An email marketing customer journey is arguably the most critical aspect of your campaign. If you understand the importance of this journey – and how to create an effective one – your emails will generate more results.
In this guide, we’ll answer all the burning questions you have on this topic, helping you work towards better email marketing campaigns.
What is an email customer journey in marketing?
Email customer journeys are similar to general customer journeys in wider marketing. It’s a way of describing the process your customers go on from the moment they receive/send the first email.
The journey starts when you interact with them and it goes on to look at all the touchpoints they may pass through until they complete the action you desire. This could mean they purchase something, sign-up for a course, etc.
Throughout the journey, you use email automation to send out messages based on customer habits and interactions.
Why is the email marketing journey for your customer important?
This journey is important because it helps you do multiple things:
- Understand customers’ on a deeper level by seeing how they behave/react to certain touchpoints
- Figure out what prevents conversions by tracking when customers stop interacting
- Develop a better customer experience that creates improved lead generation
Put simply, the email marketing customer journey lets you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your email campaigns. From here, you can write better marketing emails that appeal to a customer’s interests and have a higher likelihood of keeping them on the journey towards the desired action.
How to create an email marketing customer journey map
Creating a customer journey for email begins with a journey map. This is a way of mapping out and planning the journey your customers will ideally go on. It also lets you plan and decide what emails are automatically sent to them depending on where they are on the journey.
You should have multiple customer journey maps depending on the audience you’re targeting. Regardless, the process for creating an email marketing customer journey map is as follows:
- Set a goal – Decide the end goal of the customer journey. Are you trying to generate sales? Do you want people to join a loyalty scheme? The goal establishes the purpose of your emails.
- Gather data – For email customer journeys to work, you need data on your email subscribers. Ensure you have a detailed sign-up form when people hand over their email, so you’ve got more knowledge on the person – like their age, gender, location, etc.
- Outline the triggers & actions – Triggers in email marketing refer to actions customers take to kickstart a reaction from you. For instance, a trigger could be a returning customer visiting your website. An action is whatever you decide to do next. In this scenario, a natural reaction to the trigger is to send a discount code email encouraging them to make a purchase.
These are the basics, and you will create a map that’s full of triggers and actions until you reach the desired goal from the beginning. In some cases, the customer journey could last one interaction before you achieve your goal. Other times, you may need to constantly send out automated emails until you finally get what you’re after.
To make the whole process easier, we have a fantastic marketing automation feature that lets you build customer journeys. You can literally drag and drop things into place to map out the journey for your subscribers. As it’s on the Instiller platform, it’s easy for you to track everything too.
Adapt your marketing strategy to your customer journey
With a clear customer journey mapped out, you need to alter your marketing strategy to conform to this. All the content you produce should be aimed at appeasing your main email marketing goal.
This will mean creating lots of different email templates depending on the goals you’re aiming for. Remember, you can have multiple customer journeys going at one time for different segments of your audience. Be sure that the marketing content for each segment aligns with the customer journey.
As a result, you have a better chance of being successful and seeing positive results from your email campaigns.
How to measure the success of a customer journey within email marketing
Customer journey success is measured by tracking some of the key metrics in email marketing.
You should track the following metrics at every stage of the customer journey, whenever you send out an email:
- Open rate
- Conversion rate
- Click-through rate
Of course, you can also look at the revenue generated after the desired goals are reached as this gives you a good idea of the overall ROI. But, tracking the three metrics above at each stage during the journey will tell you how successful your triggers and actions are. You may discover the initial two emails have a higher open rate and CTR, but this stops after you send the third email. As such, you can work on improving the third automated email to boost the rates back up and see more conversions.
Overall, email marketing customer journeys are integral to your overall campaign success. If you want to create better journeys and have access to full analysis and tracking data give Instiller’s email marketing software a try today.