by Business2Comunity
When it comes to a successful digital marketing campaign, understanding the customer journey plays a significant factor. You may wonder, what is the customer journey? Simply put, The customer journey is a map of how a customer takes from when he first interacts with the brand to the time he makes a purchase.
Now, how to automate the journey?
Automating the customer journey is an essential part of marketing automation, in which the marketing team must consider utilizing specific tools and software to execute this journey successfully. Moreover, there are many marketing tools that you can use to accomplish that, but my favorite platform is HubSpot.
Here are the steps that you need to automate your customer journey:
Step 1: Build Leads
With automation tools, you need to find a way to acquire or get leads into your account. To achieve that, below are the well-known methods that you can go with:
- Capturing website visitors via forms, such as signups.
- Collecting attendees via regular events.
- Collecting leads via regular webinars.
- Collecting leads manually from live events such as conferences and trade shows (OnSpot forms)
Another key point to remember is that you need to consider CRM to manage your collected leads.
Step 2: Build Journey
Here, you need to define triggers for leads to enter the journey. Listed below are the various triggers:
- Form submission trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user signs up through the form.
- List entry trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user enters the mailing list.
- Lead score updates trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user reaches the scoring criteria your define.
- Page visit trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user visits a specific web page.
- Goal achievement trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user meets a particular goal.
- Email action trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user receives or opens an email.
- Date trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user meets a particular date, such as a birthday.
- Video click trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user clicks or views a specific video.
- Attachment download trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user downloads attachments you attach with your email.
- Unsubscribes trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user unsubscribes from your mailing list.
- Abandoned cart trigger: The journey will be triggered when the user abandons the cart.
Step 3: Define Actions
In this stage, you need to define actions that need to be performed on leads entering the journey. The following is a list of all that you can perform under this section:
- Sending emails to your leads.
- Sending survey emails to your leads.
- Sending SMS to your leads.
- Setting up reminders to be sent to your leads when they don’t reply to your emails.
- A/B test by sending two variants of your campaign to a particular group of your leads to test performance and then make improvements.
- Setting up conditions based on your lead information, behavior, and interest.
- Adding leads to a list when they enter this stage of the journey.
- Removing leads from a list when they enter this stage of the journey.
- Adding lead score to your leads.
- Subtracting lead score from your leads.
- Pushing leads to CRM when they enter this stage of the journey.
- Creating a task in CRM for your leads.
- Creating a deal in CRM for your leads.
- Creating a milestone of the journey.
- Sending notification emails to your leads when they pass a particular stage of the journey.
- Selecting a lead stage for your leads.
- Moving leads to the end-of-journey or another journey.
- Removing leads from the journey when they enter this stage of the journey.
Step 4: End-of-Journey Actions
End-of-journey actions take effect when the lead exits the process. Here is a list of actions that can be performed in this stage:
- Add a lead to another list.
- Remove a lead from the list.
- Add/subtract lead score.
- Push leads to CRM.
- Move leads to another journey.
Note that having end-of-journey actions in this process is not mandatory.
Final Words
In conclusion, using marketing automation tools to manage your customer journey can differentiate between a struggling and a thriving business. Another key fact to remember is that marketing automation tools are the future of the online store customer journey.
Article originally appeared on Business2Community.
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