Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / Why CMOs Are Ditching the Funnel for One-to-One Journeys
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I think we need to talk about something that is quietly killing the marketing funnel. Not the AARRR funnel — we already did that episode. I'm talking about the entire concept of a funnel. The idea that customers march neatly from awareness to purchase to loyalty. Luna: Right, because in practice it's always been more of a tangled web. But you're saying it's actually dying as a framework, not just as a metaphor? Lucas: Exactly. I was looking at some data from the Marketing Science Institute's latest report. They surveyed about 450 CMOs globally, and 38 percent said they have already abandoned the funnel as their primary planning model. Another 29 percent said they plan to phase it out within 18 months. That's two-thirds of senior marketers essentially saying 'this structure no longer reflects how customers actually behave.' Luna: That's a huge number. But what are they replacing it with? I mean, you need some kind of framework to organize campaigns, budget, attribution. Lucas: The emerging framework is what a few folks at Gartner are calling the 'continuous journey loop,' but my favorite term is the one that Spotify's marketing VP used in a private roundtable I heard about: 'one-to-one, in-the-moment journeys.' The idea is that every customer interaction is an independent event that can trigger a personalized next step, rather than a stage in a linear progression. Luna: So instead of saying 'someone in the consideration stage gets an email,' you're saying 'someone who just listened to a podcast episode about running gets a push notification about running shoes.' Lucas: Precisely. And not just any running shoes — the ones from the brand they've browsed before, at a price point that matched their previous purchase history. Spotify does this incredibly well. They don't have a funnel; they have a set of event triggers. You finish a playlist, they suggest a concert. You skip three songs in a row, they offer a curated 'refresh' playlist. Every action is its own signal. Luna: That's smart, but it requires a massive investment in data infrastructure. Not every CMO has Spotify's engineering team. Lucas: True, but you don't need a hundred engineers to start. Look at Sephora. They revamped their loyalty app in 2024 to move away from a points-based funnel. Now, when a customer buys a moisturizer, the app doesn't just show them more moisturizers. It triggers a replenishment reminder exactly when the product is likely to run out — based on their own purchase history and average usage. That's a single event trigger, not a funnel stage. Luna: So it's about shifting from batch and blast to what I've heard called 'intelligent patience.' You wait for the right moment rather than forcing the next step. Lucas: That's a great phrase — intelligent patience. And it changes how you measure success. Instead of conversion rate from one stage to the next, you measure the value of each triggered interaction. Does the replenishment reminder lead to a purchase within 48 hours? Does the playlist skip trigger a retention lift? Each trigger has its own ROI. Luna: But here's the attribution nightmare: if every customer journey is unique, how do you compare campaigns? How do you tell your CFO what the marketing budget is actually doing? Lucas: This is the part that makes a lot of CMOs nervous. You have to let go of aggregate funnel metrics and embrace a portfolio of individual trigger metrics. Some forward-looking companies are using what's called 'incremental lift testing' for each trigger. You run a control group that doesn't get the trigger and compare the behavior difference. It's more granular, but it actually gives you causal proof, not just correlated stage movement. Luna: That sounds expensive. Do you have an example of a company that isn't a digital native pulling this off? Lucas: Yes — and this one surprised me. A regional grocery chain called h e b, based in Texas. They have a really strong loyalty program. Instead of sending weekly circulars to everyone, they built a system that tracks what you buy and when you typically run out. If you buy milk every Tuesday, you get a coupon for milk on Monday evening. If you haven't bought diapers in three months — maybe your kid aged out — they stop sending diaper offers entirely. No funnel, just triggered, individual relevance. Luna: That's actually more respectful of the customer. You're not blasting irrelevant stuff, you're being helpful. I can see why retention goes up. Lucas: And that's the deeper point. The funnel was always a seller-centric model. It organized the customer for the marketer's convenience. One-to-one journeys are buyer-centric. They organize the marketer around the customer's actual life. And in a world where attention is the scarcest resource, that shift is becoming a competitive necessity. Luna: We've been talking a lot about the benefits, but what are the biggest roadblocks? I imagine siloed data is a big one. Lucas: Huge. Most companies still have email data in one system, web behavior in another, purchase history in a third, and store visits — if they track them — in a fourth. To do one-to-one journeys, you need that identity resolution layer that connects all those signals to a single customer profile. That's the technical hurdle. But the organizational hurdle is maybe bigger. Luna: Meaning the teams are still structured around funnel stages? The awareness team, the conversion team, the retention team? Lucas: Exactly. If you organize your people by funnel stage, they will optimize for that stage. The top of funnel team wants to maximize impressions and clicks, regardless of whether those clicks actually lead to revenue. The retention team wants to minimize churn, even if they're using expensive retention tactics on customers who would have stayed anyway. One-to-one journeys require a cross-functional team that owns the entire customer lifecycle, or at least a specific segment of it. Luna: So we're talking about a pretty radical restructure. Do you think the 38 percent who said they've abandoned the funnel have actually reorganized their teams, or are they just using the language? Lucas: That's the million-dollar question. I suspect many have adopted the language and the technology — they've bought the CDP, they've set up the triggers — but the old organizational silos remain. That's where the real work is. And I think that's why you see some companies getting great results and others just adding complexity. The tech is necessary but not sufficient. Luna: It reminds me of the early days of agile marketing. Everyone said they were agile, but most were just doing sprints without changing the underlying command and control culture. Lucas: Good analogy. And I think the winners over the next few years will be the ones that truly embed the one-to-one mindset into how they hire, how they budget, and how they evaluate success. We're already seeing job postings for 'customer journey architects' and 'trigger strategy leads.' That's a new role that didn't exist five years ago. Luna: So if a CMO is listening and wants to start this transition, what's the first step? Don't say 'buy a CDP.' Lucas: I won't. The first step is to pick one high-value customer behavior and build a single trigger around it. Don't try to transform the whole journey at once. For example, if you're an e-commerce brand, pick 'cart abandonment.' But instead of sending the same generic 'you left something behind' email to everyone, segment by reason: did they abandon because of price? Send a discount. Did they abandon after reading a review? Send a testimonial. Did they abandon at the shipping page? Offer free shipping. That's one trigger, three variations, and you can test it with a simple A/B test against your old approach. Luna: Start small, prove the ROI, then expand. That's classic change management. Lucas: Exactly. And once you have a couple of triggers that work, you can start to see the data connections you need. You'll realize, 'Oh, to do the price-discount trigger well, I need to know the customer's lifetime value to decide how much to discount.' That drives the data integration naturally. Luna: I want to take a quick step back. We've been talking about the shift away from the funnel, and I think it's really an important conversation. These are the kinds of discussions that we have on this show because we're trying to give you, the listener, practical frameworks you can actually use. And we do this without any sponsors or ads. Lucas: Right. That's intentional. We want the content to be clean and focused on your job, not on selling you something. If you find value in that approach, and you'd like to help us keep it that way, you can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Just a small gesture goes a long way to keep these episodes free and ad-free. Luna: It really does. And we appreciate everyone who's already chipped in. Now, back to the funnel — or rather, the post-funnel world. Lucas, you mentioned that some companies are actually measuring the value of a triggered interaction. Can you give an example of what that metric looks like? Lucas: Sure. Let's go back to the replenishment trigger. h e b measures something they call 'trigger-activated revenue per customer' — basically, how much additional revenue comes from customers who received a replenishment offer versus those who didn't. They found that customers who got the triggered offer spent 12 percent more on that category over the next 90 days. That's a clean, attributable number. Luna: So you can literally say, 'Each trigger email generates $X in incremental revenue.' That's the kind of language a CFO understands. Lucas: Exactly. And once you have that, you can start to optimize the triggers themselves. Maybe the 12 percent lift comes mostly from customers with a certain purchase frequency. Then you focus your trigger design on that segment. It becomes a continuous improvement loop. Luna: I think the other piece is that this approach forces you to be more creative. You can't just run the same funnel playbook as everyone else. You have to understand your customers' specific behaviors and find the moments that matter. Lucas: That's the fun part. And it's why I think this shift is ultimately good for marketers and good for customers. The old funnel was a factory. The new journey is a conversation. And conversations are much more interesting. Luna: Well said. For our listeners, if you've started experimenting with trigger-based journeys, we'd love to hear about it. You can find us on the Fexingo site. Thanks for tuning in. Lucas: And if you want to keep these conversations coming without any ad breaks, you know where to find us. Until next time.