Customer Journey Analytics: Market to People, Not Data Points
Here’s why customer journey analytics is so important:
You know that embarrassing moment when someone greets you by name, and you realise you’ve forgotten theirs?
Or perhaps you remember the name, but can’t recall whether they’re a work colleague, your child’s former teacher, or first baseman of your old rugby team. So you mentally scramble for the context it will take to show that you remember and value this person’s presence in your life.
Brands are facing that same social awkwardness, but on a massive scale and with revenue on the line. Marketers are frequently called to personalise customer experiences with little context beyond the last website visit or purchase made. Getting it wrong can lead customers to seek out a brand that truly “gets” them.
Customer journey analytics is the key to seeing your customers as people, not just a disjointed set of data points. Our latest guide, Market to People, Not Data Points: Analysing the Full Customer Journey, dives into this concept in detail.
Read on for an overview of customer journey analytics, why it matters, and what it can do for your business.
What Is Customer Journey Analytics?
In general terms: customer journey analytics is the practice of uniting and analysing customer data from many different channels—both online and offline—to generate insights. Customer journey analytics can spot trends, identify your most valuable customer profile, provide crucial context for marketing to individuals, and much more.
Currently, many marketers rely on web analytics to better understand customers. This includes data like links clicked, time on page, and bounce rates. But as customer journeys grow ever more complex, this type of data only gives a partial picture of what leads customers to a purchase decision.
Why Customer Journey Analytics Matters
When you bring together online and offline customer data and apply intelligent analytics, the added context can fuel much smarter marketing. That means more memorable customer experiences, more conversions, more upselling, and longer relationships with customers.
Without customer journey analytics
Imagine a customer from California is on a business trip to London. It’s sunny and warm in California, but freezing in the UK. They get a notification of a new email from Coffee Shop LLC, their favourite coffee chain. The email says, “We miss you! Notice you haven’t stopped by in a while. Come into your home store today and get a free iced coffee.”
This email is of incredibly limited use to our poor chilly American. But marketing is doing the best it can with scant information: This customer hasn’t visited our shop this week and usually comes in every Wednesday. That’s all they have to work with.
With customer journey analytics
Now imagine the same scenario, but with customer journey analytics working behind the scenes. Now, marketing has location data that the customer opted into when they downloaded the coffee shop’s app. They have third-party travel history tied to the customer profile, so they know the customer is in an unfamiliar town. And they have weather data to see the difference between the climate the customer is used to and the one they’re shivering in right now.
Now, when that email notification pops up, it reads: “Brrrr! Hope you’re keeping warm today. Click this link to find the nearest Coffee Shop LLC franchise and take 25% off any hot drink.”
With added context, we’ve gone from a useless check-in email to one that provides empathy, direction and a valuable offer. And the best part: All of this can be done in microseconds and without human oversight.
Adobe’s Unique Approach to Customer Journey Analytics
It’s possible to build your own marketing personalisation framework by cobbling together solutions from multiple vendors. There are even some single-vendor solutions that claim to analyse the full customer journey. But Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is more efficient than a do-it-yourself solution and more effective than other vendor offers. There are three key elements that set it apart:
- Integration. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is compatible with a wide variety of other systems, including CRM and sales solutions, customer service platforms, and more. It can connect to, and process data from, virtually any source.
- Simplification. Most analytics solutions require data scientists to query the data and present results. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics reduces the overhead and the time spent waiting in the queue for results. It’s built with self-service in mind, with low/no-code querying that anyone can learn to use. It’s a drag-and-drop, intuitive user experience made with marketers in mind.
- Efficiency. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics reduces the time and effort it takes to generate insights. It also streamlines workflows between sales, marketing, customer service and the data team.
Ultimately, these elements contribute to measurable business results. Adobe customers have seen a host of benefits through more data-driven, hyper-relevant automated and personalised marketing:
- Higher response rates
- Higher conversion rates
- Increased upsells and cross-sells
- Increased lifetime customer value.
Level Up Customer Journey Analytics
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is a great place for marketers to start their journey. Combine it with Adobe Analytics to bring in web-based data and Adobe Target for personalisation recommendations and testing, and you have an even more powerful suite of tools.
To truly maximise the potential of your customer data, Adobe Experience Cloud hosts a set of solutions that work together. These tools can automate the process end-to-end, from data to insight to action to optimisation:
- Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RTCDP) consolidates customer data and creates individual customer profiles that can be queried in real time. It includes tools for data governance, identity management, and advanced segmentation.
- Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), as discussed, can analyse data from online, offline, and third-party sources in order to glean insights about customer behaviour.
- Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) Is an automated system for putting these insights to work, managing optimised engagement for more millions of customers and improving its approach over time.
Get Started with Customer Journey Analytics
Every brand interaction that your customers have is sending a message. Is your brand saying, “Where have I seen you before” or “Hey, it’s you! Here’s where we should go next?”
With customer journey analytics, you can make potential, present and future customers feel seen and valued by bringing the right message to the right person at exactly the right time.
Read our full guide, “Market to People, Not Data Points: Analysing the Full Customer Journey”, to learn more.
Ready to get started? Get a free demo of Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.