Journeys

Customer centricity. Targeted communication. Contextual experiences. Customer delight. Personalized engagement... As marketers, we often come across these buzzwords in meetings, while surfing the internet or checking up on our favorite marketing gurus.

While you may come across these terms in various contexts, they all boil down to the same thesis: designing your engagement strategy around each user's behavior and preferences.

Building upon this premise, we created Journeys - a flexible, logic-based tool that unifies all your channels of communication, helping you deliver incredible experiences throughout a user's lifecycle.

What is a Journey?

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A Journey is a wholesome experience that guides each user through the various stages of their lifecycle by engaging them in the right moment, with the most relevant context, through their preferred channel.

How? Let us explain.

When a user interacts with your business through your app, website, or offline, they perform various actions as they navigate their way to achieving a specific goal. Depending on your business, these goals vary and could be anything like:

• Placing an order
• Purchasing a subscription
• Signing up to avail your services/consume content
• Learning a skill
• Managing financial investments
• Booking a travel package/ flights tickets/ hotel stays
• Booking movie/ concert tickets
• Purchasing fashion accessories/ gadgets/ home decor and so on.

In their journey to achieving these goals, each user experiences several stages. However, factors like a user's device preferences, channel preferences, expectations from your brand, spending habits, location, educational qualifications... invariably cause each user to experience your brand differently.

Creating consistent brand experiences across channels and platforms is one of the most prominent challenges marketers, like you and me, face today. This is why we created Journeys.

Each Journey experience can be designed using an If-this-happens-then-do-that logic, helping you:

• Identify the moments in which engaging users with informational/promotional content can help them proceed to the next stage.

• Spread out the experience over a period of time (because we don't want to be too pushy, right?)

• Contextually personalize each user's experience to their behavior, preferences, location and real-time interactions with your app, website, and campaigns.

Let's go over a use-case to show you how it works:

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Creating a Journey to Motivate Users to Complete Their Purchase (E-commerce)

Let's take the example of an e-commerce platform (app + web) that exclusively deals in fashion wear and accessories.

They recently launched multiple holiday season offers on their platforms in a bid to drive sales and it worked brilliantly! Within a week, their conversions were up by 2x.

But, there was also a problem.

Stats indicated that a high share of users added products to their cart but failed to go through with the purchase. This is behavior is commonly referred to as 'cart abandonment' and can easily be curbed with an effective engagement strategy.

And this is exactly what marketers of the platform decided to do!

Here's how they planned the Journey experience:

Problem Statement: Cart Abandonment

End Goal: Purchase

Target Audience: All users who add products to cart but don't purchase

Plan: Offer users an additional 10% off on their entire purchase and a cashback too, if necessary.

Strategy: Specifically engage non-purchasing users with a series of messages, spread out over 2 days.

• How? - Observe the purchase behavior of all users who add products to cart, for a day.

  • Then engage all users who haven't made a purchase with a personalized Push Notification offering 10% off!

  • We'll observe the purchase behavior of all users who received the discount offer for a day and nudge non-purchasers through the same offer, but via Email.

  • Then, we'll wait for another day to see if these users make a purchase. If not, then we'll make one last attempt at motivating them with 10% off + cashback and cease communication.

• Where? - Push Notifications and Email.

Here's what their Cart Abandonment Journey looked like (minus the jumping users :P):

And just within 2 days of launch, the Cart Abandonment Journey achieved a 3x uplift in conversions!

Sounds exciting? Let's show you how you can leverage Journeys to engage, convert and retain your users, better.

Planning a Journey Experience

Here's a framework to help you build & optimize your lifecycle engagement strategy, as per your business goals.

Step 1: Identify the Problem Statement

Ask yourself, what do you seek to solve with the Journey experience?

1. Are you trying to keep users informed (bridge a communication gap)? This could be anything like:

• Helping users track the status of their order.
• Helping users track returns on their investment.
• Engaging users with updates on their interest categories.

2. Are you trying to get users to act (convert/move to the next stage)? This could be anything like:

• Signing up to create an account.
• Starting a free trial.
• Purchasing a subscription/ product/ service/ gaming credits/ membership plan.
• Investing in a portfolio.
• Referring more users.
• Adding product/service reviews/ app store rating.
• Sharing on social media.
• Booking a flight/ hotel/ holiday package/ travel experience.

3. Are you trying to drive platform engagement? This could be anything like:

• Consuming content (streaming shows, listening to music).
• Attending live classes, seminars / completing an on-going course.
• Exploring new features/ promoting products (new collection, product launch, seasonal offers, new courses).
• Playing a game/quiz.

4. Are you trying to retain users? This could be anything like:

• Reminding users to renew an on-going subscription/ investment/ policy.
• Periodically engaging users with related content/ product recommendations based on their purchase history.
• Wishing users on special occasions like their Birthday/ Wedding Anniversary.

Step 2: Identify the End Goal

Ask yourself, why do you want to build the Journey experience? What returns will it generate?

• Will it help you enhance your brand's cross-channel experience?
• Will it help you drive platform revenue?
• Will it help you meet your conversion goals?
• Will it help you drive platform engagement?
• Will it help you drive user retention?
• Will it help you build a seamless O2O experience?

Step 3: Identify the Target Audience

Ask yourself, who is at the root of the challenge you're facing?

• Is it new/ existing users?
• Is it inactive/ active users?
• Is it active users who haven't converted yet? (cart abandoners/ search abandoners/ users who browse and leave)
• Is it churned users?
• Is it brand loyalists?
• Is it subscribers/ premium members?
• Is it users located in a specific country/ region?
• Is it users who have specific technological preferences? (Mobile/ desktop/ iOS/ Android)

Step 4: Make a Plan

Ask yourself, when is the right time to introduce the fix?

• When users perform a specific action OR sometime after their interaction?
• When users enter/exit a geofence?
• When users update or change their preferences?
• When users don't perform a specific action?

Step 5: Build the Strategy

We'll combine answers to the statements from Step 1 to Step 4 to build a viable engagement strategy on the Canvas. We've broken down Journey experience strategy into two parts:

Part 1: How do you plan on engaging your users?

Dig into the stats of your previous campaigns, cohorts, funnels and other CRM data to identify the most viable tone and method to initiate a conversation with your users (and keep it going over a long period!) Once you have the insights, ask yourself:

• Will you appeal to the user's emotions?
• Will you incentivize the user's actions by offering a discount?
• Will you reinforce the value proposition of your brand by showcasing how it has benefited other users?
• Will you engage users in the context of their behavioral history and preferences to achieve your goals?

Part 2: Where do you plan to engage your users?

Identify the most viable channels of engagement that will help you meet your goals. When doing so, ask yourself:

• Does the user journey span across various platforms (app, web, offline store)?
• Which channels do my users prefer to connect with my brand?
  • This could include any or a combination of Push Notifications, In-app Messages, SMS, On-site Notifications, Web Push Notifications, Emails & WhatsApp Messages.

Step 6: Identify Prerequisites to Execute Strategy

Once you have your strategy in place, create a checklist to identify all the data points, creatives/content, and tech support, you need to execute it.