4 Revenue Marketing Strategies to Improve the Customer Journey

Facilitate A Seamless Customer Experience

One of the goals of revenue marketing is to facilitate a seamless customer journey for prospects at each stage of the funnel. It achieves this by streamlining sales and marketing processes to align its activities with the organization's overall goals.

Through revenue marketing, sales and marketing can work as a cohesive unit to achieve the same goal of attracting leads and converting them into customers (preferably repeat customers) for the business. 

One of the tenets of revenue marketing is creating a seamless customer experience through each stage of the customer’s journey. Why is this important?

Benefits of Improving Customer Journey 

Emphasize Customer Experience to Increase Sales

All B2B marketers should aspire to improve the customer's journey. Today's customers know what they want and will leave when it's not offered. Therefore, a positive customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have feature of a business – it is a distinguishing characteristic that sets you apart from your competition.

Some of the perks of improving your customer experience include:

• Increased sales 
• Higher levels of customer loyalty 
• A better reputation and image. Reputable businesses retain more customers and lower their marketing costs due to referrals from your current happy customers. 
• Improving your customer journey 

Revenue marketers play a central role in optimizing the customer journey and thus the customer experience. They do this by bringing together marketing and sales teams. As a result, revenue marketers demonstrate the importance of marketing in revenue generation in an organization.

As part of their responsibilities, revenue marketers provide an environment of collaboration and support between sales and marketing teams, encouraging them to approach customer experience as a continuous activity that starts with the right marketing touch before sales teams convert leads. 

Understand the Customer’s Journey and the Parts of the Journey You Can Influence

See your customers' journey

The customer journey tracks the steps a prospect follows from the moment they learn about your brand to when they buy from you. Understanding these steps is vital for revenue marketers who want to understand better and serve their prospects.

Understanding the customer journey starts with customer journey mapping. Customer journey mapping is a data-driven activity of predicting what actions a prospect might take after their first interaction with your business. 

It is a process that helps revenue marketers make decisions with their customers in mind and improve their prospects' experience at each stage of the buying process. 

Some of the steps to help you map out and understand your customer’s journey include:

• Profile your buyer personas based on their goals. It has to be done on existing customers and prospects for this to be effective. 
• Highlight the personas of your target customer. You should have learned what personas typically interact with your brand in the first step. The next step is to choose the most common persona and map their journey. You can do the same with other types of customer personas. 
• Outline all your touchpoints (the places your customers interact with you). Touchpoints may include paid ads, email marketing, social media, review sites, or third-party referrals. 
• Identify the actions your customers take each time they interact with your brand. This helps you identify where your customers might be having to take unnecessary steps to meet their needs. 
• Identify the emotions involved in each stage of the buying process so that you can deliver the right content at the right time.
• Understand your prospects' pain points or obstacles that keep them from taking the desired action, such as the cost of a product. 
• Take inventory of your resources or those you'll need to improve your customer experience. 
• Continuously analyze the customer journey map to identify any hiccups and fix them as you go. This means maintaining high-quality CRM data and using the reports you generate from the data. 

Employ Customer Segmentation to Create Unique Experiences for Different Types of Customers

Boost Revenue with Segmentation

While working on understanding the customer journey, you'll notice different buyer personas and market segments. For instance, if you sell a software product, you may realize your buyers range from small businesses to multinational corporations. 

These are different market groups with different budgets and needs. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all solution or price will not fit all of them. However, suppose you can segment your buyers into small businesses of less than ten employees or small businesses of up to 50 employees. In that case, you can develop a customer experience that fits each buyer. 

Customer segmentation in revenue marketing ensures that your customers receive a personalized experience at every step of the buying journey. In customer segmentation, you divide your customers or prospects into groups based on certain predefined traits. These could be demographics, income, personal interests, hobbies, personality, or industry, among other factors.

By doing this, you learn more about your customers and ultimately deliver content that addresses their needs and challenges. 

Customer segmentation also allows you to understand your customers deeply thus, creating campaigns that resonate with them and build customer loyalty. 

Here are some tips to keep in mind when implementing customer segmentation in your revenue marketing efforts:

• Set your customer segmentation goals. What do you expect to achieve from segmenting your customers? This sets the tone for developing a strategy to help you accomplish your goals. 
• Determine the groups you want to work with. Some of the groups you can use for customers could be based on demographics, geographic location, psychographics, technographic factors, behavior, needs, and the economic value of prospects. 
• Decide on the strategies you will use to reach each segment with targeted content that resonates with their needs and pain points.
• Regularly analyze your segmentation efforts to identify where changes or improvements are necessary. Consult with your sales, marketing, and service teams to determine how your customers have responded to your marketing efforts. You should also evaluate your customer segments each time you introduce a new product or edit your buyer personas.

Use Marketing Automation to Personalize the Customer Experience

Scale Personalization with Automation

So far, we've talked about how understanding the customer journey and segmentation can improve your customer's experience. Automation takes your personalization efforts to the next level and allows you to compete in a market where customers demand a better customer experience. 

Data is an essential element in personalizing the customer experience. But as businesses deal with more data every day, it becomes harder to keep track of the changing consumer needs and requirements manually. 

This is why automation is important. 

Automation streamlines personalizing each lead, thus saving time and ensuring your marketing and sales teams focus on tasks that they cannot automate. 

Some of the ways you can employ automation as a tool to enhance customer experience include:

• Automate customer service by providing 24/7 through chatbots to ensure your customer's problems are dealt with as soon as they arise. Automation tools handle the fundamental customer problems while more complex issues are transferred to your human team.
• Use automation to ensure messages get to the right customers, at the right time, and through the right channels. 
• Use email marketing automation tools to send out specific email sequences; for instance, when a user signs up to your email newsletter, you can start by sending automated thank you and welcome emails. You can proceed to provide them with content that matches their buyer journey. 
• Use automation to predict future customer actions based on their past activities and interests.
• Use automation to segment your leads.

Measure the Success of Your Efforts

Track Your Revenue

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Your revenue-driven marketing strategy requires metrics that you can regularly track to measure your progress on improving your customer journey. 

Here are some of the metrics you should be tracking with your revenue marketing strategy:

Financial outcome

Ultimately, a revenue marketing strategy aims to improve the customer journey and increase revenue. Therefore, metrics such as revenue and a customer's lifetime value are good indicators of the success of a revenue-driven marketing strategy. Other financial metrics include predicted revenue and revenue forecasting. 

Deals Acquired

An effective customer journey leads to more wins as customers receive the right message, at the right time, and through the right channels. Therefore, tracking the number of customer accounts you win helps you track the effectiveness of your strategy. 

Deals closed

In addition to the number of deals acquired per stage, revenue marketers should track the number of deals closed, including the contribution of each stage of the customer journey to the final closing. 

Other important metrics for revenue marketers include:

• Time to ROI
• The sales cycle (or how fast customers move through the funnel)
• Cost per opportunity
• Marketing ROI

Final Word 

Make Buying Easier

B2B consumers are as concerned about customer experience as B2C customers. They want their needs met and the right messages delivered to them through the right channels. In addition, today's B2B buyer is more sophisticated and wants a fulfilling customer experience throughout the buying journey.

Revenue marketing strategies such as understanding the customer journey, marketing automation, personalization, and tracking key metrics help marketers deliver a better customer journey to their clients.