A revenue-focused approach to the customer journey

It's no secret that the customer journey is a key factor in marketing success. However, creating a seamless and positive experience for customers can be difficult. That's where revenue marketing comes in.

Revenue marketing is a term that is used to describe a holistic approach to marketing that focuses on generating revenue. This type of marketing takes into account all aspects of the customer journey, from awareness to purchase. By taking a revenue-focused approach, businesses can ensure that every touchpoint is optimized for maximum impact.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can improve your customer journey, focusing on: 

• Why the customer journey is important in revenue marketing
• Best practices to improve the customer journey 

Why the customer journey is important in revenue marketing

By mapping out the typical stages and touchpoints a customer goes through in their relationship with a brand, marketers can gain valuable insights. These insights allow them to optimize the experience to drive better business results.

First, understanding the customer journey enables more relevant and personalized messaging. When you know where prospects are in their lifecycle, you can target them with content and offers that speak to their specific needs. This helps move them through the funnel. 

Second, it helps allocate resources more effectively. You can see which channels work best at each stage and invest accordingly. Paid search, for example, may be key for newcomers, while email works better for existing customers.

Plus, the customer journey helps with better cross-functional alignment. With the roadmap, sales and marketing can hand off leads appropriately to create a consistent experience. It also reveals opportunities to improve pain points and test new approaches through A/B testing experiments. 

Essentially, the customer journey provides an end-to-end framework to offer tailored experiences that convert at each stage. When optimized, it boosts revenue growth through higher conversion rates and customer lifetime value.

Best practices to improve the customer journey

Have an in-depth understanding of the customer journey

The customer journey tracks a prospect from the moment they discover your brand, to when they buy from you (and beyond). Having an in-depth understanding of this process is essential for revenue marketers who want to better serve their customers.

To gain this understanding, you need to start with customer journey mapping, which is a visual way of predicting what actions a potential customer might take when they first interact with your business. 

This can be done in several ways such as profiling your target buyer personas, outlining the touch points, and identifying the actions you can take at each of these touch points to address your prospects’ paint points.

Fortunately, revenue marketing is the perfect way to facilitate this. Revenue marketing breaks down the silos between marketing and sales, encouraging more collaboration between the departments. Sales have access to a lot of incredibly useful data points that often aren’t shared with marketing. 

Under the revenue marketing model, marketing would have access to everything sales does, and vice versa. This gives marketing an even greater understanding of the customer journey beyond the point of sale.

Personalized customer experiences

Another way to improve the customer journey with revenue marketing is to focus on creating personalized experiences. Every customer is different, so it's important to tailor your marketing messages and offerings accordingly by using audience segmentation.

When undertaking your customer journey research, you’ll discover multiple buyer personas with different budgets and needs. So a one-size-fits-all solution just won’t cut it. But if you can segment your customers, you can create a personalized customer experience that fits each type of buyer. This can include sending out individual emails to certain customers or curating content specifically for those within a certain step of the sales funnel.

By segmenting your audience in revenue marketing, you ensure your customers receive a personalized journey at every step. You can segment using predefined metrics like company size, industry, or budget. It’ll not only produce better sales outcomes, but you’ll learn even more about your customers as you deliver content to them that addresses their unique needs and challenges.

If you can create a personalized customer experience for your buyers, this deeper understanding of their needs will help you create more effective campaigns that resonate with them and keep them coming back.

Get people outside of your industry to test 

We spoke with Jason Mashak, Senior Manager of Analyst and Public Relations at Runecast, for his advice on improving the customer journey with revenue marketing. He said, “One simple and effective yet often overlooked method for ensuring great CX is to ask family or friends who are NOT in the industry to test communication flows and provide feedback.”

This is a good idea to improve the customer journey for multiple reasons: 

• They provide an outside perspective: They are not blinded by industry jargon or assumptions, so they can point out areas of confusion or friction that may not be obvious to those within the industry. Their feedback is from the lens of a typical customer.
• They represent a sample of the target audience: Friends/family often have diverse backgrounds that can mirror parts of your broader customer demographics. Their feedback can help identify pain points faced by different customer segments.
• They can test end-to-end journeys: Friends/family can be enlisted to go through entire customer journeys rather than just giving feedback on individual touch points. This helps identify friction between touchpoints.
• They give honest feedback: There is an openness and lack of inhibition when getting feedback from friends/family. Industry insiders may hold back more in their feedback.
• It's cost-effective - Using friends/family as a sounding board is much cheaper than large sample user testing before making improvements to the customer journey.
• Quicker feedback loops: Getting input from friends/family can be done much faster than more formal market research projects, then enabling quicker iteration.

Automation

Personalization is incredibly effective, but it can be a lot of work. Automation can help your personalization efforts and allow you to thrive in a market where people are demanding a better, more streamlined customer experience.

Working with data is essential for creating personalized experiences. But as a business, you’ll be dealing with huge amounts of data that can become tricky to keep track of manually.

So this is where automation comes in. Automation streamlines many processes, including personalization and segmenting customer data, saving your team time to work on tasks that can’t be automated.

You can introduce chatbots that use automation and machine learning software to help deal with customer concerns and queries. They’re an attractive prospect to customers as they’re available 24/7 to handle fundamental customer issues. As technology develops, automated chatbots will be able to handle more and more complex problems. 

And for problems it can’t solve, it can transfer customers and prospects through to a human team. By taking on a large chunk of the burden of customer queries, chatbots free up human employees to focus on other areas.

Automation can also use predictive analytics to set up a profile for each customer, which can predict future behavior. This data can then be used to decide on the type of content to create, so it can be sent out at the right time to customers at every stage of the buyer funnel.

As an example, automated AI software can determine the best time to send out an email marketing newsletter, using predictive analytics to determine when a prospect might be on the verge of making a purchase. When customers receive the right content at the right time, you increase the likelihood of a sale, boosting revenue.

By using automation in your marketing efforts, you can further scale your personalization. Increasing personalization across the buyer funnel has the potential to convert more leads, translating to an improved ROI over time.

Focus your KPIs

KPIs (key performance indicators) are essential for any marketing campaign as they help keep the team on track to reach their goals. Having KPIs that reflect the entire customer journey also helps to narrow down where improvements can be made and where things might be going wrong. But there is such a thing as having too many KPIs, or when a team has conflicting ideas about which are the most important.

There’s no magic number for the right amount of KPIs for your campaigns, but you can do a health check to ensure you’ve not got too many. First, you can check them against your goals. KPIs are evidence of progress towards your goals, so each one should have a link to a goal. If one or more of your KPIs isn’t linking towards a goal it could be a sign that it’s redundant.

While you might have more than one KPI linking to just one goal, it could be an indicator that that goal is not very well defined. If you have too many KPIs, your team may lose focus on what’s really important. KPIs should support each other towards the overarching goals outlined at the start of a campaign.

By nailing down your KPIs, your team can perform better and provide an overall better customer experience to your current customers and prospects.

Final thoughts

By taking a revenue-focused approach to the customer journey, businesses can ensure that every touchpoint is optimized for maximum impact. By making small improvements in each stage of the journey, businesses can make a big difference in their overall sales and conversion rates. Improving the customer journey is an important part of any successful revenue marketing strategy.