The Leak Proof Guide to the Email Customer Journey
It's become harder than ever to avoid that short and dreaded trip from "unread" to "deleted." The fierce fight for customer attention has kept inboxes overflowing with marketing emails, and the email customer journey can end abruptly if you don't bring your smartest tactics and best content.
Despite the challenges, 87% of brands believe that email marketing is critical to their business success. The same report finds that dynamic, personalized content is the most effective way to improve the performance of email campaigns.
Video has been the king of content ever since the advent of high-speed internet, and the popularity of platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Netflix evidences its continued dominance. The logical next step for marketers is to bring this preferred content medium into first-party channels like email, and this guide will help you map out the email customer journey to create campaigns that leverage your content to its best advantage.
What is an email customer journey?
The email customer journey refers to the customer's progress from their first encounter with your brand to their completion of a purchase, as tracked through your email interactions. Understanding the email customer journey is the first step to:
- Mapping out the journey.
- Identifying customers' changing needs and pain points at different stages in the journey.
- Using this knowledge to keep customers engaged and speak to their most pressing concerns.
Creating a map of the email customer journey is vital for any business using email to communicate with customers. It can pinpoint the obstacles that prevent customers from moving closer to a final purchasing decision and help you create targeted, purposeful email marketing content that positively addresses the issues that cause customers to churn and drop out of your sales funnel.
Why the Email Customer Journey is an Effective Strategy
Email marketing is still the number one way to drive sales, beating out newer channels like social media, text messages, and banner ads. Tracking the email customer journey ensures that you aren't neglecting the potential of this powerful outreach method and that you're identifying the areas where your campaigns could work harder to engage with customers and convince them to take the next step.
Email marketing's superpower is that it's the perfect delivery vehicle for personalized content, a highly effective way to connect with customers and build loyalty. While email itself may not be a new technology, you can leverage state-of-the-art features like generative AI, marketing automation, and interactive video to build stronger connections with customers and enhance the effectiveness of campaigns.
How to Measure the Success of Your Email Customer Journey
These three marketing metrics can give you the most straightforward indication of whether or not your email campaign is succeeding. Depending on your campaign objectives, other KPIs may also be relevant.
Open Rate
The percentage of recipients who opened your email. A high rate is a good indicator that you're writing intriguing subject lines and targeting the right audience.
Click-Through Rate
How many customers clicked on the link in your email directing them to your landing page, main website, event sign-up, or other destination. This metric tells you if the body of the email is holding their attention and delivering a clear call to action
Conversion Rate
How many customers completed the desired action, such as making a purchase, as a result of the email. Conversion rate is the ultimate measure of the campaign's success.
5 Email Customer Journey Stages You Should Know
The average customer journey has many touchpoints, but they will mostly fall within these five progressive stages. Understanding what customers want in order to feel comfortable moving from one stage to the next is critical to executing a successful email marketing strategy.
1. Awareness
At this stage, you're making an impression on customers encountering your brand for the first time. This point is when you want to present a strong brand image and deliver the key messages of your current marketing campaign.
Awareness comes before the customer has provided you with an email address, but you can still include it in your strategic plans for the email customer journey. Use social media to promote your email coupons, newsletters, tutorials, and other benefits of signing up for your mailing list.
2. Interest
Once a customer signs up to receive emails from you, you've acquired a lead. Your priority at this point is to create a positive first interaction and effective onboarding through valuable initial content. It's a lot of pressure, but this is an important stage to get right.
Your landing pages and email sign-up forms should be reviewed and optimized for this stage, and the first “welcome” emails that the customer receives should be carefully crafted to explain how they can benefit by continuing to read and engage with your email communications.
3. Consideration
Consideration can be a lengthy stage where the customer weighs the pros and cons of purchasing with you. They might:
- Browse your website or online store.
- Engage in product research.
- Watch videos.
- Submit questions.
- Create and abandon shopping carts.
Messaging at this stage should convince the customer that you're the right company with the best products for their needs.
The consideration stage is a good time to start including customer testimonials, education materials, and other persuasive content in your emails to answer some of the tougher questions users might have about your products. Also, consider sending automated reminders or coupons to customers who abandon their carts.
4. Post-Purchase
When a customer finally makes a purchase, the primary goal of your marketing efforts has been achieved—but the email customer journey doesn't end here. The best email strategy can ensure that customers remain happy with their purchase, confident in your brand, and ready to purchase again or recommend you to their friends.
Maintain high customer satisfaction rates by effectively using order confirmations, shipping notifications, personalized thank-you notes, and user resources. At this stage, you also have the opportunity to promote similar or related products that the customer might like.
5. Retention
Once the immediate post-purchase stage is over, the focus shifts to customer marketing that keeps your brand on their mind, builds loyalty, and encourages re-engagement. Birthdays, purchase anniversaries, new product launches, and other significant events can be good opportunities to reconnect.
You can support retention by sending special offers and invitations to join reward or referral programs. It's also effective to ask customers for feedback and engage in real conversations with them about what they like and don't like about your products.
You can distribute customer comms in the form of video content via email, which is made possible through lightweight platforms like Blings. For example, Blings uses a super lightweight file size, so loading and sharing short videos via email is a breeze.
Hyper-Personalization: The Driving Force Behind the Email Customer Journey
Email marketing remains one of the most effective digital communication channels. It offers your business opportunities to speak directly to customers at pivotal moments in their buyer journey. With the right strategy and content, email can drive customers further down your sales funnel or help them circle back for a repeat purchase.
However, email marketing needs to work harder than basic, generalized, and text-based communications if you want to see real conversion results. After all, it’s harder than ever to encourage users to read emails.
With the Blings innovative MP5 video technology, enterprises can tailor their video content to each user and create interactive and personalized experiences through simple email communication. The MP5 is ultra-lightweight leading to instant loading times, infinite scalability, and distribution across any channel, including email. The patented MP5 video format is created on the end user’s device in real time, meaning a single video template essentially results in unlimited video variations, based on specific user data.
Adding interactive elements like buttons, forms, and quizzes, can help capture customers’ attention and encourage them to take real action—so users engage beyond simply reading the email. Edit, measure, and improve any part of the video through the Blings platform, without involving your creative teams.
Find out how Blings can help you create hyper-personalized, conversion-driving email campaigns by scheduling a free demo today.
