Ryan Deiss

Ryan Deiss is the Founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer. Over the last 36 months Ryan and his team have invested over $15,000,000 on marketing tests, generated tens of millions of unique visitors, sent well over a BILLION emails, and run approximately 3,000 split and multi-variant tests. Ryan is also a highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted over 200,000 businesses in 68 different countries.

Turning a stranger into a customer isn’t luck, it’s strategy.

How do you deliver value through the sales process that motivates a stranger to become a customer?

Let’s take a look at a marriage. How do two individuals go from strangers to sharing the most intimate moments of their lives?

Knowing the answer to this question is the difference between novice marketers and experts. In life, we have to convince somebody who doesn’t know who we are to invest their time into a relationship with us. In business, we have to convince somebody who doesn’t know who we are to give us their time and money.

Here’s how to turn a stranger into a loyal customer:

There are 12 stages of intimacy in a romantic relationship.

Eye to body
Eye to eye
Voice to voice
Hand to hand
Arm to shoulder
Arm to waist/back (aka a hug)
Mouth to mouth

Hand to head
Hand to body
Mouth to body
Hand to
Bow-chick-a-wow-wow

Most people can look at these stages and agree with the order. The amount of time from Stage 1 to Stage 12 varies within each relationship.

Reaching Stage 12 can be deemed the goal, and as long as each step follows the one before it, intimacy can be achieved with consent on both ends.

Yet, if the stages are not followed by each other, there is a serious problem. Moving from Stage 1 to Stage 12 is considered assault. This assault is commonly seen in marketing and is one of the largest reasons businesses see their marketing strategies fail.

The marketing strategy isn’t what is failing, it’s the sequence of events.

Turning a stranger into a loyal customer involves taking them down a specific

sequence of marketing techniques in a specific order.

These are the 8 stages of the customer value journey.

Stage 1: Awareness

Awareness is the eye-to-body stage of intimacy. Somebody is becoming aware that you and your brand are there. Advertising is the primary mechanism through which awareness is created.

Stage 2: Engage

Engagement is the eye-to-eye and eye-to-body stage of intimacy. It’s the pickup line of the marketing world. It’s the first time your customer first beings to consume content through reading a blog or watching a video. Content in the form of education and entertainment motivate consumers to engage.

Stage 3: Subscribe

Subscribing is the marketing equivalent to asking for somebody’s phone number. The ability to follow up is essential to continuing the relationship. Prospects choose to opt-in to receive gated content. In some way, there must be a way to contact this person again.

Stage 4: Convert

This is when the customer relationship becomes active. In dating, this is the first date that takes people from friends to something else. Remember, even though this person is willing to go on a date, it doesn’t mean they should be probed about what they’d like to name their children. In stage 4, the relationship is still casual.

Stage 5: Excite

A great first date is the only way to get a second date. Without adding some element of excitement, it’s unlikely the individual will want to continue the relationship. Discount codes are an example of the excitement stage of the customer value journey.

Stage 6: Ascend

The ascend stage of the customer value journey is equivalent to proposing.

This is when a brand officially asks somebody for their money or time

investment. Things are getting serious and it is necessary to continue putting in substantial effort to continue the relationship.

Stage 7: Advocate

After the ascend stage, in a healthy, intimate relationship each partner tends to be a major advocate for the other. The individuals are happy to say positive things about each other to their friends and families. The idea is to

motivate this advocacy within the customer relationship. The goal is to make the customer an advocate for the brand, telling friends, family and colleagues how much they enjoy the product.

Stage 8: Promote

The final stage of the customer value journey is promotion. This is the stage

where romantic relationships and customer relationships take two directions.

In romantic relationships, the promotion stage is when each person is a true brand ambassador for their significant other. In a business relationship, the promotion stage involves customers inviting other customers into the relationship.

There are 6 steps to implement to create a successful customer value journey:

Begin at “the end.”
Splinter off an entry-point offer and lead magnet.
Deliver an ah-ha moment.
Create engaging tofu content.
Generate awareness with advertising.
Transform happy customers into brand ambassadors.

Unlike in intimate relationships, a customer value journey is extremely purposeful. From the very beginning, there is a clear intention as to the end result, instead of a loose idea of what could come from the relationship.

Strategizing for a promotional customer relationship, doesn’t begin at stage one. It starts with choosing the type of commitment you are asking for from a customer.

It all starts at the end.

Step 1: Begin at “the end”

Defining the ascension stage of different brands comes down to answering

this question:

Where do you want the relationships to go and how does it need to begin to get there?

In business terms:

What’s your core, flagship offer, and how are you going to continue to deliver value to your customer/client?

Reverse engineer the customer value journey to lead directly to this end goal.

Step 2: Splinter off an entry-point offer and lead magnet

Entry point offers establish micro-commitments that convert strangers into friends. This is the first date. For example, a micro-commitment can be time or money.

A candle wick selling business primarily sells wicks to their customers. This is their entry-point offer. What if while the customer was buying wicks, they were offered wax and molds too?

This is an example of a money commitment from a customer, where they start as a small consumer and increase how much product they are purchasing.

The first date portion of this method is the consumer purchasing the wicks and becoming aware that they can also buy everything else they need to make candles.

Demos and free trials are popular methods of entry-point offers because they directly lead to a lead magnet.

The goal of step 2 isn’t to close the sale. The goal is to get the first date.

What is the entry-point offer that will lead your prospect to make a micro- commitment?

Once the entry-point offer is defined, the next step is creating the lead

magnet.

Discount codes are a major lead magnet. For example: Kate Spade implemented a Black Friday sale with a discount code. The code could only be accessed by people who opted in and provided their email address.

Kate Spade asked for their customers email address and increased the amount of people they were able to reach with later promotions.

How will you “get the customer’s number” so you have permission to follow up?

Step 3: Deliver an ah-ha moment

An “ah-ha” moment is the intersection between wonder and understanding. It’s the moment that the true value of a product clicks, transforming it from a nice-to-have product to a must-have.

Companies like Tesla are profiting off of this ah-ha moment during their test drives. During the test drive, the driver is asked to do a “launch”, which is the Tesla going from 0-60 mph in seconds. If the driver doesn’t perform

the launch accurately and it takes longer than normal, the car salesman will do something most sales people don’t. Tell them to do it again. Once the launch is successful and the car reaches 60 mph in 2.8 seconds, the ah-ha moment clicks. The car just gained value and the intersection of wonder and understanding has been met.

Million dollar companies like Tesla and smaller companies are capitalizing off of this ah-ha moment by creating a community aspect out of it. Only a Tesla owner knows that when somebody is referring to a “launch” they’re talking about launching their car from 0pm to 60mph.

This is community, a marketer’s best friend.

Establishing a community built around a product creates the advocacy talked about earlier and a new identity within the customer. Prior to owning a Tesla, this customer was just a car owner. After owning a Tesla, he’s a Tesla owner.

He has a new identity as a Tesla owner and is now welcome into an exclusive community of car owners.

What “ah-ha” moment will you deliver that will transform your product/ service from a nice-to-have to a must-have?

Step 4: Create Engaging Content

Content is about the customer and not the product. It’s how to turn glances into stares and intrigue somebody to want to learn more. There are two forms of content:

Entertainment
Informative

A company who sells snacks to businesses shouldn’t create content for the people consuming the snacks. Their content isn’t for the employees eating the snacks, it’s for the office manager who purchases the snacks.

For example, this company doesn’t create content about the health facts of their snacks or how delicious they are. Their content is an article titled, “39 Insanely Fun Team Building Activities For Work (Trust Falls Not Included)”.

Whole Foods implements this same strategy. Their website has content like, “This Summer’s Must Have Grilling Guide.” They’re not telling you to use their products, they are telling you how to use their products.

Create content around the customer’s problem so they don’t glance at the product, they stare at it.

How do you turn a glance into a stare?

Step 5: Generate Awareness with Advertising

There are 3 main platforms for advertising online: Facebook, YouTube, and Google. These can be considered the “traffic stores” where purchasing traffic can have major impact. These advertisements are bought and come in the form of social ads, pay-per-click and SEO.

There are also offline platforms, like t-shirts and stickers. BeachBody has implemented a t-shirt marketing technique by asking customers to take a before and after picture. If they send it in to BeachBody, they’ll receive a free t-shirt. This person wears the t-shirt to the gym and around town and people start to learn about BeachBody. They become aware of the brand and if they were to see another advertisement, they automatically have more trust for this company.

How do qualified prospects find out about your brand?

Step 6: Transform Happy Customers into Brand Ambassadors

Brand ambassadors surpass a passive promotion of the product. They become promoters actively talking on behalf of the brand. These advocates are created through referral programs, affiliates, internal champions and value- added resellers. Having a referral engine within a business is critical for long- term growth.

This referral engine can come from other companies that offer different services or products to the same clientele. The main initiative of step 6 is to partner with companies in the same niche, but with different products.

How will you encourage your happy customers to say nice things about your brand to everyone they know?

The customer value journey looks like this:

Turning a stranger into a customer doesn’t take the right moment and time, it takes a carefully calculated strategy. In the marketing world, this is called the customer value journey and it has profited millions of dollars for the world’s most successful companies.

If your customer’s journey was a romantic relationship, would they be interested in being proposed to? If the answer is no, implement these strategies to create a profitable and efficient customer value journey blueprint that can be applied to varying businesses in different niches.

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Value Journey Worksheet
Intimate Behavior by Desmond Morris