Getting Lost with the Map

But too many of those marketers have been getting lost trying to create and sustain mutually profitable loyalty programs with their best customer candidates. The customer journey has proven to be highly unpredictable, and the journey map tools, by design, don’t allow them to adapt fast enough to move at the new speed of their customer.

While adding more channels provided more convenience for customers, it also created the perfect storm for marketers. More channels naturally forced marketers to develop marketing strategies that were optimized on a channel-by- channel basis, producing multiple different, and often competing customer experiences. Additionally, more channels empowered customers to interact wherever and whenever they wanted, making it nearly impossible for marketers to keep up. Finally, customers started noticing this effect and increasingly desired one seamless and personalized customer experience across channels.

Now, marketers can get the best customer view from the trees.

Adaptive marketers are now converting their journey maps into dynamic Opportunity Trees that let the customer control their journey and enable the marketer to create an adaptive customer experience. The focus shifts from optimizing channels to optimizing each individual relationship with customers. With opportunity trees, channels become irrelevant.

The View from Opportunity Trees

What is an opportunity tree? It’s a dynamic decision tree that exposes all the potential opportunities that let an adaptive marketer create the best possible customer experience to achieve a specific business objective. In other words, it puts the power back in the marketer’s hands.

Here’s an example:

First, the business objective:

Let’s say “Mikes” are high-value loyal customers that haven’t renewed their subscription yet. As a loyalty marketer, the goal is to create an adaptive customer experience for the Mikes by influencing their decision to renew their contract, reduce churn and increase LTV, and offer a personalized renewal experience.

Next, design the opportunity tree:

1. Web Opportunity
   Mike is viewing the product page
2. Email Opportunity
   Mike opens email after being on website
3. Mobile App Opportunity
   Mike views account info
4. Mobile Web Opportunity
   Mike is navigating through renewal wizard

By upgrading the journey map to an opportunity tree, loyalty marketers can maximize every opportunity at every step. Where the customer journey map gets disorienting with multiple siloed strategies, a channel-centric mentality, and linear and controlling execution, the opportunity tree offers a single, unified strategy company-wide, a customer-centric mentality and dynamic adaptive messaging.

The outcome? 100% adaptability. Opportunity trees let the marketer adapt to customer behavior ensuring the right message is always sent regardless of the channel and order of interactions.

Moving Past Channels

Marketers are no longer forced to take a channel-centric approach to communicate with their customers - stuck with a proliferation of channels, devices, and the disconnected tools that were built to take advantage of each unique benefit that every channel and device offered. That’s old news that applied when the number of channels was limited.

It’s time to shift past these limits. Whether it’s adapting externally to customers’ unpredictable behavior or internally within a brand’s organization, the time has come for loyalty marketers to become adaptive marketers, moving past channels to create opportunity trees.