What do your customers experience when they interact with your brand? If you haven’t thought about your customer journey, now is the time.
In 2017, the Salesforce State of Marketing report found that if your brand doesn’t personalize each and every customer’s experience, 52% of them will switch to one of your competitors.
Your customers are having incredible customer experiences with companies like Amazon, Google and Apple, every day. Whether you like it or not, you are being held to the same standards as the major digital innovators. Your customers are more impatient with bad marketing experiences than you think.
-Justin Piehowski, VP of Marketing Consulting for Penrod
But the thought of planning and mapping a customer journey can be headache inducing, so we’re here to simplify it for you.
What is a customer journey?
Throughout a customer’s lifecycle with a brand, they interact at multiple different touch points. For instance, prior to becoming a customer, the face of your company that they see is your sales and marketing departments. Once they sign on, they may still interact some with sales and marketing, but now, depending on the services you offer, they likely interact more with your customer service team. All of those points of contact – from before they become a customer to two months, two years, two decades into their relationship with your brand – should be consistent. And they should consistently meet or exceed your customer’s expectations.
The gold standard for digital experience in my mind is the 1-click order on Amazon. If your digital experience is not as quick, useful, or delightful as the 1-click order, you need to keep trying.
-Piehowski
Technical enablement
Creating a customer journey that sets you apart from you competitors involves some upfront heavy lifting by your marketing team and ongoing tweaks to keep it consistent. It’s also going to require that your marketing team have a handle on all the customer data they can get as well as managing that data and using it to continue to improve the customer’s journey.
You’ll need to map the journey you want your customers to experience, create an ideal customer avatar, plan and test campaigns, as well as develop the creative behind each of those campaigns.
Our team has spent years working in the Marketing Cloud and have enabled the sending of billions of emails across dozens of clients. We know the Journey Builder as well as any partner in the Ecosystem.
-Piehowski
While initially it may be possible to use a variety of platforms to do all of those things, eventually you’ll need one platform that can scale with you as well as store all of your data in one location so everyone from sales to marketing to customer service can work off of one platform.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you do all of this. From setup and configuration to journey building to ongoing management, the Marketing Cloud helps you create and deliver one consistent customer journey.
Marketing Services at Penrod
Our Marketing Services team at Penrod brings both expertise in customer experience as well as expertise in technical enablement. We work with you to create a custom customer experience by helping you answer questions like “what does your company provide for your customer?”, “How can our brand help our customer?”, and “what do they need from us?” We take the answers to those questions and find solutions to make them work.
Often when a Salesforce implementation partner works with a brand to implement their Marketing Cloud, they start with the technical enablement side of the equation, determining the scope of the project, what the deliverables are, and how to set up the software.
Penrod does the opposite. We first sit down with you to discover what your customer journey looks like now, what it should look like, and who your ideal customer is. From there, we create solutions that fit your customer experience needs instead of trying to force your needs to fit a one-size-fits-all solution.
Too often, we see clients eager to jump in and build, turn on and configure before defining the experience they want their customers to have. Usually, this results in an overly architected platform and under uninspiring experiences.
-Piehowski
Justin Piehowski leads our Marketing Services team and instead of considering his team as contractors, he views their role as trusted advisors who can help you use technology and big data to deliver a one-of-a-kind customer experience. We partner with you, work to build trust, and from there, we want you to jump on our backs while we carry you to the finish line.
Ready to give your customers an experience they’ll never forget?