customer persona types

Get a life with the leading cannabis CRM

For the uninitiated, customer journey marketing may seem like a very abstract concept. How are you supposed to keep track of each individual customer’s history with your store? Even if you could, how are you supposed to use that information in a meaningful way?

Customer journey marketing is not nearly as difficult to understand or utilize as some retailers think. In fact, the customer journey is at the heart of every effective customer relationship management tool.

However, recent statistics show that only 20% of organizations actually used marketing across the entire journey of their customers.

Why the massive disconnect?

From the moment someone joins your loyalty rewards program, paying attention to their behaviors can help you to better understand how to serve their interests, while also learning how to influence their actions in your store.

what is a customer journey?

First things first, let us get a clear picture of what a customer journey means.

Each customer’s “journey” is their whole experience with a brand. It begins with their first time using a product or service. If you’re doing it right, they eventually become loyal customers. Some would say the phases of the customer journey include:

1. awareness

When customers first learn about your brand or business

2. engagement

Customers start looking for more information about your products or services.

3. evaluation

Potential customers compare your offers and features with other options or retailers.

4. purchase

When the individual decides to buy one of your products.

5. retention

Using additional promotions and re-engagement campaigns to re-connect with existing customers.

6. loyalty

Earning the customer’s repeat business.

7. advocacy

When the customer goes out and starts raising awareness for your brand or business.

Right around phases 4-5 is when things get really critical. Sadly, in some cases, the customer journey ends here when someone stops using the product or service. It is truly an untimely death for a potential customer relationship.

They say all good things must come to an end, but what if you could grant your customers immortality? If you want to keep the love alive, you have to be ready for the kind of commitment that goes into any long-term relationship. That means turning your cannabis CRM into a fountain of youth!

defining customer journey marketing

Customer journey marketing is all about trying to prevent customers from ever reaching the end of the line with your company. The goal is to keep customers or patients of your dispensary as an active consumer. Instead of letting them lose interest or go with a competitor, you want to keep them engaged.

In other words, when they get to phases 5-7, you want to find a way to lead them back to phase 1, instead of letting them slip through the cracks.

To properly utilize customer journey text marketing, you need to be able to understand your customer’s behavior, and then work to align their behavior with your business’s goals. springbig encourages our partners, and all cannabis dispensaries, to keep in mind X crucial benefits of customer journey marketing.

1. identify critical points for customers

One thing to understand right away is how a customer journey map allows retailers to identify critical points in each customer’s journey. It is a timeline of their experience that helps you understand how to improve the experience and subsequently prolong their customer journey. The details of these critical points will vary, depending on your dispensary and how you build your customer journey marketing strategy. However, there are some common metrics many in the cannabis industry use to keep track.

frequency of visits

One way to measure a customer’s journey data is by keeping track of visit frequency. Through springbig’s cannabis CRM software, you are able to target customers/patients by how often they visit your store.

spending habits

In the same way that an effective cannabis CRM allows you to keep track of consumer visits, you can also use their spending data. When building a text campaign, you can also focus on individuals who spend more or less.

2. create tiers for customers

Our loyalty rewards software helps dispensaries to create an appropriate sales funnel for each customer based on the unique criteria you establish. Whether you focus on how often they visit or how much money they spend, you can use customer journey data to establish different tier levels.

Once you have established tier levels for your loyal customers, you can continue to build relationships by offering special deals to those who reach each level. These rewards may also entice those in lower tiers to work toward the next level.

3. investigate info and interests

Gathering additional information on customers can help dispensaries expand their content marketing. It is easier to create meaningful relationships with their customers when retailers know how to cater to each individual’s unique interests. Thankfully, businesses can utilize customer journey marketing to acquire more information on their customers,  including:

Birthdays, Email address, Special interests.

For example, if a customer has not provided you with their birthday after 30 days in your springbig rewards program, you can create a text message campaign that reaches out and asks them for their birthday info. Similarly, you might send an SMS marketing campaign to customers who have been in the program for 50 days offering a $5 coupon to anyone who enters their special interests before 60 days.

By collecting more data from your rewards members, you are able to create more targeted campaigns. This same principle of customer journey marketing can also apply to the products each customer purchases. Over time, our cannabis CRM tools can show what brands people buy the most, and what kinds of products they are more interested in. Then, based on that customer journey map, a dispensary can determine how to market to that customer.

For instance, customers who have a history of buying only high potency flower might not care about the new CBD lotion you want to promote. This helps you avoid over-texting people in your dispensary loyalty program.

4. influence their behavior

This is the moment you’ve been reading for. All market research, including customer journey data, is for the sake of influencing the behavior of your audience. The whole point of customer relationship management is to put life back in customer journey marketing by inspiring people to take action.

Customer journey marketing is a major resource for steering your customers in a certain direction. Some examples of  using Customer journey mapping in digital marketing to influence consumers to include:

visit milestones

For some, it is important that customers keep showing up, even when they are spending less. Having that regular traffic can make a real difference. Thankfully, there are a lot of ways you can use our dispensary loyalty rewards program to make randoms into regulars.

Using customer journey marketing, you can set visit milestones that offer loyalty rewards, then send a marketing campaign to those who are close to those milestones. For instance, if you want to reward a customer after their first 10 visits, send them a text at 5 visits to let them know how close they are to that reward.

Also, you can use this to celebrate those regulars who already shop with your dispensary regularly. You could set a campaign that celebrates every 100 visits with $50 off a purchase of $100 or more. Something like that will keep those regulars stopping in as often as possible.

spend milestones

Springbig has always understood the advantage of rewarding loyal customers based on dollars spent. That is why we offer dispensaries the option to create a spend-based loyalty rewards program instead of only a visit-based system. Customer journey marketing lets you set spend milestones that can encourage the average customer to spend a little more, while also rewarding the customers who already spend big.

Say your average customer spends $100 a month. You may decide to send a campaign to those who only spent $50 last month offering $10 off a $100 purchase this month. This is just an example of motivating customers to up their spending when they are pacing behind other customers.

Conversely, you might set an automatic campaign that goes out to your loyal customers every time they spend a thousand dollars, offering them 10% off their next purchase. There are other ways you can celebrate your big spenders, such as:

  • Offering them free brand merchandise, like branded T-shirts, stickers, etc.
  • Encouraging them to share their VIP status with their social media account

brand preferences

A customer’s journey data also offers a glimpse into the kind of products they prefer. As the leading CRM in the cannabis business, springbig allows retailers to set up campaigns that target customers based on the brands that they like.

So if you have a group of customers who typically spend less than your top spenders, and you want to incentivize them to spend a little more. Using springbig, you can create an SMS or MMS marketing campaign that targets them based on the brands they have a history of buying.

For example, you can make a campaign for everyone who:

  • Has spent less than $100 this month
  • Always buys “Silly Spinach Vape” products
  • Offer them bonus rewards points when they buy another “Silly Spinach Vape” item by the end of the month.

make every customer an active customer

When all is said and done, your mission is to provide the best cannabis experience for your customers. Part of that is excellent customer service and creating a dispensary loyalty rewards program that keeps customers engaged.

You want every customer to be an active customer, which is why springbig offers your dispensary the tools to meet each individual where they are.

Customer relationship management isn’t just about giving free stuff to regular customers. It is also about effective customer retention. Adding value to each person’s unique experience with your brand is how you enhance that customer journey. That is why springbig is committed to bringing you the best tools to build relationships with every person who walks through your door.

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