Where do your conversions come from? Visualize every step of the customer journey
Customer experience has become the ultimate battleground for customer loyalty and lead conversion. Marketers today know that their greatest weapon is insight. In fact, organizations that use behavioral insights to understand the customer journey can generate up to 85% more sales growth than those that don’t.
But insight doesn’t just mean knowing your customers, it means analyzing their behavior across complex customer journeys, understanding the impact of every interaction for each business outcome, and pinpointing where every conversion comes from.
However, the complexity of the modern customer journey can often obscure marketers’ ability to see the true impact of every minuscule experience within a single successful sale. This leaves them in the dark when it comes to assessing the ROI of their operations, personalizing for their audience and maintaining a holistic view of their customers.
The roadblocks to crystal-clear data insights
In today’s always-on digital landscape, a number of market drivers and trends are putting pressure on brands’ ability to clearly visualize the entire customer journey from start to finish.
1. Exploring customer touchpoints
Set the scene: within one single journey, a customer opens a campaign newsletter from your organization, visits your offline store and speaks to a customer service representative, explores product reviews and video demos online, interacts with a social media post about your brand and then, finally, makes a purchase. How can you measure which of those experiences triggered the sale and which channel to attribute that conversion to?
The number of ways for a prospective customer to interact with your brand is constantly increasing. This means marketers have to assess web, email, mobile, offline, social media touchpoints to piece together a complete view of what leads to that all-important purchase - a process that requires time, resources and complete visibility.
2. Measuring ROI on marketing spend
Marketers are constantly asked to justify how they distribute their marketing budget across channels, what the true cost per sale is and whether they’re accessing the full ROI on their tactics and technology. Say a CMO decides to invest in a bespoke automated email marketing solution to ensure greater personalization on a global scale. They’ll then need to justify that investment with robust engagement and sales outcomes. But if that email communication is just one element of a complex and multi-faceted customer journey that results in a subscription or purchase, how can that CMO pinpoint whether they’ve maximized the ROI on their new solution and whether conversions are due to those personalized emails or not?
As Netcentric’s Elena Stan explains, “When data is pouring in from so many channels it can be challenging for clients to make sense of what is relevant or not, let alone decide which marketing strategy has brought most conversions and where is best to invest their resources and marketing initiative to drive value.” So, as the gap between marketing and sales grows smaller, the pressure is on for marketers to develop more mature attribution models. “Attribution models offer an overview of the customer's touch points and the possibility to act on the insights generated by these to deliver the ideal experience to the user,” says Elena. With few marketers currently using advanced attribution models and many still relying on outdated single-click methods, these businesses have a serious blind spot when it comes to accessing sophisticated analytics - and then utilizing them to optimize their customer experience at scale.
3. Connecting the dots
Imagine you’re a marketing leader within a financial services company seeking to analyze how your team is capturing leads and which channels are driving the highest customer engagement. With that engagement scattered across multiple channels (as we’ve already explored), the behavioral data behind it is stored within different third-party applications, in different formats, and in vast quantities.
How can you stitch together, for example, call center data with social media engagement insights in a format that allows you to compare performance, learn from interaction data, and look at the customer journey holistically? Fragmented data sources are a key obstacle when it comes to gaining crystal-clear insights into how users are interacting with your brand.
How to access multidimensional analysis of user interactions
The first step on the road to cutting-edge analytics is to confront the complexity of customer journeys. As Netcentric’s Raluca Tanase puts it, “the more experienced you become in the field of web analytics, the more you understand that it’s not black and white.” With so many interlocking touchpoints and data sources, it’s not about eliminating complexity. “I love the grey areas”, says Raluca, who knows that gaining clarity on how every cog contributes to the machine is what drives conversions within your brand.
Next, move beyond the first and last clicks of your users. Build a rule-based attribution model that uncovers why particular campaigns generated more results than others and how different touchpoints work together to drive purchases. That way, you can better measure the ROI of your marketing investments to constantly fortify the areas of your campaigns that are working, and adapt the areas that aren’t.
Finally, invest in a solution that helps you envision the entire customer journey. Adobe Analytics means marketers can measure the impact of every moment, from a site visit, to a social media ‘like’, to a newsletter sign up, against their end goal of bringing that user onboard as a trusted customer. For example, the Segment IQ tool can show you what purchasers of a new product all have in common: whether they all clicked on the same CTA in an email, or all responded to a targeted social media ad.
Adobe Analytics can also stitch together data points from many third-party applications and services into a single-point-of-truth, so you can understand your greatest assets and weakest links.
Welcome to a 360-degree view of your customers with Netcentric
At Netcentric, we have digital analytics experts ready to help you make sense of your data and turn it into actionable business insights that build value in the long term. We can provide:
- Multi-channel reporting and analysis for mature data insights.
- Advanced data visualisation to help identify patterns and trends.
- Multi-channel attribution analysis to enable you to attribute success events to the channel that contributed most within a user journey.
- Data storage optimization to help you identify the most relevant data to your marketing objectives and how to manage it effectively.
- Stitch together data to break down silos and create a single-source-of-truth.
- Robust reporting to ensure all stakeholders have quick and easy access to valuable data.
To learn more about how to use data insights to cultivate business advantage, you can join us for a virtual workshop. Identify and solve your digital marketing challenges alongside our experts, so multiple pain points can be identified and solutions can be developed in just half a day.