Anna Harrison
In a world of fast and constant change, relationships that boost loyalty and advocacy are your tools for conquering tomorrow’s unknowns. The ADORE ProcessTM is your secret weapon to crafting customer journeys and experiences that nurture relationships -- and effectively become the product
The ADORE Process™ consists of the following milestones in the customer journey:
- Zero Seconds: The Arrival
- Ten Seconds: The First Impression
- Three Minutes: The First Date
- Sign-up: The Honeymoon
- First 48 Hours: The Reality
- Upgrade: The Moment of Truth
How ADORE Fits Into the Buying Process
The ADORE Process™ optimizes the space between the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) and First Moment of Truth (FMOT). The space between SMOT and FMOT is the only segment in the buying journey that is entirely under your control—you get to decide exactly how to tell your story to each stranger that lands on your website, how to nudge them from first date to full commitment. You get to refine and evolve the relationship with your customers over time: sometimes you will get things very right, and sometimes a website update will set you backward. The objectivity of ADORE will help you to track what to do more of and what to roll back on.
How ADORE Fits Into Existing Sales and Marketing Frameworks
You are likely already familiar with many marketing and sales funnel frameworks and methodologies. If that is the case, you will be able to easily place the ADORE Process™ in the context of your existing mental models. Whatever your preferred model, it provides a particular perspective on how to manage each stage of the end-to-end inception, creation, delivery, operations, and maintenance of the customer experience. The ADORE Process™ does not compete with these frameworks. It simply provides an extra layer for you to manipulate.
ADORE is the emotional layer from which the relationship with your brand is constructed. It describes what happens to each human buyer as they transition from stranger through prospect, customer, and on to buyer; or from site visitor to subscriber, marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), opportunity, customer, and brand evangelist. Placing ADORE in the context of existing frameworks will also help you map the metrics in each milestone to ones that you may already be collecting through marketing automation tools like Hubspot, HotJar, Pardot, or similar.
The Six ADORE Milestones Described
Zero Seconds: The Arrival
Your new site visitor arrives at your website in the context of their regular day. They are on your website because they are looking to solve a particu- lar challenge in their own life. They arrive at your website preloaded with anxieties, inertia, and the distractions of 35,000 decisions a day. They do not arrive at your website in a vacuum—your job, in order to create a lasting relationship with the stranger on your doorstep, is to successively remove any anxieties or blockers that they may have and to do this in advance of them noting that they have the anxiety in the first place.
Ten Seconds: The First Impression
Your potential customers assess whether you are in the running for their attention in the first ten seconds or less. You have this long to establish credibility and appeal to their intuitive response to “does this feel right for me.” Inward and unclear messaging will not only lose a prospect, but it could also lead to them buying elsewhere and spending more with your competitors.
Three Minutes: The First Date
If you captured their attention in the first instance, you will have the privilege of unfolding the storyline of how your product makes their life better. You have at most three minutes to do this, so leveraging terrific customer testimonials and articulating your offerings in crisp, customer- centric ways are key. Feelings of confusion, lack of trust, and lack of clarity will impact your potential customer pool.
Sign-Up: The Honeymoon
You have done the hard work and steered the customer through the vir- tual door. This phase is critical to get right, and if you do, you stand a chance of creating a loyal fan, and with that, increased revenue. Poorly packaged products and out of sync pricing models are the most common causes of low conversion rates.
First 48 Hours: The Reality
The First 48 Hours are critical to establishing ownership and success. Common mistakes at this phase include onboarding that creates too much homework or does not deliver on the promises made earlier in the customer journey. The price of being ineffective in this phase are high churn rates and missed opportunities for conversion to paid and premium products.
BONUS: Upgrade: Do you make my life better?
The ultimate litmus test—did you deliver value? Has your product become part of your customer’s regular routine? Low return-usage rates and poor engagement are a red flag that your product is either not deliver- ing or perceived as not delivering on the promise to make your customer’s life better. The costs here are higher than lost revenue—the cost is lost future earnings through low loyalty.
Summary
The ADORE Process™ is based on six critical emotional milestones in the customer journey. Each milestone represents a deepening of commitment between your site visitor and brand, and reflects the evolution of this relationship in the digital space.
Like a relationship between two humans, there is a cadence that builds increasing trust and intimacy, which must be respected for the relationship to succeed. This optimal pace of relationship evolution is represented in the ADORE milestone names: Zero Seconds, Ten Seconds, Three Minutes, Sign-up, Upgrade (and Recommend or RIP).
The milestones are ordered in a specific way and can’t be skipped over—the stranger that landed on your website needs to pass through each milestone sequentially to consummate the relationship with your brand.