This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Marcloud’s Marketing Cloud Academy. If you’re looking for training on Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (ex-Pardot), Tom Ryan and his team are the best!
Today I want to help go beyond your 3 first journeys and give you a framework to “automate” journey creation.
For those who are not familiar with Design Thinking, here’s a quick definition: “Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that emphasizes understanding the needs and perspectives of the people who will use a product or service and using that understanding to develop innovative and effective solutions.”
What’s in it for us?
Can we really use it in a Salesforce Marketing Cloud context?
Of course!
All you need is to follow a 4-step approach and use the SCAMPER framework for ideation…
Let’s dive in!
The 4 key steps to creating new customer experiences.
Design thinking is a human-centred approach to problem-solving that involves empathy, experimentation, and iteration.
Here are the key steps you should follow:
1. Empathize with your Audience
This is all about using data to understand your audience. Their needs, pain points and behaviors.
If you understand your customers, you’ll be able to identify new opportunities to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud to address their needs and deliver value.
2. Define the Problem
Once you’ve empathized with your audience, define the problem that you want to solve. This could be anything from improving customer retention to driving more sales. The key is to clearly articulate the problem so that you can focus your efforts on finding a solution.
3. Ideate New Solutions
With the problem defined, it’s time to start ideating new solutions. But we’re not all equal when it comes to being creative or brainstorming. That’s why, I recommend using the SCAMPER framework for this step.
4. Prototype and Test Your Ideas
Once you’ve identified a few promising ideas, it’s time to create prototypes and test them with your audience. Iterate based on your campaign’s metrics until you hit your targeted conversion rates.
Ideate with the SCAMPER framework!
SCAMPER is an acronym that stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Rearrange.
This framework prompts you to ask questions about your existing ideas and see how you can modify them to come up with new ones. For example, you can ask “What if we combined two of our existing ideas?” or “How can we adapt this idea to a different context?”
Here’s how you can use the SCAMPER framework for customer journey creation:
- Substitute: Consider substituting a step in the customer journey with a different approach. For example, instead of sending an email, you could try sending an SMS or a WhatsApp Message to engage customers more dynamically.
- Combine: Think about combining different touchpoints in the customer journey to create a more seamless experience. For example, you could combine email and Facebook ads (using Marketing Cloud Advertising) to create a coordinated campaign that targets customers on multiple channels.
- Adapt: Consider adapting an existing customer journey to a new audience or context. For example, if you’re targeting promo hunters, you may need to adapt the messaging and channels used to engage that audience and maybe add coupon codes.
- Modify: Look for ways to modify existing touchpoints in the customer journey to improve the customer experience. For example, you could modify the content of an email to better address customer pain points or add an Einstein Send Time Optimization activity to determine the best time to send an email.
- Put to Another Use: Think about how you can repurpose existing customer journeys for a new purpose. For example, an upsell journey to win back series.
- Eliminate: Consider eliminating touchpoints in the customer journey that are not adding value or causing friction. For example, if you find that customers are dropping off at a particular touchpoint, you may need to eliminate that touchpoint or simplify the process to reduce friction.
- Rearrange: Look for ways to rearrange touchpoints in the customer journey to create a more efficient or effective experience. For example, you could rearrange the order of touchpoints to create a more logical flow or reduce the number of steps required to complete a task.
Marketing Automation solutions are creative tools.
If you want to make the most of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you should be creating and constantly optimizing.
Continuous creation requires structure and I hope this issue gave you one.
That’s all for today, see you next week!
Other ways I can help you: