How To Optimize Your Email Marketing Customer Journey
Is your email marketing customer journey properly optimized? If you’re staring blankly at this blog post and shaking your head, then don’t worry. We’re going to tell you everything you need to know, and why you need to know it.
The thing is, optimizing your customer journey is the best way to get results. We’re talking better customer satisfaction, increased engagement, and, yes, even a higher conversion rate.
Those are the end results. Mapping an email marketing customer journey is a bit of a process. It might take a while to get every aspect just right, but this guide will help you get there.
Before you start thinking about the nuts and bolts of optimization, though, you should understand the stages that make up the customer marketing journey.
Let’s get this ball rolling.
1. Understand the stages of the email marketing customer journey
The standard email marketing customer journey has four distinct stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and retention and loyalty.
Each stage will look slightly different depending on your industry, but the basics are the same across the board. The awareness stage introduces the business or product and helps identify a need. The consideration stage highlights the benefit of the product or service, and retention and loyalty keeps customers coming back for more.
Let’s take a broad look at each, and see how you can use them to build your email marketing customer journey.
- Awareness stage
The awareness stage usually starts straight after a survey or a sign-up is completed. A welcome sequence gives you the opportunity to introduce yourself and what it is you’re offering. Make sure your recipients understand your values, as well as what your product or service is and how it benefits them. At this point, you’re laying a foundation for future engagement and positive brand associations.
- Consideration stage
This is where you need to show your worth. Showcase your expertize, demonstrate how you solve relevant problems, and prove you’re the best option. Hit leads with blog posts covering their pain points, testimonials, and case studies detailing how you solved similar issues for other clients. The data you glean from ScoreApp quizzes and other lead magnets will help you personalize your approach and content. Leave leads in no doubt as to how much value you can bring to their operation.
- Decision stage
We would never recommend a hard sell – not if you want to establish and nurture a long-term relationship – but you can nudge leads down the sales funnel. The decision stage is about creating some level of buy-in. That could be booking a demo or a place on a webinar, taking out an entry-level subscription or a trial, or making a first purchase. Time-sensitive special offers are one way to encourage leads to make a decision, as is access to relevant gated content.
- Retention and loyalty stage
A conversion is not the end of the story, not if you want a long-term relationship. Retention and loyalty are key, so make leads feel special with a nurture sequence that includes retargeting techniques. Retargeting isn’t just for lapsed leads and abandoned carts – it can be used for upselling and cross-selling to existing customers. The better the job you do at understanding their needs, the stronger your email marketing customer journey. The stronger that is, the better chance you have of increasing conversions.
2. Analyze and map out your current email workflow
You can’t plan for the future without examining the past. That sounds like fairly deep advice – and is true for a lot of things in life – but we’re talking about email workflows. By reviewing your sequences and workflows, you can see what needs to change going forward.
Look closely at your analytics data. What are your open rates, clickthrough rates, and unsubscribe rates telling you? Are they on a trajectory?
If you can identify an issue – a point in your sequence where leads are losing interest and dropping off – then you can make changes. A/B testing your subject lines, frequencies, and content will also show you what works best.
Once you have that, you can build a new email marketing customer journey without the assets that have been dragging your efforts down.
3. Segment your audience for personalization
You can’t try and speak to an entire email list and expect to strike a chord with the same piece of content. Your leads will come to you with different issues, different concerns, and different budgets – which is why it pays to segment your email list.
Segmenting your list allows you to get more personal and to send relevant content for increasing engagement and the chances of converting.
ScoreApp integrates with your CRM and email marketing platform, meaning any leads are automatically placed into segments within your email list. You can choose what criteria they’re segmented by, but we’d suggest separating them by:
- New subscribers and long-term customers
- Their actions, such as downloads, webinar attendance, and waitlist sign-ups
- Their purchase and browsing history, or by using specialist interest tags
- Location and scale.
Whatever tool you choose for your email marketing customer journey, segmenting your list is essential.
Every tool has tags and advanced options to enable lead segmentation, but it’s the data from your ScoreApp lead magnets that really gives you the insights for creating personalized campaigns.
With that data, you can speak to specific issues, offer solutions you know your leads are looking for, and demonstrate why you’re best placed to provide them.
Personalization is hugely powerful, especially when it’s powered by ScoreApp data and segmentation.
4. Optimize each touchpoint in the email marketing customer journey
So now you know what your email workflow needs to do differently, and who your audience segments are. Next up, your email sequences need to hit the mark.
Here are a few easy ways to optimize the elements of your email marketing customer journey.
Welcome emails
They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Your welcome email should be clear and engaging to establish a positive relationship.
Including a clear next step, like booking a call or a demo, will help guide warm leads down the funnel by deepening their interactions with you.
Nurture sequences
With a nurturing sequence, you need to be attentive to your leads. That means including educational content based on their pain points and interests, as well as testimonials and proof of your abilities. Your ScoreApp data will help you pinpoint what concerns your leads, and what relevant work you can show them.
What you don’t want is for your leads to drop off because you’re being full-on. Your nurturing sequence should never overwhelm your leads.
Be sparing with your nurture emails, and make sure each one is adding real value. Be someone people are happy to hear from, not a pest.
Sales sequences
Sales sequences need to guide readers further down the funnel without being too pushy. One way to achieve that balance is by using scarcity or urgency (low stock, limited-time special offers) to compel leads to act.
Creating strong, clear, and compelling calls to action (CTAs) is another. A CTA is your chance to show the reader what to do next, and how it will benefit them. Without that clarity of purpose, you can expect a large drop-off.
Post-purchase emails
A successful conversion is just the start. The work doesn’t stop there, and post-purchase emails are just as important to your email marketing customer journey as anything that’s come before. Thank you emails let you deepen the customer’s positive brand associations.
A request for feedback shows buyers they’re valued, while a ScoreApp survey will yield more relevant data for your personalization efforts.
By taking care to build and maintain such a positive relationship, you can include upselling and cross-selling opportunities (as well as referrals to partners) without looking like you’re leaning on them with the hard sell.
5. Create engaging and valuable email content
You want your emails to be engaging. You want them to be read, to be enjoyed, and for them to strengthen your audience’s connection with you. For that to happen in a way that feels natural, you need to do two things: add value, and make your emails personal.
Making sure your emails have a purpose, and aren’t generic inbox fodder, is a must for engaging leads. Meanwhile, a mix of relevant content types will bring the value that keeps them coming back.
We’ve already covered some of this, but think:
- How-to guides and product demos which show customers how to get the most out of your product or service.
- Case studies and testimonials which show how you’ve solved specific problems and helped other businesses improve their sales. Use ScoreApp data to pick case studies where the results match the goals of the particular email list segment. Businesses trust the word of other people in the same situation over marketing messaging. If you’ve got customers willing to shout from the rooftops about how good a job you’ve done, then it’s a no-brainer to make good use of their voices.
- Exclusive offers and behind-the-scenes insights make readers feel special. And, let’s be honest, we all want to feel like we’re getting special attention from time to time. Offers can be used to reward loyalty or retarget lapsed customers. Even a relatively small discount can be the difference that nudges people towards a sale.
As for personalization, it all starts with the subject line and the introduction. You should always include the person’s first name and acknowledge their interaction.
If they’ve signed up for a webinar, mention it. If they’ve completed a quiz, bring up their results. It shows you see them, and that you aren’t just sending everyone the same content.
The open rate for personalized emails is 5.7% higher than non-personalized emails, which is definitely not to be sniffed at or ignored when planning your email marketing customer journey.
6. Automate your email marketing process (but keep it human)
Automation is a fantastic tool, and it’s especially effective when paired with personalized marketing. It saves your sales and marketing teams time and boosts their efficiency. It also makes sure leads are contacted immediately, whatever the day or time, and not left hanging. All of that aside, there are pitfalls you need to avoid.
For a start, your automated sequences should never feel robotic. As we’ve said, personalization is key, but it won’t stick convincingly if your emails sound rote.
That’s why you should include authentically engaging elements, such as personalized PS lines and feedback requests. The more you can vary these across your leads, the better.
As for the bulk of your email copy, the tone is going to be important. A flat tone is never going to inspire engagement or positive associations.
You’ll have far more success with a conversational tone, speaking as one human to another. That way, even the most clearly automated emails will at least carry a positive and friendly vibe recipients can connect with and feel a human presence behind.
7. Test, track, and refine your email marketing customer journey
The work involved in creating and optimising an email marketing customer journey is never really complete. There’s always going to be a way to make it better.
A tweak here, a revized piece of wording there. It might feel like busy work, but the reality is that even small changes can have a big impact on the strength of your campaigns.
The key performance metrics to keep an eye on are:
- Open rates: Your open rate will tell you how impactful your subject lines are (or aren’t). No email will ever have a 100% open rate, though. In fact, the average open rate across all industries in 2024 was 36.11%.
- Clickthrough rates: Are your CTAs and body copy strong and enticing? Could they be more bold? Your CTAs must be explicit in their intent and benefits if you want people to follow them.
- Unsubscribe rates: How many people are opting out from your emails? Is your content relevant enough to keep them hooked? Are you going overboard on the frequency of your messages? The unsubscribe rate will help you figure it out.
Once you know what you’re dealing with, ScoreApp’s A/B testing capabilities will help you optimize your email marketing customer journey in real time.
With A/B testing, you can try different subject lines, content formats, body copy, and CTAs across different groups to see which performs best. Put the strongest together and test again, and you’ll eventually come up with the best possible combination.
After that? Well, it’s back to the start. Continually checking your metrics is the only way to get the insights for keeping your emails on top form.
Enhance your email marketing customer journey experience with ScoreApp
Creating an email marketing customer journey isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ task. It’s a process that has to be refined, and you’ll need to diligently check your metrics for insights into how to improve it.
Like we say, it’s an ongoing concern, but one that’s worth the effort. By optimizing your email marketing customer journey, and making sure each touchpoint is the best it can be, you stand a better chance of engaging your leads. Engaged leads are more likely to become frequent customers, especially when your workflows and nurturing sequences add demonstrable value to their businesses and help them reach their goals.
The good news is, you don’t have to do it alone – ScoreApp is with you every step of the way. We’ll help you implement A/B testing that feeds back with immediate insights, as well as putting automation into play to enhance efficiency and engagement.
Not only that, but with personalization powered by ScoreApp data, you can speak to leads on their terms. Lead magnets such as surveys and quizzes will give you a glimpse into their minds, showing you what’s important to them and where they want to be. With that information, you can segment your email list and get deeply personal.
Put all that together, and you can see how ScoreApp works behind the scenes to make your email customer journey that much more powerful.
Start optimizing your email customer journey today by trying ScoreApp for free.
