Want to send highly targeted (and better performing) marketing campaigns? Start by mapping your customer journey.

Creating a customer journey map is a vital part of understanding and improving your customer experience. With Microsoft Dynamics, you can build a comprehensive and effective customer journey map that helps you visualize your customers' interactions with your brand.

The customer journey is broadly defined as the steps a potential buyer could take toward becoming your customer. For most brands, this will be comprised of Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, and Advocacy:

Taking the time to map your customer journey is a great way to help you better target your marketing, support the sales funnel, align sales and marketing to the same conversion plan, improve customer experiences, and identify problem areas in your funnel. Getting a map together can take time and effort, but the payoff is a stronger, data-driven marketing and sales strategy that everyone can agree on.

 

Download our step-by-step guide to building your customer journey with Microsoft Dynamics >>

 

Leveraging Microsoft Dynamics for Your Customer Journey Map

Microsoft Dynamics is ideal for this exercise, as it is already designed to map data points along a sales funnel. Here’s how each step might look with Microsoft Dynamics and your marketing automation platform (which serves as the data house for the Awareness stage):

 

Now that you’re thinking about Microsoft Dynamics as a guide for your customer journey, let’s talk about how to actually map and optimize your touchpoints.

 

Step #1: Define Your Customer Journey

Begin by documenting all potential ways a person could engage with your brand, from marketing to sales to customer success. This includes:

• Email (through marketing or through sales/direct)
• Social media (paid, organic, or both?)
• Events (webinar, trade show, networking, etc.)
• Customer support (automated and personal)
• Online content (your website, promoted profiles, partner sites)
• Phone calls
• Face-to-face, word of mouth, referral

Cataloging these touchpoints will help you reference what stage these touchpoints fall into later on.

 

Step #2: Integrate Data with Dynamics

Ensure that Dynamics is capturing marketing, sales, and support data. Essential marketing data in Dynamics should include:

• Campaigns Entity: Leverage both Lead Source and Source Campaign
• Competitor Entity: Capture who you’re losing (and winning) to at the Lead and Opportunity stages
• Marketing Spend and Potential ROI

Having these tracking options in place will help you build a stronger, data-driven marketing budget that looks at marketing spend, the number of leads a campaign drives in, which types of marketing activities are most successful for your brand, and the potential and actual revenue of the campaigns you’re invested in. You’ll need these data points later—so even if you don’t have them in place now, be sure to ask for them.

 

Step #3: Set Clear Goals

These goals could be general or you might want to create a unique goal for each line of service you offer. Using previous Dynamics data, determine:

• How many opportunities did it take to get to your sales goals?
• What was your average deal size?
• How many leads did you need to meet those sales goals? Look for outliers and use average deal size.
• How many MQLs do you expect and at what rate do you turn them into SQLs?

 

Step #4: Identify Your Best Lead Source

With data supporting which lead sources drive the highest quality leads and biggest sales dollars (easy if you’re tracking Lead Source and Source Campaign for every Lead), determine your best source. Is it tradeshows, paid search, memberships, or SEO?

Document why you selected this Lead Source so that your sales and customer success teams understand your reasoning.

 

Step #5: Collaborate with Your Team

Invite every person who engages with any part of the funnel. For most organizations, this includes Marketing, Sales, Support, and Customer Success. The goal is to have a collaborative discussion about what’s actually happening at each stage—not just what the data says, but the actual conversations.

 

Preparing for Your Customer Journey Mapping Session

Prepare your team for the customer journey mapping session by clearly defining their roles. Start with your most profitable lead source and ensure everyone involved with that lead source attends.

Drill down on a few good examples, and ask your sales team to do the same. Have them bring examples of emails, sales meeting notes, or relevant conversation remarks. Use a mix of won, lost, and open opportunities in Microsoft Dynamics to frame the discussion with concrete examples.

Your meeting goals are to answer:

• What’s missing at each stage?
• Are we over/under communicating?
• Where is sales getting stuck? Can marketing help?
• Is there more opportunity in the pipeline?
• Are there broader goals marketing can support on the client side?
• Are we working hard enough to turn existing clients into advocates?

 

Post-Session Action Items

After the mapping session, you should have a clear understanding of necessary campaigns, funnel gaps marketing needs to fill, and how marketing can better support each team. Create a campaign map to identify required data points in Dynamics for these campaigns like the example below:

Once you have mapped your best lead source, work down to your worst lead source. Most marketing strategies have many campaigns but fewer than a dozen tactics—stay focused on big buckets like conferences, digital ads, webinars, and SEO.

Learn more about the emfluence Marketing Platform's integration with Microsoft Dynamics and how it can improve your marketing strategy at each stage of the customer journey.