Email Personalization: Customer Journey Mapping Guide & Tips

More and more businesses are prioritizing customer-centered values and shifting to business models.

And for that, customer journey mapping is becoming the rising star when it comes to the target of the marketing.

However, with the right use of this tool, you can gain a better understanding of the customer, their needs, and expectation; this plays a cruel role in leveling up personalization in email marketing.

And how you can start, what to know, and everything; here is what can help.

Contents

Why Does Your Email Marketing Need To Level Up Personalization?

The use of generic email marketing can influence your customer to purchase or take action. So sending them a simple email, including best-selling products, won’t help in converting the shoppers.

You need to develop an understanding of the customer, what they need, their pain point, and their goal, and use the information to personalize the experience for them.

So you need to level up your personalization in order to get more conversation, engagement, and loyalty.

Well, here is why your email marketing requires to upgrade the personalization, includes :

Helps You In Communication To Boosting Engagement

Most email marketing neglects the needs of their customer; instead of that, they focus on making sales. This doesn’t lead to engagement rates.

So personalized content is customer-centric, and this is a key to increasing engagement.

Helps In Increasing The Conversion Rate

Personalized emails help in filling content that is relevant and helpful for the customer, and also make more likely and purchase reading such emails.

According to consultancy, there are more than 93% of business experiences boost connection rates when they are using personalization.

Shortens The Sales Cycle

Email personalization helps you in taking advantage of data for your customers to boost the sales friction and nurturing process and shorten the sales cycle.

With such an email, you know what you are offering them, and it is what they actually want.

Helps You In Generating More Revenue

Personalizing email campaigns can help you in generating more than 760% revenue as compared to those that are not personalized.

According to segmentation, 44% of consumers will make repeat purchases with a brand if they have personalized shopping experiences.

Helps You In Creating a Much Deeper Relationship With the Audience

Upgrading personalized email can help you in developing a relationship with the audience; 62% of consumers are more than happy to respond to personalized messages from their barns.

This helps in boosting how to reach the customers and use the right content at the right time.

Improve The Customer Satisfaction

Consumers want personalized experiences; they want brands to learn more about them as well as understand what they want.

In fact, around 31% of consumers state they like to make online shopping much more personalized.

What Should You Know About Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping is one of the trending techniques that help business people from multiple different industries, from their user experience designers to the owners of the business. Also, visualize the journey of customers who are using the product.

More specifically, the method helps you in creating a map of the customer experience throughout your process of discovering, purchasing, and using the services as well as the product.

Journey maps help in designing for helping in identifying the flaws and weak spots you have in customer experience along with the high points.

Essential parts of your customer journey map

Your mapping process centers on understanding touchpoints along with moments where you interact with the customer and the perspective of the customer.

Even though it sounds complicated, customer journey mapping can be straightforward

With the mapping, you get the following:

Collecting the data and research of your user.
Creating stages as well as steps for capturing your user’s experience.
Relating to each step for goals and customer goals, interaction, problems, expectations, etc.
Analyzing the table and data for pinpointing the high as well as low points of your business.
Brainstorm ways to improve the problems and elevate the strength.
Integration changes based on human insight, which is meaningful regarding the business.

What You Get From Learning Your Customer’s Perspective?

With the help of getting a newfound perspective and diving into the nature of the user’s experience, there are different things you get. This includes :

benefits from learning customer perspective

Improve The Website

Customer journey mapping can help in identifying your sticking pointers that are website user experience during the touchpoints; it includes :

Booking appointments
Using the customer portals
Communication with business
Contacting the business
Booking the appointments.

Pinpointing the specific moments that your audience enjoys and moments when they are becoming irritating and frustrating which should be of immense value.

Elevating The Techniques For personalization Email Marketing

A great way to elevate the email marketing technique is through the use of customer mapping.

For example, you need to work on creating the plan for your new email campaign. You want to craft a way that helps in appealing to your customers and drives them to the website,

With the help of mapping, you can identify why they are skipping the email and how to raise the open rates along with target content, appeal to the incentives, etc.

Revamping The Strategies For Social Media

If you are looking to revamp your social media strategies, you should start with mapping, as it’s your perfect start.

It gives you visualization, and this type can help you determine why you have a lack of engagement and understand the content that will be valuable for the customers.

This ensures your time and effort are directed to posting and monitoring the most appreciated channels on social media.

Why is Journey Mapping Needed?

Gaining a deeper understanding of the customer journey gives you priceless for the business owner.

It is the key is connecting them in the right way and at the right time. With this, you also get vital when in building the relationship and helping process between your prospective customers as well as business.

In 2019, research done by the Aberdeen Group published different findings on how journey mapping helps in making your focus much clear.

Along with that, the studies showed :

You Get a Stronger Return On Investment

The research indicates that customer mapping can help you in leading a more than 50% greater return on marketing investment as it helps you in connecting with the audience much faster and more accurately.

Vast Improvement In Cost Of Customer Service

Aberdeen found that with the help of mapping, the companies can focus on minimizing their cost in customer services which goes more than 10 times and efficiently.

This helps in decreasing issues in customer services and focuses on increasing sales.

Striking Improvements In Engagement on Social Media Platforms

The research’s data showed that utilizing the insight gained from the journey mapping can help in leading more than 20% positive responses, mentions, and interactions on different social media platforms.

Mapping also helps in assuring you are targeting the right customers in the market.

Boosting The Referrals

Aberdeen found that mapping can help in gaining 3.5 times the revenue from their customer through referrals both word of mouth as well as social media mentions.

Quicker Sales

Journey mapping can help in the catalyst for significantly better as well as sales. Targeting the right customer chooses the right time to boost the sales timelines by more than 18 times.

How Use Map Stages Of Your Customer Experiences?

When you start mapping your customer’s experience, with this, you can get help for different stages, it includes five basic stages, and each one varies in nature, language, and order depending on the business.

With different basic stages, it includes :

Stage 1: Awareness

The first step that your customer’s journey starts is the discovery of the desire and need regarding the product and services you are offering to them.

This step, it includes being aware of the existence of the company. This can also occur when the customer is doing a search, social media ad, recommendation, review, google aad, and social media post.

It’s also important to discover your loyal customer and how and where they found your company. This helps in connecting with similar ideal prospects.

Stage2 : Consideration

The consideration, deliberation, or evaluation stage is the next step in which your targeted customer is considering the options.

At this stage, they are still considering whether they will go ahead with the purchase or will skip it.

Here, customers start shopping using your website, including doing a search, browsing reviews, searching social media, etc.

You should consider automated emails, as they will help in persuading customers to choose the customer and services.

Automated email requires a link in order to promote or a positive review from your customer. This helps in swaying the perspective of those customers who still haven’t decided on their actions.

Stage 3: Acquisition

This phase includes the customer taking the action of buying what you are offering, but it doesn’t end with it.

This stage initiates the relationship, which is based on services and communication.

Your goal here is to turn your customer into a loyal one who feels happy and satisfied with the service.

The touchpoints you get here include automated emails, customer discounts, etc.

Understanding this stage can help you in getting insights that are extremely valuable. Also, you know exactly why your customer decides to choose your service.

You can use this data for tailoring the email campaign for continued partridge via community and incentives.

Stage 4: Retention

Once you get a customer, retaining is essential as you maintain longevity.

This stage can help you in getting repeat customers, saving money and effort, and leading to getting loyal customers.

Here you need to offer continued discounts or ask for their earnest feedback.

Make sure you are keeping them engaged and feel valued, as it’s the key to this stage.

You can also offer them incentives like sneak peeks along with exclusive content; such offers help you in improving the result of the retention stage.

With the help of mapping can make you understand why your customers are choosing to leave or stay faithful to the brand.

Stage 5: Advocacy

In the next stage, here your customers might share their experiences and positive words with others who might be your next potential customers.

Keep in mind that with this stage, you also need to focus on ensuring the current customers are not just active but also engaged with the brand.

You can also use automation for highlighting anniversaries, offering specific discounts, etc.

With the help of advocacy and retention for improving the understanding regarding the behavior and building strong relationships depending on the social media platforms.

How To Use The Data From Your Customer Journey Mapping?

After you are done with stabilizing all stages of your customer journey, you can start to understand and engage the customer with the help of data. Also, utilizing it in the right way can help in harvesting the correct data, which leads to behavioral insight. This is also helpful in improving conversion rates, retention and revenue.

Some of the ways you can consider utilizing data for building the map include:

Better Segmentation

As the name suggests, which leads to better segmentation, it’s a separation of your audience into segments.

This can help you better target specific audiences along with content that is tailored especially for them, particularly via your email marketing.

In the process of your journey mapping, the segmentation helps you in understanding the specific ways for each type of user to experience the brand.

Segmentation can allow you better utilization of insight; this helps you in gathering specific audiences for sending emails that are created specifically for what they need and want.

You can use this to reduce the risk of overloading the audience with content that is low value and allow tracking for customer data,

Identifying The Pain Points

Once you establish the segments in the audience, you can integrate the data to identify the reasons behind losing customers.

For Example. If you might see that if there are younger customers who are leaving after ambitious email campaigns, then there are chances that you are overloading with emails.

So using the research data as well as critical thinking to understand why customers take or do not take the actions.

Pain points can be reflected through the negative feedback that you can get from social media, poor reviews, high volumes receiving customer service requests, etc.

Use customer feedback to identify where the user experience is flawed since it can cause the customer to feel unhappy. When you have unhappy customers, they tend to see other brands or some other options.

You can also use the discount and improve the quality of service to reconnect with those who are not satisfied with your brand.

Finding The Strength

Using the tool, including email A/B testing, social media metrics, and email tracking, can help in better focusing on what your customer is experiencing and gaining loyal customers.

Also, you can focus on emphasizing loyal customers, for example, understanding who they are or what you’re doing, which helps in connecting with them.

Positive engagement, increased sales, high click rates, etc., these all are clear signs that you have one stage which works well for you. And with this insight, you can capitalize on the stage.

Evaluating The Competition

With customer journey mapping, you can get the information that points out what competitors are doing and how it’s better for you.

You can focus on attention to feedback and competitor research to determine the weaknesses of the customer experiences.

With drop-off, stages can help in identifying as well as removing the obstacles between the customer and you.

How To Use The Customer Journey Map For Email Marketing?

There is a science behind building a great email marketing campaign, it’s beneficial for envisioning email marketing as an ongoing conversation with leads and customers.

Consider the value you are bringing the reader through the email you send.

Customer mapping can help in determining the content for creation as well as specific talking points. This helps you in connecting in much more meaningful ways with customers.

Keep this in mind; there are different tools you can provide in email marketing. This helps you in bringing the mapping much more potential. This includes :

Branded Email Templates

After you get an understanding of aspects of the brand that appeal to most of your customers.

Here you can consider the branding, which reflects the strength. The branded email template can help in making it easy to create a much more professional as well as polished identity for the brand.

Automated Emails

Customer journey mapping can help you in adding a personal touch to email marketing. However, it doesn’t mean you have to do more work for yourself once you get the perfect content for the specific customer, so automate the email process and make it easier to ensure the emails, and it’s sent at the right time.

Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is one of the most powerful tools, especially when you are pairing it with your customer mapping.

Once you develop an understanding of your audience, this can help you in easily tailoring the content as well as sending it to the customers. Since the content is based on the customer, it will help in connecting with them.

This also makes a strain on the inbox of your customer, helps eliminate email frustration, and provides personalized experiences to your customer.

Email Tracking

Customer mapping can also be cyclical, so using it with the tracking tool can help in mapping as well as monitoring the new sight. Also, how does it’s impacting on your business/

You can also track the tools for gathering long-term knowledge regarding the customer base.

Steps For Creating Journey Mapping For Your Email

Well, to use journey mapping for your email marketing, includes different steps, and it can help you in improving the better chances of successful results.

Here are some of the basic steps you should start with it :

Step 1: Set The Goals Straight

When you are creating the customer journey for mapping the email strategy, you tend to first make sure that you are setting a very clear objective for the map.

So focus on finding the purpose, what you want to accomplish and goals etc.

Do you want to get more customers? Well, depending on the goals, you can select how your map is going to grow.

Once you are done, you are next required to define the customer’s personas and goals. Who is the type of group or individual that will require what you are selling?

What do they want from using the brand? You require to come up with different goals and personas for your customers.

Step 2: List All The Touchpoints Of Your Customers

The next is to define the touchpoints your customer has, and connect them with your email.

With this, you include all the information and sign-up forms where your customer will share their email address.

It includes touch points such as offers, newsletters, etc. It adds everything you are sending or confirming with customers via email.

Step 3: Collect Information About Interaction With Customers

Once you know you are going great, use this time to get down all questions and answers.

Add questions that talk about the motivation of your customer, actions, and obstacles they have to face when they interact with your mail.

Such as Motivation Behind Why Customers Moves To Buy

Enhancing the status
A dream come true
Making amends
To be defiant
To feel good
Feel safe
Forgetting the problems
Making statement
Reward yourself

The motivation of Your Customer

It’s important that you know why your customers are interacting with your email and what their needs, as well as desires, are.

The motivation can depend on various reasons, it includes:

They are actively pushing from the band as a tool for helping them and using your email for commuting in order to learn as well as engaging directly with you.
They signed up without knowing, and now they are lazy about unsubscribing
There are different reasons, maybe they signed up for something, but they don’t remember.

Actions Of Your Customer

The next is to understand what actions do your customers are taking related to your email marketing. What are the actions they are doing on a regular basis? Well, it includes :

They are clicking through emails you sent to get more information and to see what you are offering to them.
They are o opening and reading. However, they are not clicking through the email, also find the general updates, deals, offers, etc.
They are not engaging with you, not even little; it means you need to cleanse those emails from the email list.

Obstacles Customer Face

Here you require to see what’s keeping the customers interacting with your brand and email like you hope they would do.

There are some obstacles they might be facing, it includes :

They might didn’t found out much about your brand enough to make them feel cared about.
Your emails are either confusing or not clear enough, or it does not respect the brand accurately.
Your email is way too plain and contains no click-throughs, CTAs, or other options for creating opportunities for engagement.

Step 4: Identify The Opportunities In Each Stage Of the Customer Journey

You need to figure out what keeps you from the customer and focus on finding ways to fix the issue.

Also, there are different opportunities you get with different stages of the customer journey, so you can target the customer by sending the right emails.

Well, some of the examples you can consider are :

Creating new marketing assets that better reflect what you offer along with its usefulness.
Train the sales force to respond to inquiries and leads much faster.
Target a new segment of your customers; consider the market that hasn’t happened yet.

You can use the customer journey and behavior to walk yourself through the journey of your customer as it will help you in getting a feel regarding how your customers interact.

Also, with this, you can see how your brand is going to leave an impression on them and the effectiveness of your email strategy.

What Mistakes Of Customer Journey Mapping Effects Your Email Marketing?

For upgrading the personalization in your email marketing, you require to focus on understanding what to avoid when you are planning your customer journey maps.

No doubt, customer journey maps are powerful tools, this helps you understand your customer much better.

Since you can see the experience and detect the challenges as well as opportunities your customer might have, you can create a much better and more effective email marketing plan.

Also, it gives you much more control over the tailoring content as you have actionable insight and data backing up.

But when you are focusing on this, here are some of the common mistakes to avoid so you can build effective journey maps for your mail marketing.

mistakes avoid in customer journey mapping

Not Defining Your Goals

When you start the journey mapping, you should have a specific goal in mind.

Not just that, it should be known by every single person on your team. When you are not on the same page, it ends up failing and underperforming.

So make sure you have a project goal or set the objectives before you start with mapping.

Using The Unreliable Data

To start a successful project, you need to research, and the same goes when it comes to CJMs.

You can firmly believe that you have an understanding of the customers. This might lead to not doing research, as you don’t need it before you do the mapping.

But the truth here is you need to map, and it won’t reflect the actual journey of customers without having data based on doing the research.

So you need to do the customer interview, analytics as well as other sources. Not just that, it will be based on just assumptions and not going to bring value to the business.

Interviewing The Loyal Customers Only

Loyal customers are likely to agree to participate in the interviews, but you should talk to those who are not loyal to your brand.

Well, when it’s about a type of loyal customer, there are chances that they only share the positive experience. This leads to the false impression that you don’t require the changes.

Not Considering the Early Stage Of Your Interaction

The first impression of your customer is the starting point for probing the customer’s needs as well as dating the needs.

Also, you need to study the needs your customer might have during the early stages of doing interaction with you. Not just you need to be aware of those early-stage needs, but you also need to offer the solution to the customer.

Not Giving Attention To Retention Stage

What makes your client need to stay with your brand? What influences your customer’s decisions as well as makes them go away?

The retention stage can give you much more answers to their questions. With this, it can help you understand how to improve their customer retention rates.

That’s why it’s crucial to analyze the feedback of your clients. So make sure you survey what their needs, expectations as well as problems are at an early stage.

Including The Touchpoint But Limited The Number

When you are building customer journey mapping, this might be tempting to include limited touchpoints but not take others into account.

For example, when you are doing an e-commerce store journey map as well as including the only touchpoint to the website.

But other touchpoints, such as blogs, face-to-face, or communication, also influence the total experience.

Not just that, it’s crucial to consider them and have them on the top.

Not Mapping Competitor’s Customer Journey

Mapping the journey of your competitor’s customer for doing the better turn for helping and understanding what gaps your customer have in their experiences.

As well as for fixing things that the customers might doesn’t like. Also, you can improve satisfaction, advocacy, and loyalty and attract potential customers.

Not Updating Your CJM

In order to make it effective, you should take care of your customer journey map, as it should not be done and dusted.

Those should be living documents required to be revisited and updated using the fresh data.

When you have the old map, this won’t be useful for the business. It’s similar to using the GPS, which is outdated, and sending your places and roads which don’t even exist.

Not Taking Actions

The journey mapping project is not going to end with the map. So you should analyze, ideate as well as keep it based on it.

End up with a list of initiatives that you are going to use for launch. So when you are using the CJM for driving the action, accountability as well as responsibility, make sure you take the actions.

Not Asking The Guidance Or Advice

The whole project depends on the expertise of the people who are involved in the process. So if you are new to the journey and have no idea how to start, then it’s better that you ask for help.

YOu can consider experts and ask for guidance in setting up the whole customer journey mapping project, forming a team, etc.

Without it, there are high chances you end up wasting time, taking wrong actions, and having no result in the end.