R-Com Customer Journey Customers looking for IT consultancy will take a long time to choose a company or service that they want, due to cost and complexity of what they require. Therefore, this customer journey is over a period of weeks/months and not an instant decision.

Acquisition Retention

Conversion

Free whitepaper written by R-com expert offered as incentive to enter

contact details

Customer enters contact details

Customer then takes time to

deliberate options

Customer is aware of R-com though update

emails when they require new/updated IT systems. Enticed by

discount for repeat custom

Quarterly update email sent to

customers

Phone call is made by R-com salesperson

which is the point of conversion.

Customer searches for ‘IT Consultancy

Manchester’ and find PPC advert

Customer lands on landing page,

detailing R-com’s services

Webinar on whitepaper keeps R-com at the forefront of customers mind during deliberation

1

Negative Positive

• Designed as a cyclical journey in order to retain customers over a long term relationship

• Minimal steps, useful for a small company such as R-com

• Several opportunities to showcase expertise in whitepaper and whitepaper webinars

• Conversion methods encourage customer to enter details so even if there is no initial conversion they can be contacted in the future

• LinkedIn variation keeps awareness of R-com by the customer more frequent than non social method

• R-community on LinkedIn creates a pool of potential customers who are easily contactable

• Relies on quality of whitepaper and webinar to retain awareness of R-com with customer during consideration

• Uses PPC and therefore costs more than using SEO

• Customers may become annoyed with marketing emails however making them quarterly will hopefully stop this

• Does not allow price conscious customers to see the price before conversion

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References (1) Gardener, O. (2009) Conversion Economics 101 – The Benefit of Landing Pages. Unbounce. [Online] 28th September [Accessed on 11th

April] http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/conversion-economics-101-the-benefit-of-landing-pages/ (2) Knight, J. (2012) 4 Benefits of Using White Papers in Your Content Marketing Strategy [Online] 26th June [Accessed on 12th April]

http://www.equinetmedia.com/blog/bid/146025/4-benefits-of-using-white-papers-in-your-content-marketing-strategy (3) Webinar (no date) Benefits of Webinars. Company Webcast. [Online] [Accessed on 12th April] http://www.webinar.nl/en/about-

webinar.html (4) Best, J. (2014) How Often Should You Send Email Marketing Campaigns. Emfluence. [Online] 23rd October [Accessed on 13th April]

https://www.emfluence.com/blog/how-often-should-you-send-email-marketing-campaigns (5) Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012) Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. 5th ed., Harlow: Pearson Education

Limited (6) (2) Caputa, P. (2010) How to Write a Whitepaper That Will Capture Leads. [Online] 1st September [accessed on 10th April]

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6496/How-to-Write-a-Whitepaper-That-Will-Capture-Leads.aspx (7) Manoochehri, G. & Lindsy, C. (2008). ‘Reverse auctions: Benefits, challenges, and best practices.’ California Journal of Operations

Management. 6 (1) pp. 123-130. (8) LinkedIn (no date) The new LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn. [Online] [Accessed on 16th April] https://business.linkedin.com/sales-

solutions

Desired customer journey

Possible variation to customer journey

R-com call the customer to place

their bid in the reverse auction

Key

James Bowyer 11072024