Sureshot’s 4-Step Guide to Cross Platform Journey Mapping

Sureshot’s 4-Step Guide to Cross Platform Journey Mapping

Mapping customer journeys across platforms and channels is more important than ever. According to Salesforce, the average customer uses 10 different channels to communicate with brands. What’s more, Entrepreneur found that regardless of what channels your customers choose, 90 percent expect a seamless interaction with your brand. However, ensuring the customer experience at your organization is a happy and friction-free engagement requires you to map their journey across all the platforms and channels your company uses to communicate with them.

Benefits of a Cross Platform Journey Map

A good cross platform customer journey map benefits both marketers and customers. By tracking the journey your customers take to arrive at the promised land—a purchase—you, as a marketer, are better able to see what communication touchpoints are helpful, which ones need work, and where there are gaps that need to be filled. In time, your diligent quest to track your customers’ journeys will lead to a better experience for them and for future customers. Additional benefits of mapping the customer’s journey include:

• Better understanding of customer needs – From a variety of pain points, to maintaining a competitive edge, when customers seek your company, they have a motive in doing so. Monitoring the types of touchpoints that produce the best outcomes will keep you in tune with what’s important to your customer, even as their needs and motives for buying change.
• Predict future customer behavior —As you track the wins and losses across multiple touchpoints, your data will begin to tell you a story that should enable you to better predict what customers want and need at each stage of their buying journey. Use a marketing ops dashboard to view, track and share customer data with team members and other stakeholders.
• Retain customers and revenue — It’s a shame to lose something as costly as a customer, but if you track their journeys with diligence, over time you should be able to see data patterns that reveal the types of customers you are losing and where they are getting lost in the process. Then, you can implement a strategy to prevent those losses in the future.

Step 1:  Connect the Dots on Your Cross Platform Journey Map

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to communicating with today’s customers. The average martech stack has between five and 21 different platforms, systems and tools in play. In addition, customers switch back and forth between a variety of communication channels, which typically include a combination of the following 12 channels:

Email • Phone (Audio/Video) • SMS/MMS • Chat (Bots/Live) • Social Media • Messaging Apps

Web Forms • Online Portals • Push Notifications • Direct Mail • Gifts • In-Person

To ensure the journey you create is seamless, you will need to both inventory and integrate all of the systems in your tech stack. Optimizing integrations will allow you to eliminate many of the manual steps your team has to take when platforms need to work together. It also makes it infinitely easier for you to automate the sending and receiving of personalized content from each platform to each customer on the appropriate channel.

Step 2:  Set Goals for Each Touchpoint of the Customer Journey

In our recent blog, 5 Steps to Mastering the Art of Customer Journey Mapping, we discussed the importance of identifying who your target customer is for a particular journey and what it is they want. Knowing this information will allow you to create a journey for them that is engaging, helpful and fulfilling. Ideally, you want to set goals for each stage of your customer’s experience. For example, a basic outline of progressive goals you set for customers to perform using multiple channels may look something like this:

• Touchpoint: See social ads on LinkedIn that identify your company as a solution to the customer’s pain points.
  Goal/Customer Action: Click to learn more.
• Touchpoint: Go to site landing page and download content personalized according to their pain points.
  Goal/Customer Action: Sign up for additional content and/or use chat to get answers.
• Touchpoint: Receive Push Notification Thank-You and begin three-piece nurture campaign on customer’s preferred channel.
  Goal/Customer Action: Learn more about your solution and feel more familiar with your brand.
• Touchpoint: Receive SMS with invitation to a live or pre-recorded webinar.
  Goal/Customer Action: Participate in webinar.
• Touchpoint: Receive personalized follow-up email from sales team member with invitation for a free demo.
  Goal/Customer Action: Sign up for demo.
• Touchpoint: Receive direct mail thank-you note for doing the demo.
  Goal/Customer Action: Customer feels recognized and appreciated.
• Touchpoint: Receive call from sales team member to close the deal.
  Goal/Customer Action: Purchase product or service.

Step 3:  Create a Personalized Cross-Channel Journey for Your Customers

Now that you have identified the platforms, channels, customers, and touchpoint goals that are essential to your customer journey, you are ready to coordinate your first of countless compelling customer journeys. Before you become overwhelmed by the thought of juggling multiple channels and platforms without dropping the ball, take a deep breath and say, “Thank God for Journey Orchestration tools!” A customer journey platform simplifies the complexities of a personalized multi-channel customer experience by enabling you to automate the process of sending targeted communications across multiple channels and platforms in real-time. In addition to making personalized account-based marketing scalable, a good customer journey tool will enable you to:

• Trigger the launch of synchronized marketing campaigns
• Automate complex lead management workflows
• Connect to popular sales tools like SalesLoft, Outreach, etc.
• Monitor the performance of customer journeys and adjust them on-demand

Step 4:  Embark on Your Customer’s Journey and Identify and Address Potential Issues

While it’s good to maintain a practice of surveying customers to see how their buying experience measured up to their expectations, it’s even better to make a habit of regularly taking the journey yourself. Experience is the best teacher, so if you really want to know what it feels like to be one of your customers, then you need to walk a mile of your customer journey in their shoes. When you do this, try to do it incognito, if possible, so you get the real experience. Write down any issues you encounter, frustrations you have, and opportunities to reduce steps toward taking an action.

If you are too enmeshed to be objective, invite someone from another department to take the journey and observe them as they do. Take note of any long pauses they have or any suggestions they give you. Ask them to be honest about any frustrations they experience or let-downs regarding what they thought a button or action was going to do and what it actually did. Customer journeys are like gardens in that they should provide an inviting path with lots to see and experience on the way to the ultimate destination. Keeping this analogy in mind, it’s easy to see how they also need constant monitoring and care in order to ensure everyone has the best possible experience of your brand.