A customer journey describes the interaction path that customers or other important business stakeholders take with a company or product/service.
These journeys can be measured, and mapped, and then managed to help marketers create better customers experiences along every interaction step. They are often broken down into stages or even sub0-stages.
The Scope of a Typical Customer Journey
Typical end-to-end customer journeys will show every significant interaction with a business or product, from awareness and discovery to consideration, purchase, use, and eventually advocation.
The Three Core Steps of the Customer Buying Journey
Awareness
Potential buyers (or prospects in B2B) have a need/desire or discover they have a problem that needs to be solved. Often, the first step is for the prospective buyer is to conduct research around purchasing options or to further validate or define their need.Consideration
Consideration
With the need or problem now well defined, buyers move on to phase two, which involves researching various product/service options to find the best fit for their needs.
Decision
During the decision phase, buyers will narrow down their purchasing options and ultimately make a decision on which product or service they will purchase.on
The Post-Sales Customer Journey
Assimilation/Use
During this stage, the customer is now regularly using the purchased product or service and is satisfied or seeing value. At some point in this stage, they may also make a repeat or upset purchase or renew an initial contract.
Advocacy
In the final stage, the customer becomes a reference or advocate for the seller's product(s) or services, either by participating in customer success activities for the company (B2B) or becoming a self-motivated advocate by other means (social media, forums, word of mouth).
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a documented pathos the customer journey stages mentioned above.. The allows marketers to gain insights into common customer behaviors and pain points at every step and how to optimize and improve them..
Snowflake for Marketing Analytics
Snowflake can play a critical role in surfacing the necessary data insights from customer journey data for effective customer journey mapping.
The explosion of marketing tools has also led to an explosion of new marketing data points and data sets. However, with so many point solutions, data can quickly become fragmented and siloed. Many marketing teams are struggling to obtain insights, deliver personalized engagements and experiences, and boost MarTech stack ROI.
Snowflake’s platform virtually eliminates data silos to create a single repository for a single copy of your data. As a result, marketing teams can extract deep insights and deliver timely, relevant and consistent customer messaging and offers. With Snowflake, deliver faster marketing insights, increase relevance, and improve marketing ROI.