To optimize your demand generation marketing efforts successfully, you need visibility into every step of your customers’ journeys and the means to track and analyze their data to understand what motivates them now and in the future. How do you do that? Fortunately, customer journey analytics provides valuable insights into your visitors’ behavioral patterns and preferences throughout their entire customer journey. These insights allow you to create enhanced customer experiences that motivate visitors to reach the endpoint in your sales funnel.
What exactly is customer journey analytics, and how can you use it to optimize your lead generation marketing strategies? Let’s find out.
What Is Customer Journey Analytics?
Customer journey analytics is an application that explicitly analyzes customer journeys. This application involves tracking and analyzing the way your customers use various channels to interact with your brand. It analyzes all channels — used currently and in the future — that your customers touch directly.
These channels could include:
- Channels with human interaction, such as call centers
- Two-way interaction channels, such as display advertising
- Channels that are fully automated, such as mobile devices or websites
- Third-party operated channels, such as independent retail stores
- Channels that offer live customer assistance, such as joint site navigation or live chat
Why Do I Need Customer Journey Analytics?
Even as customers’ journeys have grown increasingly complex, today’s customers expect their business interactions with your brand — across multiple channels — to be on par with CX leaders such as Amazon and Google. If your customers’ journeys aren’t seamless every step of the way, they will become dissatisfied and quickly move on to a competitor. Conversely, studies show that positive customer experiences drive revenue growth.
Studies also show that investment in customer feedback management isn’t enough to improve your CX levels. This failure is attributed to the fact that feedback is generally only requested at points along the journey. Unfortunately, this means that only some of the customer journey is captured, misrepresenting your customers’ overall experiences.
This incomplete data reduces your ability to gain a complete picture and accurate insights into your marketing strategy performance. It also leaves you at a disadvantage for enhancing customers’ experiences and tying customer experiences to tangible business outcomes.
Customer journey analytics is the bridge between your customers’ behaviors and your business outcomes. A customer journey analytics program enables your business to track, measure and improve customer experiences across several touchpoints and time periods, encompassing the entire customer journey.
Leveraging customer journey analytics enables demand generation marketing leaders to answer complex questions, such as:
- What causes our customers’ behaviors?
- What past interactions or journeys have our customers undertaken that led them here?
- What paths do our customers take on their journeys?
- What are the most likely outcomes for each customer or journey?
- How will these journeys and outcomes impact our business outcomes?
- What are our customers’ goals?
- How do their goals align with our business goals?
- How do we add value for each customer and enhance their customer experience?
What Are the Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics?
Customer journey analytics is a vital ingredient in an effective customer journey management program. It is the piece that analyzes comprehensive data and generates actionable insights. The insights gained from this type of customer management program are valuable for both customers and businesses alike. Here’s how.
- Optimized Customer Experiences (CX) – The insights gained through effective analyses of your customers’ journeys enable you to optimize each step along the way for a seamless overall experience.
- Ongoing Measurable Performance Results – In addition, ongoing analytics allow you to continuously measure demand generation marketing initiatives’ performance across multiple channels and define the appropriate KPIs to measure each journey.
- Data Analyses From Numerous Channels and Timeframes – When you look at customers’ journeys across several channels and timeframes, authentic pain points become evident. Identifying these pain points enables you to take action and positively impact your customers’ journeys.
- How Can I Optimize Customer Journey Analytics? – Customer journey analytics is typically optimized by leaders in customer service, analytics, marketing and CX. These leaders adopt customer journey analytics platforms to improve their demand generation marketing strategies and performance measurement capabilities.
These teams optimize customer journey analytics to:
- Amass customer journey data
- Resolve multi-channel customer identities
- Analyze innumerable interactions throughout countless cross-channel journeys
- Identify CX pain points and their root causes
- Verify potential customer journey enhancements
- Quantify CX investments’ ROI
Customer Journey Mapping vs. Customer Journey Analytics
As a demand generation marketer, you may already implement customer journey mapping and feel that it provides the same insights as customer journey analytics. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While journey mapping focuses on qualitative insights, customer journey analytics is more quantitative and incorporates a much larger scope.
- Static Snapshots vs. Continuous Detail – Journey mapping provides only static snapshots of some of your customers’ journeys and lacks the required detail to represent the multitude of your customers and their unique behaviors.
- Static vs. Time-Based Data – Customer journey analytics is driven by time-based data, allowing you to see how customers’ journeys change over time. The ability to continuously measure complex multi-channel customer journeys and touchpoints along journeys help marketers predict customer journey successes.
- Trial and Error vs. Real-Time Testing – Without visibility to up-to-date data on each interaction along the customer journey, businesses are left to experiment with new enhancements on the entire customer journey. Not only does this potentially waste time and resources, it means marketers will be waiting for aggregated results that don’t pinpoint where the issues are.
Customer journey analytics provides marketers with the visibility to see how customers respond to improvements along several touchpoints and time periods. In addition, this application enables marketers to test and track the success of customer experience interaction improvements in real-time.
Powered by machine learning and AI, customer journey analytics enables marketers to identify pain points along the entire customer journey that negatively impact CX. These insights allow data-driven businesses to prioritize opportunities for customer journey optimization and drive revenue growth.
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