Prioritize The Audience Who Doesn’t Take Your Defined Customer Journey
Far too often, marketers spend too much time focused on the bottom of the funnel–the people ready to engage and set meetings. They end up neglecting to fine-tune and hone their processes in the middle of the funnel, losing opportunities along the way.
At Goose Digital, there are two types of audiences our clients typically deal with during a nurturing campaign:
Fully Engaged Audience:
- This audience does what you want them to do (e.g., book a meeting)
- This is likely the smallest percentage of your audience
Somewhat Engaged Audience:
- This group has some interest but doesn’t generate immediate conversions
- Typically, this is a bigger pool of your audience than the fully engaged one
There’s also a third audience to your nurturing campaigns: a completely disengaged one.
Unfortunately, the 100% unengaged audience will likely comprise the largest pool.
Your Audience Isn’t Engaged: How Do You React?
When 60% of your audience doesn’t engage, it shouldn’t be a simple matter of “our product/service/brand doesn’t connect with these people, so we’re leaving them behind.” You’ve invested far too much money into designing your campaigns not to maximize every facet of them.
Instead, it’s crucial to build in opportunities to learn about this disengaged base along the way and capture more information.
Here is some information we suggest gathering about your disengaged audience:
- Industry
- Geography
- Are they a decision-maker/influencer in their organization?
There is a chance those disengaged customers won’t fill in anything. However, the people who are only partially engaged with your campaigns will give you some answers. From there, you can apply that information to those who didn’t engage at all through language, content or creative approach, etc.
There’s More Than One Path to Conversions
These days, marketing automation tools do amazing things with reporting/analysis, metrics, and KPIs, allowing you to see various customer journey stages.
With all those scoring-based capabilities, you need to give audiences more than one opportunity to engage and present you with data.
For instance, in an email campaign, don’t solely provide the option to set up a meeting. Give the email recipients the alternative of clicking a link to your website to scope out more information.
Yes–you want the people who set up meetings right away. However, the person who clicks the link still indicates interest; they just might take a bit longer to nurture. Then, marketing automation tools can analyze that person’s behaviours and help hone processes that streamline conversions of those customer types.
Don’t Ignore Actions Happening Outside the Defined Path.
Mapping out a customer journey often involves predicting how your audience interacts with your marketing message. It’s meant to define a specific path and offer a blueprint. But what happens when customers veer off that path?
Marketers can’t miss those clues – such as website visits – that occur outside the structure of the ideal journey.
These actions offer a read on how these somewhat engaged customers interact with your brand.
To the above point, while the three to five emails sent out during a nurturing campaign are vital, it’s equally critical to look beyond that scope for answers.
Other interactions can happen in concert with those emails, such as sales reach outs, digital advertising/targeting on relevant platforms. From there, reporting, analysis, and metrics will all make a significant impact. Still, those insights will only present themselves once you look beyond the defined customer journey.
When marketing teams begin embracing the middle part of the funnel and immerse themselves in the nitty-gritty, conversions and growth reach new heights.
Need help with your own customer journeys? Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.