Discover How Customer Journey Data Can Shape Your Digital Marketing Strategy!

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What is a Customer Journey?

"Think of the customer journey as a roadmap detailing how a customer becomes aware of your brand, their interactions with your brand - and beyond."*

An average household in the UK owns 7.4 different internet devices**. People no longer interact with brands and businesses by coming directly to the website only, often an interaction is a mix of different channels & devices. Customers get frustrated if certain functions or features are missing when they switch from one device to another (e.g. desktop to mobile website). They expect the same experience with the brand across all the channels and seamless transition between multiple devices.

My clients frequently say: "I'm struggling to focus my efforts and budgets on all the channels and devices at the same time?" (& I don't blame them - it's not easy!). They ask: "Is there a shortcut?"

And we say: "Yes, map your customer journey in order to define which areas are the most important for your businesses".

Starting from the channel journey it is very important to know which channels bring you the quality traffic. Using your web analytics solutions you can identify what channel or channel combination brings the most value. For example, focus your efforts on the paid campaigns, emails and social- if that is where your most important customers 'hang out '/come from. To add a level of deeper understanding, include in your journey mapping the device type that is being used most commonly by your audience.

Web analytic tools provide various solution for customer journey tracking on your website. For example IBM Digital Analytics allows the mapping of customer paths via 'Clickstream' reports, where you can track the most popular journeys 'continuing on from' or 'arriving at' that specified page of interest.

Another report that can give you insights into web journey is the TruePath Funnel. It allows monitoring paths via defined steps (pages or group of pages) and tests how different pre-set paths are really working on your website (e.g. that very important 'checkout funnel').

My clients also want to know: "What if I want track my customers journey across different devices?"

No problem! We also have a solution for that!

It's limited to your tracked customers (via registration ID) but it definitely gives you an idea about cross device paths & journeys used by your customers. To tie in a journey across devices, IBM Digital Analytics needs a common identifier (Registration ID). This ID can be anything, that uniquely identifies a visitor on your website (a number, email address, alphanumeric code) and will be collected in the Registration Tag every time your visitors identify themselves.

When they make a purchase on mobile, complete a conversion event (download, newsletter sign-up, catalogue request, generate a quote) on tablet and then simply sign-in to their account on desktop, as long as the Registration ID is passed to Digital Analytics on each of the interactions, we can link these touchpoints and create a map of their journey across the devices.

Our Mobile Stream report can map the journey (for the registered visitors) across different devices to show the interaction on your website across different device types. Starting from the last session in your defined period, you can work backwards to view the devices used by visitors in previous sessions and identify the average time in-between each of these sessions. The report includes not only mobile devices but also desktop sessions, and so provides a great starting point to understating cross device usage for your customers.

Clients go on: "Great, however what about my offline data? My customers redeem lots of online vouchers for in store purchases and have plenty of customer service/call centre interactions linked to the sessions on the web. Can I link all these touchpoints together?"

Absolutely, with our IBM Multichannel Import bundle solution you can complement your data by uploading additional information about your customers on visitor level, order level and product level. By importing additional information from your marketing database, customer services centers and stores, you can build a comprehensive view of who your customers are, how they interact with the brand and their purchasing preferences.

What's more, why not go a step further and segment users into different buckets and target them with personalised campaigns, messages & offers…which as we all know - are proven to effectively convert visitors into buyers and create a loyal customer base (all down to the high level personalisation and relevance).

Interested in the topic?Want to find out more? Join our IBM Amplify 2016 session "Discover How IBM Digital Analytics Customer Journey Data Can Shape Your Digital Marketing Strategy" at #ibmamplify in sunny Tampa, Florida 16-19 May 2016. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/events/amplify (@donatapieta & @meeramodha)

* source: surveymonkey blog, Audra S;** source:https://www.theguardian.com/technology