The job of marketers has never been as complicated as it is today. That's because digital transformation has increased the touchpoints between brands and audiences to an edge where it's almost impossible to manage and optimize customer journeys the traditional way.
But we are masters of adaptation. So, we developed a new form of digital customer journey mapping to help us understand our audiences, thus analyzing and optimizing how we market our products and services to them. We came up with the concept of Digital Customer Journeys.
Accordingly, successful marketers are now compelled not only to know the eight digital journey stages but also how to optimize each one across different touchpoints and media channels. In this article, we will be covering everything about stages and optimization. In addition, we will provide you with a free template to help you create a digital customer journey map.
So, What Is DCJ, and How Significant Is It?
Digital customer journey (DCJ) is a framework developed to help digital marketers and brands understand how audiences go from not being interested at all to becoming long-term loyal customers of a brand. This, of course, is in the digital world as the name suggests.
Digital customer journeys refer to the patterns internet users follow to become customers of a digital brand. The journey covers all the touchpoints and possible interactions between the brand and its audience. And it doesn’t stop after a purchase is done! In fact, DCJ optimization aims straightforwardly to keep a customer loyal to a brand, even after they perform their initial purchase.
However, a new term has joined the glossary recently due to the peak in the number of online media platforms: omnichannel digital customer journey. The term simply refers to the fact that the eight digital customer journey stages may differ in their core depending on the channels where each step may take place.
For instance, an internet user may know about your brand on Google, get engaged with your YouTube videos, and purchase your Instagram or Facebook store! This is an example of an omnichannel digital customer journey; a journey across different channels that results in a customer vs brand relationship.
The Difference Between Digital Customer Journey and Buyer Journey
Digital customer journeys and buyer journeys differ roughly in one thing: where the journeys end. A buyer’s journey ends once they perform a purchase online. While a customer’s journey has only started there! That’s because DCJ aims to make customers come back again and again and purchase more items from a brand. And it also tries to attract feedback and reviews to make other people aware of the offered service or product.
In other words, one aims to make a one-time sale with possibly a one-time buyer. While the other aims to establish a long-term relationship entitled with loyalty and rewarded with continuous sales.
The 8 Digital Customer Journey Stages
There are as many digital customer journeys in the world as there are audiences and marketing campaigns. Each online sale results from a different journey! I.e, customers become aware of a specific media channel, convert their perception of the brand to another, and then end their journey in an unprecedented manner.
Still, all of these different journeys and patterns can be studied and optimized in roughly the same way. At the end of the day, it’s humans and the internet! Everything about them can be mapped, studied, and thus predicted.
So, with no further suspensions, the eight stages of digital customer journey mapping are:
- Awareness
- Engagement
- Subscribing
- Converting
- Exciting
- Ascending
- Advocate
- Promoter
1 - Awareness
The question we aim to answer in this stage of the mapping process is: How can we make our potential customers know we exist?
In this phase, we set out all the practices we’ll rely on to reach out to an audience and make them aware our brand exists. In other words, we are talking about digital marketing! How are we going to market our brand, products, and services online? Are we going to rely on paid advertising such as Adwords and Facebook Ads, or we’d rather play the long run and focus on SEO and generating inbound leads?
You may have come across a video by Gary Vaynerchuk or read his famous book “Crush It”. If so, we bet you heard him say you should be present across all media channels and with tons of content and advertisement every single day. This is a great and effective way to massively grow and increase online brand awareness. But, it’s tough for new brands with limited budgets and small to average teams!
So, we recommend you don’t half-do everything, but rather full-do one or two things max. Choose one marketing technique, then design a clear strategy for your team. Then execute it.
2 - Engagement
Engagement is the second stage in the digital customer journey. Here, the question we aim to answer is: How can we transform awareness into engagement?
Awareness is temporary if it’s not combined with engagement. Think of awareness as the moment you look left and right before crossing the street. At that particular moment, you are aware of the traffic light’s color, whether a car is coming or not, and whether you should cross the street or wait. But you’d barely remember doing that after 10 or 15 seconds!
The same thing with awareness in marketing. People can simply take a glance at your ad, skip it, and never remember your brand again. Your efforts are now buried in oblivion! So, avoiding that requires engaging the audience, making it stare, look at, and check your piece of advertisement out.
To do so, you should create visually appealing designs, engaging articles, dynamic videos, incorporate effective chatbots… etc. Your piece of advertisement should be catchy to get the target audience’s attention. But once it does and prospects click, they should find themselves in an interactive and engaging website with advanced digital customer experience properties. This guarantees you will move seamlessly to the next stage!
3 - Subscribing
So you reached out to the potential audience and got many of them engaged with your brand. Now, it’s time we turn them into subscribers. The question we will be answering now is: How can we turn engaged visitors into subscribers so we can follow up?
At this point, we are trying to collect information about potential customers. The info can be exchanged for an eBook, webinar, demo, quote, call from the sales team… etc. In other words, you offer them a valuable and free tool/information that would make their lives easier, and to which they would be sharing their contact information in return.
4 - Converting
So, now that we have the leads’ info, we need to get them to take a micro-action! The relationship here converts and shifts from ‘I know about your brand’ to ‘I want to do business with your brand’. Accordingly, the question is: How do we get people to commit to our brand?
We usually commit to something either with our money or our time. So, we need to make the leads either spend time with us, in a demo session for instance, or buy our products.
To break it down, think of when someone books an appointment for a call with the sales team and attends the call. This means he or she now is a converted lead who is engaged with your brand and is ready to give time up for your brand. And the same goes for all the other forms of deployed magnets that target people’s time mainly.
However, if your business model needs people to pay you money directly, it’s a different story! Let’s say you are a marketing agency or a SaaS company, you can offer a guidebook or so for a small amount of money; $5 for instance. It’s not significant materially speaking, but it helps define the type of relationship you and your audience are building.
Both of these methods are of extreme value, and you’re about to find out why in stage number five!
5 - Exciting
This probably is the most important stage of all! It’s when we know if we’ve succeeded in all the former steps, and whether the next ones will be as great or not!
The former stage witnessed a transaction in the relationship you built with your customers! You managed to turn them from visitors or prospects to customers or leads. But if they are not happy and excited about what they have in hand, all your efforts will be of no worth.
If the purchased guidebook was boring and added no value, the people will never invest a dime in your brand again. And if you showed up to a meeting with a prospect with an unprofessional look, only spoke about yourself the whole time, and overall you left a bad impression… There would be no second meeting with that client and there would be no business at all!
In both cases, the people are not excited about joining you in the next stages of the journey!
What you want to do is to pay extreme attention and devote a lot of time testing and developing the product you offer or preparing for that meeting with a prospect. If you leave a good impression combined with bewilderment and understanding at the same time, people will certainly agree to another meeting. And they would pay more money for your brand. And certainly, they now are far more likely to join you in the next stages!
Remember, this is the most important phase of all!
6 - Ascending
The ascending phase is where the sale occurs. Only now, we start closing our customers to buy high tickets.
Notice how far the journey was before we finally reached high ticket closing! Most inexperienced marketers try to close their audience on a high-priced sale in the very first stage (i.e awareness). As a result, they end up leaving a negative impression on the audience, and wasting a lot of money and effort on ineffective marketing strategies. What’s even worse is that some marketers would try to solve this problem by improving their ad copy or the target audience, while the problem lies in their whole approach to marketing!
In other words, don’t focus on closing the actual sale in the moment of awareness, nor any of the first five stages! You will just scare the potential leads away. Prospects are not willing to give you their money if they do not know who you are nor understand why they should in the first place. Digital customer journeys that do not perceive awareness, excitement, and ascending as separate stages, will just waste a lot of your time and money.
7 - Advocate
Unlike digital buyer journeys, digital customer journeys don’t end with a sale. In other words, the fun has just started for you!
Your customers are now happy with their journeys and couldn’t be more satisfied with the service or product at hand. It’s now when they begin to leave comments, product or service reviews… etc.
People now are simply saying good things about your brand even without you reaching out and asking for it. Simply because the digital journey and the customer experience you granted them were top-notch.
You can even contact them or have one of your team reach out to them and ask to interview them to create a happy customer story. You can leverage that story and increase awareness and engagement because people tend to buy things they see others are happy with!
In other words, your former customers are now raving fans that advocate your brand!
8 - Promoter
DCJ's are like an empty loop. They only end to begin again!
The promoter is simply an advocate who is now spreading the news about your brand. In other words, your happy customers will start talking about you; thus increasing awareness of your brand. More educated prospects will simply reach out to you. And your only job now is to engage them, and walk them through the whole process again!
Why Should You Analyze and Optimize Your DCJ
So, now you’d be able to map and outline your DCJ. So, is that enough? Obviously not! You should constantly analyze and improve it in order to increase sales and improve the quality of the leads your marketing endeavors generate.
So, digital customer journey analytics simply refers to the collection, aggregation, classification, and analysis of customers’ data (i.e sales frequency, percentage of leads leaving in each stage… etc.). The goal of these analyses is simply to optimize the DCJ and increase your ROI.
When doing so, focus on optimizing the phases where the highest rate of leads is lost. For instance, if it’s the ‘Exciting phase’, we recommend you work closely with your team to create a product that will certainly appeal to the people more. You can also survey the lost leads and ask for their ticketings or feedback on why they’re no longer interested in doing business with you.
Map & Optimize Your DCJ With Vardot’s Template
Vardot built a template to help you map and optimize your digital customer journey. The template will enable you to outline and keep track of the performance of each phase during the whole marketing campaign. So, you can start by filling in what you will do in each box in the first column. For instance: how will you create awareness in the awareness box, what product will you be selling to create excitement in the exciting one... etc.
Then you can assess the performance of each phase during a campaign and save data in the second vertical column in front of each phase. Finally, you’d brainstorm ideas about how you can improve each phase’s performance, then take notes in the third empty vertical column. Once the campaign ends, repeat the process, and keep improving!
Grab our DCJ Template now!
In a Nutshell
You should create a seamless and smooth digital customer journey and constantly improve it. This is done by continuously testing new strategies and techniques, but within the proven eight stages map. With this article and our template, we believe you will be now capable of creating a great journey! But, don’t optimize the journey without improving the experience.
In this regard, we recommend you read: Digital Customer Experience in 2022