.

Not anymore with Contentstack. The headless CMS has enabled them to redesign the entire publishing process, making it faster and more efficient. They can now track user interactions, log relevant related topics, and send targeted content and offers. The changes enabled them to personalize at scale. 

Richard Bilton, the Director of Technology, had this to say. “Thanks to Contentstack’s Modular Blocks, we’ve really upped our game when it comes to personalization.” 

Read more about Leesa’s success story.

BISSELL

BISSELL’s goals were simple. They wanted to improve product end-user relationships. They needed to deliver modern product experiences. They also needed to personalize and localize content for the benefit of their customers. It took over one year of shopping around for a solution before they found Contentstack.

With Contentstack, they improved the customer post-purchase journey. The delivery of personalized marketing content and localized solutions became a reality. The changes reduced their development costs and improved in-app uptime by 100%. It also improved customer experience, which led to 60,000 app downloads in the first 30 days. App usage also grew to 100K active monthly users.

Hear from David Baarman, the Associate Director of Digital Product.“We knew that we could punch at a level above our weight class by having content consolidation and being able to connect the mobile and web experience.”

Keep reading to see how Bissell reimagined its mobile experience.

FAQ section

What is a customer journey map in marketing?

A customer journey map is a visual depiction of the process a customer goes through when they interact with a brand. It starts from initial contact to when they become a customer.

What are the 7 steps to map the customer journey?

The seven steps of mapping a customer’s journey are as follows:

1. Define clear objectives
2. Gather data and research
3. Identify customer touchpoints
4. Create relevant personas
5. Map the journey
6. Analyze findings
7. Implement improvements

How would you utilize a customer decision journey map to improve your marketing efforts?

To start, gather relevant data on customer touchpoints and optimize them for better engagement. Track the gaps and pain points in the customer’s decision process and create personalized content to address them.

How do you personalize the customer journey?

First, you must map the journey to understand the needs of customers at every point. Then, create digital solutions that address those needs. Also, ensure that you tailor content, offers, and all interactions to the preferences of customers at each stage.

What is Contentstack Personalize?

Contentstack Personalize is an innovative digital platform that offers precise segmentation and data-driven insights that enable you to map customer journeys and deliver personalized marketing at scale.

Learn more

Customer journey mapping allows you to step into the world of your customers. It allows you to understand the experience, context, and motivations of your customers. It reveals gaps that you can improve on to deliver tailored content at every touchpoint. It offers insights that you can rely on for personalized marketing content targeted at specific audience segments. 

Contentstack Personalize offers you the right tools to map customer journeys, optimizing personalized marketing via precise segmentation and data-driven insights. With features like unified content authoring, A/B testing, segmentation, and audience preview, it is your pathway to customer satisfaction and business growth. Talk to us today to jumpstart your personalized marketing strategy.