Key takeaways:
- Marketers and CX specialists often exhaust known strategies, prompting the need for experimentation.
- Experimentation is crucial for discovering new effective tactics but is often avoided due to complexity.
- Out of Dark’s customer journey mapping tool simplifies experimentation by allowing easy tracking and comparison of experiments.
- The tool enables persona-centric customer journeys, making it simple to customize strategies for specific target groups.
- Features like touchpoint/activity tagging, data integration, and team member assignment streamline experiment management and evaluation.
Every marketer and CX specialist has a go-to collection of things to do that work – he’s done them a couple of times already and they always deliver. To be honest, there’s not even that much of them. Everybody knows you should do social media, write a blog, try to get mentions in the best-ranking articles for the keywords you care about, set up PPC campaigns, create discounts, pay a few influencers, and so on. In the case of CX, tweaking the onboarding process in some way, doing some magic with emailing, or adding something to the checkout page that increases upsells.
The problem is, that almost every company hits a ceiling of the “usual” things to do. If you exhaust the known, there’s only one way to look if you want to continue developing your strategy: to the unknown. Since you don’t know what things from the unknown will work, you have to try whatever makes at least a little sense and see what happens. In other words, you have to experiment.
Many of the greatest ideas were born this way: they were not conceived by the brilliance of their maker, but rather by trial and error. Although it has to be said that there’s certainly some skill in coming up with the right things to try.
So why aren’t more marketers and CX specialists running experiments with their strategies, campaigns, or customer experience? It’s just too complicated. The strategies they already have in place are complex enough on their own. Trying a simple thing or two here and there won’t hurt, but adding a ton of experiments that can themselves be a bit complex would make the current strategy nothing but a mess.
Many of the experiments they dream about wouldn’t be meant for the whole customer base, but only for a specific target group. That means they’d get to mid-double digits of customer journey modifications without even trying. If you presented this to your boss (if you’re not one yourself), it would most likely be a very short conversation. It’s very frustrating because any marketer or CX person would tell you that even a small tweak or modification somewhere could bring you exponentially bigger results.
The funny thing is that the tool we created basically for something else (although quite similar) can be very effectively applied to solve this problem. Our customer journey mapping tool allows every business to easily map all customer touchpoints. We summed up target groups into the persona concept, and you can add your personas to the touchpoints of your choice. This allows you to create persona-centric (i.e. customizable) customer journeys with a few clicks. It’s all incredibly simple, intuitive, and easy to maintain.
So if you decide to experiment with one of your personas (i.e. target groups), you can keep track of all the experiments in Out of Dark. What’s more, you can directly track and compare their performance by connecting your data source – we have a ton of integrations with the most popular tools. You can tag the experimental milestones so it’s clear which milestones are the permanent pillars of your strategy and which are the experiments. Do you have a large team and therefore multiple people involved? Great! You can attach your team members to the experiments (touchpoints) they’re responsible for and make it easy to understand who’s responsible for what. And there are certainly more of our features that will come in handy.
You don’t have to be afraid of the forgotten, faded out, or otherwise neglected experiments (which is another thing that often happens) either. With Out of Dark, you can create a nice workflow for coming up with, creating, managing, and evaluating them – it also provides you with everything you need to keep it tidy.
