Read time 4 minutes
Exclusive Forrester Report on AI in Marketing
Why it matters:
Journey pruning is key to creating more effective, personalized marketing campaigns that maximize customer engagement and Return on Investment (ROI.) By focusing on high-performing journeys and eliminating ineffective ones, brands can boost efficiency, enhance customer experiences, and invest in strategies that work.
Key takeaways:
Imagine taking hundreds of customers down a journey that kills a customer relationship. They unsubscribe or ghost the brand and never buy again.
To avoid killing customer relationships – marketers need to prune the journeys that have a bad ending.
At the heart of this evolution is journey pruning – the process of identifying and eliminating underperforming customer journeys to optimize marketing strategies. Far from being a limiting practice, journey pruning is essential for streamlining efforts, amplifying what works, and delivering meaningful, personalized interactions at scale.
Journey pruning is the practice of testing multiple customer journeys, analyzing their effectiveness, and removing those that fail to meet objectives. Rather than letting ineffective campaigns drain resources, marketers can focus on refining and scaling successful journeys. This approach is an integral part of an iterative marketing strategy that prioritizes experimentation and optimization.
Journey orchestration is not a static process—it’s a continuous cycle of building, amplifying, and pruning:
This three-part model fosters agility, enabling marketers to pivot quickly in response to performance data.
Journey pruning focuses on eliminating unnecessary or underperforming steps to enhance efficiency and functionality in marketing strategies. By removing ineffective journeys, marketers can concentrate their efforts on the touchpoints that truly drive meaningful engagement.
This approach ensures that resources are allocated to the most impactful campaigns, streamlining efforts and delivering a sharper focus on customer needs and business goals.
In today’s marketing landscape, agility is critical. As brands strive to deliver real-time, personalized experiences, journey orchestration must evolve dynamically based on customer signals. This means constantly evaluating which pathways are worth investing in and which should be discarded.
Journey pruning is particularly vital for:
A critical measure of success in journey orchestration is the ability to identify and eliminate unproductive journeys. This shows that marketers are actively learning from data and refining their approaches. The more effectively a brand can "prune" unnecessary journeys, the better it can focus on creating experiences that resonate with its audience.
By adopting a surgical approach to journey pruning, brands can:
Journey pruning is not just a tactic; it’s a mindset that fosters agility, experimentation, and continuous improvement. It ensures that marketers meet and exceed customer expectations building, amplifying, and killing journeys to stay competitive.
Surgical pruning of bad journeys ensures a brand’s ability to continue to live and earn a customer’s loyalty for life.
For more insights on surgical journey pruning, contact us to request a demo.
Exclusive Forrester Report on AI in Marketing
In this proprietary Forrester report, learn how global marketers use AI and Positionless Marketing to streamline workflows and increase relevance.
Writers in the Optimove Team include marketing, R&D, product, data science, customer success, and technology experts who were instrumental in the creation of Positionless Marketing, a movement enabling marketers to do anything, and be everything.
Optimove’s leaders’ diverse expertise and real-world experience provide expert commentary and insight into proven and leading-edge marketing practices and trends.
