Exploring the 4 Essential Steps of the Customer Journey

Keeping customers is an essential part of business success, especially if yours is a subscription product. Repeat guest Charl Coetzee shares how it’s done in four distinct steps.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 30:48 — 29.0MB)

Keeping customers is partly key to having a successful business. Charl Coetzee of JBayStudios knows this, and has broken retention down into four steps in the customer journey.

In this repeat appearance, he chats with James about the first important step of gaining awareness from prospects.

They talk about deepening connection through customer retention emails.

And they discuss conversions and the final step and goal of online customer retention.

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Table of contents

1. The shirt that backfired
2. What Charl brings to this discussion
3. Stepping stone 1: Awareness – getting noticed
4. Stepping stone 2: Consideration – deepening connection
5. Stepping stone 3: Conversion – value for money
6. Stepping stone 4: Retention – getting people to stay
7. Is retention only for subscription businesses?
8. For the Kleq user wanting help…
9. What gives, Facebook?
10. Knowing your customers, playing the long game
11. Pushing a great product forward

The shirt that backfired

Charl loves James’s shirt.

There’s a story behind it, James says. A client had gotten him hooked on Lululemon, and he thought the high vis shirt would be perfect for cyclone swells, letting him find himself easily in pictures.

The first cyclone that came, he met up with friend John Lint, and told him he’d be wearing yellow. Apparently at least a dozen people had the same idea.

James doesn’t normally wear the shirt for podcasts, but he was feeling high energy (and there may have been an incident with butter on another shirt he was wearing).

Download 4 Stepping Stones of Customer Retention (and the PDF transcription)

What Charl brings to this discussion

James has brought Charl on to talk about customer retention and break it down into steps throughout the customer journey.

Charl is known for his understanding of marketing and technology and is affiliated with Kleq, James’s preferred membership platform. James has in fact, referred clients to him for help with Kleq, with stellar results.

For this discussion, Charl will be tackling what he believes are the four phases of customer retention: awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention.

Stepping stone 1: Awareness – getting noticed

Awareness is the beginning of the story – how do people notice you? When you can get someone to actually sit down, listen to you, pay attention, that is worth its weight in gold.

Now you might have an awesome yellow shirt like James, but if a bunch of other people also wear yellow, you’re just one of many. So how do you differentiate yourself?

Job one is getting your traffic source – either you pay for traffic, or you do content marketing. And given, traffic is harder these days than back in the day, but there are still ways to make it work.

And once you have attention, says Charl, you have to know where to send people. Some big YouTubers have millions of subscribers and get ad revenue and brand deals, but they don’t own the racecourse, to use James’s language.

So it’s important both to get attention and to have something to sell, and then to bridge the gap between the two.

Stepping stone 2: Consideration – deepening connection

The goal of the next phase, consideration, is to deepen connections with potential customers who express interest in your content. And capturing their email addresses can help with segmentation and targeted messaging.

Once you have their email address, the next step is to deepen the connection via email by continuing to deliver value and helping them with their problems.

Peter Drucker says the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. So by showing people you understand their problems and by demonstrating you can help them, you pull them in and progress to the third step, conversion.

Stepping stone 3: Conversion – value for money

In this, the third step, James and Charl emphasize the importance of creating value for the customer that is lopsided in their favor, making them feel they would be foolish not to pay for the product or service.

Also essential is understanding what to offer and how to sell it, with automation being a useful tool for leveraging the sales process. For the automation part they highly recommend Kleq’s campaign builder, that creates fully customizable sales funnels and ready-linked pages.

James and Charl also touch on the importance of customization, particularly for course creators who may be using the same platform as others. They discuss how Kleq allows for heavy customization, which can help make a business stand out and create a unique customer experience.

James shares his experience with his own membership site, where he has made subtle changes over time to improve the customer experience and retention.

Finally, they stress that the first sale is not money, but rather the customer’s attention, followed by their email address and then their money. Retention is the last sale, and businesses must work to retain their customers through ongoing value and engagement.

Stepping stone 4: Retention – getting people to stay

Charl admires James as a marketer because James values integrity and delivering transformation to his customers. He sends weekly emails to members to encourage them to use the product they purchased and to feel good about their investment.

James believes that retention is a function of both the relationship and the results. He wants to have a great relationship with the people he works with – that fulfills him. And he takes responsibility for ensuring that customers get the desired results.

Is retention only for subscription businesses?

James also believes that even businesses that sell one-time products can build repeat sales by offering subscriptions for items that expire or are in a moving market, like flowers or coffee. What would Charl say to that point?

There are definitely other angles, says Charl. Obviously, if you can do subscription, do it – it gives you a longer path that you can work with someone, which means you can deliver a bigger result.

But if you only sell one-time things, first of all make sure your customers get their result. You need emails in your sequence to one, make sure they use your product, and two, once they’ve used it, get a testimonial.

You need the testimonial, firstly, to feel good about what you do, and second to help get you more conversions without being so salesy.

Charl also recommends increasing prices and creating new products based on customer feedback. He suggests that businesses can also promote other products or services that they use themselves, and get a commission for providing ongoing value for customers.

For the Kleq user wanting help…

James knows Charl helps Kleq users who want to improve their business.

Interested individuals can get in touch with Charl and his team through their website, JBayStudios.com, or their new brand, BringCashAndCoffee.com, for training and demos on how to use Kleq effectively. Their goal is to help build brands that impact people’s lives and stand out by incorporating automation and the four customer journey steps.

What gives, Facebook?

James has had some beef recently with people on Facebook stealing his pictures and setting up fake accounts with his name to contact his customers, sending them private messages with special gifts and offers.

Despite reporting an account five times, Facebook has left it up for seven weeks, which James finds outrageous. He also notes that Facebook seems to shut down accounts that try to set up ads after being banned, but they allow these fake accounts to continue.

Charl says it’s worth paying for the blue check to avoid being cloned, and that one way to stand out in the current market is to do business that you’re proud of and deliver great value, which cannot be easily copied by others.

Knowing your customers, playing the long game

The thing that stands out for James is actually knowing most of his customers. When he refers them to one of his partners, he can provide all the background needed to help them better.

James loves that level of relationship. Retention is a major focus for him, and he’s had customers for as long as 12 years.

Play the long game, says James. What he could improve is his marketing, he says – one person took 14 years to join his membership.

So James has changed to his personal brand and is putting himself out there more on socials, with the aim let people know he exists, to share education, and to hopefully get prospects a result in advance of even payment.

Listen to enough of James’s podcasts, and you’ll get a result somewhere. And listen to Charl, says James, do what he says, go and map out your four steps.

Pushing a great product forward

In closing, James and Charl discuss how having a few power users with a good relationship can push a high-quality product like Kleq forward faster than catering to the masses.

Charl emphasizes the importance of working with clients to understand their customer acquisition, communication, and sales nurturing processes, and how the Kleq platform can support those efforts.

James thanks Charl for his support and would love him to come back and share more insights on building a successful business with the Kleq platform. Charl looks forward to it – he loves building a brand and making a difference.

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