The management of customer journeys is a powerful way for you to ensure that you are engaging your customers in the best ways possible.

The traditional approach to managing customer journeys relies on a number of static “journey maps,” while Optimove allows a different and more effective approach.

What is a Customer Journey?

A customer journey tells the story of a customer’s experience interacting with a company, starting with the initial contact and continuing through all subsequent interactions, via all touchpoints. A marketer’s job is to understand the various points at which customers engage with a brand, its products or services, and its marketing messages, and to ensure the most successful usage of each such opportunity.

Marketers can plan typical customer journeys and prepare the best ways to interact with customers at each stage. Unlike a traditional marketing funnel, which is linear, customer journeys can jump around from one stage to another, skipping particular stages and even going backward (for example, a customer can actually return to behaviors typical of earlier customer lifecycle stages).

The goals of defining and managing customer journeys include improving the customer experience, identifying the stages of greatest potential and greatest danger, and ensuring that every customer receives the right messages at the right time via the right channel.

The Traditional, Flowchart-based Approach

Most marketers – and the products that help them manage customer journeys – use a map-based, or flowchart-based, approach. This framework for customer journey mapping is one that enables marketers to plan and take advantage of customer journeys in order to maximize customer engagement and satisfaction. The best such flowcharts are built using data-driven research that can express the most important stages of the most common journeys and how to best engage the customer at each one.

This pre-planned flowchart approach offers two primary advantages:

Control and visibility – The marketer knows exactly what each customer will get at each point of the process flow, and in what order because the marketer designed it in advance.
Easier internal communication – Because the flowchart can be shown to other people in the organization visually, it is easy to explain the plan and communicate it with other people in the company.

However, the flowchart-based approach has some severe limitations which essentially make it unsuitable for managing the journeys of most of your customer base:

Journeys are static – Pre-planned journeys can cover common paths that customers take, but they cannot address unplanned or unusual customer behavior.
Limited flexibility – Pre-planned journeys cannot cover every scenario, inevitably leaving many customers behind, or treated too generally, or even incorrectly.
Relies heavily on the marketer’s inherent abilities – Only the most advanced marketers will be able to foresee and visualize the huge number of different journeys to adequately cover all bases.
Assumes a single journey for each customer – It is difficult to manage, modify or combine multiple journey maps, even though many customers shift behavior from one path to another during their journey.

A Potential Break in the Customer Journey

The flowchart-based approach to customer journeys certainly has its uses. For example, during the brief “incubation” period of new customers, the small amount of variability in most customers’ activities allows the marketer to address the majority of new customers with a handful of static journey maps.

However, during most of the customer lifecycle, there are literally an infinite number of different combinations of activities, behaviors, and paths that customers can take.

We are usually unable to predict every customer activity, and inadvertently end up creating broken journeys. Broken journeys are those a marketer envisioned, that end up being unsuitable for the customer, whether it’s because they became a part of multiple journeys simultaneously, or because the path the marketer planned doesn’t accommodate the path the customer wanted to take.

This short video perfectly encapsulates what a broken journey feels like for a customer:

A broken journey typically occurs in one of the following instances:

A customer becomes part of an automated journey, such as a post-purchase one, and before the journey has been completed, the customer no longer qualifies for it. However, because customers are locked into the journey, they continue to receive automated messages. This could happen if, for example, the purchase was canceled or returned.
A customer, who is part of one automated journey, becomes eligible for another customer journey and begins receiving messages from both journeys, or more.
A marketer failed to anticipate every customer behavior, and the campaigns along the customer journey no longer reflect the current wants and needs of the customer.

Creating Infinite Customer Journeys

Optimove embodies a far more comprehensive approach: instead of pre-planning the various journeys that a customer might take, this approach focuses on dynamically segmenting very similar customers into many small target groups, which you can define on any combination of “behavioral DNA” factors, including:

Lifecycle stage
Customer attributes
Specific website/app activities/behavior
Spending patterns (amount, frequency)
Product preferences/affinities
Response history to previous campaigns
Predicted customer lifetime value and propensity to churn

This approach focuses on using customer data and predictive behavior modeling to identify the most important intervention points – and the best kinds of responses and activities for each – which you can utilize to maximize customer engagement and satisfaction.

Because every customer falls into at least one target group at any point in time, every customer will receive the most relevant and appealing messages/offers at that particular point in his/her journey.

The main advantages of this approach to managing customer journeys are that it is:

Dynamic and adaptive – Because customers are treated based on the Target groups in which they are presently located, each customer’s journey continuously adapts itself to changes in behavior.
Easy to scale and evolve – By simply adding more and more Target groups – and the most effective communications for each – the number and sophistication of the customer journeys handled can increase rapidly, even exponentially, without having to re-engineer anything that was built before.
Greater customer coverage – Focusing on customer Target groups allows you to easily cover hundreds of different customer segments/events/scenarios, without being limited to imagining and planning out certain paths in advance.
Higher-volume customer marketing – Because no customer is left behind, this approach can easily blast relevant messaging to every customer, at every point in the journey. There is no need to limit treatments to particular junctions on particular pre-planned paths.

As already mentioned, there are some circumstances in which a flowchart-based customer journey is a useful approach. In these cases, a pre-planned journey can be implemented alongside – or even be enhanced by – a wide range of target group-based journey configurations.

Visualizing the Differences

No matter what customer journey maps a marketer can plan, customers will inevitably follow many different journeys of their own making.

Consider a simple, flowchart-based journey that a marketer may devise using a flowchart-based customer journey management tool:

The problem with this type of simple journey map is that many customers will not follow it exactly, rendering it somewhat (or totally) irrelevant to those customers. To make it more relevant to more customers, the marketer needs to continually add more and more nodes and branches to the map. Covering just a few more common customer journeys will quickly force even the smartest and most motivated marketer to create an exponentially more complex flowchart:

In theory, such an approach could possibly cover many of the relevant customer journeys, but in reality, this is impractical: devising, managing, and evolving such a complex tree is simply impossible. This is especially true when one considers that it would be necessary to include journeys where a customer backtracks to an earlier stage, repeats stages in a loop, and so forth.

On the other hand, the Optimove approach does not force you to consider and define “hard-coded” journeys. Instead, you need only consider – and address – the customer’s “behavioral DNA” at any point in time, without necessarily worrying about how the customer reached that point. This approach becomes even more powerful when combined with the use of predictive analytics to send offers to customers based on what it appears they are going to do/want/buy in the near future!

Let’s visualize how this works:

The left-most column in the above matrix may contain dozens or hundreds of very specific Target Groups. Examples may include:

Registered less than a week, no purchases, browsed handbags
Spent more than $500 to date, but never responded to a previous campaign
Played poker in the last week and lost, with a predicted future value greater than $200
Predicted to churn, bought two or more ski-department products in the past
Top 10% of all spenders to date, but made no purchase during last 60 days

The remaining columns are actual dates: on each date, customers in each Target Group will receive the highest-priority campaign catering to that particular Target Group (unless they are still in the “duration period” of a prior campaign and thus intentionally excluded).

In this approach, customers create their own unique journeys, and you are always ready for them, with the best messages, offers, and incentives – no matter how they arrived at the Target Group where they are today. In other words, the journey of any individual customer can be plotted as his/her inclusion in the various Target Groups over time:

This approach is infinitely more flexible, and therefore infinitely more powerful. You begin by starting with a limited number of customer Target Groups, and the messages that each will receive to encourage them to take a desired action. As time goes on, you will define more and more of these Target Group-campaign pairs to ensure that more and more customer journeys are covered. By including predictive-based Target Groups (such as “likely to churn” or “expected to purchase shoes”), you can directly impact behavior when it matters most, or create a fantastic experience by anticipating the paths that a customer will probably take!

The Optimove approach is also far easier to manage, improve and evolve over time. It is much more dynamic, delivering more relevant messages to more customers, at every point of each one’s particular customer journey.

Conclusion

While focusing on customer journeys as a means of improving customer engagement, satisfaction and long-term loyalty are gaining traction among B2C marketers and there are two very different methodologies of how to approach it.

The static, flowchart-based approach offers clearer visibility into what the marketer has planned, but it is severely limited in how many actual customer journeys it can efficiently address. The flowchart-based approach is also far more difficult to maintain, adapt and expand, although it can be useful to manage typical new-customer journeys.
Optimove’s smart orchestration engine and target group-based approach, allow you to easily and dynamically address an infinite number of different customer journeys, by focusing on customer Target groups and predicted customer behavior, instead of hard-coded, pre-conceived paths. This more sophisticated approach provides greater and more accurate customer coverage, with greater flexibility and adaptability. In fact, there is no other practical way to manage the infinite customer journeys that are, quite simply, a fact of life.