A central facet of digital marketing is the customer journey. This journey takes an anonymous visitor (either online or in a physical location) to becoming an identified prospect to the purchase transaction, and then onto becoming a happy customer (who might buy more) or an unhappy one (who needs some kind of special treatment to become happy again).
Simple enough – but for all you marketers out there who’ve been at this for a while, you’ll notice that there’s nothing particularly new about the notion of a customer journey. In fact, customer journeys actually date back to the dawn of commerce, thousands of years ago.
The central notion of a customer journey is essentially that the purchase transaction is only a part of a merchant’s hopefully lifelong relationship with their customer – and furthermore, that relationship is important to the performance of the merchant’s business overall.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling fish at an open air market, running a general store in the Old West, or hawking your wares online. Building relationships with customers that begin before they buy anything and extend well after their first purchase are the key to maximizing the value of each customer to your business, and thus the key to profitability overall.
Why, then, is there so much talk about customer journeys now, as though the rise of digital was somehow responsible for the entire notion? It seems that digital discussions have co-opted the customer journey entirely – leading to the concept of a digital journey. Does a digital journey even make sense?
Read the entire article at http://cxblog.dynatrace.com/index.php/2016/02/25/digital-journey-or-customer-journey/.
Dynatrace is an Intellyx client. At the time of writing, No other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this article. Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker.
