Transcript
Okay. So customer value journey. I’m going to talk about this real quick. This is probably the most important document you can have in your business when it comes to marketing. So I want to spend a good bit of time going through this. Essentially, what customer value journey is, is the journey that an absolute stranger goes through from never hearing about your business, to becoming a powerful brand advocate for your business. And throughout that journey, we’re going to go through each of these steps, we have to communicate different things at different points in the journey.
So the very first step is aware. This is when they first become aware of your business. They go from a state of never hearing about you to becoming first aware of your business. Then they engage with your business in some way. So maybe they click on an ad, they comment on an article, they watch a video. Now the relationship has changed. At every single stage, we have to communicate differently because we just want to move them from one stage to another. Subscribe, this is for the lead gen is usually they become a lead. They sign up for a newsletter with eCommerce. It could be they start following you. It could also be that they sign up for your email newsletter.
Maybe they become a fan of your page, but the relationship has fundamentally changed from engage to subscribe, because now they’re more of an active followup. Once they’ve gone and subscribed, we not need to convert them. Obviously for lead gen it’s converting into a lead and then ultimately a sell. On eCommerce that’s converting into a purchase. This is the most important stage of the journey, because this is the stage where everything changes. Customers are completely different to leads. The value of a customer is so much more than a lead.
Each business is slightly different, but in some cases, if you were to value how much your leads cost, or how much a follower costs, it’s almost a hundred times more valuable to get a customer. So it’s so important that we convert we change that relationship from them just being engaged and subscribed to becoming an actual customer or client. Immediately after we’ve converted them, we have to excite them. And so we have to have campaigns or services or practices in place that gives them a phenomenal experience for becoming a customer or client, because, again, it’s one of those ways that we can stand out.
There’s so many businesses out there that will just send, they’ll use eCommerce for example. I bought something from Amazon, or I bought something from a website, they send it to me in the box and that’s it. There’s nothing else in the box, there’s no, thank you very much for becoming a customer. There’s no, here is some other products that you can buy. There’s no welcome to the family. And I see this every, from so many business and I’m like, “You’ve got my undivided attention right now. I just opened this box. I’ve got all the adrenaline and the good vibes from purchasing something and you’ve lost me because you didn’t do else additional there to excite the buyer.”
So having stuff in place with lead gen, has anyone heard of the thank you economy? So we’ve lead gen, what’s called the thank you economy is there’s a book out there. Tell me what the name of the book is. Can’t remember the name of the book but it goes on about the thank you economy. If you Google it, you might be able to find the name of the book, but essentially every time someone becomes a client, having a thank you department that essentially either sends them out gifts, follows them on Twitter, just basically says, “Hey, thank you for becoming a client. We’re going to have a great time together. Welcome to the family. You made a great decision.”
All you’re doing with excite is rewarding them for making a decision. People respond to being rewarded and so if we can reward our customers and clients from making that purchasing decision, it goes a long way to moving that relationship. Once you’ve excited them we want to ascend them, and ascend means that we want to get them to buy more stuff. As Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, they all become more and more competitive, the customer acquisition goes up all the time. Like customer acquisition today of a new customer is so much more than it was five years ago, and it’s only going to increase. And so getting existing customers to spend more is considerably easier than getting a new customer.
Now, it’s great. We want to have new customers, but a good mix would be having 30% of your revenue come from existing customers. We always looked at having a good mix. And so we want to have campaigns and strategies in place to ascend them and sell them more stuff. Typical example is you go into McDonald’s, you order a Big Mac and they say, “Hey, do you want fries with that? Do you want to supersize it?” Immediately they’ve turned a five pound purchase into a seven pound purchase. And you do that enough, you’re going to increase the value of every single customer. Advocate, this is where you get them to advocate your business by whether it’s leaving a testimonial or leaving reviews, or it becoming a case study.
A lot of businesses will kind of leave this to chance like, “We’re a great business, but hopefully someone’s going to give us a testimonial or they’re going to give us a case study.” We want to have campaigns and specific actions in place that actually encourage this because we can then use the advocacy in some of our campaigns later on. And then finally promote. So whether you have a rewards program or you have a referral program, getting your existing customers to bring in new customers. Again, that’s going to increase the lifetime value of every single customer or client coming through your business. Any questions on this? Yes.
What’s the typical journey time?
Okay. So it does depend on business, on your industry, but let’s say this is home delivery. Home delivery for vegan food. I’m browsing on the internet and I see a video about vegan recipes. Oh, I watched that video I’m now engaged. After watching that video, it says, “Subscribe for our vegan cookbook.” So that’s all happened in 15 minutes. I subscribed for the vegan cookbook, I read through the vegan cookbook. Maybe I get distracted, I come back the next day. There’s a retargeting ad that says, “Hey, we saw you checked out our vegan cookbook. Would you like to sign up for our home delivery service? This month we’re giving a discount where you can get the first 30 days for free.”
I’ll try your vegan home delivery service. I try the vegan home delivery service. It comes to my door, but instead of it just being vegan home delivery, I get a paleo cookbook in there as well. So I’m like, “Oh, these guys are cool. They gave me a cookbook as well.” So I am using the vegan home delivery service, about two weeks into my service with them. I get an… Let’s go back.
About two weeks into my vegan delivery they send me an email or another ad that says, “Hey, by the way, would you like to sign up to six months? You’ll get three months off.” Okay. I’ll sign up for six months. I get three months off. That’s a good deal. After that, about 60 days after me using the vegan home delivery, they’re going to say to me, “Oh, by the way, how’s the experience been?” This first three happened in the space of 14 days. This, it just depends how long it takes you to use the product. But if someone uses your product every 30 days or every 20 days, this can come after that.
But because of how quickly you can go through a sequence, this stuff can happen immediately. Again, depends on how many touch points you need. But in the example I just showed you there, you don’t need that many touch points. Some people might need more, but if you build the sequence in, someone can go through that sequence in one day and they can go through that sequence in a week. If we were to use a lead gen, for example, let’s use, whose a lead gen business here? Sorry, I don’t want to give you… What’s your lead gen business?
Me?
Go on, yeah.
No, no, you go.
Well, so we work through referral marketing. So we have a private equity company, a corporate finance house, [inaudible 00:08:17] counselors that don’t provide the services that we do which is putting in an excellent finance director into a business. So we would get a call from one of those types of organizations. And then they would say, “You need to go talk to this client because they have the need for finance directing.”
Yeah. Okay. I’m going to take a stab at this. If I get it completely wrong I’m going to take a stab anyway. But let’s say they see a piece of content online about the importance of having an FD. They read that article, read that blog post, and at the end of it, there is a popup that says, “Why don’t you give us your contact for an additional report of the best ways to hire FD?” Then there is, at the end of that rapport, there is a button or an invitation to why don’t you schedule a consultation with our team and we can figure out what your requirements are? I would reckon that would take little bit longer, just because it’s a lot more trust involved, but it wouldn’t take more than if you set this sequence up.
Okay. So the good thing about when you sequence this stuff out, people can move at their own pace. If someone has a lot of intent, they’ll go through it very quickly. But if someone doesn’t have as much intent, we will keep picking up the pieces with the campaigns that we create. So they can go through it really quickly if they’ve got intent, or if they don’t have as much intent, they can go through it in their own time. The point is this could potentially happen in one day, depending on your business model. We have seen this happen, especially in eCommerce stuff. This happens really, really quickly.
Lead gen can be a little bit more, but as to your point earlier, if they have intent… Even when we build our campaigns for cold traffic, as in strangers, if someone has intent, they just go through that funnel a lot quicker. So if they’ve got intent, they can just go through it quickly. Even if that campaign is built for someone that doesn’t have incentive. So to answer your question, it can happen very, very quickly.