EMBiz: It's Time to Re-evaluate Your Customer Journey

It's Time to Re-evaluate Your Customer Journey

Cody H. Owens

Hi Cody here, Content Director at Elevate My Brand. And in this EMBiz video, I am here to encourage you to re-evaluate your customer journey. So 2025 is almost upon us as wild as it seems it is true. So you should be putting together your 2025 marketing strategy. Now, if you're not, please do. Part of that should be looking at your customer journey and seeing based on what data you have, how your customer journey has changed this year. How have your customers’ lives changed? What about your business has changed? And does that impact how your customer goes from awareness, your first point of contact with them to making that conversion point at the very end? And then also how do you continue that relationship afterward? So you need to start evaluating that.

Determine Your Current Customer Journey

And I have five questions for you to ask as you're going through that process of re-evaluating your customer journey before I give you those five questions. I think it should go without saying that in order to re-evaluate your customer journey, you need to first know what your customer journey is. If you do not know what that is, you've never done that research or maybe you did that research 6, 12, 18 months ago, or maybe you've done it recently, but it's all in your head. Make sure that you re-evaluate it now, and make sure that you put whatever you have done on paper, it doesn't have to be beautiful, formal or gorgeous. It just has to be on paper, has to be institutionalized in some sort of way and there has to be consensus on your team, bring in all your stakeholders and thought leaders from across your organization to make sure that everyone agrees on what that customer journey looks like and see if anyone has any insights on how to update it.

Find Your Breaking Points

Now, considering that you have your customer journey down on paper and everyone's agreed on it, of course, you do, then these are the five questions you need to ask yourself as you're re-evaluating your customer journey. As we go into 2025 and beyond the first one, is, is there anything broken a pretty obvious question? And of course, you're not gonna just think that anything is broken and leave it, but you need to dive in and look and see if anything is broken. So if you believe that your first point of contact is going to be an ad that drives to the website that drives to an email sign up that drives them to social media, you need to make sure that all of the like jumping off points from each of those to go to the next one is not broken that they can actually get there and that it's clear. And that's how your customer actually works because if it's just a theory, but you notice that no one is actually signing up to the emails from the website or no one who opens the email is actually going over to social media,then either something is broken in the way that your customers interact with your brand, or there's something broken in the way that your brand understands your audience. So make sure you are asking the obvious but hard question of is anything broken here? 

Assess Your Messaging

The second question is, can I improve my messaging? So things could be completely technically perfect, right? Everything could be set up well. But if the messaging is not there to make it clear what you want the customer to do and what the possibilities are for your customer, then that is a problem as well. So make sure that in your customer journey, you have defined messaging between all of those stages of the funnel from awareness to decision making to make sure that it's very clear what you're asking them to do and what they actually want to do at that stage.

Reflect On Your Personal Touch

The third question to ask is, can I make it more personal? Personalization is huge and it's never not gonna be huge in marketing because marketing is all about relationship building and relationship maintenance, building those relationships with your customers. So they're always top of mind when they need your product or service or brand in some sort of way. So you need to start asking yourself as you re-evaluate that journey, is there anywhere along this journey that we can personalize things whether that's putting your last order and their emails or whether that's creating separate landing pages based on your different buyer personas for all of your different ads sets, so find ways to personalize that journey because that's gonna really like lubricate it and make it easier for your customers to go through that process.

Build Your Automations

The fourth question is, can I automate it? So not only do you want the customer journey to be easy for your customer, you want it to be easy for you too. And even if you've re-evaluated your customer journey in the last three months, I promise you there's a new tool or strategy out there that's gonna assist you in automating your customer journey because there are new tools and systems coming up all the time, all kinds of a and machine learning that's gonna help you make that customer journey easier to track and develop internally.

Evaluate Your Branding

The fifth and final question is, do I need to update my branding? So is the way that you're talking to your customers is the way you're presenting yourself at all of those stages along the funnel, is that still aligned with who you are and who you want your customers to think that you are? Is your logo up to date? Are the colors correct? Is there different branding from different eras of your company along different areas of the funnel that's making it a little confusing for your customers? Make sure that you're asking yourself if you are presenting your brand identity consistently across the customer journey as well.

So those are five questions among many that you should be asking yourself as you're re-evaluating your customer journey to make sure that it's as easy as ever for your customer to go from point A to point Z in your customer process.