The digital customer journey stages (awareness/browsing, building a cart, purchase, and post-purchase) are fairly straightforward.
- Browsing – The prospective buyer has just begun their journey. During this stage, the customer isn’t quite sure what they’re looking for yet the good news is, you’ve at least piqued their curiosity.
- Building a cart – The customer has found what they were looking for. However, they must still weigh their options. It’s not a foregone conclusion that they’ll move on to the next stage: purchase.
- The final stage – The customer has committed to making a purchase… whether a first-time or repeat transaction. Now the question is how to turn this customer into a returning/loyal customer.
- Post-purchase – The majority of customers are one and done, and it’s harder to acquire than retain. So this stage is all about inspiring further purchases ideally with some genuine digital hugging.
For a detailed understanding of how to achieve this kind of ultra-personalization, a deeper dive into customer lifecycle marketing is needed. With an expanded perspective, we break the stages listed above into five more advanced journey stages:
- Acquisition encapsulates driving traffic via referrals and social media advertising. It also includes getting initial conversions and subscribers by inspiring visitors to sign up.
- Conversion focuses on driving purchases with various email and retargeting campaigns.
- Growth includes building customer relationships, and inspiring existing customers to spend more and buy more frequently. These campaigns are geared toward known contacts, and it’s the first stage where you can really start using accumulated data to do real personalization.
- Retention strategies include tactics like back in stock and price drop. Promotional emails for anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, and more fall into this category, along with your loyalty program.
- Win-back campaigns remind customers of the value of doing business with you. You can also target inactive contacts via social channels, and try different channels to earn the business of defecting customers.
