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Guiding the Customer JourneyGain Brand Advantage from the Very First Click

Daniel Gilmartin, CMO, BlueConic Inc.

© 2015 BlueConic Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The informa-tion contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. BlueConic disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. BlueConic shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The information and opinions expressed herein are subject to change without prior notice.

Table of Contents

Executive Overview ..................................................................................................................................................................2

A Long and Winding Online/Offline Road... ...............................................................................................................................4

Negotiating Off-Ramps & Detours ............................................................................................................................................4

Mapping the Journey: Leveraging the Historic Approach ..........................................................................................................6

Bridging the Gaps to a More Direct Route .................................................................................................................................8

How to Guide the Journey From the First Click..........................................................................................................................9

About Us.............................................................. ....................................................................................................................11

Appendix: Reference List ..........................................................................................................................................................12

1

Guiding the Customer Journey

2


Executive OverviewToday the customer journey — the ways in which the customer engages with a company or organization from first

awareness through purchase and referral — is more complex and unpredictable than ever. It is by no means a straight and

narrow path, but more of a long and winding road.

Over time and touch points, the journey incorporates traditional outbound channels like advertising, trade shows, direct

mail, customer call centers, retail outlets. It now also includes online/inbound channels across multiple devices: Website,

Social Media, Search and Mobile.

Marketers must not only learn to understand the journey, but also find ways to help direct it, optimize it and pick

it up again — even when prospects and customers get off and back on the path. This means that we must understand

individual customer journeys to deliver relevant messages, content and offers in real time and on the channel/device that

is active in the moment. This has remained an elusive goal.

Some traditional offline marketing disciplines have a fairly good handle on the customer journey as it relates to their

customer touch points. For example, User Experience and Customer Service professionals have developed methods

like Customer Journey Mapping. Other methods, including qualitative and quantitative consumer research, also help to

improve customer interactions in both offline and online channels.

Yes, we’re doing a good job of using traditional means to gain valuable insights about our customers in a general way. But

how do we leverage this knowledge for today’s marketing?

Prospects and customers are taking control of the buying process

and revealing far more about themselves along the way. Yet we

must bridge two significant gaps in our ability to create mutual

marketing success for both our companies and our customers.

1. How can we unify online/offline intelligence and engagement?

2. In online channels, how can we overcome the period of pre-engagement anonymity.

3


With the current state of marketing technology, we have the capability to know our customers better than we ever have

— even better than we think we do now — but we have yet to realize this potential. To motivate customer engagement,

we need to move away from campaign mentality. We must actually join the customer journey and recognize our web

visitors’ interests, needs, characteristics and emotions in order to win their hearts and minds with contextual experiences

and useful content.

We need better processes for shortening the period of anonymity. The earlier in the customer journey we engage, the

better chance we have to create competitive advantage, make a sale and build brand loyalty/advocacy.

A powerful new technology — BlueConic — now lets us begin learning about each prospect from the first click on a

website or ‘Like’ on a social media page. BlueConic can take a user’s intent in the form of an action or other data point in

the profile – and then go through a series of processes to identify that individual, potentially merge their profile with an

existing one for that user; assign them to a segment the marketer has pre-defined; apply intelligence to make a decision

about how to respond; and then trigger that interaction to the person in the form of a tailored message or other content.

All of these decisions occur in less than 24 milliseconds!

Companies can implement BlueConic immediately and use existing content and offers. They can then help direct the

customer journey — offline as well as online — rather than following it passively.

0.0024 seconds

intent

triggerinteraction

generatedecision

assignsegment

associateidentity

identifyprofile

interaction

4


A Long and Winding Online/Offline RoadThat evolution is picking up speed as customers — both B2B and B2C — adopt multiple online/inbound channels across

multiple devices — Website, Social Media, Mobile and Search. They are forging new paths that take advantage of the

channels most advantageous to them as they search for products and services to meet their needs.

And, in many ways, marketers are struggling to keep up. Ironically, a new

landscape resulting from technology advances is suffering from a lack of even

more advanced technology to solve new marketing issues emerging from rapid

change.

A recent report by eMarketer1 shows that 40% of marketers are using 10 or more

types of marketing technology applications. Each in its own way optimizing

the customer journey. However, the same report shows that 75% of marketers

haven’t been able to integrate these disparate silos. This results in clear gaps in

the customer journey at the channel hand-off.

Negotiating Off-Ramps & DetoursCurrently, companies are hard-pressed to follow the customer journey, let alone understand it. But to grow a business

and meet marketing KPIs, we must understand the journey. In fact, understanding the individual customer and helping to

direct and optimize his or her journey is the path to the next level of marketing.

If we can follow the journey, we can proactively provide stepping stones along the way, delivering relevant messages,

content and offers in real-time and in the channel or on the device that is active in the moment.

But here is the challenge: From the time a prospect

becomes aware of your company and offerings, their

engagement with your brand is anything but linear.

Prospects and customers may begin a journey and

engage for a while but get off and then back onto the

path at some future time.

This may have nothing to do with the quality of our products/services, the competitive environment, changing

technology or roadblocks put in the way by siloed online-offline marketing efforts. It may have everything to do with life

itself.

Life is not linear. It’s full of life-stage changes, evolving interests and unexpected twists and turns — despite what we

might plan. If we can read our customers’ transitional signals from stage to stage, we can engage more appropriately to

meet changing needs.

understanding the individual customer and helping to direct and optimize his or her journey

is the path to the next level of marketing.

5


For example, it stands to reason that if we provide products for young women, we’ll know them through early career,

marriage and into motherhood. As they move from one stage to another, we may lose them for a time, but depending on

our offerings and how we present them, they may return when they arrive at another phase in life. But can we recognize

them when they come back — or are we forced to re-start the relationship from scratch?

Traditional, demographic-based research can give us some insight to ‘group journeys’, say, “women age 21 to 34, college

graduates, living in urban markets”. Fortunately today, despite customers having gaps in their company interactions, we

still have the potential to understand and influence individual journeys when they return.

What a powerful idea!

The customer journey is not a linear path

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6


Mapping the Journey: Leveraging the Historic Approach

“If you don’t understand the journeys, you’ll rush to judgment with ill-timed surveys, miss important moments

of truth and fail to align operational data with customer perceptions” 2

Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

Traditional offline/outbound disciplines have a fairly good handle on the customer journey as it relates to their customer

touch points. User Experience and Customer Service professionals have developed methods — including Customer

Journey Mapping — to understand and improve customer interactions with their departments.

These efforts could yield even greater opportunity to leverage the integration of offline and online customer knowledge.

Let’s take a look at how traditional marketers approach the customer journey and how this approach can be leveraged in

the digital age.

A post titled, “Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience,”3 on the Harvard Business

Review blog defines customer journey mapping:

A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated — but necessary — such a map becomes.

Although the post explains that there’s no one right way to create such a map, it proposes that customer journey

mapping can be used to chart a small segment of the customer experience, such as ‘un-boxing’ a product. Or, it can

attempt to trace the entire process — from first awareness to purchase completion.

However, historically, there has been insufficient information available to accomplish this latter feat across all channels.

Customer journey mapping has been based on predictive modeling, largely informed by traditional customer research,

which, as stated earlier, is good for mapping group journeys.

While one-to-one customer interviews and ‘day-in-the-life’ research may drill down into the thoughts and emotions of a

group of individuals, these techniques are incapable of following the actual, individual journeys of millions of prospects

and customers.

And the data we collect online, which has the potential to offer us understanding of individual customer journeys, has

remained largely — if not fully — siloed from what we know about our customers from offline channels.

7


• adequate staff to manager programs (28%);• lack of budget to fund programs (23%);• lack of consolidated/integrated customer data (20%).

• cost effective;• salable to management;• capable of producing even more insightful data that can

benefit marketing efforts across all channels?

Yes, we’re doing a good job of using traditional means to gain valuable insights about our customers in a general way. But

how do we leverage this knowledge for today’s marketing?

In a survey amoung US marketing executives at enterprise companies in 2014, The Relevancy Group in 2014 uncovered

the top obstacles to understanding and optimizing a customers journey across channels4. Some of the most important

ones were:

So how do we enable our organizations to understand and guide the customer journey? How can we

connect online to offline marketing in a way that is:

Sophisticated, new technology systems can now make cross-channel communications better and easier, helping

marketers determine the next best step for contextual engagement with individual customers — and, potentially, the

more profitable step for the business.

8


Bridging the Gaps to a More Direct RouteProspects and customers are taking control of the buying process, and marketers need to change strategies to meet

customer needs and expectations.

Yet we must bridge two significant gaps in our ability to create mutual marketing success for both our companies and our

customers.

1. How to unify online/offline intelligence and engagement.

2. In online channels, how to overcome the period of pre-engagement anonymity, which we

refer to as ‘the marketing blind spot.’

Let’s examine the issue of anonymity first. We know less than we could about how customers engage with us online as

they can remain largely unknown and anonymous to us for long periods of time. Enticing them to identify themselves and

engage with us has been a challenge.

We have attempted to shorten the period of anonymity by dedicating considerable resources to creating offers that will

encourage anonymous visitors to engage. However we have been creating and delivering content without customer

context.

We’ve been operating online with the same type of ‘campaign’ thinking as we have traditionally done offline. However, if

we can change our online mentality from ‘campaign’ to ‘customer experience’ we could envision an unprecedented

opportunity — given the proper tools — to provide just the right offer to just the right customer in just the right moment.

We could leverage our previous investments

and use the real-time intelligence we gather

about our customers to create and deliver even

more meaningful offers. We could turn content

from simply useful information into experiences

with context that win the hearts and minds of

our prospects and customers.

However, at the moment, there is a gap in inbound marketers’ understanding of the customer journey. Content is being

offered to web visitors without relevance to their individual journeys up until the moment when they finally identify

themselves with an email address, username, or other unique identifier.

Even though we have more customer data available than ever, and are taking some steps to put it into contextual

timelines, we know less about our customers than we think we do– or than we should. What if we could recognize earlier

in the journey our web visitors’ interests, needs, characteristics and emotions?

there is a gap in inbound marketers’ understanding of the customer journey. Content is being offered to web visitors without relevance

to their individual journey.

9


In an article on mycustomer.com5 titled, “Measuring Customer Journeys Across Offline and Online Channels Can Be

Done!” the director of a web analytics consultancy put it well:

“If you can figure out the best methodology of picking up the user, the interested person who’s not become

anything yet, and taking them through to becoming the customer and tracking that journey, that’s gold dust,”

he said. “Because at the moment there is a huge disconnect in terms of capturing the online persona — it can

be done, but it’s tricky because there are so many different systems. Any CRM system is good at reporting once

you have the customer — knowing what they do and their preferences, etc. And online data can be collected

and reported on by web analysis tools. What we need is the joining of the break between online and offline.”

Providing more contextually relevant content would certainly help to shorten the anonymity period. But we must also

address Gap #1 — the process gap that keeps us from better connecting offline and online channels. For example, what

if a TV or direct mail campaign could drive prospects to a smarter landing page that would recognize respondents from

other channels/campaigns. Or if our website could make trial assumptions about first-time visitors and offer messages

in the moment in order to immediately begin understanding the visitor’s specific interests? Or if the call center could

instantly provide an offer based on online interactions?

We would begin to bridge not only the online/offline gap, but also the gap in our understanding of the customer journey,

helping to close the marketing loop.

Here’s where we need new and more advanced technology. One such software tool is already making a difference for

companies in the U.S and Europe.

How to Guide the Journey from the First ClickThe earlier in the customer journey we engage, the better chance we have to create a competitive advantage, make a

sale and build brand loyalty/advocacy.

It now becomes imperative that we don’t wait for visitors to engage/convert, but that we begin learning about each

prospect from the first click on a website or ‘Like’ on a social media page.

If we have the ability to immediately begin serving up trial offers to each new Web visitor, we can more quickly learn

preferences and truly accelerate the potential for engagement. This capability helps direct the customer journey — rather

than following it passively. What we learn online can more quickly translate to offline leverage, and optimize the whole

customer journey.

Companies can start this initiative immediately, using the content and

offers they’ve already developed and putting them to better and more

targeted use with the help of BlueConic.

This cloud-based software not only identifies new visitors, but begins,

proactively, to test client content, calls to action and offers, to begin

assessing interests, motivations and buying signals.

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BlueConic superimposes on existing technology providing a comparatively simple and immediate implementation path.

As the platform gathers data and learns more and more about each visitor, it stores all information in an individual profile

to which future knowledge can be added.

The profile for each prospect/customer will roll up data

gathered across channels and devices — i.e. an office computer,

home computer, laptop, smartphone, and tablet. It can also

learn from and inform offline outlets — call centers, retail

stores, customer service departments — to make all channels

more effective at ongoing customer engagement.

BlueConic scales to address enterprise level complexities. For example, a large publisher is using the tool to continuously

collect data for each individual (anonymous, non-customer and customer) visiting/engaging with its 25 labels/brands in

more than 60 different channels. To date the company has developed some 28 million profiles through which it is

following and guiding individual customer journeys.

Through BlueConic the company is connecting diverse channels including social media, e-commerce, news portals,

websites, customer service portals and outbound call centers. It is able to recognize engagement by profiled individuals

whether they are interacting via home or office PC’s, smartphones or tablets.

All of the tracked interactions are connected with its central CRM system containing all customer subscription and

transactional data.

With BlueConic, the anonymous period becomes shorter and more productive, enabling marketers to serve up the right

content and offers on the right device at the right moment and to begin guiding the customer journey from the very first

click.

BlueConic drives multiple marketing processes for this company including:

• Delivering specific relevant online articles to improve the individual experience;

• Delivering profile-based targeted offerings from third parties;

• Interacting with and guiding individuals to targeted in-company e-commerce offerings;

• Serving cross-brand targeted offerings (Brand A targets a relevant visitor to Brand B’s website);

• Interacting with mobile users through a mobile app to deliver additional customer-only content (iPhone and

iPad);

• Qualifying online sales leads and feeding them to the outbound call center. With BlueConic, the anonymous

period becomes shorter and more productive, enabling marketers to serve up the right content and offers on

the right device at the right moment and to begin guiding the customer journey from the very first click.

A PUBLISHER WITH 25 BRANDS AND 60 CHANNELS USED BLUECONIC TO

BUILD UP 28 MILLION PROFILES TO DATE

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About Us The future of marketing hinges on the ability to identify, understand, and interact with customers on an individual basis.

It is our mission to drive better outcomes by translating intent into insight to improve marketers’ actions. More than 70

brands, including Volvo, Boston Globe, ING and Ahold, currently leverage the platform to drive cross-sell and upsell initia-

tives, increase conversions and decrease waste to grow incremental sales and revenue. Founded in 2010, the company is

headquartered in Boston, with offices in Europe. Learn more at www.blueconic.com.

Follow us on Twitter @BlueConic and “Like” us on Facebook.

Copyright © 2014 BlueConic B.V. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.


Appendix: reference list

Resources

1. Marketing Technology: Nine Important Trends for Brands and Agencies in 2015 , eMarketer, Q1 2015

2. There is a secret to better CX metrics: Journey mapping, Q4 2012, http://blogs.forrester.com/maxie_schmidt_

subramanian/14-12-08-there_is_a_secret_to_better_cx_metrics_journey_mapping

3. Harvard Business Review Blog, “Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience”

4. The Relevancy Group, “From Acquisition to Advocacy: Discovering The Value of Lifecycle Marketing”, Q4 2014

5. Mycustomer.com, “Measuring Customer Journeys Across Offline and Online Channels Can be Done!”, Posted by Neil

Davies, Publisher

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