A marketer’s guide to the best customer journey software in 2024
Did you know the average consumer encounters eight touchpoints before making a purchase? It’s up to brands to ensure the experience across every touchpoint is consistent, cohesive, and relevant to your customer.
Updated on 15 Aug 2024
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Customer journey software provides brands with the tools and information they need to build these highly personalized, cross-channel experiences and boost key metrics. Leading cosmetics retailer, Yves Rocher, saw a 19% increase in conversions and 7X ROI when its marketing team partnered with Insider to launch a cross-channel browser recovery campaign.
In this blog, we’ll dive into customer journey software—what it is, its benefits, how to select the right platform, and a look at the best customer journey software options of 2024. Let’s get started.
What is customer journey software?
Customer journey software orchestrates, tracks, and analyzes customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. These touchpoints can range from initial brand awareness through the entire lifecycle, including website visits, social media engagements, email interactions, and product purchases.
The software provides valuable insights into customer behavior, empowering marketers to make informed decisions based on the journey’s performance.
What are the key functions of customer journey software?
- Building the customer journey: Set up and automate your customer journey. Outline every touchpoint and highlight when and how your customers will engage with your brand. This is instrumental in identifying patterns, gaps, and opportunities for improvement.
- Analyzing interactions: Dive deep into the analysis of customer interactions. Scrutinize data points across each channel for critical information about preferences, pain points, and conversion triggers. Marketers can then adapt and tailor their strategies based on this analysis.
- Cross-channel integration: If the average consumer has eight touchpoints before making a purchase. Your customer journey software should integrate data from various sources, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more, into one dashboard, providing a holistic view of the customer’s path.
- Real-time insights: Timing is everything. Your customer journey software should offer real-time insights. Access up-to-the-minute data on customer behavior, allowing for agile decision-making and strategy changes.
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“We had no automated tool for interacting with users and meeting them at the touchpoints they were available on in the customer journey. When Insider entered the picture, Eatsy was transformed. We saw a 50% to 70% increase in signups once we started using automatic scenarios in Insider’s customer journey software.”
- CTO of Eatsy
The benefits of customer journey software
- It improves customer understanding
Effective marketing can’t rely on guesswork. Customer journey software provides brands with data and analytics on customer behaviors and interactions to move beyond assumptions. This enables you to craft strategies that align seamlessly with the customer’s journey. You can optimize your efforts by identifying high-impact touchpoints and eliminating redundancies, ensuring a more efficient and cost-effective approach to reaching your audience.
- It makes personalization quick and easy
Personalized experiences are an expectation of every consumer. From customized email campaigns to targeted content recommendations, showing you know and value your customer is the key to standing out. Customer journey software empowers you to use your data from the platform to create relevant, contextual experiences that you know will work.
- It helps to build customer loyalty
It costs 5X more to acquire a new customer than to re-engage a current one. By understanding crucial touchpoints, you can consistently deliver positive customer experiences, cultivating trust and reliability to boost CLTV and increase loyalty.
- It improves your cross-channel consistency
Maintaining a consistent brand experience across various channels is challenging, but customer journey software makes it more achievable. With a dashboard to understand how customers move seamlessly between online and offline touchpoints, including Email, WhatsApp, SMS, Web, and App, you can ensure that your messaging, branding, and customer experience remain cohesive to reinforce brand identity and trust.
How do I choose the best customer journey software?
Here are some key questions to ask when looking for customer journey software for your brand:
Does it have the capabilities to help me achieve my objectives?
Selecting customer journey software requires a thorough examination of your business requirements. Ensure the software aligns with your unique needs, addressing specific aspects of customer interactions and marketing strategies for optimal effectiveness.
What are its integration capabilities?
Evaluate how seamlessly the software integrates with your existing tools. A solution that effortlessly integrates with your current tech stack ensures a smooth workflow, minimizing disruptions and maximizing overall efficiency.
Is it scalable for my business?
As your business grows, your software needs to grow, too. Verify that your chosen software can adapt to your business growth, accommodating increasing data volumes and expanding operations without necessitating frequent software changes.
What are its AI capabilities?
Evaluate the software’s AI capabilities for advanced insights. Consider platforms like Insider, which leverages AI to analyze customer behavior, predict trends, and automate customer journey building. AI-driven solutions enhance decision-making, boost efficiency, and provide a competitive edge in understanding and engaging with your audience more effectively.
How user-friendly is the interface?
You won’t have the time or resources to spend weeks learning an unintuitive new platform. Opt for a solution with a user-friendly interface to ensure easy adoption by your marketing team. An intuitive design will help your team enhance productivity and minimize the learning curve.
What analytics and reporting features does it offer?
Comprehensive data and analytics is a non-negotiable for customer journey software. A complete suite of analytics features allows you to extract meaningful data, enabling informed decision-making and precise adjustments to your marketing strategies based on real-time performance metrics.
The best customer journey software for marketers in 2024
Insider
Trusted by over 1,200 global brands, including Samsung, Estee Lauder, Adidas, Slazenger, Puma, NA-KD, GAP, Lenovo, Adidas, MAC Cosmetics, Clarins, Marks & Spencer, Philips, Yves Rocher, and many more, Insider is the leading customer journey software across all leading analyst reports, including G2, IDC, and Forrester.
Insider takes customer journey orchestration seriously, which is why the platform offers a full suite of capabilities to unify customer data, build journeys, and leverage AI to boost campaign launch times. Insider empowers marketers to deliver personalized, cross-channel customer experiences within minutes, not weeks.
- Architect, the cross-channel journey builder: Architect is Insider’s customer journey software, a platform that empowers brands to automate campaigns seamlessly across all touchpoints, consolidating efforts and maximizing marketing budgets. Powered by customer data, Architect enables the creation of automated flows triggered by events, attribute changes, dynamic dates, and more. From international beauty retailer, MAC Cosmetics to leading financial services provider, Garranti BBVA, Architect empowers marketers to build relevant, personalized cross-channel journeys across every industry for every use case.
- 360-degree customer view: Insider’s actionable Customer Data Platform ensures a unified understanding of customer interactions, behaviors, and preferences across 12+ channels and hundreds of integrations, enabling brands to deliver the ultimate personalized omnichannel experience.
- World-leading AI capabilities: Insider equips marketers with innovative AI tools, including its world-leading generative AI solution, Sirius AI™, for quick and efficient segmentation, journey creation, optimization, and content generation. Other AI-powered features, such as Next Best Channel and Send Time Optimization, remove the manual effort of building the perfect customer journey so marketers can spend more time on high-impact strategies.
- Ready-made templates: Insider’s extensive template library of 120+ pre-approved, ready-made templates enables marketers to act quickly. Remove the stress and customize the templates in line with your branding to launch campaigns in minutes.
- Personalization expertise: Beyond automation, Insider is the number one platform for personalization, according to G2. Insider’s personalization suite enables brands to tailor omnichannel experiences, websites, banners, and product recommendations based on individual customer needs, interests, and preferences.
Braze
Braze provides robust customer engagement through personalized messaging across channels. Its strengths lie in dynamic content and A/B testing. However, some users find its platform learning curve steep, which can be overwhelming for beginners.
Learn: 11 Best Braze Competitors and Alternatives
Emarsys
Emarsys stands out for its AI-driven personalization and automation. It empowers marketers to create tailored experiences. However, the platform doesn’t offer onsite personalization in its journey orchestration, which could lead to an inconsistent experience between channels.
Learn: 9 Best Emarsys Competitors and Alternatives
Iterable
Iterable’s dynamic content capabilities and robust workflows streamline campaign creation. Its integrations and API support enable connectivity with other business tools. Despite this, the platform lacks analytics and data, making it hard to adapt and refine customer journeys.
Learn: 10 Best Iterable Competitors and Alternatives
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a comprehensive suite for customer journey management, blending CRM and marketing automation. Its adaptability to various industries has made it a legacy product. However, it has a lengthy, intricate setup process, making it difficult for smaller businesses with limited resources.
Learn: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud Competitors and Alternatives
Insider in action: Why global brands choose Insider
Insider’s extensive capabilities and intuitive interface make it a go-to for companies across the globe. Here are real-life case studies from two of the world’s most recognizable brands.
- How Slazenger gained 49X ROI in 8 weeks thanks to Insider’s omnichannel marketing solution
Slazenger was looking for a cross-channel customer experience solution to engage its customers better and improve the ROI from its martech stack. Using Insider’s cross-channel journey orchestration solution, Architect, Slazenger engaged shoppers with contextual messaging across Email, Web Push, and SMS, about products they’d already expressed interest in. By sending price drop notifications and cart reminders about these products, the leading sports retailer increased acquisition by 700% and achieved 49X ROI within eight weeks.
“Insider enabled us to build relevant and timely campaigns across nearly 30 customer segments. We built personalized, multi-channel user experiences, which helped us gain a 700% increase in customer acquisition and 49X ROI within just two months thanks to Insider.”
— Ecommerce Director and Slazenger
2. How NA-KD powered omnichannel journeys with unified customer data to increase CLTV by 25%
NA-KD, one of Europe’s fastest-growing brands, faced rapid expansion challenges with a fragmented tech stack and siloed customer data. Recognizing the need for a unified solution, NA-KD partnered with Insider to unlock the full potential of their customer data and create personalized experiences across all channels.
By consolidating its data into one platform, NA-KD gained a 360-degree view of each customer. Insider’s Architect, a cross-channel campaign orchestration tool, enabled NA-KD to action this data, shifting from traditional campaigns to data-driven, cross-channel experiences. Leveraging Insider’s customer journey software helped the brand to deliver a tailored and frictionless customer experience across App, Email, and SMS, showcasing relevant products and content on the channels customers most engage with. The campaign increased CLTV by 25% and achieved 72X ROI within eight weeks.
Customer journey software FAQs
Customer journey software is a tool, like Insider, that maps and analyzes customer interactions across various touchpoints, providing insights to enhance the overall customer experience.
Tracking customer journeys involves using in-built analytics tools to monitor and analyze customer interactions across multiple channels, helping businesses understand and optimize the customer experience.
Creating a customer journey map involves identifying customer touchpoints, mapping out their interactions, and understanding their experiences with a brand throughout the entire lifecycle. This facilitates a holistic view of the customer’s interactions and preferences.
While customer journey refers to the steps a customer takes in interacting with a brand, customer experience encompasses the overall impression and perception a customer forms throughout their entire relationship with a business, including all touchpoints and interactions.
