A lot of our work in the past had to do with Audience Development, and so when we approach things from that perspective, Customer Journey Analytics begins to fall into four pretty distinct phases.

These phases really have to do with the amount of information we can reasonably gather about a person as they move through the journey.

Phase One: Audience – this is where all relationships with the consumer start. We know very little about the person other than that they exist. We may be able to guess at demographic and geographic information based on media targeting, but generally we are fishing with a net here.

Phase Two: Addressable Audience – this is the next stage, where we may not know specifics like a person’s name, email, address, etc. but we can start to understand the behaviors they exhibit through analytics associated to a random number or some other “blind” methodology.

Phase Three: Audience of One – this is the point at which we have a customer’s actual identity – we know their name, email address, or other personal information that allows us to sync up third party and first party data to build a rich profile of this consumer’s demographics, psychographics, behaviors, past purchases, and any other data we can associate to this customer record. This is where true personalization can begin.

Phase Four: Audience² – Audience Squared, or The Audience of our Audience. Understanding not only our customers, but THEIR audience, enables us to leverage a lot of key opportunities in advocacy, up-sell, cross-sell, renewal, referral, and related approaches.

Understanding how audiences become customers, and how those customer audiences can lead to even more customers, is a key component of customer journey analysis.