Customer Journey Archives - Act-On

How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Act-On — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 21:19:57 +0000

TL;DR: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures how much revenue a business earns from a customer over the full relationship—not just the first sale. By calculating CLV, marketers can understand true profitability, identify their most valuable customers, and prioritize efforts that improve retention, upselling, and cross-selling. CLV helps guide smarter budgeting, refine ideal customer profiles, and avoid low-quality leads that hurt long-term growth. With marketing automation, companies can track behavior, personalize outreach, and increase lifetime value more effectively.

Introduction

The true value of a customer is not just the size of the deal. Calculating customer lifetime value is a more reliable measure of the ROI of your sales and retention motions. Researchers estimate that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to retain a current one. In other words, customer satisfaction and customer retention are crucial to calculating the lifetime value of a customer’s business.

It’s useful to ask if you are making money, of course, but this formula also addresses practical questions every marketer should be able to answer:

Are you finding your most valuable customers?
Are you targeting them effectively with your marketing?
Are you making the most of the relationship once you win their business?

In this blog we’ll cover these and other common questions about customer lifetime value calculation. We’ll also explain how to use customer lifetime value to assess marketing effectiveness, diagnose common problems, and make smarter decisions.

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total amount of revenue that you will receive over the course of your relationship with a specific customer. It hinges on how long, on average, you are able to keep customers.

Customer lifetime value is the key to figuring out what you’re actually gaining from each customer. If you’re great at getting deals to close and you’re making all of your monthly revenue goals, that’s fantastic. But if you’re having trouble retaining those customers that you worked so hard to get, you’re likely making much less revenue from each customer than you potentially could. The amount of money you’re truly getting out those deals is small, even if there are a lot of them. And depending on your business model, you might not see net profit on a customer until you’ve had them for a cycle or two.

How to calculate Customer Lifetime Value?

Start with three questions that every marketing organization should be able to answer (or at least know where to find the answer):

What is the average sales value of your first transaction with a customer?
How much do you typically make per year from a customer after the first purchase? (including cross-sell and upsell revenue)
How long does a typical customer continue to do business with you?

For example, a typical first sale of $20,000, a typical ongoing annual value of $5,000 and a typical customer lifespan of five years (or 5 * $5,000), yields a customer lifetime value of $45,000.

This formula can get much more complicated. Some marketers use net profit instead of simple revenue, apply a rate of discount to capture today’s value of future customer purchases, or factor interest into the equation.

^{So you’ve made your customer lifetime value calculation: how do you know if it’s good or bad?}

How do I know whether my CVL is good or bad?

Ask yourself these questions:

How much did you spend to acquire a customer?
Do you typically generate significant revenue from return/repeat customers?
How much do you typically spend to maintain these ongoing customer relationships?

Often, marketers calculate customer lifetime value based only upon the value of the first sale, underestimating the total value of the customer. Much of the value marketers get from calculating customer lifetime value comes from tracking the impact of ongoing marketing campaigns, customer service interactions, upsell & cross-sell programs, and other tactics designed to increase revenue. When you base customer lifetime value entirely on the first sale, you lose the ability to measure the success of these activities.

CLV simply lets you see clearly what you’re getting out of a customer versus what you’ve put in. Having insight into your revenue streams can help you dictate your go-to-market strategy. Additionally, CLV helps you answer one of the most important questions anyone can ask about a business: Did it make more money from a customer than it spent to acquire that customer?

How can I use CLV to make my marketing more effective?

A complete view of customer lifetime value allows you to track the impact of your customer onboarding, retention, upsell & cross-sell efforts, and loyalty programs. You can pull each of those levers, assess the results, and decide where to focus future efforts and investment.

Customer lifetime value has long been used to determine not just campaign effectiveness, but also to determine how much should be spent on marketing, on media buys, and other marketing investments. Marketers also work very hard to increase the value of a customer’s initial purchase. You don’t need a customer lifetime value to do that necessarily; average revenue per customer tells the story. Changes in initial deal value, however, often interact in interesting ways with changes in long-term customer value.

Connecting CVL with ideal customer profile

You can also use customer lifetime value to define your ideal customer profile, and pursue more customers that fit that profile. To do so, first identify and segment your ICP customers based on whatever metrics work for you and your business (industry, company size, etc.). Then, compare the customer lifetime value for that segment to your CLV on the whole. The difference should help you invest more in your ideal customers, or make the case to your leadership team that you need to do so.

Finally, a clear view of customer lifetime value allows marketers to spot and fight back against “sloppy growth.” This is often a problem when marketers choose high-volume lead-gen tactics without considering where and how to protect lead quality. Often, these customers are the inverse image of a company’s “best customer” segment: They buy less initially, spend less after the first purchase, and are less likely to renew. Falling lifetime value is a signal to adjust your lead-gen programs to target your ideal customer more carefully.

Customer lifetime value can help you craft an accurate budget

According to Ruth Stevens, President of eMarketing Strategy, “The expected lifetime value of a customer represents the maximum allowable acquisition cost of that customer. Then using those numbers, you can craft a marketing budget that is related to firm profitability versus some fussier method of budgeting for marketing expenses.”

The more predictable your revenue streams are, the better. If you know exactly how much money will be flowing through your company this year, next year, and beyond, you’re already off to a good start for budgeting and creating sustainable growth.

Marketing automation and lifetime value

Marketing automation tools equipped with reports and dashboards make it quick and convenient to review and analyze tons of customer intelligence, including demographics, campaign engagement, website visits, and purchase history. This information – often available in real time – is helpful for identifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities – great ways to increase the value of your customers! Behavior history profiles can also uncover likely follow-up sale products based on each customer’s pre-purchase and post-purchase interactions.

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5 Strategies to Convert Prospects into Customers

Act-On — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 02:00:00 +0000

Nobody likes to lose. When you create a strategy to convert more prospects into customers and actual sales, it’s frustrating when your results fall short. But as marketers, we also know that when a strategy doesn’t work, it’s an opportunity to learn, pivot and get better results.

Simple, right?

Well, let’s be real. We all know it’s easier said than done. So, we’re here to offer some guidance on powerful strategies on how to convert leads into customers, clients and sales. Leverage them and you can achieve the results you want.

Convert Prospects into Customers by Being at the Right Place, at the Right Time

Wouldn’t it be nice if converting prospects into customers was easy? And if all customers followed the same path to purchase? Of course! But, we know they’re much more likely to zig and zag than follow a neat, linear path. And that means that marketers have to get really good at meeting them where they’re at.

The trick to accomplishing this is cross-channel marketing.

Cross-channel marketing allows you to leverage many different platforms to market products and services across the sales funnel. Offers are customized based on the prospect’s stage in the journey across all channels.

Now, just to be clear, this is different from multichannel marketing, where you use many different channels to reach prospective customers. Most importantly, these channels don’t share information. Cross-channel marketing shares data. The content a person views is based on previous engagement activity, whether that engagement happened on your website or a social media platform. This consistent experience leads to more potential customers converting, and that’s because they feel understood.

And speaking of results, 87% of customers say they want brands to give them more consistent experiences. With multichannel marketing, content is often locked in silos creating fragmented experiences. But with cross-channel marketing, you can provide an experience that keeps pace with prospective clients along their journey.

An easy way to implement cross-channel marketing is using marketing automation. Don’t manually analyze and select the content based on prior customer interaction. Automation can send the most relevant content to the right customer at the right time based on their prior interactions and behaviors.

Align Your Strategies to Your Customer Personas

^{Getting to know prospective customers is important to closing the deal.}

Customers want to feel known. Sure, you can meet them where they’re at; that’s an excellent start. But even before that, you need to figure out how you will speak to them emphatically about their problems. That’s where personas come into play.

Convert more leads into customers by creating personas for each group of prospective customers. Dive deep into how they will benefit from doing business with you. Then identify different outreach methods and messaging frameworks. Highlight the products and features your prospects will likely find most appealing.

Use tools such as marketing automation to get really good at nurturing and, ultimately, closing more deals. For example, you can segment your audience into groups based on the personas you created and enter them into targeted automated nurture campaigns. Once your prospects are assigned to a campaign, they’ll automatically start receiving information. Content and recommendations will arrive automatically based on their interests. This in turn ,will increase their enthusiasm and confidence in your brand, products and services along the way.

Strategically Map Content to Drive Higher Engagement

We’ve talked a lot about delivering the right content, but we haven’t really mentioned what that entails on the back end. Identifying and developing quality content takes time and effort. Unfortunately, many marketers fail to realize that they need to develop specific pieces before using them for a campaign or other marketing effort, such as customer prospecting.

In this scenario, many marketers often have to change course or wait until a specific piece is created and approved before presenting it to their target audience. In both situations, marketers are vulnerable to losing their leads to a competitor that is ready to deliver the right content to their prospect at the right time.

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Developing a robust content library that accounts for multiple product, service and feature lines at every stage of the sales funnel can help you prepare to strike while the iron is hot, i.e. once the decision-making process actually begins.

When creating content, consider each of your customer personas and their stage in the sales funnel, and create a variety of assets that address their pain points and interests and that will help them make a final decision. If you already have some content ready to go, you can be proactive by working with your team to identify any content gaps that need to be filled. Over time, work to address these needs so you’re always prepared with the right content to engage your prospects.

Leverage Your Data and Insights To Optimize Efforts

If you’re constantly launching new campaigns but not seeing your engagement rates rise, you’re likely not using your data and insights to optimize your efforts. Continually review data to identify trends at the root of the efforts that have succeeded and those that have fallen flat. You can then use this data to optimize how you convert prospects into customers further as you move forward. We recommend applying A/B testing to improve results.

Testing which subject lines, CTAs and content pieces perform better than others allows you to enhance your marketing to yield better results every single time. And guess what? The more engaged your audience is at every stage of the sales funnel, the higher your chances will be of converting prospects into loyal customers once they reach the finish line. This is especially true when you leverage proven tactics such as storytelling.

Use Storytelling To Convert More Prospective Clients

^{Converting prospective customers is more than just making a sale: it’s winning them over with your story.}

Converting prospects into customers involves more than just requiring your sales and marketing teams to adjust their efforts. It also takes more than the right content, the right ads and the right messaging. Your future customers want to know that your company has their best interests in mind, and they want that fact to be affirmed by your current customers.

In other words, it’s important that everybody in your network understands your goals and your prospective customers’ needs — and can speak well on your behalf. A good way to show that to your customers is through success stories and customer referrals.

Identify a few extremely satisfied customers and ask them whether they’d like to be interviewed about the success they’ve experienced using your product or service. Use these interviews to extract quotes you can use as testimonials and write success stories for your website. There might be prospects who will have more detailed questions, so having a few customers your salespeople can contact for a reference call is also a good idea.

These result-driven strategies will do wonders for your engagement and help you get on the right path toward achieving your goal of converting more prospects into customers. Will they require upfront work? Absolutely. But the time investment is well worth the effort once conversion rates begin to multiply.

How to Use Data to Inform and Improve Your Customer Journey

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 20:14:00 +0000

Marketers are collecting more and more first-party customer data, especially in the wake of increasing email and advertising privacy regulations. Yet many teams report difficulties when it comes to applying all that data to their marketing programs. One simple way to start? Use your customer journey as a lens to identify opportunities to apply data-driven improvements.

Customer journeys, by nature, are centered around your customer experience. They function as your team’s guide to the step-by-step process your audience takes as they identify a problem, learn about solutions, make a decision to purchase, and maintain an ongoing relationship with your business.

When you look at your data through the lens of the customer journey, you can concentrate your improving the touchpoints that matter most to your audience. This ability to laser-focus is likely why organizations that have and use customer journey maps are twice as likely to outperform competitors than those that don’t.

Let’s explore some practical, real-life examples of how you can use data to deliver a more personalized customer journey, using a simplified four-stage model: awareness/discovery, research/evaluation, justification/purchase, and retention/advocacy.

Using Data During the Awareness or Discovery Stage

In the awareness or discovery stage, your customer is just realizing they have a problem that needs solving. They want to learn more, and your goal is to educate and inform them through helpful content like blog posts, whitepapers, and eBooks.

At this stage, look for insights that will tell you how well you’re answering your customers’ questions or making a positive first impression. Some of these data sources include:

Organic Search and Website Behavior

Look at Google Analytics to learn whether the prospects who find your content through organic search are sticking around on your website. If metrics like bounce rate or exit rate are high for specific pages, it’s a sign your visitors may not have a clear path to deeper engagement after landing on your site. Adding relevant internal links, suggesting related content, or having clear CTAs like a newsletter signup can help improve this early step along the customer journey.

Form Fill Data

At this stage, you’re just introducing yourself to your new prospects. If you’re seeing high abandonment rates on form fills for gated content or webinar signups, you may be asking for too much information too early. Keep forms as simple as possible now, and ask for more information later through progressive profiling.

Email Engagement

See how individual pieces of content are performing in email campaigns. When you see high clickthrough rates, consider promoting these top performers in paid campaigns, or give them prominent placement on your website to help more customers discover your best content and move further along their buyer’s journey.

Case in point: when nonprofit organization Education at Work identified a powerful article on their website was underperforming, they changed its placement to make it more visible. In just two months, their media and form conversion rate rose from 6.7% to more than 40%.

Using Data During the Research and Evaluation Stage

During the research and evaluation stage, your customer understands their problem and is actively trying to solve it by learning about and comparing different solutions. The time is ripe to communicate clearly why your product or service is their best option, using content like case studies, comparison pages, customer webinars, and product demos.

It’s crucial to share targeted information that’s highly relevant to your prospects at this stage. Pay close attention to data that indicates whether your campaigns are hitting the mark, including:

Unsubscribe Rates

Be cautious about over-indexing on hard sales at this stage, or sending too-frequent emails if prospects aren’t engaging. Keep a close eye on your opt-out rate and pull back on your email cadence if needed.

Segmentation

At this stage, you should be able to identify attributes like industry or company size through progressive profiling or services such as ZoomInfo. Evaluate whether you’re sending relevant content, like case studies or webinar invites within your prospect’s industry, to communicate your brand’s value proposition to their specific use case.

For example, The Netherlands-based full-service agency The Marketing Guys uses progressive profiling to gather key information about leads during webinar registrations. They use that data to drive further engagement, such as sending a whitepaper about the key features of marketing automation platforms based on the prospect’s company size and industry.

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Using Data During the Justification and Purchase Stage

As your customer reaches the justification and purchase stage, they’ve learned that your product is a great solution for their needs, and they’re almost ready to finalize their purchase. Help them feel confident by setting clear expectations about onboarding and adoption, empower their internal selling, and remove friction whenever possible. This is the time to nudge them over the finish line by offering free trials or assessments, and scheduling live sales calls or demos.

Conversion is your primary focus at this stage, so focus on data that helps you fine-tune your offers and messaging.

A/B Testing

Ensure you’re testing your headlines, visuals, and templates for landing pages with high-value offers like free trials. Get more data quickly by testing assets in PPC, and then apply the winning concepts across your campaigns.

Lead Scoring

If you haven’t done so yet, set up a lead scoring program that automatically assigns points to specific behaviors along the customer journey. Lead scoring helps ensure you’re sending the warmest leads to the sales team for one-on-one conversations and live demos, when the time is right.

Case in point: for cloud service provider interworks.cloud, automated customer journeys and lead scoring work in tandem to track activities and segment their audience accordingly. Every path is designed to guide customers towards booking a demo, which triggers a handoff to the sales team for a personalized conversation. In the first year after implementing these marketing automation programs, the company saw a 20% increase in conversion rate.

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Using Data During the Retention and Advocacy Stage

In the retention and advocacy stage, your customer is now post-purchase. Congrats! But, they’re constantly evaluating whether to renew, upgrade, or refer others to your business. It’s time to measure and improve their satisfaction, drive their lifetime value, and encourage advocacy through feedback, loyalty, and referral programs.

Data helps you know which customers are at risk for churn and which are your biggest fans, so pay attention to metrics.

NPS or Customer Satisfaction Scores

Measuring satisfaction in a systematic way is the foundation for automated retention and advocacy programs. When customers are very happy, trigger automated referral requests. When they indicate problems, enroll them in a nurture sequence that shares knowledge base resources or send them to Customer Support for extra attention.

Usage or Adoption Data

When accounts have empty seats or unused features, they’re likely not getting the full value from your product (which leads to higher churn risk). Use this information to trigger education campaigns about overlooked features or nudge invited users who haven’t completed signup or failed to log in for an extended period of time.

Milestone Data

Customers appreciate being recognized. Create positive moments of engagement by celebrating signup anniversaries or hitting key usage milestones with special communications.

For example, leading insurance provider RSA Canada uses customer data to power a gamified leaderboard for its brokers, awarding points for specific activities, celebrating achievements, and motivating more activity with tangible rewards. Since launching their program, RSA Canada has seen a 30% increase in overall broker engagement.

Getting Started With Data-Driven Improvements to the Customer Journey

Applying data across your entire marketing strategy can sound intimidating, but using the customer journey as your guide helps you focus on simply improving one touchpoint at a time.

And you can start at any stage, based on the needs of your organization. If lead generation is your primary concern, begin at the awareness stage. If churn is a major problem, focus on retention first. The more data you begin to leverage, the more ideas will spark about where to improve next and how to continually deliver a relevant, personalized customer experience.

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Customer Journey Map: What is it & How to Make One

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 19:42:10 +0000

TL;DR: Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool that helps businesses visualize and optimize the path a customer takes from awareness to advocacy. It involves creating buyer personas, identifying key touchpoints, uncovering pain points and opportunities, and using insights to improve customer experience (CX) and boost marketing ROI. Implementing and regularly updating the map using marketing automation data leads to better personalization, improved retention, and increased sales.

Introduction

Think of customer journey mapping as your secret ingredient for marketing strategy success. The process allows you to gain a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, goals, pain points, desires and experiences. Companies that use customer journey mapping are twice as likely to outperform competitors that don’t, so it’s definitely worth discovering your ideal customer’s unique path, and using it to enhance her unique experience of your brand.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual guide to your customer’s step-by-step process as they work towards a specific goal. Identifying these individual steps can give you a deeper understanding of the typical experience of your customers, and what types of information your marketing and sales teams can provide along the way to encourage the actions you’d like them to take.

As a customer prepares to make a purchase, he will likely have identified a problem he’s trying to solve. Next, he’s going to explore and compare potential solutions. This might include reading reviews or asking questions of different vendors. He might look for proof that the solution has worked for others, or ask for a demonstration, or walkthrough meeting. Usually, marketing and sales teams will identify three or more general stages and get more detailed in the process of building a customer journey map.

Any type of action can end up in your customer journey map, including:

Signing up for a newsletter
Making a reservation
Completing a purchase
Signing up for a software trial
Using a comparison tool or checklist
Interacting with a pricing page

The goal is to create a natural-feeling customer journey that leads to a purchase, or grows existing business. In either case, the customer’s journey with your brand shouldn’t end with a purchase. It also needs to include your returns or exchange process, signing up for loyalty programs, getting support, converting on seasonal offers, and/or rewards for word-of-mouth.

Creating a customer journey map allows you to optimize the experience to create a frictionless, efficient pathway to a solved problem. Depending on the goal, customer journey maps can be very simple, or far more complex, but they offer plenty of advantages for any business. Let’s get into some of the most important benefits of customer journey mapping.

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Creating customer journey maps can take a fair amount of time and effort, but the benefits are well worth it. The main advantages include seeing the big picture, understanding points of friction, identifying gaps your marketing team needs to address, predicting customer behavior, and improving the customer experience.

Seeing the Big Picture

Customer journey mapping is a great way to make sure everyone within your team understands how a customer moves from one part of the research or buying process to another. Without a map, the CX can be very different when dealing with different departments of your business, leaving the customer with a disjointed impression. Using a map allows your team to see the big picture and ensure a consistent CX at all stages of the journey.

Understanding Points of Friction

Build your customer map from the customer’s perspective. The shift makes it easier to understand any points of friction they have throughout the journey, and you may find that the actual journey a customer takes doesn’t match up with your expectations.

Friction can slow your customer journey down and cause frustration that loses you the conversion. If someone signs up for a demo of your software, but has no access to a self-serve knowledge base where they can quickly find answers and get started, it’s highly likely they’ll give up before they have a chance to discover the amazing features that would get them hooked. Adding a content library or on-demand webinar around popular topics can help smooth this friction away.

The goal is to keep your CX as smooth as possible, so you have a better chance at optimizing sales, engagement, or other goals.

Identifying Gaps in the Path to Purchase

As you map out your customer’s journey, your team may identify gaps in the overall CX that you hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps your returns policy is unclear, or customers have urgent queries that no one responds to until the next day, by which time they’ve purchased elsewhere. You may not notice these gaps from the inside, but a customer journey map can help to uncover blind spots and then go on to create content for the buyer’s journey.

Predicting Customer Behavior

Customer journey mapping makes it easier to predict which customers will convert and at what point of the sales funnel. You may identify opportunities to help potential customers at specific stages of their journey, thus increasing your conversion rate. Knowing how your customers behave at each touchpoint can also inspire relevant content and connection points for each stage.

Improving Customer Experience

Regularly reviewing and improving your customer journey map is a great way to ensure you’re offering the best CX possible. You may uncover ways you can make the whole experience with your brand even more delightful by offering deals, surprises and value along the way. In some cases, it can be as simple as a fun animation on your website, or app. Proactively improving the experience around these helps build brand loyalty and reduce the risk that your customer decides to switch brands.

How to Map Customer Journey in 6 Steps

Use these six steps to guide the process when you’re ready to build or enhance your customer journey map.

1. Create Buyer Personas

The first step of customer journey mapping is to create buyer personas for each of your typical customer groups. Knowing the goal of each buyer persona will help you find ways to meet their specific needs. At this point, it’s also helpful to think about your goals and how a customer journey map can help you meet those while also meeting the specific requirements of each buyer persona.

2. Conduct Direct Research

Getting direct feedback from your customers is one of the best ways to find out exactly what’s important to them – and it might not always be what you expect. Questionnaires and user testing are good strategies to help you find out why customers chose your business and get insights into their experiences.

3. Identify Communication Touchpoints

Using marketing automation data to inform your customer journey map makes it possible to improve your customer experience (CX) and use advanced segmentation strategies to retain customers. One of the best places to use marketing automation data to create a customer journey map is in discovering essential touchpoints.

Touchpoints are individual interactions between your company and your customer. Identifying these interaction points in detail gives you an insight into the separate actions that your customers are taking as they move towards a specific action.

Touchpoints can occur in many different channels, including:

Your website
Email marketing
Social channels
Third-party sites

Once you’ve identified your main touchpoints, group them into three sections — pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase. Grouping touchpoints like this helps you identify what actions are being carried out, when, and how the journey might be improved at certain stages to make the path to purchase easier and faster.

4. Uncover Positive and Negative Moments

Knowing which positive or negative moments come up repeatedly with each touchpoint can offer additional clarity on how to improve the customer journey. It’s important to consider both positives and negatives at each stage of the journey, because your customers’ opinions are likely to differ, and you’ll want to have the chance to adjust and improve either way.

Positive moments can include things like offering free shipping with orders over a certain amount, and adding a 1% discount, or other bonus at checkout as a surprise. Afterall, high shipping costs account for 44% of abandoned shopping carts, so that’s a huge opportunity to save the sale. Clearly, advertising free shipping can help customers decide to move forward with their purchase and a special surprise makes them feel like they’re getting great value for money with a brand that cares about their satisfaction.

On the other hand, negative moments can be hard to overcome. A slow-loading site, for example, can quickly become a negative moment that halts the entire journey. Multiple studies have shown the average person expects a site to load within a few seconds. Pages that take 10 seconds and more to load are dead in the water.

Offering limited channels for technical support can also lead to negative moments. If a customer’s preferred channel isn’t available, they may feel resentful that they can’t pick up the phone or send a quick chat message. This is where your direct research can come into play, because knowing which channels your customers prefer can help you better tailor their journey.

Once you’ve identified negative moments, you’ll need to decide how to overcome them by improving the customer journey, whether that’s making your returns policy easier to find, increasing the speed of your site, or adding a chatbot option to answer important questions and direct someone into a sales conversation. When you’ve uncovered positive moments, enhance them by figuring out how to duplicate across personas, channels, or stages of the buyer’s journey.

5. Travel the Customer Journey Yourself

Now that you’ve gotten this far, the next crucial stage is traveling the customer journey map yourself. Put yourself in the place of each persona, and go through the entire journey. Another option is asking someone else to do this while you observe. Was the process easy, or can it be improved? One pro tip is to have people from different parts of your business test the journey as well, including online and offline components.

Experiencing the customer journey of your competitors can also be a valuable way to gain insights into how the experience of other brands can impact a customer’s perception of your own business. Start by visiting a competitor’s website. For example, you may sign up to receive an ebook with a similar topic to one of your own gated assets. Then, observe the emails or SMS communications you receive. If you’re invited to follow the brand on social media, follow. See what you see. Pay attention to the ads you start to see and schedule a sales call or demo when you are invited to do so. Take screenshots and recordings along the way to keep for inspiration.

6. Create a Visual Map

Customer journey mapping is a visual process, so now it’s time to combine all of your work into a visual. If you’re not sure exactly where each step of the journey goes, start out by using post-it notes to create an initial journey, with touchpoints that can be moved around.

Your map can be simple and linear or more complex, outlining touchpoints across multiple channels.

A basic customer journey may include the following stages:

Awareness → Research → Evaluation → Justification → Purchase → Retention

A more complex journey might look like:

Engagement → Education → Research → Evaluation → Justification → Purchase → Retention → Expansion → Advocacy

For each stage, add in the touchpoints you identified earlier. Then for each piece of the journey, consider:

Customer goals
What is your customer likely to be thinking?
What are their emotions likely to be?
Any points of negativity or positivity?
Opportunities to improve and enhance

It’s generally easier to lay out your stages horizontally, with a column for each bullet point above. Once you have everything in a cohesive structure, you might prefer to create a digital version.

How to Implement it Into Your Marketing Strategy

Creating a customer journey map is only the first step toward building enhanced experiences that lead to sales growth for your company. You actually have to implement your customer journey map. So, what does that mean, exactly?

Adjust Your Marketing Strategy

The most powerful way to use your customer mapping journey to help grow your business is to integrate it into your marketing strategy. Consider how you can create or improve content, offers, and calls-to-action at each touchpoint to help meet both your customers’ goals and your own.

A negative experience could occur post-purchase when a customer realizes the service they just signed up for is more complicated to use than expected. If there’s a lack of support post-purchase, the customer may feel frustrated. These negative feelings can be compounded if it’s difficult to contact the account manager for support. Resolving this could involve adjusting your email marketing to include options to book a support slot with account managers, or adding a chatbot for instant advice.

Implementing automated programs that offer relevant content to your customers at just the right point along their journey is an important part of any modern marketing program. Specific marketing strategies like personalized email marketing automation can be used to extend each customer’s lifecycle by creating and delivering content that drives loyalty and retention. Personalized marketing like customer segmentation and adaptive sending can help result in a 10% increase in sales.

Consider how the customer journey also extends post-purchase. Existing customers are your best customers, with a 60-70% chance of making a purchase, compared to 5-20% for new customers. Nurture those relationships by using segmentation to match them with new products or services. Launching referral or advocacy programs can help drive brand loyalty as well.

Use Marketing Automation Data to Reassess Regularly

Once your first customer journey mapping is complete, it’s important to revisit it regularly. Aim to reassess at least every 6-12 months. You can collect data from Google Analytics, social media, reviews, and your marketing automation platform. Analyzing this will give you powerful insights into which points in your customer journey need to be improved.

Other points when it’s useful to reassess are when you launch new products, find that your customers are using different technology, or that their tastes are changing. Once you’ve made any changes, adjust your marketing strategy as necessary.

Customer Journey Mapping In Action

RATESDOTCA used customer journey mapping to create a more personalized customer narrative, leading to a 15% increase in annual email revenue. The financial services aggregator used customized content to accelerate the customer journey with the right information at the right time to advance toward the conversion.

Summary

Customer journey mapping is a strategic process that helps businesses visualize and optimize every step a customer takes—from awareness to loyalty—by identifying key touchpoints, emotions, and pain points.

By creating buyer personas, collecting real feedback, and analyzing interactions across channels, companies can deliver more personalized, seamless experiences that improve conversions, retention, and overall customer satisfaction. When integrated into marketing strategies and supported by automation data, journey mapping becomes a powerful tool for driving growth and loyalty.

Orchestrate Engaging and Immersive Brand Experiences With Act-On’s Automated Journey Builder

Act-On — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Modern marketing strategies are evolving past the attract and capture model to focus on delivering better brand and buying journeys that drive more interest, engagement, and value for both prospects and customers alike.

Generating demand will always be a critical component of any well-constructed marketing and sales funnel, but engaging your target audiences with immersive experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints throughout the entire lifecycle continuum is critical for both immediate and sustained business growth. As a way of turning that belief into action, Act-On has completely reimagined our automated program feature set and are proud to announce that we are releasing the new and improved Automated Journey Builder on October 19, 2020.

Keep reading to learn more about the Automated Journey Builder and how it provides users with an unprecedented ability to deliver exceptional brand experiences and buying journeys.

How to Move Beyond Lead Capture and Improve Brand Experiences

Before we delve into the features and benefits of the new Automated Journey Builder within Act-On, let’s get a feel for the current landscape. Chiefly, how and why the quality of the customer experience has overtaken the quantity of leads in terms of importance.

Historically, marketers have been tasked with driving as many leads as possible to give Sales the most potential opportunities. However, that model led to major inefficiencies as the majority of these leads simply weren’t ready to have a purchasing discussion or weren’t actually part of an organization’s target audience. As a result, salespeople continued to find themselves chasing “leads” that didn’t want to be caught. So, within the last few years, successful marketers have pulled back the throttle on lead generation and began shifting much of their focus toward fostering those leads into sales-ready prospects.

The way they’ve done that is by nurturing existing prospects (and existing customers) with automated buying journeys. And since most marketers are now placing an emphasis on nurturing throughout the customer lifecycle, the most successful brands have differentiated themselves by focusing on delivering better brand experiences.

This makes good sense, as in 2010, 36% of companies competed primarily on the basis of the customer experience. In 2019, that number had risen to 80% (1). In addition, according to Qualtrics XM Institute, “87% of customers who say they had a great experience will make another purchase from the company, compared to 18% of customers who had a very poor experience. (2)”

By leveraging data-driven marketing automation solutions, marketers can track engagement and behaviors to deliver on specific pain points and needs, exceeding customer expectations and differentiating their brand and offerings from the competition. Understanding where customers are in their journey and what they need to succeed allows marketers to provide timely and relevant messaging and content across multiple channels at key touchpoints. At Act-On, we’ve made this process even easier, more intuitive, and more effective with Automated Journey Builder.

What Is the Automated Journey Builder?

The completely reimagined and reinvented Automated Journey Builder is a highly visual automation environment that makes it easier than ever to plan, build, copy, share, and deliver myriad communications workflows. The tool is designed to nurture prospects into sales-ready leads and further engage your existing customers for better product and service adoption, retention, and advocacy.

According to one of our beta-testers, Daniel Schmieding (Director of Digital Marketing, AdvisoryCloud), “The new UX design looks great and aligns perfectly with recent changes to the user interface. It’s cleaner, more legible, and less busy. It’s much more clear than the old version, which makes it a lot more usable and user-friendly.”

An interactive and dynamic marketing automation tool, the Automated Journey Builder allows marketers to deliver against diverse journeys and customer pathways. And with built-in multi-channel capabilities, you can drive engagement along numerous potential touchpoints. Best of all, you can templatize and save workflows to increase efficiencies and maintain brand consistency across all of your automated campaigns.

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How the Automated Journey Builder Improves Marketing Efficiency and Outcomes

Marketers are inherently creative people who want the ability to flex those creative muscles in a fun and beautiful environment. The Automated Journey Builder allows you to do just that.

Here’s what another of our beta-testers, Cara Moretti (Creative Manager, REV Group) had to say about her experience with the Automated Journey Builder. “From a visual standpoint, the Automated Journey Builder makes it so much easier to identify where prospects are in their journey and then deliver better experiences. It’s so much easier to use and follow than the previous version of the tool.”

Whether you’re creating simple or complex (or anything in between) programs, the Automated Journey Builder allows for a more interactive and flexible design experience while expanding your ability to engage across channels and touchpoints. And with a significantly improved ability to visualize program construction thanks to new zoom and pan functionality, you can build better programs in less time with increased efficiency. Additionally, updated tracking features allows you to track engagement — empowering you to identify strengths and weaknesses within each journey and adjust accordingly for consistent and sustained improvement.

Common and Effective Automated Journey Builder Use Cases

The best part about the new Automated Journey Builder is its versatility. For years, marketers have been frustrated by limited multi-channel messaging program functionality within their marketing automation platform, but our reimagined feature allows for unparalleled campaign dynamism.

Here are just a few examples of how you can leverage the Automated Journey Builder to deliver truly exceptional brand experiences and buyer journeys.

Prospect Nurturing

By tracking entry points and engagement at multiple touchpoints, you can leverage scoring, intent, and segmentation to construct efficient and effective automated prospect nurturing campaigns. When you understand behaviors and identify patterns, you can add more relevant messaging, content, and calls-to-action to these programs for further engagement. These data-driven approaches will improve and accelerate the lead-to-conversion process. And by adding if-then logic and dynamic content, you can guide prospects along a uniquely tailored experience that will exceed expectations and leave a lasting impact.

Customer Marketing

Extending and expanding customer relationships is a critical aspect of scalable marketing for sustained growth. Once a lead becomes a customer, you can continue the conversation with prompt and thorough welcome and onboarding campaigns, product and service adoption programs to drive satisfaction and retention, and even promotional journeys designed to drive additional opportunities and sales. Lastly, you can build simple or complex campaigns that evangelize your customer base and encourage advocacy and referrals.

Lifecycle Engagement

Modern growth marketers transcend the traditional buying funnel to engage with target audiences across the entire lifecycle — regardless of channel, medium, or stage. The Automated Journey Builder allows you to deliver throughout the lifecycle with progressive and consistent messaging and content that is entertaining, educational, and engaging. Choreograph and orchestrate across numerous touchpoints based on numerous behaviors and real-time data points to nurture prospects and upsell existing customers with sneak peeks, free trials, and exclusive promotions.

Improve the Brand Experience With Act-On’s Automated Journey Builder

Whatever your organization’s goals may be, the reimagined and reconfigured Automated Journey Builder allows you to delight your target audiences at every turn — anticipating their needs and delivering value at critical points. The new interface is extremely intuitive and interactive without compromising power or functionality.

If you’d like to see the new and improved Automated Journey Builder in action, please schedule a 20-minute demo with a marketing automation expert today. If you’re not quite ready to have that conversation, you can click here to take the interactive tour of our proven and innovative platform.

Still learning about marketing automation or researching the best fit for your organization? Click here to learn how to make marketing automation a reality!

How to Make Marketing Automation a Reality

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Dynamic Website Personalization: How to Use It Successfully

Act-On — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Current state: You know that you need to improve website traffic and conversions. Despite having good content and a good content marketing strategy, you’re just not where you want to be. And you’re pretty sure it’s time to see what all the fuss around website personalization is all about.

It’s true. Website personalization is all the rage these days — and with good reason. There’s no better way to get great content, product, and service recommendations in front of your target audience segments.

Naturally, though, there’s a bit of a catch. Not all personalization solutions are created equal.

Some are more expensive than others.

Some are more labor-intensive than others.

And some are more effective than others.

But even the most affordable, efficient, and effective website personalization solutions can’t achieve their full potential without a thoughtful and thorough website personalization strategy.

Let’s dig a little deeper to gain a shared understanding of what we mean when we say “website personalization,” how you and your marketing team can implement and use website personalization successfully, and also a few of the main benefits of website personalization.

What Is Website Personalization?

Website personalization uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to track user behavior data and deliver tailored experiences based on those behaviors. As a result, you’re able to better target and engage your website visitors as they navigate your site. Better yet, as you review your key performance indicators (pages visited, time on page and site, and conversions), you’re able to then build and update your content strategy around what’s working — and also improve what’s not.

The idea behind website personalization is that it’s a win-win for everyone. Your consumers don’t have to go on a wild goose chase scouring your website for the information they need. And you’re able to deliver a more comfortable and rewarding experience for your website visitors while also getting awesome insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your content and your content strategy.

For example, let’s say your regional insurance agency sells a ton of great offerings that cover a variety of different policy types (home, auto, life, etc.). Your customers can either purchase individual policies or bundle their coverage. Your software notices that certain website visitors are interested in just one type of coverage, but there’s also another subset of users who seem to be viewing and engaging with content across two or more policy types. A good website personalization solution will begin serving up quotes and content related to bundled insurance offerings to this unique audience segment since they clearly have a need for (or at least an interest in) multiple insurance products.

Website personalization helps you streamline the attraction phase of your holistic marketing strategy, gather useful data for further outreach, and create stronger, more trusting relationships between you and your prospects and customers. What’s more, it gives your sales team crystal clear visibility into your visitors’ preferences and interests — empowering them to have more informed and impactful conversations with new leads and current clients.

It shortens the sales cycle, improves conversion rates, and leads to more and better closed deals.

How to Use Website Personalization Successfully

So now that we know what website personalization is, let’s examine the steps involved in learning how to use website personalization successfully.

1) Optimize Your Existing Content Strategy for a Website Personalization Solution

Since website personalization technology leverages machine learning to do its job, the heavy lift required for it to work actually occurs prior to turning it on. Before considering potential solutions and vendors, you should have a firm grasp of your current content strategy.

Here are just a few questions you should be asking:

When was the last time you performed a content audit?
Do you have any existing content gaps?
Is your content up to date?
Do you have the right assets for your target personas along each stage of the sales cycle?
Do you have a nice mix of high-level thought leadership content and more solution-based content?
Are you tracking content performance? If so, how?
Are you emphasizing productive content, updating lagging content, and sunsetting irrelevant or outdated content?

Another pivotal question you need to ask yourself is if you have the right team in place to meet and exceed your goals. Great content marketing requires more than just great writers. Of course, writing skill is paramount, but your content team should also understand SEO best practices, how content impacts demand generation, and, of course, the details and benefits of your products and services — as well as a concrete and comprehensive understanding of your industry.

If even one of these questions isn’t covered to your satisfaction, you might not be able to get the most out of your website personalization solution. So make sure your content strategy is strong across the board, that you have (or are producing) the right types of content, and that you have an awesome content team in place to help you reach your goals.

Most importantly, you need to have your content properly organized and labeled. This means you’ve created and are using a strict taxonomy in which all of your content is broken down by category, sub-category, and tags, and that all of those classifications are consistent across your website. This will impact how your website personalization tool is able to make sense of your content, so it’s imperative that this is in good shape from jump street.

2) Choosing the Right Website Personalization Vendor

If you’re serious about adopting an effective website personalization vendor, and you’re confident that your existing content strategy is in tip-top shape, the next step in the process is to begin researching and vetting potential vendors. There are a lot of helpful solutions out there, but every organization will have different needs, so your company’s industry, size, and mission should heavily influence your selection process.

Here are a few questions you’ll want to ask as you begin interacting with potential website personalization solutions:

1) How Does This Website Personalization Solution Fit in with Our Current MarTech Stack?

The different tools and technologies your sales and marketing teams use should complement and enhance one another, and the same is true of a website personalization solution. Before deciding on a platform, you should speak with vendors about how their solution fits in with your existing MarTech stack. Specifically, the tool should play nicely with your marketing automation, CRM, and CMS systems, as well as any third-party APIs you’re using. If the proposed solution doesn’t integrate seamlessly with your existing technologies, you should move on — or at least ask if they’re working on building out new integrations.

2) What Are the Capabilities of This Website Personalization Solution?

As I mentioned earlier, not all website personalization solutions are created equal, and some are better suited for specific use cases. So, depending on what you and your key stakeholders have identified as your principal needs, you’ll want to look only at those solutions that are able to meet those needs. Whoever you choose should provide flexible, outcome-based solutions and be willing to work with you to align your content marketing strategy with their platform. Most importantly, the solution should allow you to turn anonymous visitors into known users so that you can continue to market to those individuals on separate marketing channels, such as social media and paid digital advertising.

3) What Are the Limitations of This Website Personalization Solution?

Does the solution work sitewide? Can you tailor it to work in different ways on different pages? Does it work with your CMS? How much work does it require on your end? These are pivotal questions that you should be asking, and the answers will inform your decision. The best website personalization tools are dynamic and can be formatted to any site or page to provide the best content or product recommendations at the perfect time to influence buyer intent. Furthermore, the tool you choose should be simple to use and operate on rules-based logic that make sense given how you’re housing and categorizing your content.

4) What Are the Costs Involved in This Website Personalization Solution?

Website personalization solutions vary greatly by cost, so you’ll want to understand your budget limitations and make that figure clear to the vendor before getting too far in the weeds. There’s no sense wasting your time speaking with a company out of your price range. Once you’ve established a mutual understanding, you’ll need to look closely at several line items in the quoted price — including ongoing management and strategy, onboarding and training, data connections, and platform access. You’ll also want to consider contract length and potential fees for choosing to opt-out prior to completing the engagement.

5) What Is the Time to Value with This Website Personalization Solution?

The most commonly used misnomer in marketing and sales technology applications is “out-of-the-box.” I hear this phrase constantly, and the truth of the matter almost never matches the promise. And when dealing with website personalization, it’s often more misused than with other software tools. Regardless of what a vendor tells you, you need to understand for yourself what goes into getting up and running with your website personalization solution, and the best way to do that is by speaking with current and former users of each solution. You should ask them how long it took to develop their strategy, how long it took to start seeing results, and how long it took to start optimizing their content strategy based on the performance of their website personalization solution.

3) Implementing Your Website Personalization Solution and Tracking Results

Strategy… Check.

Solution… Check.

Implementation… Pending.

At this point, you’re almost there. Now it’s time to open up your new toy, align it with your MarTech stack, and let it absorb the data before turning it on. If you’ve chosen an easy and effective website personalization solution, you’ll be able to install a basic plugin to enable:

Automated content exports
Automated code placement
Admin control for recommendation display options

This should drastically reduce the workload for you and your team and get you started on the right path toward successful implementation and deployment. It might take a week or two to collect enough data for the system to start working properly, so you’ll want to install the plugin as soon as you’re able. After about 10 days, you should have enough data to turn on your solution with the confidence that it will deliver the right content to the right visitors and yield immediate results.

This is where the fun begins because it’s the point at which you’ll begin seeing some initial success. Whatever platform you choose should have its own portal with access to a reporting interface. From your dashboard, you should be able to view aggregate time on site, pages per session, and conversions.

You should also be able to drill down further to see which content categories are performing the best and even view performance by individual content assets. Best of all, these metrics are unique to those sessions where visitors are engaging with personalized content, so you’re able to see a breakdown of “participating” vs. “non-participating” traffic, which will help you measure the effectiveness of your website personalization software in isolation.

Serve Intelligent Content Recommendations with Act-On Adaptive Web

This blog was a little long, so I don’t blame you if you skimmed. Actually, that’s perfect because you’ve now arrived at the best part!

Act-On’s Adaptive Web solution is the most affordable, efficient, and effective website personalization on the market today. It’s designed to make personalized content recommendations simple, easy, and attainable for every marketer and organization. It’s easy to implement, requires no extra work for marketers, and produces serious results within weeks of installation. It also gives you the ability to manually manipulate your content recommendations to promote new and especially relevant content.

Download our eBook to learn more about website personalization and how Adaptive Web can help you “Personalize the Web Experience.”

The Benefits of Website Personalization

Act-On — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For decades, we marketers have been trying to predict which content to serve up to our target audiences — and with good reason! Giving your prospects and customers exactly what they need when they need it gives you a serious advantage over your competitors, instills consumer trust, and helps build customer relationships prior to any direct sales engagement. Unfortunately, delivering highly relevant and personalized content can be really hard to do consistently. (If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be writing a blog on the topic.) Thankfully, it’s getting easier… but more on that in a minute.

Before the digital age, getting good content in front of the right audience was more of a guessing game that was usually influenced by market research and the occasional snail mail survey to give us a few clues about what our prospects might be interested in. Then, as the internet became a staple in our lives, we were able to manually collect some meaningful user behavior data. But analyzing it required serious man hours and expertise — and even then, we couldn’t ever be sure it was 100% accurate. Adding to that challenge, we couldn’t be certain these insights were helping us deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time.

Now it seems we’re entering a new digital era — one that is defined by the user experience and their interests. Suddenly, developing and distributing relevant content is more important than ever. Thankfully, this transitional period presents a great opportunity to deliver more personalized content to more interested consumers and also create some breathing room between you and your competitors.

The idea of creating more personal websites tailored for distinct user groups isn’t a new concept, but it’s only recently become a reality for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Most of us refer to this [not-so] new phenomenon as website personalization, but no matter what you call it, it’s revolutionizing the way we understand and use the internet. Today, even single-employee startups with a super basic website are just a CMS plug-in away from delivering sophisticated website personalization to all their site visitors.

What Is Website Personalization?

There are several different types of website personalization, which means there are also several different definitions. But in a broad sense, website personalization is exactly what it sounds like: creating intuitive web experiences tailored for each individual user.

You know how Netflix has a knack for serving up your favorite movies? Or how about the way Spotify always plays the perfect song? This is website personalization in action, but it can also be used in retail, advertising, and topical content marketing. For example, Amazon is the gold standard of B2C personalization, serving up spot-on product recommendations on nearly every page you visit. And remarketing ads on Google and other search engines have been around for nearly a decade now, delivering relevant advertisements based on your previous online interactions and preferences.

In fact, users are becoming so familiar with personalization that according to a 2016 Infosys study, 74% of customers are frustrated when their website content isn’t personalized to their unique needs and interests (1). Further, more than 90% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that deliver tailored recommendations — including both product and content recommendations. But aside from the fact that delivering personalized experiences meets evolving customer expectations, what are some of the direct benefits to you and your company?

What Are the Benefits of Website Personalization?

We all know that creating compelling content that is informative and encourages engagement can be extremely difficult. And when we up the stakes to try to make that content more personalized for our target audiences, it’s not only challenging, but it can also eat up a lot of valuable resources. It’s hard to be all things to all people, but using software to personalize the user experience is a great way to increase efficiency, web traffic, time spent on your site, and conversions and marketing qualified leads (MQLs) while also conserving resources.

The level of personalization on a website can vary greatly depending on several factors (company size, website sophistication, industry — just to name a few), and certain aspects of website personalization work better with certain sites depending on the function of those sites. For example, are you running an e-commerce site? A marketing agency? Maybe you’re the webmaster or content manager for a local news outlet? Each would likely enable different types of personalization — and each of those could have significant upside if implemented properly and with a sound strategy.

For our purposes, we’re going to focus on how personalizing content can benefit small, medium, and enterprise-level B2B organizations.

Deliver More Relevant Content Recommendations

Delivering content recommendations to users based on their demographics, behaviors, and interests is a practice that has been around for a while now, but traditionally, these content recommendations haven’t always been relevant or intuitive, which can actually have the unintended consequence of decreasing the user experience.

With new personalization technologies, however, you can leverage pertinent data to serve up fresh content that closely matches user intent and guides them through a wholly unique customer journey. This will help increase the amount of pages a user views, as well as the time they spend on these pages, ultimately increasing the number of conversions on your site and the amount of ROI directly attributable to these visits.

The insights you gather will not only help you provide more targeted content recommendations on your website, but can also enable your team to focus their efforts where they matter most. As you begin to understand which content produces results, you can revisit your organization’s content strategy and create more pieces similar to those that are performing well.

Create Better Opportunities to Nurture Prospects and Customers

By personalizing the user experience and collecting accurate, useful data along the way, you can segment your target audiences more meaningfully and then continue messaging prime prospects at multiple digital touchpoints throughout the sales cycle. Most notably, you can deliver automated email programs to customers based on their browsing history on your site, which is a great way to continue delivering highly relevant content. You can even gate some or all of these content pieces to collect even more information that will help your marketing and sales teams hone in on prospects and close the deal.

For example, if a prospect completes a form on your site to download an eBook on corporate retirement savings plans for employees, you can place them in a drip campaign to provide more information on the topic— such as a pre-recorded webinar, success story examples, infographics, or even a recent podcast your team recorded on the subject.

Generate Qualified Leads to Eliminate the Guesswork for Sales

Personalized content leads to more and better user interaction, which helps you gather tons of great data and continue nurturing these leads with creative and effective marketing strategies. Obviously, this is great news for your marketing team, but it also has a significant effect on your sales reps. Not only does website personalization lead to a faster sales cycle, it also helps narrow your sales team’s focus to interested consumers with a greater chance of buying.

By delivering content that easily guides potential consumers through the buyer journey, you’re able to gather more data to help your sales team reach out to the right people at the right time and focus on the right message. For instance, you can gate relevant and valuable content with intuitive forms that use progressive profiling to gather valuable data like the user’s industry, company size, and position within the organization. By integrating a marketing automation platform with your CRM, you can seamlessly pass this information to your sales team so they can have more productive conversations with prospects and existing customers.

Personalize the User Experience with Adaptive Web from Act-On!

Organizations need to create more personalized experiences for their website visitors, but most of the tools on the market today are highly expensive and not especially accurate or effective. However, Act-On’s Adaptive Web solution is designed to make personalized content recommendations simple, easy, and attainable for every marketer and organization.

With Adaptive Web, marketers can leverage machine learning to deliver behavior-triggered content recommendations that better target and engage each website visitor as they navigate through the customer’s website. This engagement leads to more conversions and thus, more data collected, which you can then leverage as part of an omni-channel marketing experience for all of your target audience segments.

To learn more about how Adaptive Web can increase conversions, reduce manual effort, and help inform your company’s content strategy, please download the eBook below or reach out to us directly to talk to a website personalization expert!

Engage Your Customers at the Best Time with These Outreach Strategies

Act-On — Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s busy world, our target customers are constantly being bombarded by ads and messages wherever they go, making them almost immune to these tactics. As a result, most of these efforts are often interpreted as background noise and easily ignored at times when customers just don’t have time to engage. That is why time is one of the most crucial factors impacting the success of your marketing efforts.

Knowing when your customers are ready and willing to pay attention to what you have to say will increase your chance of captivating them, guiding them through the customer journey, and motivating them to choose you when the moment arrives to make a final decision. Better yet, you should be prepared to make a good impression when your target audience comes looking for you.

Reaching your customers at the most appropriate time can be immensely challenging, especially for those of us dealing with various customer segments in different geographical locations. To help you determine a recipe that works for your customers, we’ve compiled these strategies so you can ensure that you always strike while the iron is hot with your marketing efforts.

Ensure Your Messages Get Read by Optimizing Your Sending

Timing is extremely important when it comes to ensuring the success of your email marketing efforts. You can craft the perfect subject line, message, and CTA, but if your email is sent at the wrong time, it can easily get lost in the clutter. Thankfully, there exist methods to determine the optimal sending time for your audience.

Segmenting your audience based on geographic location is a good place to start when it comes to determining the optimal sending time. This practice will help you ensure you are reaching out during working hours when your contact is most likely to be online and taking care of business.

Testing and analyzing your email send times can help you gain a better sense of when your target audience is more likely to engage with your messages. You can do this by sending similar messages to the same audience at different times, and then reviewing your results to see which send times resulted in higher open rates.

Better yet, Act-On’s marketing automation platform features Adaptive Sending, allowing you to adapt to the preferred email viewing time for each contact on your list. This advanced technology predicts the best time to send your email to each audience member based on their previous history and makes sure your message land in your recipients’ inbox at the optimal time for improved engagement.

Contact Customers on the Go with SMS Marketing

Most marketers know that keeping their marketing efforts mobile-friendly is a best practice to attract and engage their target audiences. While most of us apply this rule to email and websites, we often forget that SMS marketing is also an option.

What makes SMS marketing effective is that it ups the chances of your messages getting seen and read. While your contacts may ignore their email for days, turn off their social media notifications, or forgo opening web browsers on their phone, chances are they are constantly keeping up with their text notifications while they are on the go. This provides the perfect opportunity for you to place your offerings on their radar and get noticed.

As with all your marketing efforts, not all are created equal. If you really want to get noticed and encourage engagement from your audience, try making your messages more personal. For example, Banana Republic is extremely successful with their SMS marketing efforts by appealing to their audience by using casual terms like “friends” and “yours” and promoting local events (1). These tactics resonate with their audience members and motivate them to engage.

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Deliver Web Content Appropriate to Their Current Stage in The Customer Journey

Websites continue to be at the center of the customer journey, and it’s where your customers are most likely to go when they want to find out what you’re all about and how you can help them. Enabling them to see value in what you have to offer requires that you provide them with a personalized experience that resonates with what they want and where they are in the sales cycle. The best way for marketers to do that is to match their customers with relevant content that answers their current questions and keeps them wanting more, moving them along from one phase of the buyer journey to the next.

While in the past website personalization seemed out of reach for most marketers, it is now achievable for any business or organization thanks to today’s advanced technology. Act-On’s Adaptive Web solution makes it easy for any marketer to leverage machine learning to deliver web content relevant to their customers’ interests and current stage in the sales cycle.

Take Advantage of Micro-Moments by Creating Content That Answers Your Audience’s Most Pressing Questions

The concept of micro-moments has been trending the past few years as more and more consumers are turning to their phones looking for immediate answers and solutions to whatever is occupying their mind at the current moment. These moments when your audience members are looking for answers provide the perfect window of opportunity for you to appear in their search engine results, offer answers to their questions, and stand apart from your competitors.

Landing pages are a great tool to use to provide curated content that addresses your customers’ pain points and introduces them to your brand. Gating at least one piece of content behind an adaptive form on your landing page allows you to collect your target customer’s contact information so you can continue to engage and nurture them in the future. If you’re wondering what question or topic your landing pages should address, try looking at top keyword searches in your Google Analytics reports to gain a sense of what your customers are looking for.

An Omnichannel Approach Is Essential

If you want to reach your customers at the best time, you can’t rely on a single marketing tactic and expect engagement. Engaging your contacts wherever they are and a time that works for them requires you to cast a wide net by adopting an omnichannel approach. Providing your customers with a personalized experience through every possible channel will make you recognizable and increase your chances of capturing their attention and the conversions you crave.

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Optimizing Your Website to Personalize the Customer Journey

Act-On — Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Although websites have been at the center of the customer journey for years, most businesses continue to struggle to leverage this essential tool to deliver a fully personalized customer experience. This presents a challenge for both customers and marketers alike, preventing each from accomplishing their goals and witnessing the type of results they strive to achieve.

For customers, lack of website personalization serves as another roadblock keeping them from finding a solution to their pain points. When the content they need to make a decision is hidden and difficult to find, they have no other choice but to fend for themselves to try to find the answers they need –– which is the last thing they want to do when they’re already unsure of what they are searching for in the first place. To make matters worse, this sense of frustration often leads customers to choose the solution that’s readily available, even if it’s not necessarily the right option (or the best).

While practices such as segmentation open the door for marketers to deliver personalized content through tactics like email and landing pages, the complexity and static nature of a website makes it nearly impossible for marketers to utilize this tool in the same way. This obstacle prevents marketers from fully benefiting from one of their most powerful marketing tools and, as a result, prevents them from engaging, educating, and converting new customers.

However, this challenge usually doesn’t stem from marketers’ lack of awareness or desire to transform their websites into robust demand generation and selling tools. Instead, this problem is typically the result of limited knowledge and tools to accomplish this goal.

Thankfully, the right resources and strategy make it possible for marketers to transform their website to serve as a key component of a personalized marketing journey. So, if website personalization is a goal for your organization, keep reading to learn what key components you need to get you on the right path toward delivering a tailored experience that engages, nurtures, and converts prospective customers.

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Personalize the Web Experience Through Data Collection

While customer personas can provide a great foundation for helping us understand our customers’ preferences, they only begin to offer us a glimpse into the ideal customer journey. In today’s world, tools such as Google Analytics provide a more in-depth view at the behavior of our customers, enabling us to track how they interact with our website and which elements of it capture their attention.

When it comes to website personalization, these insights are invaluable because they provide us a roadmap of how we can leverage this tool to attract, engage, and convert our audience. Further, the more you drill down and look at data such as age, location, occupation, the more you deepen your understanding of what truly speaks to each individual customer based on their overall characteristics.

Making data collection a priority will ensure you have the information you need to optimize your website to match the buyer journey your customers expect.

Deliver Targeted, Personalized Content to Increase Engagement

Content is king, especially in the world of B2B marketing, which is why it’s an important piece of creating a unique and tailored website experience. Your website should serve as a tool to deliver content that addresses your customers’ greatest concerns and speaks to how you are the most equipped to solve them.

Knowing what type of content to deliver stems back to using data collection to get to know your customers. Analyzing your data for patterns in areas such as keyword searches and page views can give you a better idea of what content to feature on your website and where. Furthermore, this information can provide insight that will empower you to speak the same language as your consumers, so you can create content that accurately reflects their pain points and interests and motivates engagement.

Connect the Dots With an Omnichannel Approach

Even if your website is fully optimized to match the needs and interests of your consumer, you can’t expect every visitor to immediately convert. Instead, you have to look at your website as one of many connected pieces in the customer journey.

Your website is not only intended as a tool to help you deliver targeted content that nurtures your customers and informs them about what you do; it should also be designed to help you collect valuable insights that will inform other marketing efforts such as email, PPC and events. Therefore, it’s good practice to use customer behavior insights to inform the rest of your marketing strategy and ensure that your audience is receiving that same type of cohesive tailored customer experience wherever they go.

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Segment Your Data to Target the Right Prospects

Act-On — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There’s no denying that delivering a personalized marketing experience is essential in today’s business environment. When it comes to your email marketing efforts, statistics show that companies that ensure their messages are targeted see 18% more revenue than those that don’t (1). And who doesn’t want that?

While most marketers are aware of the benefits that come from delivering a unique and tailored customer experience, they’re often lacking the resources to make this a reality. They’re also often dealing with various customer personas, so adjusting their efforts accordingly is easier said than done. This becomes even more difficult when you consider that most of us have to manually manage the tasks required to provide a personalized marketing experience.

Thankfully, in today’s marketing world, there exists a tool or method for almost every marketing challenge. In the case of personalization, audience segmentation and marketing automation are every marketer’s best friend.

Marketing automation enables you to design, launch, and track your marketing efforts. When you add segmentation to the mix, you improve your ability to personalize your marketing and drive engagement and conversions. In this blog post, we will walk you through some of the ways you can leverage both to amp up your email marketing efforts and maximize results.

Improve Your Ability to Appeal to Your Audience’s Specific Pain Points

Unless you’re a one-trick pony, chances are that your product or service is designed to solve for a variety of customer pain points. How each of these rank in the eyes of your consumer, however, will vary based on their priorities, business goals, industry, and everyday activities.

The power of segmentation is that it allows you to get very targeted and specific with your email content. One way that you can leverage segmentation to make your marketing even more personal is by segmenting customers based on their industry and tailoring your email messages and campaigns to speak that language. This segmentation tactic allows you to show leads and customers that you know exactly what pains them and that you have what it takes to help them thrive and exceed their business goals.

Segmenting your audience based on interest and pain points enhances your marketing because it allows you to tailor your messages to highlight the business differentiators that matter most to your customer. This degree of personalization will make your emails stand out in the eyes of your recipients, encourage them to engage with your brand, and help you differentiate yourself from your competitors at every stage of the customer journey.

Deliver Content Relevant to Your Specific Stage in the Buyer Journey

Content marketing is so powerful that it can contribute 3x as much ROI as traditional outbound marketing at only a fraction of the cost (2). While content marketing can yield amazing results on its own, combining it with segmentation and email empowers you to play on a completely different level than your competitors.

The reason segmentation is so important when it comes to email content distribution is the latter can only help you get results if it appeals and provides value to your customers in the first place. It needs to highlight their interests but also be appropriate to their stage in the customer journey. Providing bottom-of-funnel content to top-of-funnel leads will likely overwhelm them and make them turn away. Similarly, providing top-of-funnel content to customers in the decision-making stage probably won’t help them get any closer to signing on the dotted line.

Sending customers specific content based on their needs, interests, and stage in the sales cycle improves the personalization of your marketing efforts and helps you more effectively guide customers from one phase in the customer journey to the next.

Improve Inbox Placement and Ensure Your Messages Get Read

Deliverability is a hot topic in the marketing world and should be a high priority for any marketer who wants to see a high ROI from their email marketing efforts. While engagement isn’t the only determinant of inbox placement, it does play a significant role in determining your overall email deliverability. Segmenting your audience and providing them with tailored communications can help you keep engagement rates high, spam complaints low, and drive your conversion rates through the roof.

You can read more on how segmenting your audience for engagement can help you improve inbox placement in our eBook, Deliverability 101: Our Guide to Engagement Segmentation for Improved Deliverability.

Segmentation and Marketing Automation Allow You to Attract and Engage the Best Leads

Segmenting your audience based on factors such as interests, industry, and geographic location, among others, can help you deliver a more personalized experience to your audience and engage with them on a deeper, more meaningful level. More importantly, taking this step to personalize your marketing allows you to target the best opportunities so your team can focus their efforts where they matter most.

While having to divide and group your contacts based on these characteristics and then deliver targeted messages seems like a tedious task, the right marketing automation platform can make this process seamless and effortless. Act-On equips you with the tools to segment your audience, launch campaigns, and drive the marketing and sales alignment you need to manage the customer journey from beginning to end — all in one simple platform.