A customer's digital customer journey experiences have a great impact on whether or not they will complete the journey to conversion and then continue to repeat it. One of the most simplified representations of the customer journey has five steps:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Evaluation
- Decision
- Retention
However, with the rise of digital experiences through a multitude of channels, the customer journey is more holistic and no longer directly linear. Facilitating the customer journey means providing quality interactions during every touchpoint they have with your brand.
There are many tools that can help you guide the customer journey and nurture leads along the path. A content management system (CMS) maximizes digital customer experiences and provides crucial data for continuous improvement. Through personalization, and intuitive content management, a CMS can help drive conversions and increase repeat business.
Defining Audience Segments
Before you can even begin to map a customer journey, you must first know as much as you can about the different types of audiences to whom you're marketing. You likely already outlined target personas, so a CMS helps sort contacts into your designated segments and learn more about their wants and needs.
With a CMS, lead scoring allows you to define rules that give contact points based on various touchpoints. Once they've hit a predetermined threshold of points, they are sorted into the appropriate personas.
Leads with a score below the threshold may still be in the interest or evaluation stages, so with that knowledge, you can nurture those contacts with a variety of digital experiences supported by a CMS.
Analyzing lead scoring and persona data can help you provide the right personalized content and experiences needed to increase your conversion rates.
Touchpoints
A CMS allows marketers to make meaningful connections between touchpoints and conversion rates. To institute lead scoring, you define specific web visitor interactions and assign points to be added to the contact profile. Each touchpoint can have different values based on the level of engagement or scale of the interaction.
So if a visitor registers for one of your webinars, they may receive 10 points, but if they visit your "Request a Consultation" page they could be assigned 50 points.
With a CMS like Sitefinity, you can track the impact and conversion rates for touchpoints such as:
- Page visits
- Form submissions
- File downloads
- Search terms
- Registrations
Conversions
Digital customer experiences managed with a CMS-backed website makes it easy for visitors to move from the evaluation stage to decision. And since customer experience is set to be the number one brand differentiator, personalized content is an excellent way to capitalize on the customer journey's evaluation and decision stages.
A CMS allows marketers to tailor elements or even entire web pages to identified persona segments. Prospective leads are more likely to convert if they are seeing messages they resonate with.
But don't get hung up on the thought that a conversion equals a sale. A conversion can be anything that brings a visitor closer to the final decision stage of the customer journey. Real-time digital experiences can be incredibly useful to the visitor and you as a marketer. Allow for customers to choose their own appointment time, offer a cost calculator, or embed your Twitter feed right on the home page. These types of real-time experiences give customers a sense of control and offer your marketers even more information about user behavior. With a CMS, you can implement experiences that will help your clients and leads all along the customer journey.
Retention
You want your site visitors to keep coming back to your site. That's where intuitive content management comes into play. If your site remains static or doesn't provide valuable information, then there is no reason for a customer or lead to return, decreasing the potential of more conversions.
A great example of providing up-to-date, valuable information for clients and leads is the filtered resources based on life stages that InGen helped define for Old National Bank. Financial education for clients and leads offers valuable insights for every life stage, from just starting out through to retirement. This helps keep visitors coming back to the site as they transition from one stage to another. For institutions like banks, a long-term look at the customer journey is essential. There are conversion opportunities within each stage, but the goal is to retain clients for their entire life.
Want to learn more about how a CMS can maximizes the customer journey? Request a consultation with our web professionals to see how we can help implement or customize your CMS-backed website.
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