MarketingSherpa Blog

Here is the great struggle in all human relationships.

Me with my wife. Your brand with your customer. Even me with you, dear reader.

I am not you.

I am not my wife. You are not your customer.

However, we tend to think other people are like us. This is known as false consensus effect. Overcoming this cognitive bias – and striving to break down this barrier – is key to successful human relationships.

And thus, it is key to successful marketing. The better you understand how to truly serve your customers, the more successful your marketing will be.

Here’s one way to break down the barriers between your marketing team and your customers.

This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

A purchase is a journey

“Why do you insist on visualizing the conversion journey?” This question came from an attendee of a group coaching session with Flint McGlaughlin about conducting a data pattern analysis.

Visualizing the conversion journey is one way to break down that artificial barrier between you and the customer.

If marketers work on a landing page, direct mail piece or print ad in isolation, they overlook the real way potential customers make decisions in the real world.

Other than an impulse purchase, there is usually a step before. Or after. Or both. Or several steps. These other elements of the customer journey affect the overall success rate of whatever piece of marketing collateral your team is currently working on.

Here’s a simple example. MVMT used to send emails that linked to a general collection of its watches. When the team changed its strategy to use the emails to drive potential customers to specific landing pages that tied tightly to the campaign in the emails, they increased conversion 44% (see more in How the World’s Fastest-growing Watch Brand Used Email to Grow Revenue 98%).

To get you thinking of ways to visualize your customers’ conversion journey for your marketing team, here are a few tips.

Don’t view data in isolation

In the free Simplified MECLABS Institute Data Pattern Analysis Tool, there is a place to add in the metrics for a funnel analysis. Of course. (MECLABS is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa)

However, just seeing webpage paths and conversion numbers is not the best way to try to get into the customer’s shoes. The customer does not experience the conversion journey like this.

So there is also a place in the tool to add in the actual screenshots of the funnel.

When using the tool, having the actual customer experience close at hand is a good reminder that conversion optimization is more than a numbers game. There are real people on the other sides of those numbers.

What does the world look like to them? The more you use data as a means to an end – to get closer to the human experience – the more you can leverage empathy in your marketing and increase conversion.

Immerse yourself in the customer experience

Many decisions that impact the customer are made in a meeting in a boardroom. The walls in that meeting room might be filled with generic art or company mission statements.

As a temporary way to bring the customer journey into that meeting – and set the right environment for your team to make customer-first decisions – print out each step of the customer journey and hang it on the walls of the meeting room as an oversize poster.

That’s what we do in a MECLABS Quick Win Intensive. Here’s an example:

We’ll even use markers or Post-It notes to write the metrics right on each step of the conversion journey, or mark each step with potential conversion optimization changes.

This approach makes sure the changes aren’t made in isolation, and the entire customer journey is front and center. Should you change a certain headline or call to action? Well, when you see what customers are experiencing in the previous or next steps, you get a better sense if the entire journey is smooth and seamless.

Here’s an example of a more permanent way to visualize the conversion journey. In the MECLABS building, we had a Customer Experience Lab. There were a series of screens where you could pull up each step of the customer journey, in addition to magnetic boards if you wanted to include any print collateral and write on it. So as potential ideas are debated, the entire customer conversion journey is laid out clearly for everyone to see.

Of course, times have changed. Many people reading this article right now are not in offices or physical meeting rooms yet.

You can do a virtual version of the conversion journey over Zoom. Or print out the steps and hang them up in your home office. The core goal is the same whether you’re working in-person or remote – making sure you and your team can’t overlook the customer journey when making key decisions.

Map out the big picture

Visualizing the conversion journey isn’t just about seeing what the customer sees, you should also try to think what the customer thinks. For example, you could create a customer journey map clearly showing the questions potential customers have as they consider your product and map the marketing and sales material and interactions you are using to address these questions.

Or you can approach the customer journey from the opposite direction. Instead of focusing on the questions potential customers have about your product, identify the key conclusions they need to reach to keep traveling along the journey with your company that ultimately leads to a product purchase by creating a prospect conclusion funnel.

As you can see, there’s more than one way to visualize the customer conversion journey. The exact way you go about is less important than the intent behind it – better understanding your customer to better serve the customer and improve results.

You can follow Daniel Burstein, Senior Director, Content & Marketing, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute, on Twitter @DanielBurstein.

You might also like…

Data Pattern Analysis: Learn from a coaching session with Flint McGlaughlin

How SAP Mapped Buyer Journeys for 19 Industries to Build More than $23 Million of Marketing-generated Pipeline

Marketing 101: What is funnel creation?

Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

Most purchases are not an instant decision on the part of the customer. There are several mental steps people must take before making the actual purchase decision.

For a more complex purchase, these steps usually involve learning more about the industry, product and company, until they get to the point of making a purchase. For a simpler purchase, the steps may simply be getting through the product’s purchase path.

And each step on that journey is a decision.

For example, a complex purchase funnel might include steps like this: searching a pain point in a search engine, getting to a content piece on a website, clicking to a landing page for a white paper download, receiving several pieces of email in a lead nurturing campaign, deciding to speak to a sales rep to learn more about the product, going through several stages of a sales process with a sales rep, and then ultimately making a purchase. This may happen over several months.

A simpler purchase might look like this: clicking on a paid search ad, arriving on a landing page, moving to a product page, going to a shopping cart, entering payment info, confirming a purchase. This might happen in a matter of minutes.

Funneling customers to an ultimate conversion objective

A funnel is so named because marketing literature typically depicts this journey in the shape of a funnel.

This is an example of a kitchen funnel.

And this is an example of a marketing funnel.

(from the case study B2B Marketing: Demand generation transformation doubles conversion rate for cyber security provider)

The general idea for the funnel shape is that there are more people at the beginning of the funnel then at the end. For example, more people will visit a landing page from an ad than will purchase your product.

The other idea for the funnel shape is that, much like a funnel channels liquid into a small opening, marketers should channel their potential customers from their first touchpoint to an ultimate conversion.

However, with a physical funnel, liquid naturally flows down into the container pulled by gravity. MECLABS Institute (parent research organization of MarketingSherpa) teaches that this is a flaw in the traditional marketing analogy. Customers don’t simply fall through your funnel naturally pulled by gravity.

Read more…

Last November, we published a how-to article in the MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter titled, “CRM How-to: Tactics on Marketing/IT alignment, database strategy and integrating social media data.” As you might guess from the title, the article covered a range of customer relationship marketing concepts. To get the insights presented in the piece, I spoke with six industry experts.

With all of this great information at hand, I faced a common “problem” that crops up when researching multi-source MarketingSherpa articles – after writing a thorough how-to article, I still had a huge amount of great material that just didn’t make it into the piece. The solution? Offer those insights in a couple of additional blog posts.

Here on the MarketingSherpa Blog, we published, “Defining CRM: Thoughts from three experts,” a deeper look into how different industry experts actually define the term “customer relationship management” (and a fascinating group of opinions that might change the way you think of CRM), and another on the B2B Lead Blog, “Sales and Marketing: The technology behind CRM.”

Today, I’d like to offer more insights into CRM, and also add another industry expert to the entire mix, Lou Guercia, President and CEO, Scribe Software, a data integration and migration software company.

4 doors into the company

One key distinction covered in the post on defining customer relationship management was between CRM as simply a technology piece of software that might be as narrowly defined as the software utilized by Sales, or CRM technology embracing marketing automation and email technology as well, compared against CRM as a holistic customer lifetime experience that takes into account marketing activity, sales actions and customer service.

Even though he is coming from a very data-centric perspective, Lou said he sees CRM from the customer lifetime perspective.

He explained the four touch points, or “doors,” for customers interacting with your company:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Support (customer service)
• Finance

“What can we do to do support customers better?” Lou asked. “Think through what would be the data requirements and the workflows that would allow our business to service those customers through those four doors to the company in a way that would make those customers happy and more likely to continue to use our product or service.”

In the list of “doors,” I found it very interesting Lou added finance. Customer service is often mentioned in the holistic view of CRM, but from a customer touch point perspective, and maybe even more importantly from customer data perspective, how that person interacts with the finance department is a very important piece of the customer lifecycle.

The largest section of the original how-to article we published was on the database, and whether companies should keep separate databases for Marketing and Sales.

The opinion was mixed, with one expert, Brian Vellmure, Founder, Initium LLC/Innovantage International, splitting the difference suggesting one, or two, databases should be determined on a case-by-case basis, even though he did suggest there needed to be some way to merge all data for the ability to perform end-to-end data analysis.

Lou said a CRM implementation strategy should include integrating the Marketing and Sales databases if those are not already in sync, but the next stage would be to integrate the accounting and financial data into that overarching database as well.

With this total insight into the individual customer, if a database record changes for any reason at any point in the customer lifecycle – as a database prospect, after the handoff to Sales as a qualified lead, or at the account level post-conversion to a customer – the database everyone is using contains the correct information.

This means Marketing and Sales continuing efforts in up-selling, cross-selling and ongoing brand awareness understand, and can react to, changes in that customer’s status – maybe their phone number, job title or possibly even company changed over time.

The cloud and big data

As a marketer you might be thinking, “Oh man, first I have to get aligned with Sales and get all of us playing in the same data sandbox, and now I have to think about adding Finance to the mix?”

Lou suggested any CRM implementation strategy should be handled incrementally, and there’s no need to “boil the ocean” and try to do everything at once. At the same time, there needs to be an overall plan for the implementation.

He said, “If you think it through from a process level:

• What are we trying to do?
• What can we improve on?
• What feedback have we heard from these customers?
• How can improve the way we work with those customers and prospects?
• What are the data elements that we are going to need to do that and then have an actionable, prioritized plan?”

The implementation should be based on an overarching plan, and he said to avoid being so tactical that urgent problems get fixed without a framework in place for the entire process.

From a data perspective, one relatively new technological solution is out there.

“One factor that is impacting the market for adopting this kind of strategy is the rampant growth of cloud services,” Lou said.

He added the cloud provides the ability to link data from sources ranging from sales and marketing automation technology, call center systems and even accounting and finance.

Lou said one school of thought regarding another hot term right now – big data – is the idea of “give me every bleeping piece of data under the sun, and I will have smart algorithms that will figure out where to get some patterns.”

“I think that’s great for IBM,” he explained. “What I am about is relevant data sets. What are the types of data that you would want that can be reasonably well parsed through and used by organizations.”

He added big data is about finding patterns in unstructured data that will be helpful to the business, and marketers probably know what data they want for better access into customer insights. The challenge is managing big data in a coordinated way.

“Maybe I am not about ‘big data’ in the classic sense, but more [about] relevant use of bigger data, not vast data,” Lou explained.

Brian Vellmure, the advocate of allowing corporate culture to determine the database strategy, provided another perspective on actually handling big data for marketers:

Big data will allow us to obviously understand our customers better.

If we can understand who they are, who they are interacting with, where they go, what they are interested in beyond our products and service offering, and what their normal day in a life is, then obviously, we have a potential to bring them the right message at the right time.

It is not intrusive. It is not annoying, and it also allows us to find patterns that we didn’t even know to look for before.

Read more…