The customer journey: start with a bang
Examine your systems and make your audience's life easier
Welcome to Connectable #012 🧑🤝🧑
I am so thrilled to have you here!
I want to help your business succeed. I want to inspire change. I want you to question your current processes and align yourself with the needs of your audience / community. I want you to attract the right people, solve the right problems and create superfans.
The medium? Email.
Make life easier, not harder
Last week this meme made the rounds on my Twitter and Slack groups. It was a hit. Why? It’s just so damn relatable.
We’ve all been there, trying to do one simple task, while the business tries to squeeze every last drop of value from you. It feels like we’re starting to become immune to handling multiple tasks or information all at once.
Every time we go on to a website we have to navigate cookie pop-ups and ad pop-ups and pop-ups trying to sell us stuff. It’s like some video game. Get to all the x’s as fast as possible so you can get to the information you actually want.
I feel like we can do better. How about we respect our audience’s time and mental well-being. How about we aim to not stress them out, but make their life easier. Look at all your systems - every tiny step your customer has to take in their journey with you - and ask yourself, how can you make it easier for them? It could be anything from changing the font to changing the timings of your communication.
Takeaway: Take it easy.
Start the customer journey off with a bang
This week I wanted to briefly look at the bigger picture - mapping out a successful customer journey. More specifically, I want to look at the start because as my regulars know by now, the start, for me, is the crux of success.
Here are two questions to ask yourself when planning your customer journey with regards to your email marketing:
What does your customer do in the different stages of your product/service lifecycle and what should they be achieving in each phase?
From a business perspective, what does success look like at each point of the journey and sales funnel?
It is crucial to have a proactive strategy in place to trigger engagement a the start of your customer journey. By anticipating their needs you can try and eliminate possible churn.
So where should you be looking to optimise?
The opt-in
Where is your opt-in? Do you hide it away in a dark corner or do you flash it loud and proud? I personally think the best place is somewhere in between. You certainly don’t want to hide it, but you also don’t want to force it upon your readers. Place it in a prominent place but if you make it a pop-up I always advise my clients to (1) have it appear only on relevant pages and (2) give people time to check you out before you ask them for something - the pop-up should not be instant.
What should you ask? Don’t ask too much at the beginning, make it easy for them (no more than two boxes to fill in). Make sure you are also considerate of their data. Place data terms and conditions and unsubscribe policies in a clear place.
What CTA do I need? Give context and meaning to your value proposition. Make it easy for the reader to understand what action they are to take. But also don’t be afraid to stand out and promote your personality or an emotional response (download now or subscribe here can get boring).
Segment
At the beginning of the journey, interest and engagement are high—capatlise on this. Get your new onlookers to take part in questions or quizzes so you can learn more about them (how often they want emails, what kind of emails, what offers are they interested in). This also gives subscribers more control over their communications and relationship with you (they will thank you for this down the line).
Remember, it’s easier to keep your subscribers engaged from the beginning than to win them back once they’ve turned inactive.
It’s not all email
Email is important, of course, but to get the most out of it, it can be extremely beneficial to integrate it with other marketing channels. Use the end of your welcome sequence to invited your audience to check out your other channels and give them the agency to choose with which channel they want to interact with you. The more convenient the channel is for them, the higher their engagement.
These are just a few points to consider when planning for and creating the onboarding process in your customer journey. I hope at least that this allows you to see how important every small step is. This is not to overwhelm you but to get you excited about how, with a little planning, you can stand out from the crowd and serve your audience in the best possible way.
After more information and guidance on the welcome sequence specifically? I have an in-depth guide dropping very soon - follow along and keep your eyes peeled!
Newsletter of the week 📖
Looking for a new newsletter to dip into? Maybe even one to help you nail your tone of voice and learn some valuable lessons when it comes to writing for your brand and business? Look no further, I have just the one:
Tone Knob - Nick Parker
Join Nick Parker on his tone of voice journey and nerd out about the power of language.
Article of the Week 📜
- Fabian Pfortmüller
Key takeaways:
Gatherings and communities are two different things.
We join a community, but we attend a gathering.
A gathering has a beginning and an end, and often we count in days.
Most of us go to gatherings as “attendees”. We are there as consumers. We are there to experience something special (to listen to speakers, learn something new)
Gatherings don’t have to reflect your identity.
“The purpose of the gathering is strong enough to get us together, but it might not be distinct and valuable enough for us to make time for it on an ongoing basis.”
Tweets(perations) 🐦
That’s all for this week, thanks so much for the support.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please give it a like or share it with your friends/on Twitter. I’m still a newbie, so any help would be awesome! 💚
If you have any questions, want to say hi, or want to feature in my Q & As - my DMs are always open @LisanneNausner.
Have a fabulous week full of connection!
- Lisanne 🌻