Knowing who your customers are and how they interact with your business is crucial if you’re to understand what they really want. And by knowing what they want, you can come up with new products, services, and techniques to appeal to these desires and ultimately end up not only selling more, but hopefully developing customer loyalty to your brand that you can use to generate long-term revenues rather than having to repeat the process over and over each time you want to promote something new. However, as with everything related to this topic, this is typically far easier said than done. But if you want to succeed in business regardless of the industry you operate in, you have to master the journeys that people take in order to provide them with precisely what they want…after all, the art of selling is to convince a customer to want to buy your product rather than selling it to them.
Shift From Linear Funnels To Dynamic Journey Loops
If that heading sounds a little bit like marketing jargon, you’d be right. All it really means is that in 2025 and beyond (or until another paradigm shift in marketing occurs), you need to move away from the traditional way of directing customers down a linear type of funnel to a designated end point of your choosing, to something a little more dynamic. According to Quantum Metric, using the right data will help you to find out where users are struggling and where they convert so that you can solve any frustrations in real time and ensure they keep moving along to the stage where they feel comfortable to convert. No longer can you brute force a customer to buy something. In today’s world, you need a touch more finesse and a product that they are genuinely interested in buying, otherwise you risk losing them at the very start of the user journey. To achieve this, you can implement more dynamic loops that keep them engaged and in the buying cycle. An example might look like this:
Awareness → consideration → purchase → retention → advocacy → back to awareness
- Awareness: Here, the customer will discover your brand via your various marketing channels, be they PPC, SEO, socials, word of mouth, PR, etc.
- Consideration: You have no control at this stage, where the customer will consider all of their options via their own research. However, as long as you are offering a quality proposition that is provable via online reviews, and are at the right price point, they should return to you.
- Purchase: This is the moment of the transaction. You must make it as seamless as possible, and if you add in upsells and promotions, they must be highly relevant to the customer in question and the product they’re buying.
- Retention: If you can provide an excellent service at this point, you should find that the buyer will come back to you again in the future. And, seeing as retaining a customer is far more cost-effective than enticing new ones into your fold, you should really focus on providing incredible value and service.
- Advocacy: The customer becomes a promoter: leaves reviews, refers friends, creates UGC, posts on social, and becomes a case study.
- Back to awareness: Once you have created an advocate for your brand, you will find that new customers who follow this process will be led to become advocates themselves. This is from them reading reviews of a product and choosing to invest.
A great example of this can be seen with brands like Milwaukee Power Tools, which have really followed this process to a tee. They listen to the needs of their customers, create amazing (albeit slightly pricy) products, and end up turning their customers into rabid advocates for the brand, compounding their success.
Build Hyper-Accurate Customer Journey Maps
In the past, it was adequate to build relatively generalized journey maps for your customers, as you had less access to targeted data, and people were more easily led to a conversion. However, nowadays, you have to be hyper accurate when it comes to building a map so that you can create incredibly personalized experiences for each and every potential customer who lands on your website. This involves setting up KPIs that match the modern way of attracting customers:
| Old metric | New, journey-centric metric | Why is it better |
| Email open rate | CES (Customer Effort Score) per journey stage. | This measures real friction points, not just vanity metrics that make you feel better. |
| Cost per acquisition | Customer lifetime value divided by the cost of acquisition. | Reflects long-term profitability rather than one-off wins. |
| Session duration | Journey completion rate. | Shows true conversion health. |
| Bounce rate | Micro-conversion progression rate. | Identifies hidden leaks in the funnel that you can remedy in real-time. |
You can still use old metrics, but the best results usually come from the latest ones.
Common Mistakes To Avoid
Moving from the old, tried and tested techniques to newer tactics is always a challenge and not without its complications. If you want to achieve the best results from updating your customer journeys, you need to know some of the more common errors so as to avoid them.
Treating All Customers The Same
It’s utterly imperative to treat your customers as individuals rather than a mass of people that you want to sell things to. If you fail in this regard, you will alienate many potential customers and drive them away towards your competition, who is already likely implementing far more tailored experiences for them.
Ignoring Post-Purchase Experience
If you want to ensure that customers become more than mere buyers of your product and turn into proud ambassadors who will sing praises to your brand, you need to keep them reneged post-purchase. Yes, this is more work, but the effort put in more than makes up for the effort and fdoidng so can even turn them into a loyal customer who will come back over again when you release something new and improved.
Overcomplicating Touchpoints
If you have too many steps in your funnel or are inconsistent with your messaging, you could turn off buyers midway through the journey, which will be catastrophic for your outcomes. Keep things as simple as possible and reduce friction if you want to boost sales.
Mastering the art of nudging a potential customer along a road that leads to a sale is much more complex than it used to be. However, the advantage is that you will get to know the people behind the money and ensure they stick with your brand long-term.
