The customer journey is the complete experience of a customer going from a “contact” (lead) to becoming a buyer. We usually think of this path as a map, with its landmarks, twists, and turns.

The customer journey map needs to be considered when creating a campaign in Mautic. There are a few different approaches to what is the best practice for a customer journey. Regarding Mautic and its abilities, we have chosen the most essential steps of the customer journey. We will explain how you can complete these steps successfully using Mautic’s features. 

Five steps to build your first customer journey

The basic customer journey is divided into five steps:

• awareness;
• consideration;
• purchase;
• retention;
• and advocacy. 

1. Awareness

Creating a welcome flow of emails followed up with nurturing emails is a common way of raising awareness. That makes your company more present among your public. 

Mautic has a user-friendly interface that enables you to create your email campaign drips very easily, using either a template that is already available in Mautic or a coding mode for those who like coding. 

Awareness can also be achieved through using other channels of Mautic, for example, if it is integrated with social media accounts.

2. Consideration

Consideration is the moment when a client starts thinking about your offer but hasn’t made a final decision yet. The client is considering the possibility of engaging with you further and they still need an extra push to go from considering to being sure they find the value in your offer.

Consideration means that the client has already recognized some value of what we have to offer, and they are, therefore, willing to go further and consider the purchase. There is an option in Mautic called Assets. In the Assets, it is possible to upload any type of asset you want and make it available for your potential customers to download. 

These assets are usually a kind of promotional material that brings on the added value of a product. It can be a catalog, an ebook, a walk-through, or anything that you want. Document file types are also varied: a pdf, an image, a text document or some kind of spreadsheet, a questionnaire, a video, or any other promotional material. 

The highlight of this feature of Mautic is the ability to see in the history which of your users have downloaded the material. That is, leveraging your customer’s consideration to drive them closer to the purchase.

3. Purchase

If we follow the same logic, once the users have downloaded your promotional material, you can very easily create a segment called “leads who have downloaded the e-book”. This segment can trigger sending personalized (but still automatic) emails that will lead your client to the next step of the journey, which is the shopping cart. 

When you consider the path you are building for your customer, the idea is that you are first going to highlight the value of your product with the asset. Once the customer sees this value, they are more likely to complete a purchase.

4. Retention

Retention is the term for getting a first-time buyer to remain a customer and go on to other purchases. In terms of marketing strategies, one-way retention can be achieved through nurturing campaigns or upselling journeys. 

For this matter, the focus item option of Mautic, or more popular, a pop-up campaign can be set and triggered at exactly the same time the first purchase has been made. The popup message can communicate some similar product being available for the upsell to the same group of contacts. 

5. Advocacy

Needless to say how a good experience your client has had with your brand can influence your business reputation. 

In Mautic, there is also a possibility of creating web push notifications. These web push notifications may show up even a day or two after the purchase has been made, just saying “Thank you for purchasing! You have gotten a point”.

This means the different channels are covering your client on their customer journey. Moreover, your customers know that they have been rewarded for the purchase. 

Ivana Rosic is a marketing expert at Sales Snap. She is also a Project Manager, leading the Partnership program with Mautic. You can follow her on Linkedin and read more of her marketing strategy tips on the Sales Snap blog.

“85% of marketers who use automation tools believe they don’t use them to their full potential.” (Source)

This means that we likely have systems in our business that are helping us achieve specific goals, but not to the degree that leverages their full capability.

Not only are we not using these systems to their full potential, some of these new technologies have not been fully developed. So how do we navigate this digital marketing maze? How do we find our way while leveraging these powerful tools to make more meaningful connections with our customers? The future of digital marketing is being shaped by a variety of tools and capabilities. They will promise a great many things, but preparing for them is just as critical as implementing them.

Here are a few key things to remember when moving forward through the space between existing and future technology:

People are still needed:

Our desire to bring value to customers should never be replaced by a computer. Computers still can’t interpret the innate needs of our customers. Although we are gathering terabytes of data, we need people to help interpret the data in a way that makes meaning.

“But what needs to go is our reliance on using automation to do our jobs. Because at the end of the day, we’re communicators.” (Source)

What this means is that we need to get smarter about how we use digital marketing systems in our business. Where does it make sense to automate? When do your customers value the human element? When do they simply want information? As marketers, our job is to truly understand the journey and the value at each and every touch-point.

Focus on workflow:

One of the most damaging things that any business can do when preparing for new technology is to create rigid, inflexible workflows. As technology continues to develop and add new features, workflows along your customer journey should remain flexible.

We often assume our customer journey’s work in one direction. Rarely do we consider a customer going backward. This thinking limits the view of our processes and workflow. We become rigid in our thinking, making it difficult when new technologies come into view. We should consider our marketing as operating in multiple directions, often skipping steps or moving from one touch-point to another without warning.

Not only will this approach help you be innovative in the way you engage customers, it will provide the flexibility required to add/remove process steps to improve the way you engage everyone along the journey.

Prepare your stack:

Most everyone is familiar with the term “agile”. We use this term when describing software development, manufacturing, construction and even marketing. At its core agile;

“…advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development…and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change.” (Source)

These principles are important to running any business. They should be adaptive, innovative, flexible and continuously improve. If this is true, then your marketing stack should reflect the same. The key is to keep every area of your marketing stack flexible in the way that it communicates with customers, associates, and other systems. This will allow you to respond to the demands of new technology before it arrives in your business.

Digital marketing is constantly changing. As customers continue adopting new technologies and changing their buying habits, our businesses need to be quick to respond. This requires flexibility, not rigid workflows and systems that restrict.

What are other ways your business is navigating the ever-changing digital marketing space? Add them in the comments below!

Many times we see knee-jerk reactions in an effort to solve situations that simply require reflection, time and precision. Consider our marketing. We all want to gather greater levels of information and foster deeper connections with our audience. So we do more, add more, give more. We certainly mean well. But if our desire is to develop more meaningful relationships with our customers, should we?

“If you look at everything Apple does, it’s constantly reducing the steps. Steve Jobs used to say technology can either be beautiful – and he was a fanatic about making products that could be as beautiful as possible – or technology should be invisible, which means simplifying.” – John Scully, Former CEO, Apple

At Mautic, we are always seeking to simplify the complex. Your customer should not see clunky steps and processes as engagement, those should be largely invisible. We’re constantly evaluating each feature and finding ways to eliminate steps as you develop your communication. Our goal is to help you create simple, seamless interactions with your audience. To help you accomplish this, here are just a few of the updates in the latest release of Mautic;

Enhancements:

• Update Contact Owner: The relationship an organization has with it’s customers is vital. That’s why when there are multiple owners, it’s important to adjust ownership throughout the customer journey. Now, users can update contact owner as part of a campaign so they can assign these to different reps to own the relationship with that contact. This is accomplished by a new campaign action called: “Update contact owner”.
• Merged Contact Tracking: Don’t use Mautic forms? No problem. Now you can merge activity for unknown contacts by passing the mtc_id cookie value to Mautic when using a non-Mautic form. This feature merges activity for unknown contacts that become known contacts and enables all activity to be tracked on the same contact.
• Customize Preference Center: Users now have the ability to build a custom preference center page that can be referenced as part of an email. Admin users have access to create this page from the landing page area and mark this as a preference center page. A new section has been added in the permission area to manage access to this page. (*The Channel Frequency feature must be used.)
• Internal Notifications Using Forms: Information sharing in your business is critical to keeping the customer journey moving. That’s why Mautic now allows you to trigger emails to internal team members when a contact timeline event is recorded through a standalone form.
• Campaign Previews: We’ve added a “preview” tab to the details view in the Campaign Builder. The preview will update in real time during any campaign builder update, however, modification to the campaign assets cannot happen from the preview.
• Dynamic Content For Visitors: Dynamic content continues to be an important part of user engagement. Now you can show dynamic content to anonymous visitors based on their IP to improve the conversion of unknown visitors to known contacts. This can be done for anyone coming to a Mautic or non-Mautic landing page. New filters have been added to the dynamic content creation area to enable this. Dynamic content can also be shown to known contacts based on segment membership.
• Files in Forms: Want to include document uploads in your Mautic form? Done. Contacts now have the ability to upload attachments/files as part of forms and store these in Mautic.
• Frequency Rules: Visibility into which communications have been delayed by frequency rules has arrived. See which communications are delayed due to a contact hitting a frequency rule. You also have access to cancel or reschedule the email directly from the contact timeline.

Integrations

• Filter Activities to Push to Salesforce: You can now configure which events from Mautic get written to the custom activity object in Salesforce. The benefit of writing the data to Salesforce is; 1. Visibility for the sales rep to marketing activities responded to by the contact and 2. The ability to create reports and dashboards in Salesforce to report on marketing activities.
• Improvements to Connectwise: You can now generate a task in Connectwise based on a campaign action in Mautic. You can also bring marketing groups from Connectwise into Mautic to create segments in Mautic.

Simplification takes a careful attention to the things that will help make what you are trying to achieve, easier. With each release, we’re working toward that goal.

A huge thank you to those in the community who made the effort to load the beta release of 2.11.0 and test these features, functionality, and fixes that were part of this release.

For more detailed information, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions, please be sure to reach out to us via the Community Forums, Slack or our social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will do our best to help.

If you’re not a community member, we would encourage you to join us! Download Mautic today and start growing your business.

California Family Kicked Off Delta Flight After Argument Over Toddler’s Seat

American Airlines investigates after video shows mom in tears

Delta Employees Asked Man to Leave Flight After Using Restroom

United Airlines Passenger Is Dragged From an Overbooked Flight

I don’t share these incidents to bring judgement upon the airlines or its passengers. The reason I share this is because I think as marketers, we can learn a lot from these situations. We can learn from innovative successes and groundbreaking products, as well as communication breakdowns and errors in judgement. Each of these stories should cause us to reflect and have meaningful discussions in our businesses.

As we consider each of these incidents, what is one thing they have in common? They reflect a breakdown in the customer journey. You’re likely saying, “Yes, we know all about the customer journey, there’s no problem here. We understand the touchpoints, as well as how we engage customers along each step of that journey.” That’s great. However, have you put your customer journey in front of your customer? Would they agree with each touchpoint? Have you considered missing touchpoints that maybe only your customer sees? The director of marketing at each of these airlines likely did not see the journey that included unhappy customers that are asked to voluntarily leave their flights each and every day.

So what does this mean for our marketing automation efforts? We should consider this a wake up call to how we engage our customers at each and every step and with each and every interaction. And that includes the interactions we may not always see or acknowledge.

• Re-assess the Customer Journey:

  Your customer and marketplace are not, and should not be, static. If the way your customers find, access or engage you continues to evolve, then so should your customer journey.

  “A customer is never on a predetermined course – they are unpredictable! By ‘understanding the customer journey’ brands run the risk of pigeon holing their customers and losing them, by trying to control the process.” (source)

  This is significant. Don’t get lulled to sleep by believing that once you’ve outlined your customer journey that it is in “set it and forget” mode. There is a risk to not consistently evaluating each touchpoint. Even touchpoints you think don’t exist.

• Review the Data and Verify:

  One of the most valuable elements of marketing automation is the ability to segment and communicate directly to the needs of our audience. But how often are we reviewing the data and verifying that the value is meaningful?

  “If the enterprise does not augment the product experience with accurate, timely, and relevant information (according to the user’s location, channel and time of usage), users will be left dissatisfied, disoriented, and disengaged.” (source)

  Don’t forget to periodically monitor click throughs and open rates to ensure your content is adding value to your segments at each and every stage.

• Find the Gaps:

  As you reassess your customer journey, not only must you constantly be speaking with you customer facing team, but you must be speaking directly with customers at each stage of the customer journey. Why did that potential customer not place an order? Were there unmet needs? Are there touchpoints that we haven’t addressed?

  “As part of this 360-degree view of the customer, brands need to connect data from both physical and digital touchpoints in order to bridge the gap between the two.” (source)

  These gaps reside in our day-to-day interactions with customers, but also in the digital handoffs that occur as we provide our products and services.

• Add Value at Every Stage:

  Whether your customers are loyal or encounter an unforeseen roadblock, it is incumbent upon you to add value. We are in a sharing economy. The challenge we face as marketers is that every potential customer should be seen as a potential advocate for our business whether they are a customer or not.

  “The art of creating added value starts with the ability to see your business through the eyes of your customers.” (source)

  So walk in their shoes, talk with them directly. Sometimes the best data is not in a report, but directly interacting with the people you serve.

In summary, what can we learn from the challenges airlines have been experiencing over the past couple of weeks? That no matter how long you’ve been doing business, and what you think you know about your customers, there is always an opportunity to learn more and improve the customer journey before, during and after they interact with your business.

For more information about how to create your own custom journey in Mautic, check out our video on the subject.