Designing the ultimate omnichannel customer journey is an aspiration of almost any brand that wants to facilitate their audience in the best way possible. Customer journeys can get complex and are often not linear, but this can be orchestrated. So how do you get control over the journey that your persona crosses? And how do you design a journey for client needs? We will run you through.
Omnichannel customer journey orchestration
As marketers we want to orchestrate the customer journey as much as we can. With a vast majority of channels and platforms to choose from, designing an omnichannel strategy can be intimidating. But although there are a ton of options out there, your audience might only be present at a few of those platforms. We can at least expect our cold audience to need between 7 and 21 interactions until conversion. This means we need to be as present as possible, across the channels that our target audience engages on, during all stages of awareness.
Creating a clear persona is very essential to start with. Ideally these persona’s needs are validated by a test group. From there we can continue in choosing the right platforms for our omnichannel approach. Central in this decision are the demographics and buyer intent.
You can use the following formula to keep things simple:
Demographics x Intent = Channel
For instance, is your audience very young and have they never heard of your brand? A newer channel like Tiktok might be a good awareness channel. Are your audience elders that are proactively searching for an electric bicycle? Then a high intent platform like Bing (or Google Ads) could be a good fit. From here you can start to map different journey stages (awareness, interest, desire, action) and link them to interesting channels to end up with a customer journey map like below.
To get familiar with the different channels you might need to dive into their advertising toolkits first.
Optimizing visibility and points of contact
An omnichannel approach can be powerful, when executed well. It’s not all about the power of repetition, it’s also about ‘what’ you showcase! Exposing the same ads (information), across all platforms in your omnichannel customer journey has no value for any visitors. You want to nurture them in their journey. Their needs and expectations.
That’s why transforming visitors into buyers and later into ambassadors is a fine art, combining customer research, behavior data and optimization. In order to optimize your visibility a customer centric strategy is required. This delivers your prospects with essential value at the right time, via the right channel.
To design an omnichannel customer journey we first need to gather as much data about our audience as possible. This can include the following:
- Customer data
Existing customers (CRM) are a goldmine of information, they already crossed the journey to the end point (conversion). You can ask them feedback via surveys: like what made you consider our brand? What can we do better? - Behaviour data
Your website and social audience is where the customer journey is taking place in real time. Analytics, customer journey maps and recordings will provide you with insights about what's important for your audience and the missing pieces of your journey. - Hypotheses for your omnichannel customer journey
Creating touchpoints supported by this data and insight often result in the desired changes. It is important to keep testing and experimenting and stay in touch with your target group.
From here the process is very iterative. These insights will fuel your experiments and tests to keep optimizing the customer journey for your audience. You will find the right moments for your product or you might see the necessity of one channel fade. This structure will strengthen your omnichannel presence for your existing and future customers. Now it is time to get started.
At Mind for Business we help eCommerce brands on a daily basis with our customer centric ecommerce marketing strategy. We combined our learnings into a Growth Blueprint in which we discuss the essentials for a successful strategy. If you are eager to grow your brand, make sure to download it here.
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