Cheetah Journey Designer gives marketers a beautiful and intuitive canvas for orchestrating cross-channel customer journeys efficiently and effectively. Users can map out sequences of messages that leverage simple and complex real-time decisioning at the moment of send across the entire Cheetah Customer Engagement suite.
With the Engagement Data Platform at the core, Journey Designer executes high throughput, low-latency messaging that enables marketers across business verticals to delight customers with the right content at the precise moments that they need it.
Onboarding new opted-in customers and prospects
Onboarding new customers and prospects who have opted-in to receiving communications is a pivotal task for cross-channel digital marketers, and when done well, can set the stage for long-term, mutually beneficial customer relationships.
One of the standard journey templates pre-loaded in Cheetah Journey Designer is an “onboarding” journey template that makes it easy for marketers to quickly and efficiently launch, measure, and optimize welcome programs that drive core business objectives and positive customer experiences at scale.
Let’s take a quick look at how to leverage Cheetah Journey Designer to onboard new customers and prospects and begin to establish loyal customer relationships.
Using Cheetah Journey Designer
When onboarding customers and prospects, it is critical for brands to 1) Set expectations, 2) Showcase value, and 3) Engage new subscribers with highly relevant content/offers that resonate and prompt desired actions — Cheetah Journey Designer enables marketers to make this happen at an individual recipient level at enterprise scale.
Step 1: Setting Expectations
The first message in the default message flow for the onboarding journey is the Welcome Email. It is standard practice to welcome all new customers via email, and the welcome message for many brands is a great opportunity to set expectations about the program(s) users have opted into and open the lines of communication between brand and consumer.
It is often a good idea to let customers know how often they’ll be receiving messaging, provide access to key contact information, and feature one key call to action that moves customers along in their brand relationship. One tactic that has been proven to pay dividends is to engage new users in a brand experience that generates incremental, willingly shared, customer intent data to better serve customers (for more on Marigold Grow — click here). It is best to send a welcome email at the moment a new subscriber engages, so the default onboarding message cadence sends the first message the instant the record hits the Marigold Engage+, confirming the action and setting a positive impression moment one.
Step 2: Showcasing Value
The next step in the default flow for the Onboarding Journey is sent at a marketer-defined “wait step” after the welcome email and can incorporate all of the customer data housed in the Engagement Data Platform to drive personalization.
We refer to this message as the Member Benefits Email and suggest it is to be used to showcase the value that the brand is bringing to the relationship. For brands who are relying on strong first- and zero-party data assets, this message can be highly personalized and for most use cases, we highly suggest that it is. The default wait step is 24 hours after the welcome message is sent, but can be modified in a click to reflect a wide variety of customer scenarios. The default channel designation for the message is email, but Journey Designer supports all channels and marketers can choose to send recipients this message in email, SMS, or via mobile push as their specific use case dictates.
Step 3: Engaging with Offers and Relevant Content
The third message in the Onboarding Journey is the New User Offer message, which is again set by default as email, but can be executed via mobile, or even offline channels as well. The new user offer message can leverage the machine learning and decisioning of the Marigold Engage+ to present the appropriate content and/or offer for each recipient at an individual level.
Whether the goal of the onboarding journey is a purchase, an upgrade, a store visit, a registration, an enrollment into a loyalty program, or virtually any other outcome, having Journey Designer natively built into the Cheetah Customer Engagement suite enables brands to harness all of the data at hand to present the precise content at this stage in the customer journey to drive their business objective. The next message in the default configuration is a “Last Chance” or reminder message that is generally used to drive the same business outcome as the previous message to users who have not taken action on the first, and again, can be sent via email or mobile.
Brands and marketers who are able to use their onboarding programs to delight customers and deliver immediate value are setting a course in the right direction for long-term, loyal relationships, and positive customer journeys. For more on Cheetah Journey Designer, check out the CES Help center, and be sure to peruse the full suite of journey companion guides.
