At a time when customers have high expectations and many choices, orchestrating their journey is crucial for brands that intend to stand out, build trust, and foster long-term relationships. Orchestrating the customer journey ensures that customers receive consistent and personalised experiences across all touchpoints. A seamless journey can lead to increased satisfaction and trust in a brand.
What is customer journey orchestration?
Customer journey orchestration (CJO) allows marketers to reach potential customers on a more personal, intuitive and effective level. It involves understanding the customer’s path, from the first point of awareness to purchase and loyalty—and proactively guiding and influencing their progression through this journey.
A sophisticated customer journey orchestration program coordinates the management and automation of touchpoints, interactions, and processes a customer encounters across various channels with a brand over time. By understanding and actively managing the customer journey, businesses can guide potential customers through the sales funnel more effectively, addressing pain points and capitalising on opportunities, thus leading to higher conversion rates.
Why it matters
Personalisation at scale
Orchestration allows companies to deliver personalised experiences to vast numbers of customers simultaneously. Instead of broad, one-size-fits-all campaigns, brands can engage audiences based on their behaviours, preferences, and history. By meeting customer needs and preferences at every stage of their journey, marketers achieve a greater degree of loyalty and growth.
Effective resource utilisation
With a clear understanding of the customer journey, companies can better allocate resources to the most impactful touchpoints and interactions. Data from various touchpoints is aggregated, giving businesses a 360-degree view of their customers. This translates to more informed decision-making, stronger strategy development, and more effective deployment of marketing budgets.
Proactive problem solving
By monitoring and orchestrating the customer journey, companies can identify and address potential product experience or customer service issues before they escalate and lead to customer turnover. This proactive, responsive approach turns potential disappointments into opportunities for greater brand loyalty and long-term customer relationships.
Improved brand consistency
Customers often interact with brands across multiple channels, such as email, social media, website, and in-person. Orchestration ensures the messaging and customer experience remain consistent across all these channels. Brand identity is reinforced, and messages and touchpoints build on themselves to maximise marketing investments.
What you need to get started
Customer journey orchestration offers an unprecedented ability to engage with customers meaningfully. Embarking on a successful customer journey orchestration discipline involves several strategic and operational elements.
1. Define your goals and your team
Creating a customer journey orchestration program is a journey unto itself. Start by establishing clear and measurable goals for what you want orchestration to help achieve. Your goals may include improving customer satisfaction, increasing retention rates, or driving sales. Identifying specific objectives will keep you focused, guide your strategy and help measure success.
Talent and collaboration are equally as crucial. You want to build a cross-functional team with members from marketing, sales, customer service, IT, and any other disciplines that influence the customer experience. Your team should work towards common customer-centric goals, using shared KPIs to measure the success of your efforts.
2. Understand your customer
Orchestration is not a substitute for knowing and empathising with your customer. It’s crucial to understand customers on their terms, not yours. Gain a clearer and deeper understanding by collecting and analysing qualitative and quantitative data. Conduct market research, customer interviews and surveys, and utilise behavioural data to create detailed and dimensional customer personas.
Processing and analysing collected data can be overwhelming. Be sure to enlist analytical tools and software to help identify patterns, predict future behaviours and segment customers—enabling you to create specific and effective journey strategies.
3. Map the customer journey
Identify and explore all the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand—across different channels. Visualise the path customers take from initial introduction to conversion and beyond. Make efforts to understand customers’ motivations and pain points. This process should highlight moments of engagement, friction points, and opportunities for personalisation.
Your complete map also gives you a framework for potential engagement points for each journey stage. Determine the types of content, channels, and messaging that resonate with each customer segment—and map these to the relevant journey stages.
4. Select the right technology stack
With the customer journey mapped out, you can turn to orchestration. Successful customer journey orchestration programs require a combination of appropriate, cohesive technology platforms. The best solutions should enable data integration, analytics, communication, and automation. Solution components might include a Customer Data Platform (CDP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, marketing automation tools, and analytics platforms—all working together seamlessly.
In choosing the right tools, include scalable architecture as a key feature. Flexibility and scalability ensure that your email marketing needs are adequately met as your business grows. This eliminates the need to switch platforms—and the loss of resources such a disruption creates.
5. Implement, test, and optimise
Iteration and measurement are fundamental to an effective launch. Take a phased approach to your customer journey orchestration, starting with a pilot or specific segments, and scale from there. Continually test different aspects of the customer journey, gathering feedback and using the insights to optimise the journey flows. This iterative process is crucial to improving performance and ensuring that the orchestration meets the needs of your customers.
It’s important to be deliberate in rolling out your orchestration program. AI and automation can work wonders in reducing the effort of compiling and aggregating data, but there is no shortcut to a strong customer journey orchestration discipline. Your customers are unique—and so is your business. A testing mindset is invaluable.
The right orchestration tools make all the difference
Like all aspects of email marketing, successful customer journey orchestration requires the best tools and software possible. Robust, scalable and flexible platforms are fundamental for brands to effectively and efficiently engage with their audiences in a meaningful and personal way.
High-performing email automation platforms should empower marketers with a full suite of tools that streamline creating, managing, and optimising email campaigns. Among the many options available, Upland Adestra stands out as the most powerful software for email marketing and customer journey orchestration programs. Here’s why:
Intuitive user interface
Adestra has been meticulously designed with user experience in mind. Its interface is visually appealing and highly intuitive, making it easier for marketers and businesses to create, manage, and send emails without a steep learning curve. This streamlining is crucial for businesses that cannot afford delays in their communication strategies.
Adestra users create beautiful emails using the accessible code-free editing tool, including live RSS feeds from their site. The drag-and-drop automation customer journey builder saves time and enables decision-making based on the journeys which drive your conversions—and cross-sell relevant products from your portfolio.
Advanced personalisation
Digital audiences expect personalised experiences. Adestra empowers organisations to go beyond simple interactions with audiences, and makes it easy to build strong connections that lead to lasting relationships.
Adestra’s robust personalisation features allow users to craft messages tailored to individual subscribers based on preferences, behaviours, and past interactions. Advanced segmentation helps brands engage audiences with personalised content based on device, location, and subscriber demographics. Such precise targeting further enhances user engagement and boosts conversion rates.
Comprehensive analytics
Data-driven decision-making is crucial for successful customer journey orchestration programs. Adestra helps marketers understand these metrics—to better refine their email campaigns and ensure their messages resonate with their audience. Such valuable data provides the ultimate dynamic content experience for subscribers.
Through real-time testing, reporting and analytics dashboards, Adestra provides advanced insights into subscriber behaviour, open rates, click-through rates, and more. Adestra users can dig deeper into the data with deliverability and inbox placement audits, click-to-conversion tracking, and engagement reporting—to realise a 38:1 email ROI.
Scalability, reliability, and deliverability
Whether a small start-up or a large enterprise, Adestra delivers with a unique multi-layer structure and scalable and adaptable functionality that fits any marketing portfolio. As the business grows, Adestra ensures that all email marketing needs are adequately met—with flexibility that eliminates the need to switch platforms, saving time and resources. Adestra users can also easily connect to their DMPs with efficient onboarding and product migration.
One of the most significant challenges in digital marketing is ensuring that emails reach subscribers’ inboxes and don’t end up in spam folders. Adestra’s top-notch deliverability rates ensure that messages are effectively delivered, increasing the chances of engagement and conversion. Through multi-variant testing, Adestra users learn and improve their conversion rates with every email.
Integrations
Adestra’s ability to seamlessly integrate with other business tools, from CRMs to e-commerce platforms, means businesses maintain a cohesive digital ecosystem. Adestra integrations simplify processes, improve efficiency, and provide a holistic view of customer interactions. The result? Adestra users easily automate personalised, high-performing emails that hit the inbox—with no migration disruption.
Upland Adestra: A powerful and versatile solution
For orchestrating a customer journey, there is no better solution than Upland Adestra. Its unique combination of user-friendly design, advanced features, and top-tier reliability makes it the preferred choice for organisations that want marketing performance without losing time and resources.
Adestra helps increase engagement while saving time—through a visual journey builder that enables the drag-and-drop creation of complex multi-touch journeys. Adestra users design beautiful emails without using a line of code thanks to an intuitive email builder and built-in render previews. Adestra also allows marketers to uncover clear insights with rich reporting and analytics, tailor messages to every subscriber, and maximise the success of every send.
Far more than just email software, Adestra serves as a comprehensive marketing platform for engaging with customers and growing subscribers. Hundreds of publishing and media brands rely on Adestra to deliver tailored email and digital experiences to their users and subscribers with personalised, targeted emails and up-to-the-minute content.
For marketers who want to understand, engage, and grow loyal customers, Upland Adestra delivers. Its combination of features and flexibility allows users to build and orchestrate customer journeys that translate into thriving relationships. To learn more, chat with a member of our team today.