With services from banking to insurance now taking place online and the retail apocalypse marching steadily forward, businesses are seeing a lot less of their customers face-to-face. But did you realize that customer interaction overall is actually up?
According to eMarketer, customer interactions across all industries more than tripled from 2015-2017, surpassing 3 billion touches. So even if you aren’t seeing more of your customers in person, your customers may be seeing a lot more of you.
Question is, when was the last time you took a close look at that intricate customer journey? Are you taking the necessary steps to set yourself up for success? Are you investing in the most valuable touchpoints? Are your journeys optimized to hit your goals? If you’re not sure, it’s time for a checkup.
Auditing your customer journey — what questions to ask
Optimizing the customer journey must encompass all the digital and physical touchpoints your customers encounter—so it’s complicated. Tracking technology is the best way to bring clarity to a multifaceted customer journey and all the interactions within it. Here are a few of the essential questions you’ll want to explore with the data you gather:
“What role do each of my channels play?”
Using your tracking data, you’ll want to identify key channels that are are your best introducers, closers, and influencers. For example, if your goal is to introduce new customers, the identification of the display channel as an introducer in the customer journey is crucial in understanding where to increase spend. It’s not enough to have transparency into the end of the customer journey. With an understanding of strong introducers, you can ignite lower funnel activity through upper funnel performers.
“How frequent are cross-device conversion paths?”
In a mobile-dominant world, it’s vital to understand how your customers are interacting with more than one device. Marketers without cross-device insight may fail to accredit certain touchpoints and mistake converting customers for non-converters.
“Do certain paths deliver higher-than-average revenue?”
Be sure you look for the mix of channels that delivers optimal conversion rates. For example, if you notice visitors to your website who were then exposed to your “Spend $100, win a trip to Disney World” banner campaign had a 200% lift to AOV, you may want to increase spend on that retargeting campaign.
“Which media investments have high synergy?”
Some touchpoints work with each other better than others, and you should leverage these relationships to boost ROI. An example of this would be if you find that an email from your marketing automation server followed by a retargeted display ad from your DSP yields a significantly greater AOV than average, you may want to boost bids on the retargeting campaign.
“Are my customer journeys efficient?”
Now’s the time to ensure you’re not only just noticing lengthy customer journeys, but also taking action to reduce inefficiencies.
With new touchpoints like FB Messenger and new types of affiliates and bloggers emerging all the time, it’s worth investing in the granularity required to have concrete answers to these questions so you can feel confident about your marketing spend.
You can learn about Impact’s tools for analyzing the customer journey at impact.com/altitude. Or dive deeper into optimizing ROI from your customer journey in our eBook: 7 Questions You Need to Ask About Your Customer’s Path to Purchase.
