Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 6: Tracking the Customer Journey

Touchpoint Marketing: Tracking the Customer Journey through the ELATE framework

This is the sixth part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second, third, fourth and fifth parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

Address

Improve retention by understanding and providing actionable insights about service breaks as they occur

  

Track

Know You Customer, and not just his finances!

Many marketers launch, manage and measure marketing efforts in silos or “swim lanes”: “I sent out X mailers, and got Y response/results.” Those results are measured against other direct mail campaigns, but never truly correlated with parallel marketing efforts across other channels; at best, a senior manager may review the overall results and make rough calculations. Like swimmers, marketers are furiously paddling with their heads down in their own lanes.

Touchpoint Marketing is all about looking at the powerful new “holistic models” that look and measure activities across all of the swim lanes. Or rather, how are all the Touchpoints collectively Linking into the ‘Customer Experience’ scheme of things.

Brands need to invest in complete holistic views of their customer ecosystem. Swim lanes and piecemeal marketing approaches will no longer work as companies demand more program accountability and results. But this is only part of a much broader drive for a complete holistic view of the customer ecosystem. Many factors affect marketing, such as distribution, sales calls, and innovation to just name three. Strong performance in these areas will naturally help your marketing efforts. Your brand overall has an enormous impact on your marketing (Apple is a premier example). Yet companies have done a poor job in calculating these as part of their marketing model. This needs to witness a complete and rapid overhaul. Companies should increasingly be able to identify these key drivers and allocate funds accordingly. They should be able to evaluate exactly how much affect customer service, for one, has on marketing success. If it’s large, they might decide to allocate funds now being funneled into marketing programs, into the customer experience and drive new business with existing customers. 

Increase new customer acquisition by leveraging social media to increase awareness and educate consumers about the brand.

We could also call this the “big pool” approach. Like Brand health tracking surveys, the approach intends to put money to our‘Customer-centric’ claims by virtue of Customer Health Tracks. With their eye on the total pool or picture, marketers will have a better grasp on which activities (across Touchpoints) are contributing the most, which are killing my customers and how they interrelate.

This will allow them to shift (and better target) budgets as needed, effectively directing funds to Touchpoints so that all are contributing more equally, and not a single of them are eroding my Brand persona.

Diligent tracking and churning of Social Media Customer Insights will always add to this picture -

• Who is engaging with your brand? (Social media influencers)
• What are they saying about you? (Top themes, emerging issues)
• Why are they interacting with your company? (Value propositions from the customer’s point of view)

To know more, continue reading the conclusive part of this seven-part series here