Journey management software

A: The term “customer journey” refers to the entire process of a customer interacting with the brand, from the moment they start researching the company to the point when they stop engaging. Customers go through various stages in the overall journey, from awareness to conversion to repeat purchasing and interact with the company through different touchpoints.

A: Once a company understands how their customers interact with their brand throughout the entire relationship, they can deliver relevant, personalised messages that help move the customer closer to conversion or to each next step of the customer journey. Journey management software helps companies collect customer data, create and deliver personalised experiences and gather analytics. All the information  goes into one place, which helps overcome issues with siloed data. And customer journey management software allows companies to use automated journey logic to quickly and efficiently move customers through the conversion funnel by automatically sending out specific messages based on actions the customers take.

A: If a company is looking to purchase journey management software, they have plenty of options. They can choose to go with software from a cross-channel marketing platform company or from a smaller, more specialised provider.

Each type of journey management software has similar core functionality — they all help companies track how the customers are moving through their sales and marketing funnel. The differentiator is what type of other add-on services these companies have. Adobe, for instance, has journey orchestration tools, which allow companies to design different journeys based on how they define milestones in their funnel. And those eventually connect to the marketing channels that they can activate.

Some smaller journey management software companies offer orchestration capabilities along with management capabilities and some don’t. Many stop at the orchestration phase, but offer connectivity to third-party data for adding more information to customer profiles and further defining audience segments. These can then also push out marketing campaigns.

A: One mistake companies sometimes make in the journey management process is having different teams using different systems and not communicating. This prevents companies from being able to gather all of their customer profile data into one place, which makes it difficult to accurately map the customer journey. Without an accurate journey map, it’s difficult to provide the right information to help the customer take the next step. Companies can avoid this problem by using customisable software with add-ons that allow each team to share data with the others.