Gaining a Wider View of Your Customers: Reflections from our Journey Summit

I’d like to share my personal experiences with a recent major-life purchase (MLP) decision.  In 2016, my husband and I bought our first home. Similar to many MLP shoppers, we spent months stalking every conceivable real estate app and went to numerous open houses. We confirmed and re-confirmed our price point on multiple mortgage calculators.

We started our journey in May, made an offer in late September, and closed on the house at the end of November. It felt like a fairly typical buying journey … until I received an email from my bank 7 days after closing. The subject line read: “Are you ready to buy a home?”

Yes, you read that correctly: 7 days after I bought my first home, my bank asked me if I was ready to buy a home. Painful, right?!

Now you may be thinking, “why didn’t you reach out to your bank if you needed a mortgage?” Honestly, I didn’t even think to consider my bank for the mortgage. I researched rates online but used my realtor’s suggestion.

Now, if my bank knew to send me that exact same email a few months earlier, I would have opened it—that subject line was quite relevant for me at the time. And after opening it, I would have read about the benefits my bank was offering to existing customers who funded their mortgage with them.

The moral of my story: Because I didn’t think to reach out to my bank, and my bank didn’t know that I was on an MLP journey, we both lost out. I didn’t get the opportunity to do more business with the bank I’ve trusted since I was 18, and my bank lost out on the opportunity to increase the value of our relationship.

Understand the Consumer Journey

Understanding the consumer journey is a challenge every company faces. As a marketer, you know about consumer behavior and when the consumer interacts directly with your brand—by visiting your website, calling your call center, opening your email. But the consumer journey isn’t centered around you, it’s centered around them. There are touch points that you don’t see today because the activity is happening outside of your walls.

During our recent Journey Summit, I presented on our mission here at Jornaya, which is to help marketers expand those walls by organizing and providing access to your customers’ major-life purchase behaviors to enable the smartest and safest interactions.

In my real-life example above, my bank did not know that I was on an MLP journey because my research was happening outside of their walls. That’s a perfect example of the problem we’re trying to solve.

A Centralized View

The foundation of our platform is our centralized view into consumer behaviors. Our partners have deployed our technology across over 30,000 websites where consumers are researching MLPs. We’re capturing millions of new shopping behaviors across our network everyday.

To create meaning out of all of those disparate behaviors, we need to know who’s behind each touch point. Identity resolution plays a key role in our ability to organize these behaviors into meaningful people-based insights.

We also need to organize these behaviors into specific answers to questions, such as:

• When did this consumer raise their hand?
• Did they consent for me to call them?
• How likely is this consumer to make a decision in the next 90 days?

And lastly, we need to be able to support the two main types of interactions you have everyday:  inbound, consumer initiated interactions, and outbound, marketer-initiated interactions.

By bringing all these disparate behaviors into one place, we’ve created a dataset together that has never existed anywhere else. We now know things like the typical mortgage shopper starts researching 171 days before funding a loan and visits 4 different comparison websites before submitting their first inquiry.

This knowledge can have an impact on acquiring more customers, retaining more customers, finding new growth paths with your customers, and keeping your customers and business safe in the process.

At Journey Summit, I also shared our product roadmap with attendees. Some recent product launches that I discussed include:

• The launch of Jornaya Activate, our portfolio monitoring platform that enhances first-party data with major-life purchase journeys.
• Enhancements to our data visualization to help measure and increase business impact.
• The availability of our new Integrations Hub for push-button integrations with hundreds of CRM and marketing execution platforms for improved access to and actionability of Jornaya data packages.
• The upcoming launch of new journeys and data packages to increase your view of the major-life purchase journey.

I’m excited about the future of the MLP space and how we can help. If you missed our earlier articles about MLP marketing, check them out: Create Customer Experiences that Count!, Work that Matters for Customers Who Care, Laying the Data Foundation to Understand Your Customer, Formulating a Marketing Execution Strategy that Delivers Value.

Lauren Dickstein is VP of Product at Jornaya.