If you’re looking to optimize your customer journey or funnel, where do you start?
Not at the beginning.
Start at the end and work backwards.
Get your customer retention sorted out before you remedy acquisition. Get your conversion dialed in before you start worrying about boosting awareness with advertising.
If you start at the beginning of your customer’s journey and work your way to the end, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
For example, you can run the most brilliant ad campaign and get very little return on investment if you haven’t yet optimized conversion and retention. Sure, the campaign might have attracted loads of customers to your website, but they’ll simply run into a bottleneck further downstream in their journey you have yet to address. The result: they’ll exit before achieving the desired goal.
While customer journeys and funnels are typically gross oversimplifications, if you have anything sequential going on, optimize from the end and work your way back to the beginning. If you haven’t got the end right, everything you do further upstream is correspondingly less effective.
