Get to Know Your Customers by Creating the Final Customer Journey

“Get to Know Your Customer Day” happens on the 3rd Thursday of every quarter (January, April, July, October). It’s a great reminder to reach out to your customers and let them know how important they are. This builds trust and shows how much you value their business. Luckily, it’s easier than ever to observe this day and develop deeper relationships with your customers, no matter how big your business is.

Giving a personal touch at scale

For this quarter’s Get to Know Your Customer Day on July 21st, we’re highlighting the importance of using automations—a chain of events that run when triggered by starting conditions you define—in your customer relationship strategies. As you scale your business, it’s easy for strong customer connections to deteriorate. But as your contact list grows, so does the importance of keeping those connections.

Keeping these relationships shouldn’t seem daunting; it should be exciting! You have a wealth of resources at your disposal: automations, integrations, and free tools and templates to help you create the perfect setup for your business.

With ActiveCampaign’s 180,000+ customers, we’ve learned a thing or two about how to give a personal touch at scale.

Here are 5 of our takeaways:

1. It’s all about the journey—so track it!

Each customer who interacts with your brand is on a journey unique to them. Knowing where your contacts are in their journey is vital to understanding their needs and habits. By closely monitoring where each customer is, you can analyze their interest levels, identify specific customer needs, and provide an individualized experience.

ActiveCampaign provides you with a plethora of automation and resources to locate and engage your customers at the various parts of their journey. To gauge interest in your company’s emails and contacts, try using automations and a scoring system that adds or deducts points to customer scores based on actions they take. This provides you with a quick understanding of their engagement level and how warm the lead is.

Other automations provide insight into different stages of the customer journey. Lena Anderssen, founder of Go! Running Tours, uses tracking to keep in touch with customers as well as reactivate old ones. As travel has increased, so have tour bookings in cities all over the world. Lena can easily identify inactive customers who may have purchased pre-pandemic and push them through a re-engagement sequence.

Adding tracking automations helps you get to know your customers better and sends the consistent message that your business cares about them and the relationship you’ve built.

“With ActiveCampaign, we can get away from just doing the basics to doing something that shows who we are and that we really care, because we know these people, and we want to keep connecting in a meaningful way,” said Lena.

Explore other engagement and customer journey tracking automations:

2. Utilize site tracking and behavioral targeting

A valuable way to gain vital information about your customers’ wants and needs is through website forms. But it’s just as crucial to use what your customers may not explicitly tell you. This information can be easily collected through site tracking and behavioral targeting.

As soon as someone opts into your list, you can begin tracking and targeting them. You’ll learn which pages they visited (and when), how many times, and the various paths they’ve taken on your website. This data, combined with the other invaluable information ActiveCampaign collects (such as location history, social profiles, other tags, etc.), gives a rich case study on each contact—ultimately allowing you to create detailed customer profiles.

By utilizing behavioral targeting and site tracking, SoundSnap has been able to identify its customers’ needs and interests. SoundSnap tracks repeat actions (eg visiting a page multiple times or searching for variations of a word) and on-site searches to better understand what exactly customers are searching for. (Finding a specific sound in a database of 250,000 can be tough!) By tracking these actions, SoundSnap can then curate and send the perfect collection to each customer—helping them create film masterpieces.

3. Follow up on high-quality leads with high-quality content

Once your contacts have made a purchase, signed up for an event, or requested a service, it’s essential to remember this isn’t the end of your journey with them. Maintaining strong relationships and building brand loyalty means connecting with customers on a regular basis. An automated follow up sequence can help

Choosing the right follow-up depends on where your customers are in their journey. For example, reaching out to new customers may seem intimidating—breaking the ice can be difficult. Site tracking and behavioral targeting can make it easy to set up an automation that your contacts trigger once they visit a specific, important page such as a product or pricing page. After moving through a specified wait time, they then receive a personalized 1:1 email—starting a natural conversation with them.

This automation will help draw customers back to your website and can lead to new sales and purchases. But this isn’t the time to leave your customers hanging—another follow-up is in order. Octonationa non-profit organization, fosters a love for octopuses and has created a connected community of octopus lovers with the help of purchase follow-up automations.

“The great thing about what we do is the educational component,” says founder Warren Carlyle. “People love it when we follow up a purchase with a blog on the latest research about the octopus they were interested in. We rarely get people who unsubscribe because we stay so focused on our vision and mission.”

Each customer journey is different, so every follow-up can be unique. Explore other ActiveCampaign follow-up recipes to find the ones that best match your customer needs.

4. Create an authentic experience with your customers

Tracking the journey, targeting customers, starting conversations, and building the perfect follow-up automations all culminate into the perfect, authentic experience for each customer—which is vital for getting to know them. The next step is to keep the relationship strong and authentically connected. ActiveCampaign’s Customer Experience Automation (CXA) can help your company’s authentic experience run itself.

Authenticity doesn’t mean bombarding your customers with emails every day but instead staying in consistent contact with relevant information. For example, Johann Berby, founder of Groove Like a Pighooks people slowly, then continues to find ways to delight and surprise them throughout their customer journey.

“As a customer who’s bought the product, they go into what I call the Jacuzzi,” says Johann. “It’s just for relaxing—but they still get automated emails from us with our best blog posts and videos, and we get lots of replies saying ‘thank you.’ Personalization helps people to feel they’re being heard.”

Authentic engagement can be implemented throughout your entire customer journey. If you have an upcoming event, gathering attendee data can be key to its success. Together for Safer Roads (TSR) utilizes CXA integrations with Salesforce other Gravity Forms to have a seamless flow of vital registration information from their website into their ActiveCampaign databases. This allows for easy tagging, segmenting, and ultimately, personalized follow-ups and event reminders without so much as lifting a finger.

Communicating with customers across all platforms and channels is the final key to creating strong, authentic relationships. Using multiple platforms to send timely, relevant messages keeps your customers engaged and reminds them you care. Try out these resources to see for yourself:

5. Find out “what’s worth it” to them

After getting to know your contacts through each part of their journey, you must identify what will motivate them to purchase your product or subscribe to your content. ActiveCampaign helps you do this through various automations that can easily be integrated into the customer journey.

gated content is anything you give your audience—such as a discount, ebook, or more—in exchange for their contact info. To find out which content is “worth it” for your customers, our automation to A/B test gated content can help leading to more contacts in your marketing and sales funnels.

As your customers travel through their journey, relevant communications become increasingly more important. Utilizing conditional content lets you send content and offers tailored to them. This focus on personalization helps maintain good customer relationships, increase open and conversion rates, and improve deliverability.

Getting to know your customers can be the most important part of scaling your business. And with ActiveCampaign, it’s also the easiest! Companies everywhere use ActiveCampaign to create authentic relationships and personalized customer experiences.
Find out how ActiveCampaign can help you create great customer relationships and grow your business today with ours 14-day free trial.