Influencing Marketing’s Impact on Revenue Throughout the Customer Journey

There are many marketing metrics to gauge the success of your efforts. Yet, many businesses struggle to reach their revenue goals even with those metrics showing success. Why is that the case? Often, it’s because they are looking at the wrong KPIs or have no visibility into MOFU movement and activities, but customer journey analytics may be the answer.

Marketing typically focuses on the early stages of the customer journey. However, to generate maximum revenue, the influence of marketing efforts needs to be echoed at every stage. Given the gap between marketing and revenue teams, that isn’t easy to achieve.

As usual, data can save the day. Analytics from the customer’s journey can give businesses powerful insights to ensure that the whole ‘customer experience’ is excellent.

Why Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics provides the big picture analysis of the customer experience. For marketing teams, this data is indispensable. Learning how different customers interact with the business and what path they take to convert can help marketers improve their efforts.

We already know that for any business, customer loyalty is everything. It’s more costly to bring in new customers than retain existing ones. So naturally, businesses want to retain more customers.

Consider this: the probability of selling to an existing customer is nearly 70%, whereas that of a potential customer is under 20%. In other words, there is more potential for revenue from existing customers than new customers.

Similarly, the cost of losing these customers is also high, as already mentioned.

Businesses, especially their marketing teams, need reliable data to understand customer journeys, know what they are doing right, and scrap what they are doing wrong.

More importantly, such analytics allow marketers to engage with customers in the context of their journey, which may vary greatly. So, in a way, it allows marketers to further personalize their approach to different customer personas based on how their journey has been so far.

Many companies realize the importance of customer journey analytics, especially customer experience, or CX. According to one CX survey, top companies reported customer journey analytics as one of the top priorities for investment.

Customer journey analytics can help connect the dots from the marketing automation platform (MAP), producing insights from all the data collected from different marketing channels. As a result, it can help marketers understand and approach customers much better.

Related: What is Buyer Journey Mapping?

Customer Journey Analytics is Not the Same as Customer Journey Mapping

It’s easy to confuse customer journey mapping with journey analytics. The former is more dynamic and limited in scope, whereas the latter is more dynamic and large scale.

A customer journey map is simply a visual representation of how a customer persona interacts with the business. To put themselves in the customer’s shoes, businesses create these maps to better understand the customer’s journey and their interaction at every level in this journey.

Customer journey mapping also involves a lot of marketing tracking, as it creates an inventory of different interactions through different channels. For example, it may include interactions with email, advertisements, social media posts, websites, review platforms, or customer service.

To summarize, customer journey mapping gives an overall view of the customer experience.

On the other hand, customer journey analytics gets into the nitty-gritty details. It takes a quantitative approach, considering every little interaction the customer has with the different channels and systems within the business ecosystem.

It doesn’t work on sample size but rather on all customers. Also, the technology behind such analytics is much more advanced and sophisticated. For instance, companies can learn about customer behavior by using machine learning.

Most importantly, customer journey analytics are based in real-time, which allows a faster response to customer needs.

Unlike customer journey mapping, analytics deal with a much bigger data set. So there are certain storage and processing requirements for such data that don’t exist for mapping. In addition, it also requires personnel who can interpret the findings from the analysis.

5 Ways Marketers Can Impact Revenue Through Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics presents many opportunities for marketers. Interestingly, it’s not just the marketing agency that can benefit from it but many others, including sales and revenue teams.

It helps bridge the gap between different teams to be on the same page. In other words, it’s not just your revenue team making efforts to meet or exceed revenue goals but every department.

Here are five ways this kind of data analysis can help marketers positively impact revenue generation throughout a customer’s journey.

Behavioral Segmentation

When we talk about segmentation in marketing, we refer to criteria such as demographics, age, sex, or profession. However, with even more detailed data about customer interactions, marketers can segment customers differently, i.e., by their behavior.

Behavioral segmentation refers to segmenting customers by their behavior and using those behaviors to approach customers. For example, differing personas can be grouped together according to the type of content that resonates with them, and then more of that content can be directed their way. 

This, in turn, leads to a higher chance of reaching set goals, whether that’s increased revenue, engagement, or other outcomes. This is all the more relevant for customers already ahead in the customer journey, such as customers who have already converted.

It all comes down to fine-tuning CX. More organizations need to improve customer experience as part of their marketing expenditure. Yet, according to one survey, only 23% of respondents said CX is fully embedded in their organization.

Connect Strategy to CX

Marketers relying on data about customer journeys can use it to tweak their strategy and connect it with business results. In simpler terms, the marketing team can dynamically adjust their strategy to meet business goals (revenue goals) with data about customer interactions in hand.

This takes the marketing team out of the usual clicks and open rates and focuses on the overall customer experience. As a result, the metrics for success change significantly, with the teams now focusing on revenue increase, cost reductions, and customer retention.

This allows marketing efforts to extend from just addressing new customers to addressing new and existing customers. Their job isn’t done if a campaign gets a lot of clicks or an email gets a high open rate. Their job continues to ensure those clicks and opens turn into revenue for the business.

Understand Customer Pain Points

Marketers need to know the product or service they are marketing. However, it’s equally important for them to understand customer pain points outside and inside the sales funnel. That right there is the key to converting and retaining many customers.

How can they do that, especially with existing customers? Through analyzing the customer journey. The data can reveal where the experience is lacking and where the customers face problems.

Marketers can then address those problems, interacting directly with their customers. That ensures customer retention, but it also shows that the business cares about its customers.

Revenue Operations Teams

Businesses can leverage their marketing team and sales team to form a revenue operations team whose job is to realize revenue goals year on year. Normally, there’s a gap between marketing and sales teams, especially in enterprises with dedicated teams for each operation.

Combining these teams to create one team with one goal amplifies the efforts of each member while also emphasizing revenue generation.

Again, customer journey analytics plays a vital role here as it provides insights and reports valuable for all the members, regardless of their departments.

As many as 87% of sales and marketing leaders attribute collaboration between marketing and sales to critical business growth.

Related: How Does Revenue Analytics Help Marketing Managers Make Better Decisions?

Influence Customer Decision Making

With the information marketers gather from the customer journey, they can get better at influencing potential customers. Going back to behavioral segmentation, marketers can use different segments to create realistic personas and approach each of those personas differently.

In other words, marketers can take into account the experience of current customers to influence the decision-making of potential customers. That’s yet another way to convert even more customers and thereby augment revenue.

No matter what channel the customer is coming from, if they fit a certain persona, they can be targeted more accurately.

Customers appreciate this kind of personalization in marketing because it makes their choices easier. As many as 90% of consumers in the US find personalization in marketing appealing.

Align Marketing and Sales to Improve CX

A great strategy to increase revenue and sustain it is to align marketing and sales, two-pillar departments for any business’s success. Customer journey analytics is central to this alignment because it informs and empowers both teams about how customers behave, what they want, and what can be done to improve their experience.

RevOptics is the solution to automate customer journeys and, through that, eliminate the gap between marketing and sales. RevOptics creates opportunities for businesses to grow their customer base–and not just grow it but also sustain it. 

If you also believe in delivering the best customer experience through marketing and sales, request a demo of RevOptics today.