Customer journeys in the world of CRM – those that relationship marketers build and draw, create and craft – are the brick-and-mortar of it all. Without these marketer-made drips and paths, streams of campaigns, and creativity, there is no relationship marketing.

But, just like in any case of bricks and mortar structures – it’s not enough, and one of the main differences between a flimsy shack and a state-of-the-art high-rise construction lies in planning.

For any marketer who is in the business of turning first-time customers into repeat buyers, insufficient planning is where things start to break down. For example, when a customer who returned a product is still getting emails on how to make the most of that same product they no longer own. That happens. A lot.

We call that a broken journey.

But it’s only one way CRM journeys can break. Another common way is when they crossfire. In other words, when the same customer is about to receive their new-customer messages, birthday promotions, holiday announcements, and flash sale campaigns. All at the same time!

See what happened to poor Peter.

Of course, no smart marketer wants to do that to Peter, or to any other customer – bombarding them with way too many communications causes over-exposure, bringing upon attribution issues, and creating an overall bad customer experience. In simpler words: you don’t want to annoy the heck out of your customers.

But while no marketer in their right mind would want this to happen, that does not mean all marketers have the tools to avoid it. It’s simple: If you are still mapping your journeys manually and enforcing them automatically – you can assume it will happen to you. Well, to your customers.

And even if you use a more dynamic approach such as setting campaign prioritization and customer exclusion rules – two things can still happen: 1) You can still miss something. First, cause we are all human, and we all make mistakes. And, secondly, as good marketers we want to create the most personalized experiences for our customers, so we create more and more journeys and segments. In that case, it’s safe to assume our customers will eventually find themselves on the receiving end of cross-firing journeys.

And 2) you can still end up sending messages that are not ideal. Sure, suppose you somehow managed to set your ALL prioritization and exclusion mechanisms in a way that would cover 100% of your customers 100% of the time. But even in that case, there’s still no guarantee that those rigid prioritizations and exclusions will always send the best possible message to the right customer.

In other words, if both customers A and B are eligible today for Birthday journeys and New Customer journeys – it may well be that customer A will respond better to the Birthday one, and customer B will react more favorably to the New Customer sequence.

But, if you pre-decided that the Birthday journey should rule all others, you lost the potential to generate customer B’s best possible experience.

The only way to make sure no customer falls between the cracks and that each and every one of them is always receiving the optimal message at each and every touchpoint is to let AI help with that. Help with what we call “orchestration.”

Because automation without orchestration is chaos, and no human marketer can make the best choice for every customer, every time. Only next-gen technology can do that. By letting AI help with that part of mapping our CRM journeys, you can focus on creating the best, most thoughtful, and unique segments, creative, campaigns. Even series of campaigns.

The advanced technology will then assure each customer gets the optimal, most effective marketing treatment, every time. It must sound like something your customers would love, right?

To learn more about how to avoid CRM journeys crossfire in the futureand accelerate your growth through your existing customers, contact us.

Published on December 22nd, 2021

Posted in

• Customer Retention

Gary Cohen