8 Essential Steps Every Email Marketing Customer Journey Must Have | Blings.io
Yam Regev | Dec 22, 2024
Yam Regev | Dec 22, 2024
All our best friends and favorite colleagues were once strangers to us. Thanks to the circumstances that helped us get to know them, our lives are probably a lot better with them in it. Often, the way we meet our friends is part of what bonds us together—shared adventures have a way of building lasting relationships.
It’s the same for the brands we rely on. One day, a brand successfully catches our attention, and that starts us on a journey that turns us into loyal customers. Since the earliest days of eCommerce, email has been one of the most effective ways to invite customers on a journey and keep them on the path that leads to your brand. It’s still the preferred method of contact for 60% of consumers.
An email marketing strategy built around the customer journey concept will help you connect with specific audience segments, learn your customers’ behaviors and preferences, and understand the issues that may be blocking them from making a purchase. Following the eight steps outlined below, you can chart an email marketing customer journey that will grow your brand’s devoted following.
What Is The Email Marketing Customer Journey?
The “customer journey” refers to all of a customer’s interactions with a brand, from their initial awareness to their first purchase— and everything in between and afterward. Email marketing is one way a brand can plan and shape these interactions.
The goal of the email marketing customer journey is to nurture the customer relationship through email interactions that engage them optimally for each step in the purchasing process. By addressing customers’ questions at that particular moment, you can guide them to the next stage of the journey.
In practice, an email marketing customer journey might start with a promotional email that sparks interest. Some examples of emails you might send later in the journey would be:
Promotional offers when you see customers browsing certain product categories.
Answers to questions they post on social media.
Requests to leave a good review after they’ve completed a purchase.
Components You Need for an Awesome Email Marketing Customer Journey
The magic ingredients for a successful email marketing campaign will vary depending on the product category, target audience, and other factors. Still, four things need to be present in every email marketing customer journey:
Reliable data: If you don’t know who your customers are or what their behavior signifies, your emails might be mistimed and irrelevant, targeting either the wrong demographic segments or the wrong stage of the customer journey. Make sure you have a robust CRM and other tools to accurately collect and analyze your customer data.
A creative copywriting team:Your audience will tune out of dull writing that lacks any human creative spark. If you want readers to pay attention and get the message, find some good writers who can bring the best qualities of your brand to life through engaging digital prose.
A marketing automation solution: No matter how big your company is, your team doesn’t have enough hands or caffeine to manually run a large-scale email campaign. You can set up an automation platform to send emails triggered by specific customer actions, ensuring you never miss the right moment to connect.
A video software solution: Video makes emails more compelling, boosting click-through rates by as much as 65%. With a video software solution that enables real-time personalization, you can tailor the video content to each individual user at scale.
8 Essential Stages for Every Email Marketing Customer Journey
1. Researching Buyer Personas
Before taking your customers on a journey, you have to know who they are. Gather and analyze customer data, including demographics, user behavior, and purchase history. You can use this information to build personas of your main customer types and plan different journeys based on the needs and preferences of each. After all, segmented email campaigns have a 49% higher click-through rate than unsegmented ones.
Each buyer persona may have different purchasing patterns, so you’ll need to map out and identify the critical interactions that will give you the best chance of nudging them onto the next stage of the journey. Just like that, you’ve created touchpoints that will form the outline of your journey map.
An essential step is required before the email marketing customer journey can begin in earnest: you have to get the customer’s email address. Before that can happen, the customer needs to know your brand exists. So, the next thing to do is create brand awareness with paid ads, social media posts, and other wide-reaching lead generation, social listening, and marketing strategies.
If you promote content that’s relevant and engaging to your target demographics and the buyer personas you’ve built, you should be able to generate enough interest to motivate some of your audience to sign up for email updates or promotions—the best way to launch any email customer journey.
3. Generating Leads
Once you’ve secured an all-important email address, the interested prospect is officially a lead. Your first email will set the tone and expectations for the rest of the journey, so make sure it’s a really good one!
One of the most effective ways to make an opening email attention-grabbing and engaging is to include video, personalization, and interactive elements. Back in 2008, Forrester wrote a Trends Report called “How Video Will Take Over The World,” hypothesizing that a one-minute video is worth 1.8 million words. Fast-forward over 16 years, and the power of video still reigns supreme, increasing engagement rates by up to 2.5X in contrast to static, text-based content.
4. Answering Consideration Questions
When customers consider a purchase and decide between different options, they have questions. They won’t always ask you these questions directly—sometimes, you have to infer them from the patterns of their user behavior as they interact with your website and social media. Tackling the consideration phase is all part of broader sales enablement challenges. Address these questions as soon as they arise, and start including persuasive content like customer testimonials and promotional deals.
For example, cart abandonment emails are a common (and effective) tactic at this stage, especially if you can leverage your data to understand why a customer might have hesitated to make a purchase.
5. Onboarding Customers After Purchase
The customer journey doesn’t end with the first purchase. There’s always potential for a first-time customer to become a repeat buyer, so make sure the post-purchase phase of the journey is fully mapped out.
Onboarding emails can acquaint customers with the product or service they’ve just purchased, helping to create a more satisfactory initial touchpoint and assuring the user of your continued support and investment in theircustomer experience. Personalized emails with interactive multimedia content can be a great way to ensure that customers learn and retain everything they need to know at the outset.
6. Upselling and Cross-selling
When you’ve built trust and a good rapport with your customers, it’s time to approach upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Emails that promote upgrades, accessories, and related products are good avenues to pursue at this point.
Upselling and cross-selling efforts provide yet another opportunity to leverage rich customer data and analytics tools to unveil the optimal recommendations for each customer. For example, if the customer bought a coffee machine two days ago, an email showcasing new premium coffee beans will likely pique their interest.
7. Measuring Your Success
You can complete ongoing monitoring, reporting, and analysis to ensure you always know how well your email marketing campaign is performing. Key metrics include:
Open Rate: What percentage of recipients open your emails?
Click-Through Rate: What percentage of email-openers click the call-to-action links in your emails?
Conversion Rate: What percentage of link-clickers are completing the ultimate action you’re trying to elicit, such as making a purchase?
By setting benchmarks based on your campaign goals, you can easily determine whether your emails are delivering the results you want.
If your key performance indicators aren’t looking good, go back to the data, listen to what your customers are telling you, and modify your approach. You can cut your losses, pivot, and maintain a positive ROI by keeping your map and its underlying strategy adaptable. Common areas for improvement/adjustment include:
Successful email marketing hinges on delivering the right message to the right customer at the right moment. Treating your email interactions with your customers as stops in a larger journey is an effective framework for developing a data-driven strategy that drives conversions.
Today’s consumers expect personalized communications, but no matter how perfectly you tailor a plain-text email to an individual customer’s interests, it’s still a block of text they probably don’t have time to read. Generating personalized videos at scale used to be a challenge, but Blings developed an email-to-video solution that enables businesses to seamlessly distribute personalized, interactive videos via first-party channels.
Blings’ MP5 video format is lightweight and secure with enterprise-grade scalability. It is designed to load easily and ensure longer viewing times and a more engaged audience.
Book a quick meeting today to see how hyper-personalization and interactive elements can help you give customers an email marketing journey they’ll never forget.
