Mastering customer journey analytics: A guide for CRM marketers

As someone who collaborates closely with marketers, I’ve learned one absolute truth: Marketers who are deeply invested in optimizing customer experiences know that marketing extends far beyond product offerings — it's about curating seamless journeys that resonate with consumers at every touchpoint. 

But to curate a personalized customer journey requires an in-depth understanding of your customer’s behavior and preferences. 

This is where customer journey analytics comes into play. Brands that excel at cross-channel engagement strategies generate more revenue and retain more customers.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the ins and outs of customer journey analytics so you can elevate your personalized marketing strategies to foster lasting customer connections. 

First things first, what are customer journey analytics?

The answer is simple: customer journey analytics is the analysis of key customer experience data points at every touchpoint in the customer journey.

Having access to customer journey analytics is an all-access pass to your customers' experiences. It's about digging deep into every step of their journey, from the moment they first discover your brand to their ongoing interactions and purchases.

By using these analytics, you can dive into the intricacies of how customers interact with your brand across various touchpoints and channels.

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With them, you can also discover valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. This deeper understanding enables you to make informed decisions about your marketing strategies and tailor your efforts to better meet the needs of your audience across their entire lifecycle. Customers want to be engaged — but only at the right time. 

Personalization becomes a natural outcome of all this discovery, which increases the effectiveness of subsequent campaigns and deepens your brand’s relationship with customers. 

If there’s one thing you should take from this, it’s that customer journey analytics is about gaining clarity and insight into your customers' journeys, allowing you to create more meaningful and impactful experiences for them.

Key components of customer journey analytics

As a marketer, it's important to grasp the key components of customer journey analytics to provide tailored strategies and insights. Here's how we break it down:

Touchpoints

These represent pivotal moments where customers engage with the brand. Customer touchpoints span multiple channels, like paid media, email, website engagement, or even in-store experiences. 

Identifying and optimizing these touchpoints is fundamental for enhancing customer experience, driving conversions, and increasing ROI.‍

Channels

To discover offline and online channels, marketers analyze the platforms and mediums facilitating customer touchpoints. The key to a successful campaign or journey product lies in the ability to utilize multi-channel marketing and seamlessly being able to integrate with those channels all in one campaign intuitively. 

This allows you to personalize and tailor the customer experience, and deliver things like product updates, recommendations, and even cart abandonment notifications on the channels your customers use.‍

Stages

Channels play a pivotal role in shaping the stages of the customer journey. As customers progress from awareness to post-purchase, they interact with various touch points across online and offline channels.

Collaborating with your team and understanding your customer data is vital to crafting tailored strategies for each stage. It also helps guide customers seamlessly through their journey and enables you to analyze their engagement within each channel and leverage those insights. 

This strategic approach fosters long-term loyalty and advocacy by ensuring consistent and personalized experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Each step of the customer journey is important!

Customer actions

By tracking specific behaviors and customer actions at various touchpoints, you gain essential insights into customer engagement levels and preferences. This granular understanding enables marketers to anticipate customer needs, personalize interactions, and optimize conversion paths for maximum impact. 

Getting this granularity requires collaboration between all stakeholders: marketers, data, sales, customer success, etc. 

By integrating these key components into our customer journey analytics approach, we empower brands to deliver personalized experiences that drive meaningful relationships and sustainable growth.

The key benefits of customer journey analytics

There are many benefits to analyzing how customers interact with your brand.

First, you’ll gain a holistic view of how your customers benefit, which means you can create tailored messaging to address their preferences and pain points. Customers crave a personalized experience with brands, and, if you deliver one, they are sure to engage. 

You can use your MarTech stack to sift through the layers of data and extract valuable insights that pave the way for tailored messages, content, and offers that act as personalized roadmaps. 

Here’s an example.

Imagine you're part of a CRM marketing team at an e-commerce apparel and basics company. You utilize customer journey analytics through your tech stack and find that many customers extensively browse but abandon their online carts without purchasing. 

To address this, your team collaborates with the data team to tailor email campaigns for cart abandoners. These campaigns include reminders, discounts, and personalized product recommendations based on past purchases.

As a result, you experience increased conversions from abandoned cart emails, driven by reminders and incentives. Furthermore, customers appreciate the personalized touch, fostering loyalty and repeat purchases.

Overall, your company experiences improved engagement and satisfaction, leading to enhanced revenue and growth.

This scenario demonstrates how customer journey analytics, coupled with a tech stack, empower teams like yours to create personalized campaigns that resonate with customers, ultimately boosting sales and loyalty.

Another benefit of analyzing the customer journey is the ability to easily pinpoint friction or frustration within the customer journey and strategically address them to improve satisfaction and retention.

Then, you can optimize campaigns based on granular customer data, CRM marketers can elevate conversion rates and unlock the full potential of their marketing initiatives, ultimately improving your company’s bottom line.

How to implement customer journey analytics in your marketing strategies

Now that we’ve discussed what customer journey analytics are, their key components, and their benefits, the next logical (and arguably, most important) step is to break down how to use them.

To harness the power of customer journey analytics effectively, marketers need a robust platform that facilitates seamless data collection, analysis, and action. 

Take, for example, a Customer Data Platform (CDP). A CDP integrates with a Cloud Data Platform, which is where customer data is stored. It manages your customer engagement data, stitches together a customer 360, then helps you activate your data — all while offering automated customer journey analytics, the ability to segment your customers, and even predictive analytics to help personalize the customer experience even more.

Using a CDP means you can more easily deliver personalized experiences that resonate with your audience across multiple channels. There’s no quicker way to rack up unsubscribes or bounces than through ineffective impersonal batch and blast campaigns.

1. Collect, integrate, and unify customer data

A marketer’s CDP needs to provide unified customer profiles by consolidating data from multiple touchpoints, creating a holistic view of customer interactions and preferences. Cross-channel tracking capabilities enable seamless monitoring of customer interactions across various channels such as web, mobile app, email, and various paid media.

2. Use advanced analytics tools and platforms

Using a comprehensive suite of analytics tools uncovers actionable metrics, such as conversion funnels, heatmaps, and customer segmentation, enabling CRM marketers to make informed decisions.

Real-time reporting allows marketing teams access to up-to-date insights so that they can react quickly and adapt to changing customer behaviors quickly.

3. Create actionable insights

Leverage AI-powered recommendations to deliver personalized product recommendations and remarket services and products based on customer preferences. Even without AI, using other machine learning tools to build predictive models is another way to personalize customer communication. Campaigns should never be guess-work

You should understand customer behavior patterns through behavioral analysis to identify key touchpoints for targeted interventions and optimization.

4. Continuously optimize and personalize the customer journey

It’s crucial to have a platform with real-time capabilities that empower CRM marketers to adapt strategies instantly based on evolving customer behavior. This ensures campaigns remain relevant and effective.

Utilize A/B testing and experimentation to identify the most impactful marketing strategies and iterate for continuous improvement. Then, implement data-driven automation to trigger personalized messages and offers at crucial touchpoints, increasing engagement and conversions.

A real-world example of how Vimeo used customer journey analytics to improve customer personalization

Let’s look at how a Simon Data customer analyzed its customer journey and used a CDP to maximize its customer engagement.

Vimeo, the popular video-sharing platform and YouTube alternative, uses a freemium model common in the world of SaaS. Anyone can sign up for a free account, but accessing the platform’s most powerful and valuable tools requires a paid subscription. 

A free trial was Vimeo’s primary means of nurturing free users along with becoming paid subscribers. But the success of this strategy hinged on one key moment: A user completing their first video upload — which many users failed to do. 

To better nudge users to complete this critical action, Vimeo turned to the Simon CDP and Snowflake, which they used to:

• Understand the precise moment a user abandoned their video upload
• Build a dynamic, real-time segment of free users who abandoned their upload
• Design and execute an A/B test to determine the optimal time for sending an email nudging users to complete their upload

The results were astounding. Personalizing the timing of their email nudges resulted in a 300% increase in conversions to free trials — highlighting the power of incorporating customer data into your marketing efforts. 

Conclusion

Understanding and optimizing the customer journey is the foundation of delivering a personalized customer experience.  Customer journey analytics equip you with invaluable data and information that marketing teams can use to build personalized experiences.

The benefits? Improved customer satisfaction, lower CAC, more engaged and loyal customers, and maximized ROI. Leveraging platforms like a CDP or similar CRM tool enables you to harness the full potential of customer journey analytics and maintain a competitive edge.

To learn more about how a CDP can help, book a demo today.

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