Get an overview of key findings, insights and trends on how leading teams are measuring and optimizing customer journeys and customer experience from Pointillist’s survey of over 700 CX, marketing and analytics professionals worldwide.

It’s no surprise that customer experience is now a make-or-break factor for business success. But how do leading organizations optimize their customers’ journeys, improve customer experience and measure its impact on their business?

To find out, Pointillist surveyed over 700 CX, marketing, and analytics professionals worldwide to uncover key trends, insights and benchmarks on:

• Top-of-mind challenges and priorities
• Effective strategies, tactics and approaches
• High priority metrics and KPIs
• Key characteristics, capabilities and practices that separate top performing teams from the rest of the pack

In this post, I’ll highlight some of the key survey findings in our 2019 State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement Report.

[Read the Full Article on the Pointillist Blog]

The post Report: The State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

Get an in-depth overview of 10 different approaches to behavioral segmentation (including both B2B and B2C examples) that can be used to better understand your customers and maximize results at every stage of the customer journey.

Knowing who your customers are is great, but knowing how they behave is even better. -Jon Miller

Customer segmentation has always been important. But now that personalization and customer experience are make-or-break factors for business success today, effective segmentation is an absolute must. Understanding what customer experience is and how to best go about it in a positive way is essential, especially when it comes to a business’s net promoter score which is important for any organization that wants to ensure that its customers are getting the best assistance available, that is why effective customer segmentation has been looked at in terms of positive business outcomes and what that will mean for future growth.

However, according to a recent Forrester report, only 33% of companies using customer segmentation say they find it significantly impactful. According to the report, the main reason companies fail is that they are still using traditional customer segmentation approaches without leveraging the breadth of customer data and advanced analytics techniques available today.

In other words, they are not using a modern behavioral segmentation approach.

In this post I’ll bring you up to speed with an in-depth overview of 10 different approaches to behavioral segmentation (including both B2B and B2C examples) that can be used to better understand your customers and maximize results at every stage of the customer journey.

[Read the Full Article on the Pointillist Blog]

The post 10 Powerful Behavioral Segmentation Methods to Understand Your Customers appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

Learn how the most successful modern companies leverage customer behavior data and analytics to drive customer acquisition, retention & growth, and why you should too.

According to research cited by McKinsey, organizations that leverage customer behavior data to generate behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.

Want proof?

Look no further than Amazon, Netflix, and Google-all of whom have built their entire respective empires around a nucleus of customer behavior data and analytics. Customers are of course the most important aspect of any business and without them, even the best thought-out businesses won’t succeed.

In a digital world where customer-centricity, personalization, and customer experience separate the winners from the losers, it’s no coincidence that these companies thrive. Before long, it will grow increasingly difficult to compete in any industry for those who are too slow to follow in their customer-centric, behavioral data-driven footsteps, for instance, a marketing professional could benefit highly from creating and using a personal marketing consultant marketing funnel for their business, enabling the marketing professional to monitor where his prospective customers have the ability to come from, as well as what actions convince prospective customers to turn into a retained customer base.

And yet, it’s amazing how many organizations still only take advantage of a mere fraction of the behavioral data at their fingertips.

In this post, I’ll bring you up to speed on why customer behavior data is so important today, how it can be used to drive results, and why every company needs to adopt this approach.

[Read the Full Article on the Pointillist Blog]

The post How to Use Customer Behavior Data to Drive Revenue (Like Amazon, Netflix & Google) appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

Learn 7 ways taking a growth hacking marketing approach helps teams drive rapid business growth through innovation, experimentation, agility, and big ideas that move the needle.

In recent years, the term “Growth hacking” has climbed to the top of the most commonly used marketing buzzword list like an Adele song on the Billboard Hot 100. But like many-a-marketing-buzzword, its actual definition and practical application can seem ambiguous. So what does growth hacking really mean in the context of marketing? Here’s one (very) short definition:

Growth hacking marketing is a highly agile and experimental approach that typically leverages cost-effective modern digital marketing tactics to rapidly grow and scale a business.

To me, it’s about testing and finding the most efficient and effective ways to move the needle and make the biggest impact possible (as soon as possible) to build a tidal wave of long-term, sustainable growth.

If you happen to go to market with a super sexy, innovative and disruptive product, that certainly makes life a lot easier for an aspiring marketing growth hacker. But any company with a solid solution that solves problems for customers, good market potential, and a kick-ass team of marketers has the potential to do some serious growth hacking marketing damage.and won’t have to worry about a thing.

However, due to the nature of growth hacking marketing, the means to success can call for some significant internal shifts in mindset, approach, and culture for a marketing organization. It also elevates the importance of innovation, experimentation, “out-of-the-box-thinking” (ugh, I hate that phrase forgive me) and the need to stay nimble and agile.

7 Ways to Use a Growth Hacking Marketing Approach to Skyrocket Results

1. Not Being Afraid of Big, Bold Changes, Risks or Failure

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Edison #innovation #growthhacking @gDAZ
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This is probably an obvious one, but if you’re not on board with this, you probably should stop reading now.

If you want big results, you need to be willing to take big risks.

I’m not saying your marketing organization should be run like the wild west. Order and consistency is key to building a foundation for sustainable growth. But being super conservative all the time is not going to open the growth hacking flood gates.

Sometimes it takes a little calculated chaos and willingness to step out of your comfort zone in order to make real progress.

Learn from your mistakes, try not to make the same ones twice. But you need to be prepared to fail. Again. And again.

In my opinion, it’s not about making change for the sake of change, and just throwing absolutely everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. The big risks you take should be justified by a strong hypothesis, data, or analysis. And occasionally, you just have to trust your gut.

As they say, if you play with fire at some point you’re bound to get burned. But hey, that’s the price you pay for the chance of creating a spark that could ignite an organization.

Of course, you’ll hopefully be testing and monitoring every experiment, so you will always be able to quantify and minimize the damage.

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new” -Albert Einstein #innovation #growthhacking @gDAZ
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2. The Google 10X Mindset

Google CEO Larry Page is famous for his philosophy that instead of focusing on ideas that can grow a business 10%, focus on the ones could grow a business 10x.

Sure, this mindset can be viewed as extreme, and perhaps not attainable or realistic from a goal-setting standpoint in many cases.

But in general, I think it’s good to at least keep that 10X in the back of your mind.

Whether the goal be revenue, leads, conversion rates, or whatever KPI you are trying to impact, if you’re always keeping your eyes open for those 10X ideas and opportunities, and taking a step back every once and a while to scan the big picture for them, at least you’re giving yourself a chance to spot any bottle-rocket opportunities that may appear.

The ones who see the most shooting stars are the ones always looking to the sky.
(I think I read that in a fortune cookie once.)

3. Cultivating a Culture of Testing to Drive Innovation

3 Essential Ingredients Needed to Drive a Culture of Innovation

1. Ability to identify and understand important problems, and the levers and variables with potential to impact results and outcomes
2. Steady and organic flow of ideas in an open environment that allows those ideas to integrate and evolve
3. Constant experimentation and testing of hypotheses to enable constant learning and improvement

Getting a team into “test-mode” and encouraging a steady idea flow isn’t always easy, but in my experience, often #1 is the key to success for #2 and #3, and can be a greater challenge for a team.

For example, let’s say your team is all gung-ho about A/B testing and is peppering the wall with a million ideas. WOOP! That’s super awesome.

However, if everyone on the team doesn’t have a strong handle on identifying key problem areas that could have the biggest impact, and understanding the levers and variables to use, are all these tests and ideas things that truly have big growth hacking, needle-moving potential?

Considering the Google 10X mindset, is running another button color test in email really going drive significant business growth?

Incremental Tests VS “Revolutionary” Tests

I’m not saying that small, incremental tests and optimizations like the button color test example aren’t important – they absolutely are, and over time can accumulate to have a considerable impact. In my opinion you should have lots of these running regularly. But they’re not enough on their own.

To borrow another page (pun-intended) from Larry of Google fame’s book:

In growth hacking marketing, I think you need a balance of both incremental and “revolutionary” tests. But you’re certainly not going to get rocket ship level growth with just the incremental ones…

No Testing for the Sake of Testing!

You want every member of your team constantly thinking about variables they could test to improve results. But…

If you want to run experiments that really move the needle, and from which you can truly learn and gain valuable insights, do not fall into the bad habit of encouraging “testing for the sake of testing.”

In addition to focusing on needle-mover problem areas and understanding the levers to make an impact, the other key to avoiding “testing for testing’s sake” is reinforcing the golden rule that every test should have a hypothesis – a thought process behind how/why changing a specific variable could potentially impact the outcome of results.

7 Tips and Ideas for Establishing a “Culture of Testing”

1. Seek external inspiration. Don’t live inside your own internal bubble. Subscribe to lots of email lists. Check out other companies’ websites regularly (as a bonus you’ll get their re-marketing ads), read blogs, watch videos, browse social feeds. All marketers get ideas from other marketers. And just as often, great work-related ideas can come from unexpected non-work-related sources. Just keep yourselves exposed.
2. Encourage internal sharing. Facilitate regular sharing among the team. Test results, ideas, articles, external examples, data, anything people find interesting, share it with the team.
3. Create a test/experiment idea backlog. Whenever someone has a test idea, throw it on a running list that the whole team has access to. Later you can pull from it on the fly whenever you see on opportunity.
4. Document your tests and results. Have a centralized location where you can look back and see past tests, hypotheses and results. Use this also to help different team members learn from each others’ tests. “Oh, this ad copy worked well in PPC, let’s try it as an email subject line…” Maybe even use the documented tests to start compiling an internal growth hacking test/experiment hall-of-fame, or a conference presentation deck.
5. Come up with creative incentives to encourage effective testing. Maybe have monthly contests and give out awards for top growth hacking tests that moved the needle for example. Encouraging friendly competition and giving recognition to individual team members for their successes can go a long way motivate the team.
6. Place internal bets on test winners. Circulate tests before you run them and have people vote on which option they think will win. This is a good way to reinforce testing with a hypothesis, and to get people engaged and learning from each others’ tests.
7. Harp on statistical significance. I almost didn’t include this because it’s obvious, but of course you need to collect enough data for a test result to be valid. This needs to be ingrained in everyone’s minds. There are several free calculators available to help with this, here’s one from KissMetrics.

4. The 1920s Paris Cafe: Establishing an Idea Incubator

Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love and get excited about ideas. I also happen to love Paris, the Jazz Age, and anything Hemingway. To my own delight, they all happen to be applicable here. Allow me to explain…

Where Good Ideas Come From, and the Importance of Collaboration

If you’re not familiar with Steven Johnson’s work on innovation and ideas called “Where Good Ideas Come From”, first of all, I would highly recommend checking out his Ted Talk, or if you’re crunched for time, this short video (also embedded below) which does a good job summarizing his thesis. I have always been a personal subscriber to Johnson’s theory on ideas and innovation.

According to Johnson, great ideas actually often are not conceived by just one person, or in one “EUREKA!” moment. Instead, typically it begins as just a fragment of an idea; a small “hunch” that forms in your mind and stews there for a while. This “hunch” might end up becoming a decent or even “good” idea in its own right, but usually not a “great” one. The idea is still incomplete.

Truly innovative and breakthrough ideas happen when that hunch in your mind collides with another hunch lurking in someone else’s mind, completing the idea and creating something greater than the some of its parts.

Thus, collaboration and idea-sharing are essential to creating a culture of testing and innovation. Naturally, this means people need to feel comfortable throwing ideas out there and sharing them with team members.

The goal is to create an environment in which those fragments of ideas and “hunches” can come together to form those big, impactful growth hacking marketing ideas.

Why do you think in the Jazz Age Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Gertrude Stein and so many other revolutionary thinkers spent half the 1920s in the cafes of Rue Montparnasse and Rue Saint-Germain? I mean, the gin certainly had something to do with it, but they were idea incubators! Hemingway and F. Scott wrote entire novels sitting at tables of those cafes. It was an environment of inspiration and creativity.

“Idea Incubators” for Growth Hacking Marketing Teams: 4 Keys to Success

1. Ideas belong on the wall, but not all of them will stick (and that’s OK.) Many ideas you throw out there probably aren’t going to stick right away (or at all), and it’s important to create an environment where people feel comfortable with that and do not take it personally.
2. Start with a problem. Whenever possible, make sure to start with a specific problem first. Be careful to avoid people coming up with ideas for solutions to problems that don’t exist or aren’t a priority. This wastes time, of which we have little to gamble with when in growth hacking marketing mode.
3. Focus and prioritization. It’s also important to make sure ideation stays aligned with key goals, objectives and problems, that new ideas are being prioritized and weighed against existing initiatives and commitments, and you’re not trying to focus in too many different areas at once. This could be overwhelming for both employees and employers if you’re being drafted into too many areas at once. To organize any goals or objectives that your business has set in an effective way, and in a system that is easy to understand, incorporating OKR software from somewhere like Profit, can help you to clearly establish the goals that you have set yourself in an efficient manner, so they can be successfully achieved. It could help to make a difference.
4. Clarity on ideas versus action items. Whenever you are talking about ideas, make sure it is clear to everyone involved that they are just ideas until they become formally designated as action items.

5. Knowing When to Press the Abort or Reset Buttons

Whether it be an experiment, project, strategy, process, team, anything – there are going to be times when something just isn’t working for a while, or you find yourself going too far down the wrong path, or see a more lucrative alternative path to long-term success.

When these things happen, you have to be open to the idea of aborting the mission, or just pressing reset and starting from scratch.

You hopefully won’t have to press it often, but in the world of growth hacking marketing, there’s no time to waste when there is action to be taken.

6. Taking an Agile Marketing Approach

For growth hacking marketing teams whose approach is centered around rapid change, adaptibility, and experimentation, the ability for the organization to stay flexible and nimble is a must.

More traditional, “waterfall” methodologies that favor rigid, long-term planning simply won’t work to support a growth hacking marketing style.

Rather, the practice of agile marketing, with the advantages of focusing on executing rapid, short-term, iterative work cycles called “sprints,” is an ideal format for a growth hacking marketing team.

Taking a look at the 7 core values of the agile marketing manifesto, it’s easy to see how perfectly these align with the growth hacker marketer mentality and approach.

7. The Long-Term Innovation Plateau: Overcoming the Internal Status Quo

Fast forward a couple of years. Your growth hacking marketing team and organization has been running on full cylinders for while. All the critical pieces and moving parts are in place, effective systems, processes, programs and strategies well-established, evolved and “perfected.” Most of the kinks have been worked out and rough edges smoothed. You’ve had many failures and successes and lessons learned along the way. Made tons of incremental optimizations. Your hacking experiments and innovative ideas have lead to big results. You’ve achieved a baseline of predictable, sustainable growth.

And now you are starting to see the innovation beginning to level off.

First of all, if that is the case, it might be time to revisit a Larry Page-esque 10X mindset to rally the team. There is always more room for innovation and improvement. It’s impossible for a digital marketer or team to ever be finished.

Second, now that we’ve finally gotten to this place, and this certain way of doing things has worked for us for a while, things can start to get set in stone and become common practice, standard operating procedure. “The way we do things.”

In other words, we’ve created our own internal status quo.

Any challengers or newcomers with prying questions or ideas, are often met with a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude.

After all, it took a lot of hard work and smart people to get to this point, and many complex problems that have been thought through and solved. Why focus here, if it’s already been figured out?

I’ve been on both ends of this spectrum in my career – the firm protector of the status quo, and the change agent challenging it.

As the protector of the status quo, you have every right and reason to defend the existing “way of things” you have in place. You’ve put in the sweat, blood and tears, learned the painful lessons first hand, seen what has worked and what hasn’t, and experienced the evolution of how we got to now.

(Side note: total random coincidence, but “How We Got To Now” is another awesome Steven Johnson series I would highly recommend that is definitely worth a good Netflix binge.)

So when your internal status quo is challenged, often you may be correct in defending the current approach. Maybe you’ll be right in saying it ain’t broken. You probably will be a lot of the time.

But then again, it might not be broken, but maybe it’s starting to crack. Maybe it has been for a while. Maybe your solution had only been a temporary fix. Maybe, just maybe, there had been a better way to approach it all along that you just hadn’t thought of. Maybe there’s a way to improve results 10X again. Maybe it’s time to press the reset button.

Perhaps someone else is growth hacking what you’ve previously growth hacked…

Will your mind be open to the idea of change?

What tips do you have for a marketing organization to succeed with growth hacking? Would love to hear your thoughts and comments.

The post How to Use Growth Hacking to Skyrocket Your Marketing Results appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

Stages are just half the battle. Get the ultimate list of 65 questions to help you fully understand the B2B customer journey for your customers & business.

When people talk about understanding the B2B customer journey, it seems to me that the majority of the time we tend to do so primarily in the context of stages – the various phases customers encounter at different points throughout their journeys.

As I outlined in a previous article about the stages of the new digital marketing funnel, there’s no question that having a well-defined stages model is absolutely essential for customer journey mapping. It’s a must.

Customer Journey Stages Are Not Enough

Critical as they are, stages models are certainly not all there is to it when it comes to really getting a complete picture of the B2B customer journey. Far from it.

There are many other important variables and considerations that you need to understand that are specific to your business and customers that can drastically change the nature of the path customers take in their journey, the obstacles and barriers they encounter along the way, and thus the marketing approach that should be taken accordingly.

At SmartBear, our customer journeys varied incredibly across all of our different products, markets and audiences, so of course we needed to understand this in order to apply different marketing strategies for each.

Below I’ve compiled a list of question examples that you may look to answer in order to get a more complete understanding of what the B2B customer journey looks like for your customers and organization.

65 Questions for Understanding the B2B Customer Journey [Ultimate List]

I. Understanding your Customers

Customer Persona Questions

• Demographic information: Age? Gender?
• What are their job titles?
• What are their work responsibilities?
• What knowledge and skill sets are required to do their job?
• What tools do they use?
• What are their career goals?
• What motivates them? Why do they get out of bed in the morning?
• What do they like and dislike most about their job?
• What does their day-to-day look like?
• Where do they spend most of their time?
• What are their top work priorities?
• What keeps them up at night?
• Who is their boss?
• What does their team look like?
• How is their job measured?
• Who do they trust? Look up to? Respect?
• What traits and characteristics do they admire in organizations?
• What are their hobbies and interests outside of work?

Customer Organization Questions

• Key industry verticals?
• Company size: How many employees? Annual revenue?
• What is their business model?
• What does their technology stack look like?
• What is their organizational structure?
• What are their geographic locations?
• Who are your customers’ customers?
• Who are your customers’ competitors?

Online Behavior and Preferences Questions

• What blogs and online publications do they read?
• What online communities do they belong to?
• Which social media networks and platforms do they use?
• In what format do they prefer to consume content?
• What thought leaders, writers, bloggers, and industry experts do they follow?
• How do they research vendors online and in general?

II. Understanding your Business

Problem and Before Scenario Questions

• What are the common problems and pain points customers experience that your product/service can help alleviate?
• How do they solve (or cope with) the problem before using your solution?
• What are the common buying triggers, or common events or conditions that often set customers off in search of a solution?
• What language and terminology might they use when talking about your solution?
• What keywords and search phrases do they use when looking for a solution?

Your Product/Solution Questions

• What are the most important values the product/service provides customers?
• What are your key value propositions?
• What are the most important features/capabilities provided in the product/service?
• What are the different use cases for why/how different customers use it?
• How complex is the solution to use? To implement?
• What level of knowledge, skills or experience do customers need?

Technical Considerations Questions (If applicable)

• What are the key 3rd party technology integrations or partnerships?
• What key technologies does or doesn’t the product support?

Your Sales and Purchasing Process Questions

• What is your sales model?
• What is your pricing model/structure?
• Average length of sales cycle?
• Average deal size?
• Common sales barriers and objections?
• Complexity of purchasing decision?
• What are the different internal roles involved with the purchasing process?
• Who are the users? The influencers? The decision maker? Champion?

Your Market and Competitive Landscape Questions

• Market maturity stage?
• What is your Sirius Decisions Demand Type? (see chart below)
• What does the competitive landscape look like?
• What is your market share? Positioning?
• What are your top strengths, differentiators and advantages vs leading competitors?
• What are your top weaknesses and disadvantages vs leading competitors?
• What key trends are happening in the marketplace?

Sirius Decisions Demand Spectrum

Once you have all of this juicy info on customer personas and organizations, your business and the market landscape, add this to the customer journey stages knowledge, and we will then have a much more complete view and understanding of the B2B customer journey.

But first we have to get the answers to these questions somehow…

How Do You Get All this Information?

You’ll most likely need to collect information from a number of different sources, which might range from online surveys and interviews with customers and internal experts, networking, research and data analysis.

However you decide to go about doing the research, I would strongly encourage making sure customer interviews is a regular part of the process. In fact, I believe marketers should take the opportunity to hop on the phone and talk to customers as often as the opportunity arises. The qualitative information you often dig up in those conversations with customers is just absolute gold, and stuff you commonly won’t be able get anywhere else.

I actually interviewed 22 different customers last year as a part of a brand project I was working on, and I probably learned just as much valuable info from a demand gen and customer journey perspective as I did in relation to the brand.

Customer Journey “Battlecards”

Once you’ve done your research and collected all this great knowledge, its important to get the info into the hands and heads of each member of your team so they can start putting it to good use.

One approach I took for this which was pretty effective for us was creating what I internally called “Customer Journey Battlecards.”

For each product, we created a designated internal wiki page (or “Customer Journey Battlecard”) with all the customer journey information a marketer would ever need for that product in one centralized location, where it could be accessed and leveraged by anyone on the team at all times.

I worked with product marketing managers to get much of the missing info filled out on these pages, and then held a marketing team training series to help educate the team, which we also recorded and added to the wiki pages.

Putting in the Time to Do Your Research

As Steve Offsey pointed out in a recent interview about customer journey mapping misconceptions, far too often marketers don’t invest the time and energy to conduct the necessary research required to truly understand their customers and the B2B customer journey.

Without ever even getting input from the actual customers, or conducting substantial external research, teams frequently construct their marketing strategies and customer journey mapping programs based entirely on their own internal perceptions and point-of-view.

Marketing Golden Rule #1: Market to your customers, not to yourself. #marketing #digitalmarketing @gdaz
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Regardless of customer journey mapping, I think few would argue that there is little if anything more vital to the effectiveness of marketing than understanding your target customers.

So, I’m not suggesting that you need to answer every single question on this list in order to understand the B2B customer journey, but the more of this kind of knowledge you do have about your customers, business, and market, the more vivid (and accurate) your picture will be.

Customer journey stages are just half the battle. If you haven’t already, take the time to do the important research that really helps you complete your holistic view and truly understand your customers and their journeys!

In the likely case that you don’t have the bandwidth to drop everything for a large scale research project anytime soon, you can always break it up over time and do little by little (in fact, it really should be a recurring exercise.)

We did the “battlecard” project over a period of six weeks. Easy peasy.

What questions do you think are most important for understanding the B2B customer journey? Any others you would add to the list?

The post 65 Questions for Understanding the B2B Customer Journey appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

In this insightful interview, expert Steve Offsey debunks seven of the most common customer journey mapping misconceptions, myths and mistakes that cause marketers to fail.

Digital marketing is a relatively new concept in the marketing world but it is already such a major part of most businesses. And because it’s such a new industry, it means there are lots of trends and new terms being coined. Customer journey mapping is one of these and it is a term we are beginning to hear more and more frequently in the digital marketing community and business world every day. Reports have shown that over 1/3 of companies have already adopted customer journey mapping, and that number is increasing quickly.

34% of companies have already undertaken the process of customer journey mapping
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(Source: The Huffington Post)

As marketers look to leverage customer journey mapping for the first time, or improve results from existing efforts, I wanted to find an expert with deep experience who could pass along some knowledge that might help. Steve Offsey was at the top of my list.

As CMO and GM, Products at TandemSeven, a leading provider of digital experience solutions and customer journey mapping software, Steve has worked with companies such as US Bank and Waters Corporation to improve their customer journey mapping and customer experience initiatives, learning from their triumphs and failures along the way.

I recently had an opportunity to catch up with Steve, to get his insights on what marketers should know in order to be successful with customer journey mapping, common mistakes to avoid, and misconceptions that need to be cleared up.

7 Biggest Misconceptions About Customer Journey Mapping

Misconception #1. Mapping the Customer Journey from an Internal Point-of-View, Not the Customers’

According to Steve, a surprisingly high number of companies are guilty of forgetting a crucial step when putting together a customer journey map – actually getting input from real customers.

STEVE OFFSEY: One of the biggest ones that we always see is people who think they are doing customer journey mapping but they are really doing service design. The whole idea of customer journey mapping is to map the journey from the customer’s perspective. I often see organizations get a whole bunch of people into a room, document their internal process and call that a customer journey map. That’s the biggest misconception. People think you can get all of your staff into a workshop and come up with the customer journey map, without ever having to actually talk to customers.

We see a lot of people do that internal workshop; they’re all super-charged and excited, everyone’s up there with the whiteboard and their sticky notes, and they get it all down, and then they say, “we’re done.” When in reality, this is just the first step to get going, not the final destination.

This first step of the process is creating a hypothesis map, which details your best guess of your customer’s current state journey. You start with a hypothesis which is based on your internal view, but then you’ve got to go and test that hypothesis with your customers, which involves not only surveying them and looking at data, but also talking to them. You need take the time to validate your internal hypothesis by collecting information from your customers. Most people who have actually done that will come back and say “wow, we can’t believe how wrong we were about some of things we thought about our customers’ journeys.”

With your current state map of the customer experience, you can start looking at where the poor parts of the experience exist. What does the customer really want to do? Once you have completed and tested your current state map, then you can go and define your future state map of where you need to go. The gap analysis between the two drives your planning.

Misconception #2. The Idea that Customer Journey Maps Are One Size Fits All

In a digital world that caters to the values of personalization and individualism, treating every customer the same is one of the quickest ways to kill your results. Unless you are marketing to clone troopers, a one-size-fits-all approach is usually not a good idea. There is no such thing as one generic customer or one generic journey. However, Steve suggests many marketers fail to understand this important lesson when creating customer journey maps.

STEVE OFFSEY: Another common misconception is that there is just one customer journey map that applies to all customers. Really, the fact is different customers often have different journeys. Many journey mappers do not understand the link between customer journey mapping and personas. With different personas, you’ll usually have different journeys. They’ll also have different emotional reactions, different “wow” moments, different places where the experience of the journey is good or bad. And even if two personas are taking the same journey, they may have a different perception of it.

Misconception #3. The “Molly Marketer” Fantasy: Using the Wrong Data to Define Customer Personas

As it turns out, how many kids your customers have and whether or not they play soccer isn’t always the most pertinent info for customer journey mapping…

Steve shares how marketers have somehow gotten into the habit of developing personas based upon information that is not only often the least important, but flat out made up, and inaccurate. As a result, instead of accurate snapshots and profiles of your individual customers, many organizations’ personas end up being nothing more than constructs of marketers’ own imaginations.

That’s right, this means many of us are more-or-less out there marketing to fictional, make-believe characters.

STEVE OFFSEY: Personas became really hot in marketing a while back, and since then we somehow ended up down this weird rabbit hole of personas being defined predominantly by demographic data. So everyone began creating these personas where they gave them cute names, and told you how old they were, you know, they had two kids that played soccer, and all these things that should really be the very last details that you want to add to make your personas come alive at the end, not the primary criteria you use to define your personas in the first place.

The biggest mistake marketers make here is that they create customer personas through internal exercises, without ever conducting any real customer research, talking to real people, or collecting real data, which results in the creation of non-realistic customer personas. It’s almost like inventing your own characters.

With this, you are not really uncovering the most important information necessary to identify meaningful differences between how different types of people go about researching a product or service, interacting with your brand, and taking disparate routes in their customer journeys.

Referencing the work of Tony Zambito, Steve recommends a goal-directed approach as a much more effective strategy for customer persona development, which entails understanding how customers’ goals, objectives, problems and pain points differ, how they drive different behaviors, and how your product or service aligns with helping customers attain those goals and solve their specific problems.

Misconception #4. Viewing a Customer Journey Map as a Static Destination

Just having a map doesn’t automatically bring you the treasure. Pretty pictures don’t drive business results. Steve explains how many companies mistake what’s really just the end of the first lap, as being the finish line.

STEVE OFFSEY: A lot of journey mappers view the creation of a journey map as a final destination. However, hanging up a pretty picture on the wall is not sufficient to make your company more customer-centric.

Companies often create a hypothesis map and have a bunch of designers go into Adobe Illustrator and make it beautiful, print it out, and think that’s it. They think, “We do this activity, we create the map, and we’re done, call it a success.” The fallacy here being that they can just do this once, hang it on the wall, and declare success.

What ends up happening afterwards is, well, absolutely nothing. It is a huge misconception that just doing it is going to yield something. You can’t operationalize customer journey mapping and drive results with just a pretty drawing.

Journey mapping really needs to be operationalized if it’s to serve as a vehicle to make your organization more customer-centric, and to improve customer experience. By operationalized, I mean it’s not a one-time activity. You should be continually talking to customers, refining and adding detail to your customer journey maps, getting new ratings of customer experiences, and monitoring changes over time.

I provide some tips on how to address these challenges in a recent post on CustomerThink called 6 Ways to Make Sure Your Journey Maps Improve Customer Experience.

Misconception #5. Thinking Web Behavior is the Only Data you Need

According to Steve, many marketers share the common misconception that website activity is all there is to it when it comes to customer information needed for customer journey mapping. However, in reality, website behavior is just a sliver of the complete customer journey data pie.

Oh and by the way, customers are in fact, not robots. You need human data.

STEVE OFFSEY: Some people think that you can make a journey map just based on website logs and data. You can’t just look at the breadcrumb trail of what your customers did and the steps they took on your site. The customer journey spans way beyond your website. You also really need to understand what customers were trying to do that your site didn’t let them do, what their emotions were, how they felt while they were doing these things, or not doing these things. These are examples of various important aspects that you can’t find in just log files.

You can’t just create a customer journey map based on some web logs and some statistical tool. You need to move outside of your comfort zone of focusing on just the buying process, because as you’ve written about (on Customer Journey Marketer) the customer journey extends both before and after the purchasing process.

I asked Steve to elaborate on some of the more common different types of data companies should be collecting to get a more complete picture of the customer journey, and thus, a more effective journey map.

5 Types of Customer Data to Understand for Customer Journey Mapping

• Customer Journey Stages. The basic steps along the path that customers pass through at different points of the customer journey. These should be defined based on goals and objectives from the Customer’s perspective in the previous bullet, and not your internal POV or processes, the mistake we saw in #1 and #3 above.
• Goals and problems. Also sometimes referred to as wants, needs or expectations, these are about understanding the different objectives individual customers are looking to accomplish at each juncture along the path of the customer journey.
• Touchpoints. Touchpoints are the points of interaction that your customer has with your brand, or outside of your brand, as they seek to meet their specific goals and needs across different stages throughout the customer journey. A touchpoint is the intersection of customer actions with a specific tool or resource.
• Emotions. You definitely want to capture emotions because people aren’t robots. I believe most B2B purchasing decisions are really made largely by emotion, not just rationally. Even if they give their boss a grid to prove why their decision is rational, they’ve been influenced by a lot of other emotional factors that aren’t in that grid, like who they trust, how they’ll be perceived by their peers, etc. The Tempkin Group has proclaimed that this is “the year of emotion.” You really need to get people to describe how they were feeling at times, and you need to do that through interviews.
• Evaluation of the experience. Not just how it made you feel, or what you were thinking, you need to get customers to rate their experiences at various parts of the journey, which you can often do with things like surveys. This is where you can start turning customer journey maps into more than just a static, one-time exercise, and into more of an operational model.

Misconception #6. “Can’t I Just Buy Marketing Technology to Do Customer Journey Mapping for Me?”

No. As Steve points out, despite what MarTech vendors might have you believe with misleading messaging, no technology can build an effective customer journey map for you. It takes a human to market to a human, and lots of hard work.

STEVE OFFSEY: Many marketing platforms and solutions have jumped onto the whole “customer experience” messaging bandwagon, and are now throwing around language on personas and customer journey mapping, which has created a bit of confusion in the digital marketing community. There’s a big difference between your operational platforms like your marketing automation system and CRM, and the process of actually understanding what your customers’ journeys look like, capturing and documenting customer journeys, and getting your entire organization aligned with them.

Where the confusion occurs is when you have people thinking “I can skip this messy, time consuming research process, because my operational marketing technology can do this for me.” The truth is, none of those platforms or systems do anything like that for you. These platforms are great for creating, deploying and automating interactions with your customers based on the insights you’ve developed through journey mapping.

There are also some solutions now labeling themselves as “journey analytics platforms” trying to make it seem like if you just feed them a set of big data and web logs, they’ll show you what your customer journey maps look like and, in some cases, even operationalize it for you. They market themselves as “auto-magic solutions” with no thinking required.

What all these solutions are really doing is telling you what your customers are doing online within the constraints of what you’ve already set up. They won’t tell you what your customers really wanted to do that you failed to deliver them as an option, or what really influenced their thought process that caused them to take an action, or not take an action.

It’s kind of like treating your customers like laboratory mice you’ve created this digital-only maze for, and this technology will tell you how the mice are running through it.

What if the mouse doesn’t really want to run through the maze?

What if they’re pissed off about the experience while doing it?

What if different mice want the cheese for different reasons?

(What if the mouse is lactose intolerant?)

No marketing technology will tell you any of that.

It’s not so much the input, but rather what you are able to do with the output. Once you’ve gone through the research and customer journey mapping process, you can then use your marketing technology to do things like helping to identify customer personas and what stage of the journey a customer might be at, and align some of your marketing communications and campaigns accordingly.

Misconception #7. Lack of Internal Alignment: A Different Customer Journey Map for Every Silo

Even for companies that manage to avoid the rest of the mistakes on this list, Steve suggests that lacking internal alignment is another common mistake that can severely hinder results.

STEVE OFFSEY: What I’ve seen with a lot of companies is that customer journey mapping can start in separate silos, different functional or business unit silos. What ends up happening is the CEO will all of a sudden realize that the customer should see them as one company, but internally they are working like every function or business unit is a separate company, with their own personas and customer journeys.

The consequence of this is that you come across to your customers like multiple companies, or a fragmented, inconsistent company, as you are addressing them very differently at different points in their journey, and not taking a single customer-centric view of the experience. Not to mention you’re duplicating efforts all over the place.

You need to coordinate across groups and get unified on your goals, personas, journey maps and stages, which means getting internal stakeholders aligned. You not only need to establish well-defined goals, but also make sure those goals are aligned with internal stakeholders so that they are mapped to what the business is trying to accomplish at a higher level. This is also important so that people understand why you are doing customer journey mapping in the first place, so they can help operationalize it.

If everyone is aligned on the same goals, they can help drive towards reaching them. I provide more details on how to accomplish this in a post called How to Set Up Your Customer Journey Mapping Project for Success.

What’s next for customer journey mapping?

Forecasts indicate that the adoption of customer journey mapping is set to surge. Meanwhile, countless companies out there may be destined to fail as a result of the seven mistakes Steve shared in this post. How will this all play out in the next few years?

STEVE OFFSEY: Using the Gartner Hype Cycle, customer journey mapping is climbing the “peak of inflated expectations,” and will likely crash into the “trough of disillusionment” at some point because a lot of people will be investing resources in poorly executed projects that don’t produce real results. I’ve actually had one company tell me recently that they’re not calling it “customer journey mapping” anymore internally, and that they’ve had to come up with a new name for it to distance themselves from the failures of historical journey mapping projects.

In the next two or three years we’ll go through this phase where the bubble will burst as all the people out there making these common customer journey mapping mistakes we discussed today will start saying it doesn’t work. Then the people who are actually investing the time and effort to do it right, and operationalizing it, will start realizing more and more value and better results. Those companies are going to have better customer experiences, and as a result better reputations, and stronger brands. They will emerge as leaders in their markets, and start sharing their best practices for how to be effective with customer journey mapping. At that point, everyone will be back on the bandwagon, and we’ll climb back up to a mainstream level of adoption.

Do you have any common customer journey mapping misconceptions and mistakes to add to this list? If so, be sure to leave a comment, we’d love to hear them!

The post 7 Huge Common Misconceptions About Customer Journey Mapping appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

Learn how to improve the effectiveness of sprint planning to elevate the success of your overall agile marketing process and every sprint you run, with actionable tips, secrets and lessons learned from 4 years of agile marketing.

In a 2016 report from Work Front, 30% of marketers were currently using agile marketing methodology to manage their work processes.

As a big fan and active practitioner of agile marketing for the past four years, that statistic is very exciting news to me. Although I can’t say I’m particularly surprised, as someone who understands the huge value and impact agile can have for a marketing organization.

With agile marketing adoption numbers rising fast, more and more people are brand new to agile or just getting started. In a 2016 report from Wrike, 33% of marketers currently using agile had only started within the past six months, and another 22% were just in the first stages of getting started.

Jumping back to the WorkFront report, it also found that 70% of marketers cite lack of knowledge or expertise as the greatest barrier standing in their way of implementation.

This confirms a fact that I personally see all the time, which is that despite the fact that agile marketing adoption seems to be really heating up, a huge knowledge gap exists in the marketing community around what agile marketing really is exactly, how it works, and how to go about actually putting it into practice.

With four years worth of agile marketing lessons (many of which learned the hard way) to share, this will be first in a series of posts over-time in which I’d like to pass on some knowledge we’ve acquired along our own agile journey, that I would have probably killed to have known from the start.

Quick Refresher: “Nutshell” Definition of Agile Marketing

Adapted from agile software development, at its core, agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high-value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time. (Via Work Front)

As established by the Agile Marketing Manifesto in June 2012, agile marketing is based on a unique set of core values that contrast with that of most traditional marketing approaches.

7 Core Values of the Agile Marketing Manifesto:

1. Validating learning over opinions and conventions
2. Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
3. Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
4. The process of customer discovery over static prediction
5. Flexible vs. rigid planning
6. Responding to change over following a plan
7. Many small experiments over a few large bets

Note that #6 and #7 above are about planning, which steers us head on into the main topic of this post…

Agile Sprints and Sprint Planning

Agile processes commonly operate in “sprints,” which are short, repeatable work cycles that typically range between 2-6 weeks in which agile teams commit to focusing on completing a pre-determined list of high priority projects. Prior to beginning a sprint, teams typically go through a sprint planning process, which involves determining what projects and tasks will be added to a sprint, assessing priorities, estimating the amount of time and effort they will take to get done, and sometimes who they should be assigned to.

In contrast to traditional Waterfall models which favor rigid, long-term planning, an agile approach is all about focusing on smaller, short-term, iterative, sprint plans.

For anyone looking to be successful implementing agile marketing at your organization, one big lesson I’ve learned over the past few years is that sprint planning is an area in which your effectiveness directly impacts the overall results of your sprint.

Below are a collection of tips that I’ve picked up on how to be more effective in your sprint planning, that can really make a difference.

9 Ways to Ensure Agile Marketing Success with Better Sprint Planning

1. Make sprint planning a priority

The more effective sprint planning, the more effective your agile marketing process. Don’t underestimate the importance of spending the time and effort to thoughtfully plan your sprints out ahead of time. While you should be careful not to make the planning process too time-consuming and complex that it becomes a major project in itself, you do want to make sure everyone on the team is spending the time to thoroughly and thoughtfully plan their sprints.

2. When planning projects and tasks: Small, granular pieces > big, vague blobs

Break larger projects and tasks into smaller, granular pieces. If your sprint plan is full of large, vague tasks with lots of estimated hours for each, it will be harder to accurately track progress during the sprint, and less precise, without a clear understanding of all the smaller tasks that need to get done as a part of a project, in what order, and by when. Here’s a good instance where a little more time and thought up front in the planning process can go a long way in the effectiveness of your sprints.

For example, say you have a big project to build a new lead nurturing program that is going to take up a lot of your time in a sprint.

Big, Vague Task Planning Example
(How NOT to plan your sprint)

What the Burn-down Chart Looks Like:
(Useless…)

If you create one big task called “Build New Lead Nurturing Program” for 18 hours that spans the entire sprint, you don’t really have visibility into all the moving parts, and you won’t be able to see how you are tracking on progress until the last day of the sprint when you mark it as done. Instead, a more effective approach is breaking down the project down into a bunch of smaller bite-sized tasks, each with deadlines and estimated hours.

Granular, Broken-down Task Example
(The right way)

Epic Name: BOFU Lead Nurturing Program for Product XYZ

Notice that when the project is broken down into smaller, granular tasks and have a much clearer view of the moving pieces, it turns out the estimated time budgeted for the project is +10 hours longer than the original estimate. We now know that if you had planned your sprint using the first approach, you would be at very high risk of missing your deadline, or missing a deadline for another project to re-allocate more time for this one.

What the Burn-down Chart Looks Like:
Hey there, good looking…

4. Plan ahead for the unpredictable

We work in a very fast-paced business, so no matter how good of a job we do with planning, inevitably there are always going to be some high priority inbound tasks that pop up here and there that we still need to jump on and execute that we couldn’t have planned for or seen coming ahead of time. Even if your business is not as fast-paced, it’s bound to happen.

An effective way we’ve handled this at SmartBear is using what we internally refer to as “flex time” and “flex tasks.” The idea is, by setting some time aside while planning your sprint reserved for any incoming tasks that might suddenly pop-up during the sprint, you will always have the bandwidth to pounce on them when they do, without dropping other priorities and sacrificing other deadlines we’ve already committed to. We have baked “flex time” and “flex tasks” into our regular sprint planning process, and also report on it at the end of the sprint to track how many flex hours and tasks came in, and how many we were able to get through.

If the flex tasks don’t end up coming, we can then dedicate our flex time to optimization, experimentation, ideation or getting ahead on some tasks from the backlog.

5. Account for “non-execution” time

It’s amazing how much time we spend at work not actually working or executing tasks. Time spent in meetings, interviewing candidates, traveling, OOO at doctor’s appointments, PTO; all examples of items that can really add up and take away from the available time you have for actually getting work done. This is important to take into consideration when sprint planning in order to understand how many hours we actually have available to execute the tasks so we don’t over-commit.

To plan for this, try making a ballpark guesstimate (doesn’t need to be super exact) of how much time you might be tied up with other “non-execution” activities during business hours in your next sprint.

You might be surprised how much less available time you end up with to GSD once you’ve deducted your “non-execution hours” or “personal problems” as we call them internally at SmartBear.

6. Benchmark your bandwidth

Understand the average amount of execution hours each team member can get through in a sprint.

Taking planned “flex time” and “non-execution time” into consideration, when you run your reports at the end of each sprint, you will get a much clearer view of how much actual execution time each person was able to get through during the time frame of a sprint.

On my team for example, we saw that in a one-hundred business hour, two-week sprint, on average each person is able to get through around 50-60 hours of execution time for tasks they committed to at the beginning of the sprint.

With this information, we know that whenever someone has more than 60 or so hours of execution time planned in the sprint, that’s probably more than they will be able to get through. We can easily identify this, and make adjustments accordingly to make sure we are not committing to more tasks than our bandwidth will allow.

7. Review and commit before every sprint

Review planned tasks and give each member of your team the opportunity to commit before the sprint.

Once your team has planned all their tasks and projects for an upcoming sprint, its important to make sure that each team member has a solid understanding of everything that they to accomplish during the sprint, and also for managers, and other stakeholders involved to have visibility and ability to give input as well.

At this juncture, you have an opportunity to have discussions and make any changes that might be necessary before the sprint is locked in, such as adjusting priorities, deadlines, hour estimations for tasks, and again making sure each team member doesn’t have to much (or too little) on their plate. For managers, now is your chance to see where your employees’ time is going, and to make sure team members are focusing on the needle-movers.

Hour estimates for tasks is one example that can cause problems if you don’t take the time to review and ensure accuracy. If someone under-estimates the time required to complete a task (such as in the example in #2 above), deadlines can be put at risk. Sprint planning poker is a common team activity that was invented as a way to help police time and effort estimates, which we’ve experimented with in the past.

Once you’ve finished reviewing, I’m a firm believer in adding a formalized step to the process to give each team member an opportunity to share whether they are comfortable committing to everything in their sprint or not. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Doing this acts as a final filter to weed out any remaining potential risks of over-committing. When you over-commit, everybody loses. Since everyone is given a fair opportunity to speak up, they know that they will be held accountable for everything they do commit to.

Prior to perfecting our current agile process, my team was only completing around 55-65% of the tasks being requested of them within a given sprint. We had a bit of a unique situation due to organizational structure to support 15+ different products across 5 core business units, but basically people were getting assigned tasks left and right from all different directions and it would have been impossible to get through them all in a two-week sprint, let alone on time.

After adding a commit session to our process, we were able to see that many of the requests people were getting were complete time-wasters. Many were a low priority, or reproducing work that’s already been done, and sometimes even not the responsibility of the person it was assigned to. And some of these were making it onto people’s to-do lists before much more important priorities. And even after weeding all of these out, people’s plates were still overloaded. I once had a new hire who in their first sprint commit session had over 180 hours of tasks requested!! As I mentioned earlier in the benchmark your bandwidth section, it would typically take an average of three full sprints to get through that many execution hours. Let alone in their second week!

With our current process, now our team delivers on average 95% of the tasks they commit to working on at the beginning of the sprint.

This is also important because it places a much higher currency on every task that gets into the sprint, as those assigning the task and managers can have a 95% confidence that whatever gets committed to will be completed on time during the sprint.

8. Use your backlog, and keep it clean and up-to-date

Your sprint backlog is a running to do list of tasks and projects that you are not assigned to a current sprint. When a sprint is in progress, typically many of the new tasks and requests that come in should be temporarily added to the backlog, and later added to a future sprint as to not distract someone for executing the list of priority projects they have already committed to completing during the current sprint.

If you are using your backlog as a huge dumping ground where tasks and projects go to rot, you are missing out on the purpose and value of the backlog. If something is never going to get done, it shouldn’t still be in your backlog.

You should be reviewing and pulling tasks from your backlog while sprint planning, and also during existing sprints when you have some unexpected free time.

9. Don’t forget the long-term. Think ahead and plan multiple sprints in advance.

Just because sprints are designed to focus on short-term execution, does not mean you should be near-sighted from a planning standpoint. Below are three examples related to this.

• Have a system in place to balance long-term planning with short-term sprints. It can be easy to not be seeing the forest through the trees and lose sight of the big picture, and long-term, when you are always heads down executing a sprint or planning in two-week increments. Be sure to bake in a recurring long-term planning process to run in tandem with the sprint process, and then you’ll have the best of both worlds.
• Plan ahead for projects that span multiple sprints. When you have a big project that involves multiple people, and spans multiple sprints (often referred to as an “epic”), like a product launch or big webinar for example, you usually are much better off planning the entire project out in one sitting ahead of time, as opposed to planning and assigning pieces of it before the start of every sprint. This will give you a much better view of the moving parts, help make sure you are not forgetting any steps or tasks, and help keep everyone on track so there is less risk of missing a deadline.
• Spread your planning out instead of waiting until the last minute. If you want to do a thorough job with sprint planning, but start finding you spending hours on hours planning the week just before a new sprint starts, you can make it much more manageable for yourself if you break it up and start doing just a little planning for a few minutes every day or every other day.

What sprint planning tips and best practices do you recommend for agile marketing? Please leave a comment if you have some good ones, would love to hear them!

Be sure to subscribe to Customer Journey Marketer Blog if you haven’t already so you don’t miss my next post in this series on how to implement an effective agile marketing process at your organization.

If you’re interested in learning more about our experiences with agile marketing at SmartBear, check out the last ten slides of this SlideShare below from a presentation I gave recently at Boston Agile Marketing Group.

The post 9 Ways to Ensure Agile Marketing Success with Better Sprint Planning appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

Tired of promotional emails cluttering up your inbox? This super easy, 2-minute hack will keep all unwanted spam emails out of your inbox for good. I used to get 97.6 marketing emails per day. Thanks to this trick, I have been SPAM-free for 323 days and counting, so far spared from the distraction of 21,189 bulk emails. Works for outlook, gmail and more!

If you’ve ever gotten so fed up with the constant onslaught of promotional SPAM emails cluttering your inbox that you’ve briefly considered moving to Canada for the sole purpose of seeking refuge under the CAN-SPAM Act, this might be your lucky day.

My inbox has been SPAM-free since Tuesday, October 27, 2015 at 5:27 PM, ever since figuring out this little hack which I am going to show you in this post today.

Poor Kevan from Buffer was the first to just barely miss the cut at 5:28 PM and end up sentenced away to a dark, dungeon-of-an-outlook folder, far from my primary inbox for which it was intended. I sometimes try to imagine what my life might be like today had that “Complete Guide to Social Media Success” arrived just one minute in the other direction. Ah, Kevan from Buffer, two ships passing in the night, you and I…

In the 323 days (217 business days) which have passed since deciding to quit receiving SPAM for good, thanks to my little hack, 21,189 promotional emails have managed to evade my work inbox alone. That’s an average of 65.6 emails/day, or 97.6 emails/day if you only count business days.

I was getting inundated. And I’m not the only one being victimized by a constant bombardment of promotional marketing emails:

Spam accounts for 14.5 billion messages globally per day. 45% of all emails are SPAM
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(Source: Spam Laws)

43% of adults in the US said more than half of their emails are from marketers @hubspot
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(Source: Hubspot)

What is SPAM Email?

By definition, in order to officially qualify as “SPAM” an email must be:

1) Unsolicited – the recipient has not granted verifiable permission to the send
2) Bulk – message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages (usually to multiple recipients), all having substantively identical content.

I know for a fact that I had not subscribed to receive emails from most of the organizations that were sending them to me, and as a digital marketer, I know a mass, automated email when I see one.

Not All Email Marketing is SPAM

Despite how it might sound, I am not anti-email marketing. Quite the opposite actually. When used correctly, email marketing is a valuable tool for educating and communicating with customers that should be in every business’s toolbox.

Unfortunately, a lot of people commonly confuse good email marketing and SPAM as being one in the same.

As a digital marketer, I have a personal vendetta against companies who send SPAM emails, because they give the rest of us a bad name.

It’s not fair to all the good marketers out there who actually put in the time and effort to organically build a legitimate opt-in email list, and consistently deliver subscribers helpful, relevant content through quality email marketing, to be unfairly cast in the same light as others who break the rules and try to cut corners by spamming people.

And why should the good guys who have actually earned the right to be there have to compete with the spammers for customers’ attention inside their inbox?

Just like how those who engage in poor, misleading online advertising practices can ruin it for all advertisers by driving customers to get ad-blockers, the hack I’m showing you today is another example in which all email marketers are subjected to the consequences caused by the actions of just the bad eggs.

Why I decided to Live “SPAM-Free” and Share this Hack So Others Can Too

It was seriously starting to impact my productivity.

I have a very busy job, and work in a fast-paced environment where it is not uncommon for me to be communicating with as many as tens of people simultaneously at times via more channels than I can sometimes count. Last time I worked from home I listed them out in the email I sent around to the team…”WFH, available via all channels (skype, slack, JIRA, cell, GoToMeeting, whatsapp, work email, personal email.” And that’s not including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other platforms regularly monitor and update, as a part of my job.

I actually rarely work from home, as I prefer to be in the office with my team. However, our work environment is very open concept, and our team very collaborative by nature, which means frequent stop and chats to add to my list of potential interruptions.

Did you know that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds get back to the point that you left off after a distraction?

It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from a distraction
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Let’s have some fun and pretend for a minute that I hadn’t created the hack and was still been receiving SPAM emails for the past ten months. Say I had gotten distracted by just 5% of those 21,189 promotional emails.

Wanna guess how much potential time that could have lost me?

441.18 hours. That’s over 18.3 full days of potential lost time, and 55.14 business days! If only 2% of the emails distracted me, it would still be 22.1 business days lost!

The email distractions just had to go.

Everyone should have the freedom to choose how they wish to interact with brands online.

As I discussed in a previous article on why the customer journey is the future of digital marketing, with the “Age of the Customer” upon us, we are shifting more and more towards an increasingly customer-centric modern world (and web) that caters to the specific interests, desires and preferences of individual; a place where every internet user is empowered to get the experience they want, and to engage (or not engage) with whomever, whenever, however and whenever they wish.

And while this certainly makes life difficult for us digital marketers, in my opinion, it’s only right. Each individual customer should be free to set their own definition for what constitutes a positive customer experience for them, and for brands to respect their terms, unconditionally.

If a customer doesn’t want to be advertised to, they are free to use an ad-blocker. If they don’t prefer to receive marketing emails, they should have that option.

Here’s My Quick & Easy Hack to Keep All Unwanted Spam Emails Out of Your Inbox for Good

What we’re doing here, and how it works (big picture)

In many countries, the law requires that all promotional emails contain a functional unsubscribe option that is easy for the user to find. Therefore, almost all promotional marketing emails that are sent in bulk today contain a link to unsubscribe from the mailing list, even if you never subscribed in the first place. They also all tend to use much of the same terminology and language in their unsubscribe messages and links, which is the loophole that we’re exploiting with this hack…

Read this Before You Continue

I will make an effort here to be upfront about any disclaimers I can think of. I also want to point out that this little hack s in absolutely in no way dangerous, or sketchy in any way whatsoever. And I keep calling it things “little” and “simple” because it really isn’t rocket science – an average toddler or extremely smart monkey would conceivably be able to do this (though no guarantees on the two-minute time-cap for them…)

Please be sure to scan this list of requirements and disclaimers below:

• This hack only works for automated emails that contain at least one unsubscribe link
• It doesn’t work for real emails manually sent by humans. Yes, that means emails personally sent by sales reps still get through.
• It is illegal for businesses to send automated emails without unsubscribe links, so if for some reason that happens, it will in fact come through to your inbox, at the risk of breaking the law. How you decide to handle this is between you and the sender offender.
• This hack blocks all bulk marketing and promotional emails from entering your primary inbox, whether they truly qualify as being SPAM or not
• Your email service provider must have the capability to create custom folders and routing rules for email
• Over time you may need to add additional phrases to the list if you notice some companies emails begin slipping through to your inbox by juking past the logic with the use of some elusive, out-of-the-ordinary language in the unsubscribe line. Every once in a while I do the same when this happens to me, and will hence forth update the running list I’ll share with you today on this post with the latest rules that I add.
• You will technically still receive all of the emails, just in a separate folder than your primary inbox
• For those whose SPAM emails are not in English, the trick should still work, however unfortunately you will need to create your own list to use in your rules. Here is a link I found for you, my global friends, which has the translation for “Unsubscribe” in Chinese, French, Dutch, Turkish, Italian, German, Japanese, Hebrew and Swedish to get you started, which if you are looking to block as many different languages as possible, may be of some use.
• The bad news for global folks is that some companies estimate that as many as 73% global emails are SPAM, VS only 45% in the US, so it may be more difficult to make this hack as airtight. However, I’ve never tested this myself so I’d be interested to hear the outcome!

If none of the above sounds too disagreeable to you, please proceed to the step-by-step directions below. If you do have an issue with anything, if it’s something I can help with I will be happy to, however, I would like to remind you that I am not an IT professional, and don’t get paid for rigging people’s email systems, so if I am unable to answer your question or point you in the right direction of a solution please do not take it out on me.

I’m not going to walk through the step-by-step instructions for every email service provider, but the way to do it will be conceptually the same for all, you’ll just need to find the instructions on how to setup custom email rules for whatever platform you are using if you aren’t already familiar with how to do this.

Instructions for Microsoft Outlook

(For more detailed step-by-step directions on how to create a rule in Microsoft Outlook, check out this support article.)

1. Create a new folder in outlook for where you will redirect your spam emails
2. Create a new email rule by selecting File / Manage Rules and Alerts / New Rule
   
3. Select “Move messages with specific words in the subject to a folder” and click next
4. Deselect the box for the condition “with specified words in the subject“, and select the box for the condition “with specified words in the body“
5. Edit the rule description by clicking “specified words” in the box on the bottom
6. Where it says “Specify words or phrases to search for in the body,” add in your list of words that email marketers commonly use in the unsubscribe message at the bottom of emails (add them in one at a time and it automatically creates OR logic.)
   Below is the list of unsubscribe phrases that I use in my rule:
   “Unsubscribe”
   “Email preferences”
   “Mail preferences”
   “Opt Out”
   “Opt-out”
   “Subscription center”
   “Subscription preferences”
   “Email subscription”
   “Manage your preferences”
   
   Note: Any email you receive that contains any of these words entered in your rule will automatically be moved into the separate folder once you activate it, so be sure to consider this carefully and remove any words from my list if you don’t want emails containing them to be affected.
   
7. After you’ve added your list of words, select the specified folder you created for where you want your spammy automated marketing emails to be sent. Then click next
8. Add in any exceptions to the rule if you don’t want the rule to apply to specific emails or emails from certain people, such as your own company, which is the exception that I use. To do this, check the box for “except with specific words in the sender’s address” and add in the name of your company as it appears in your corporate email address.
9. Create a name for your rule
10. Check the box next to “turn on this rule.” If you wish to apply this rule for existing emails in your inbox, check the box for “run this rule now on messages already in Inbox“
11. Click “finish” then “apply” then “OK”

Voila! That’s all she wrote. Welcome to the wonderful world of SPAM-free inboxes! If you are like me and receive a ton of automated marketing emails daily, you should immediately notice a blissful difference. Enjoy your productivity.

I would advise that for the first few weeks after you turn on your rule, it is a good idea to closely monitor the emails that are being re-directed to your new spam folder to make sure no emails you would prefer in your inbox are being moved, so that moving forward you can rest easy knowing you aren’t at risk of missing any important emails.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, you may need to periodically add more unsubscribe message phrases to your rule list over time if you notice any emails start sneaking through. As you do, be sure to let me know so I can add them to the master list on this post!

For the Record, I do still read through the marketing emails in my SPAM folder.

As a marketer, looking at others marketers’ emails, content, websites and ads is like a professional musician listening to music from other artists – it’s a source of inspiration.

It’s a little ironic, but ever since I started using this hack, I actually started filling out way many more subscription forms than I ever did previously. I have nothing to lose. It’s a win-win situation for me.

Just about once every other week or so (on my own terms), I will spend some time scanning through my “automated email graveyard” folder hunting for gems drizzled among the rubbish, in search of content and ideas.

If your email marketing and content is good enough, and consistently high quality, you’ll be in the back of my mind to keep an eye out for next time I am sorting through my trash. And if it’s REALLY good, maybe I’ll even add your company to my exceptions rule so your emails are permanently back in my primary inbox so I don’t miss any…

Do you have any other good tips or tricks for stopping unwanted spam emails, or keeping your inbox organized? Any unsubscribe phrases I should add to my list?

The post How to Never Get Unwanted SPAM Emails Again [Incredibly Simple Hack] appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

70% of B2B content marketers aren’t reaching their goals. Learn 45+ costly mistakes that cause content marketing to fail, and actionable tips on how to correct them.

In my previous article, in addition to sharing some some tips for smarter content planning to improve content marketing ROI, I also referenced a couple B2B content marketing statistics that are cause for concern:

88% of B2B companies are using content marketing, but only 30% say they are effective @cmicontent
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(Source: Content Marketing Institute)

Only 41% of marketers say #contentmarketing has a positive ROI @hubspot
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(Source: Hubspot)

Despite the fact that so many marketing dollars and resources being invested in content marketing are not translating into positive business results, 51% of B2B companies still plan to increase spending on content marketing in the next 12 months.

So why are B2B companies investing so highly in content marketing, and why are so many failing to reach their goals?

Achieving Content Marketing Success is More Important (and More Difficult) than Ever

Not only is content often the primary avenue through which many customers discover brands online, now that up to 90% of the buyer’s journey is self-directed, for a significantly long leg of the road, we rely on our content to serve as the primary chaperone to guide and help customers successfully progress through their journeys.

Whether or not a customer makes it to the point-of-purchase is largely dependent on our content’s ability to:

• Capture customers’ attention and keep them engaged
• Answer the right questions for customers
• Help them overcome barriers and obstacles
• Establish the foundation for a strong brand relationship

As if that weren’t a tall enough order in itself, just having the right content isn’t enough if it doesn’t reach the right customers at the right times.

Is that difficult to do? You bet. But it’s getting even harder.

In a digital world where customers have all the power and everyone is a publisher, increasingly high competition and standards are pressuring marketing teams into a race to produce higher quality content, in greater volumes, and at a faster rate than ever before, often with the same amount of resources.

Every 24 hours on the internet:

• 2 million blog posts are written (enough posts to fill Time Magazine for 770 years) Tweet this
• 864,000 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube (that’s 98 years of non-stop cat videos) Tweet this
• 139,344 new websites go live Tweet this

(Sources: MBAOnline, HostGator)

With so much new content being pumped into the digital space every single day, it is infinitely more competitive than it was even just a few years ago. Standing out from the crowd, capturing customers’ attention, and ranking highly on Google search results are all feats growing more challenging by the day.

But while all of the above certainly isn’t making life easy for content marketers these days, you can’t solely blame high competition and standards for your content failures. More often than not, when content marketing fails, it’s because marketers haven’t developed a deep enough understanding of what does and doesn’t work for modern content marketing.

Why your Content Marketing is Failing and How to Fix It

Check out the slideshare below and watch the recording from a recent webinar I presented as part of BrightTalk’s B2B Content Marketing Summit. You’ll get:

• An overview of common costly mistakes that can be killing your content marketing results
• A deep dive on how to maximize content marketing ROI
• Actionable tips and steps to amplify the impact of every content initiative
• Examples and insights on how to align your content creation and distribution strategies with the customer journey

The post Why Your Content Marketing is Failing and How to Fix It [SlideShare] appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.

Only 41% of marketers get a positive ROI from content marketing. Learn 4 effective content planning tactics to maximize the return and impact of your content programs.

Given the significant role content plays in influencing the modern customer journey, it makes sense that companies are so heavily investing in content marketing now and in the future.

On Average, B2B Marketing Orgs Allocate 28% of their Budget to #ContentMarketing in 2016
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(Content Marketing Institute)

51% of B2B Marketing Orgs plan to increase #ContentMarketing Spending in the Next 12 Months
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(Content Marketing Institute)

But while many digital marketing teams are pouring their resources into their content marketing programs, far fewer are actually seeing a positive return on their investments and efforts.

Only 30% percent of B2B marketers say their #contentmarketing is effective
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(Content Marketing Institute)

Only 41% of marketers say #contentmarketing has a positive ROI
Click To Tweet

(HubSpot)

Unsurprisingly, having a documented content marketing plan and strategy was the leading factor that was found to separate the winners from the losers.
(Content Marketing Institute)

I’d like to share a few content planning tips you can start using right now that can make a big difference in helping you drive more results with fewer resources.

4 Smart Content Planning Tips that Will Save You Huge

1. Design Your Content for Re-purposing From the Start.

It’s a lot easier to make a car eco-friendly if you design it that way from the start, than it is to try to take a car that wasn’t designed to be eco-friendly, and make it eco-friendly. Such can also be the case with re-purposing content.

With a little planning ahead, the following approaches can really go along way to not only save you time and resources in the long run, but also amplify the impact of your content initiatives.

Create an eBook Outline with Stand-Alone Chapters

Conducting some keyword research ahead of time, you can strategically craft an eBook outline in which each chapter and sub-chapter can stand alone as its own content topic related to the overall subject while doing your content planning. When it’s time to publish the eBook, just don’t index the PDF on Google (for duplicate content purposes), and Voila – you have yourself fresh organic content ready to publish. You can then add a seamless CTA linking back to the gated eBook to convert the targeted traffic you drive to the article into net new leads.

Another option is to publish some chapters as PDF guides, providing great fodder for content to send your email database individually, or to gate and use for lead gen assets on their own. The sky is the limit here – you can include any content format you can think of really, as long as you plan it all out well in advance.

Check out this similar example below from Marketo, who are absolute masters of this art. Marketo regularly publishes a quarterly Definitive Guide, which they commonly use this tactic with. The product is typically a 100+ page beast of an asset chock-full of high-quality standalone content topics and chapters ready to re-purpose.

In the below example, you see the first chapter “What is Lead Generation and Why is it Important?” was re-purposed as an SEO article which currently ranks #1 on Google for the search phrase “What is Lead Generation?”

But they didn’t stop there. No, not even close. From that single definitive guide, they were able to create 11+ more standalone content assets that I could count, not including any other blog posts or SEO articles that may have come out of this. Not too shabby.

Stand-Alone Chapter Outlines to Re-purpose Webinars

Just like for eBooks or Guides, you can similarly use this approach to outline webinar content for re-purposing. After the webinar, you can than get the recording transcribed (we use Rev.com as our transcription service) to produce your written content you’ve planned in your outline. The more thorough job you do with your outline and notes for the webinar, the easier it will be later.

A really pro move with this is to plan the transcription of the webinar to turn into an eBook, while also still planning to re-purpose the chapters of the eBook into standalone organic content articles and other assets. A multi-dimension re-purpose if you will. Very meta. Very effective.

Designing Webinar Slides for Re-purposing to Slideshare

Another option that I am a fan of is designing your webinar slide decks so they can easily be published as a slideshare directly following the event.

In my opinion, if your slides are not optimized to work as a slideshare without much editing after the webinar, then the slides probably weren’t optimized for the webinar in the first place.

This has a double advantage because it also forces you to make your webinar slides more engaging, by incorporating common protocols required of a slideshare such as more visuals, less text, more data, and an interesting cover.

2. Set Strategic Business Objectives and Content Themes

Objectives are not the same as goals. While most digital and content marketers have goals and KPIs of some sort, I would bet that (in comparison) far fewer have solid content marketing objectives set for the next 6-12 months. If you do not, it can be a great way to focus your efforts on the needle-mover areas.

Business Objective Examples:

• Take market share from a competitor
• Establish yourself as a leading authority on xyz subject
• Reach a new market segment or audience
• Educate the market to create demand for a new solution

You need to be measure twice before you cut with these, as in order to be effective you need to commit to them and not switch your objectives frequently.

Once you have your objectives in place, the second part is developing over-arching content themes to help you achieve your objectives. These themes might run anywhere from a month to a year. I personally prefer the ballpark 90-day range, and no more than three-to-four themes max running at once.

Below are some advantages to getting these nailed down.

7 Benefits of Setting Content Marketing Themes

• Focus resources on needle-movers. Much less chance of wasting time and energy with these swimming lanes carved out to keep you on track.
• Building authority on topic, SEO ranking. Focusing lots of content to cover all different relevant topics surrounding a certain subject helps you establish yourself as an authority on that subject and improve SEO rankings for relevant keywords.
• Attract and grow targeted audience. The customers you attract with this topic will be an engaged audience for your future content for this theme. The more content you create content for the theme over time, the larger and larger you grow your niche audience for the next, with a growing list of prospective customers that you can behaviorally target based upon their interest. It’s a snowballing effect.
• Content coverage across customer journey. This approach helps you make sure to fill out missing gaps of content for each theme throughout each stage of the customer journey to create a more complete and consistent experience for customers.
• Optimize conversion and secondary CTAs galore. Suddenly it seems like you always have the perfect CTA and other relevant content to link to when you publish new content, which is key for maintaining customer engagement and advancing them to later stages of the journey.

• Consistent omni-channel messaging. Inconsistent messaging can be a dangerous thing that can cost you a customer’s trust if you’re not careful. With themes in place, it is easier to keep consistent with your message to deliver a seamless multi-channel experience.
• Control experimentation and resource allocation. A common (and costly) mistake content marketers can make is taking too large a risk by rolling the dice on untested content topics for high investment content initiatives such as an eBook.

In the Content Marketing Pyramid example below from Curata, content initiatives are assigned points based upon the amount of effort needed to be invested. The higher point value content assets, especially the 500 point eBooks, is not something you want to take a gamble on missing the mark. Themes help protect these high investment assets for essential topics. Any topic experimentation and testing can then be done down at the curated and short-form blog post levels where it belongs.

3. Conduct a Content Audit

Another common content marketing mistake is the tendency to always look to create new content without taking inventory of the existing content you already have.

Conducting a content audit and making this a regular part of your content planning process can not only improve your understanding of where you need to focus future content creation efforts most, but also help you discover ways to get much more value from your existing assets.

8 Factors to Consider During a Content Audit:

• Number assets/customer journey stage. how many content assets do you have for each stage of the customer journey?
• Types of assets/stage. How many types per stage? Do you have the right formats to meet your objectives at each stage?
• Performance of assets. Just because you have 150 education stage SEO articles and blog posts does not necessarily mean they are driving enough traffic. On the other hand, there might be some assets performing well you might discover and consider re-purposing.
• Age of content. Do some assets need to be updated?
• Location of content. Is each asset in the right place for customers to find it? Are there more places where it could be?
• Distribution strategy. Have we done our due diligence for promotion and leveraged all the right channels?
• Optimization, enhancement, and re-purposing. Are there, SEO or conversion optimization opportunities? Should we add to it or bulk it up? Something we can re-purpose?
• Keyword research – What keywords is each page optimized for how are they ranking?

Below is an example of a content audit my colleague, Ryan Pinkham, conducted for one of our products at SmartBear. We use google sheets for this.

4. Create Evergreen Content

Will this topic be relevant next month or next year? Three years from now? Evergreen Content is defined as SEO content that always stays relevant and fresh. Think Wikipedia.

NOT Evergreen Content Topics:

• News stories, newsjacking
• Annual reports
• Event, holiday or season
• Pop culture fad

Evergreen Content Examples:

• Lists
• Tips
• “How to” and “what is” articles
• Encyclopedia-esque articles.

Before committing the resources to produce all the content in your plan, make sure that enough of the topics evergreen ones that you will continue to reap the benefits from for years to come.

I can name more than a few content assets that have influenced millions of dollars of revenue for us years after the were originally produced, and still are today. The gifts that keep on giving…

Atlassian is one company that does this very effectively. Check out their education center on agile methodology, which is crammed full of juicy organic evergreen content.

You will be surprised how much measuring twice before you cut during your content planning can make an impact on the bottom line.

By the way, I used an outline for planning this post. Do the two standalone content topics below look familiar?

• 7 Benefits of Setting Content Marketing Themes
• 8 Factors to Consider During a Content Audit

What content planning tips do you have for improving ROI?

For insights on more content marketing success makers and breakers, an overview of costly mistakes that can be killing your content marketing results, and actionable tips on how to correct them, check out the slideshare below from a recent webinar I presented as part of BrightTalk’s B2B Content Marketing Summit.

The post 4 Smart Content Planning Tips to Ensure a Huge ROI appeared first on Customer Journey Marketer Blog.