Creating Personalized Customer Journeys

By Author: skybridge infotech
Total Articles: 6
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What distinguishes the pacesetters is their ability to prioritize which customer segments are the strategic drivers of the business; craft experiences tailored for these segments; and align content to the decision stages in their priority segments’ journeys. With the following methodology, any organization can achieve pacesetter advantage.
It starts with identifying your most important customer types
All customers are not the same. Customers classify into groups. Some groups are more important to your business than others. The question is how to accurately select, segment, and prioritize these customer groups. A segment is a group of visitors who share similar characteristics and have been determined to benefit from the same experience. Segments can be defined by, for example:
Audience types
Stages in journey
• Product/Service categories
• Industries
• Personas
In Sitecore, you can use explicit data to target specific content to specific groups of visitors, providing a more relevant, personalized, and contextual experience.
To prioritize customer segments and focus ...
... initial personalization efforts on your most valuable visitors, use the PIE criteria. PIE stands for Potential, Importance, and Ease.
Potential is both the potential to increase visitor engagement by personalizing the experience, and the potential ROI of doing so
Importance is the number of contacts in the segment. Ease is how easily you can identify a visitor as belonging to a certain segment
We recommend that you start with segments that have the most potential (business value) and importance (size); then you can move on to focus on those that have lower importance but high potential (business value).

Mapping your customers’ journeys
A customer journey is the complete series of experiences that customers go through during their lifecycle and includes all of their interactions with your brand and organization. Today, customers are in control and progress through their engagement with your brand on their own terms; however, there are similarities in how segments engage through their journey.

It’s important to understand each stage of the customer journey so you can evaluate whether you engage them in the right channel for that stage, with the right message and content. How should you map your customer segments’ journeys? Create a cross-organizational team of people representing the touchpoints between your customers and your brand. Run an exercise where the team uses sticky notes to map and detail the following for each identified segment:
Steps in the customer journey
• Definitions of each step in the journey
• Customer touchpoints for each stage
• Key customer activities in each step
Then, use these insights to create a table that details the following for each step in the customer segment journey:
Stage
• Description of the stage
• Touchpoints/channels of engagement
• Customer activities/actions in that stage

With this clear understanding of your visitors, you are ready to create a Digital Relevancy Map for each of your segments.