Why a customer journey is a must-have for any email program today

Having been in the email marketing space for over 20 years now, one of the things that still baffles me is the lack of customer journey emails I see. If you have attended any email marketing conference or webinar, you likely hear the terms personalization, segmentation, right time, and right message. Yet, developing an email marketing customer journey is seldom at the forefront of brands, even though we all know it is a must-have.

I was recently invited to participate alongside an ESP to discuss their customer journey capabilities and how brands can and should get started with a customer journey email program. The turnout exceeded their expectations, meaning brands understand the program's importance but might need help getting started. 

It is easier to develop a marketing email and deploy it to a complete list rather than mapping out a plan to deliver the right message at the right time based on where someone is in their unique journey with your brand. However, developing an email customer journey might be the most crucial part of your program and, in the end, will save you time and shows a higher ROI.

In this blog, I will summarize the basics, outline the importance, and provide tips for getting started.

What is a customer journey?

It is a series of tailored emails delivered based on behavior. This can be as simple as a welcome or welcome series to post-purchase, upsell, and re-engagement. Regardless of your industry, you have all this data on your customers. Using the data for better email marketing will drive better results and is also expected by customers today. 

If you have been in email marketing as long as I have, you know that some of the emails we define today as customer journey emails are emails we have been sending forever. When people ask me what are the essential journey emails that a brand should have, I usually list the following:

1)    Welcome/Onboarding

2)    First Time Customer

3)    Post- Purchase

4)    Abandon Cart

5)    Re-engagement

One of my favorite journeys that I built for a client was a post-purchase series for first-time wine buyers. We knew people would receive the order and ship confirmation emails, but we also wanted to build excitement while the customers waited for their shipment. The series was only three emails. The first email was timed to arrive between the order and shipping confirmations. It provided food pairing recommendations to prepare people before the shipment arrived. The second email provided tasting notes and was scheduled to hit the inbox just around the time the shipment would be arriving. The third email asked for feedback on the wine a few weeks later. This type of series allowed the business to build a relationship with the customer.

Now where would you go next on a journey like this? It could be to order again or to join a wine club.  The possibilities are endless as to where someone goes within and from a journey.

Why is this a must-have for your brand?

You know the saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” This goes for email marketing too. A customer journey is a perfect way to ensure you make an excellent first impression by building brand awareness and stronger customer relationships by delivering relevant emails at the right time.

While the journey's heavy lifting and setup take time, it will save you time and resources in the long run. I have clients who have loyalty journeys and post-purchase journeys. While we might need to swap content seasonally, the journey keeps on running, engaging their audience more quickly than we could with one-off marketing emails. This means these brands save time and money because they must develop fewer emails over time.

One of the best incentives for developing a customer journey is that it allows you to track your subscriber and customer engagement and pass them onto another journey that might be more fitting based on their specific behavior. For example, if a loyal customer stops buying, a journey to reengage them with an offer will likely address their particular needs and result in more conversions. If a new subscriber doesn’t redeem a welcome offer, a journey that reminds them might be precisely what they need to push them to purchase.

Getting Started With Customer Journeys

Setting up a customer journey strategy can seem daunting, but remember that once you set up a journey, it runs where your regular marketing emails will still need to be built.

The first step in creating a journey is to identify the goal of any journey. Is this to welcome new subscribers? Is it to guide customers on how to use a product they just purchased? Are you trying to reengage those who haven’t purchased in a specific time? Knowing the goal you are looking to achieve always needs to be step number one.

Once you know the journey's purpose, it is time to start mapping. While there are many tools to help with journey mapping, you can do it simply on a whiteboard. Understand where someone enters your journey, where they go based on specific actions, and when they exit or go on to the next journey. The one thing to remember about the journey is that sometimes there is not always a clear end. It is just about where a subscriber goes next in the journey.

Once you have mapped out your journey, use your ESP to implement it. We are so lucky in email marketing that all platforms today have incredible customer journey features to help with the implementation. From the small business platforms to the enterprise ones, I can't think of any ESP that doesn't have this capability.

However, your journey with journey building must go beyond the planning and implementation phase. Once you launch your journey, return to it and review your analytics. Understand what works and where there might still be gaps.

So, circling back to where I started, it continues to surprise me how few customer journey emails I see today, even with all our available tools and resources to make this process manageable. We know that customer journey emails are the best in class for email marketing. Creating a journey is not something that should be done later. It should be done now and be a priority for all brands. You will have better email marketing results and better customer relationships.

This Blog was originally published for Webbula