At the end of the day, customers aren’t looking for the best, brightest, or biggest businesses to work with. They just want to have a great experience with successful results. That’s why it’s critical to understand your customer journey from start to finish and to have proper messaging to match each stage of the process.
Here’s what you need to know about understanding your customer journey, refining your sales funnel, and nailing your message.
Getting to know your customer journey
A typical customer journey looks like this:
Awareness -> Consideration -> Decision -> Client (convert) -> Raving fan
As a quick primer, someone has to become aware of your brand before they’ll consider using your product or service. Then, they have to make a conscious decision to move forward with you. From there, they become your client, and it’s your job to wow them with an incredible experience. Finally, they become a raving fan once they have great experiences with you.
Of course, lots of small events take place within each stage to help leads move smoothly through this funnel. In order for a person to successfully move through each part, your messaging has to be spot-on (more on that later)!
The benefits to nailing down your customer journey include:
- Clean, easy-to-replicate systems that can help you attract new clients
- Better business growth and retention
- Increased cash flow
- Authority in your industry and a larger circle of influence
- High rates of customer satisfaction
To achieve these benefits – and to move on to the next step of mapping your sales funnel – it’s essential to know your customer journey from start to finish.
Mastering your sales funnel
Digital tools make it easy for you to understand your sales funnel once a customer is in your system. You can gain valuable insights from analysing email click-throughs, website usage behavior, and other digital clues that show how your customers make choices.
Once you understand your customer journey, you can see how people move from one stage to the next through their digital behaviors. Carefully checking and tracking metrics refines this process and helps you eliminate tactics that aren’t working.
You should also separate leads into active and inactive categories. Active leads engage with your emails, visit your website, and interact with your content, while inactive leads are receiving emails and remain subscribed, but aren’t opening your messages. Create separate campaigns for these two categories since the goals are different. Active leads need to move to the next stage in the funnel of making a decision. Inactive leads, on the other hand, are still in the consideration stage.
Refine your message process
Now that you understand your customer journey and have your sales funnel in place, it’s time to nail down your messaging.
This is critical because you don’t want to waste time with ineffective messages or drive away good leads with too much (or too little) contact. All of your content, from emails to blogs and social media posts, needs to be on-point for customers to move through your sales funnel.
Here’s what you need to do to refine your messaging:
Record and analyse your metrics:
Data is the lifeblood of your business. In order to understand how your customers think, you need to track key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs vary depending on your business model and sales funnel, but some examples include website traffic, number of qualified leads, and conversion rate of specific calls to action (CTAs).
Create an ideal client avatar:
A client avatar is another term for your ideal customer. The avatar represents the type of person who converts into a customer. At first, you’ll have to make some educated guesses about who this person is. But with enough data, you can build a profile that includes all kinds of characteristics, like age, gender, income level, spending habits, and more. It’s critical to create and refine this avatar over time as you learn more about your customer.
Test out different messages:
You won’t know what works for your brand until you’ve experimented with various messages. Some of the content you put out will resonate with your client’s avatar, while other pieces won’t. Tracking metrics helps you figure out what messages are working and which ones can be abandoned or re-imagined.
Understand the big picture:
Refining your messaging is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes many “touches” or individual contacts, to move leads through your sales funnel. Hence the reason for consistent social media posting, blogging, and other marketing efforts – with so many businesses competing for people’s attention, you have to stay in touch to stand out. Give your campaigns time to yield results and only make changes after you’ve assessed the outcomes.
Need more productivity and business tips? REAVA Solutions can help
If you need help with your customer journey, sales funnel, or messaging, get in touch with Ee Zen today for a one-on-one consultation.
