22 Jan
A customer journey is a path your website visitors take from discovering your site to becoming a paying customer.
Unfortunately, the journey isn’t always linear, so it’s important to personalize your customer journey to best suit your business and your target audience. Consider these two statistics:
- Customer journey mapping results in a 54% greater return on marketing.
- Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable.
These stats make sense because the point of customer journey mapping, or customer experience mapping, is to understand what your customers want, where you aren’t delivering and how to bridge the gap between expectations and reality. Naturally, this increases your conversion rates.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map (sometimes called a user journey map, UX map, or CJM) is a visualization of a customer’s experience with your brand, from awareness to purchase and beyond.
Customer journey mapping lets you create personalized experiences across all touchpoints for every individual across all channels. Companies can use this shared understanding to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement. These maps can be simple or complex, depending on what you’re looking to gain from them.
Why do you need a customer journey map?
For any company, a customer journey map helps to enhance the customer experience and increase customer loyalty. A customer journey map can prove invaluable for optimizing across multiple departments marketing, sales, product, and customer service in many, many ways. Mapping your customer journey can help you:
- Promote a customer-centric culture internally and externally
- Identify your ideal buyer and connect with customer needs
- Glean insights into your audience that can drive revenue by evaluating customer’s motivations
- Improve sales conversion rates authentically
- Amplify customer experience by understanding the customer’s perspective
- Reduce customer support tickets by locating customer pain-points
- Aid in marketing campaigns
- Generate repeat business
- Decrease customer churn and increase customer lifetime value
Together, these advantages translate into higher sales for your business.
3 Stages of the customer journey map
To understand how to tailor your lead generation campaigns to every prospect, you first need to know the 3 main stages of the customer journey. These stages are often referred to as Awareness, Evaluation, and Conversion (or Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel).
- The Awareness stage is when the prospect knows they have a problem, but doesn’t yet know that you exist or that you can help them solve that problem.
- The Evaluation stage is when the prospect is aware that you exist and that you have a solution to their problem, but they are still evaluating other possible solutions.
- The Conversion stage is when the prospect is almost ready to buy your solution, but they may still have a few questions or objections to overcome first.
OK, now that you know what the 3 stages of the customer journey are, let’s take a look at how to actually capture email leads during each stage.
1. The Awareness Stage
During this first stage, the prospect is just becoming aware of your brand and what you have to offer. They may know that they have a problem or a need, but they aren’t yet aware of what the specific solution is, or that you have that solution.
Your Goal: Aside from capturing their email address, your goal at the Awareness stage is to move the prospect from Awareness to Evaluation by introducing them to your brand, making them aware of the solution to their problem, and introducing them to your solution (your product).
2. The Evaluation Stage
At the Evaluation stage, your prospect understands the solution to their problem and is aware of your brand/offer. However, they are still evaluating their options (and likely looking at your competitors).
Your Goal: Aside from capturing their email, your goal is to move the prospect from Evaluation to Conversion by giving them a quick win which proves that you are the authority they need to pay attention to. You may also have the goal of acquiring initial customers during this stage.
3. The Conversion Stage
At the Conversion Stage, your prospect is aware that your product provides the solution they seek, but they haven’t quite made the decision to buy yet.
Your Goal: Aside from capturing any leads who haven’t yet opted in to your email list, your goal at this stage is to maximize immediate customer value. You’ll do this by helping them overcome any objections to the sale, and giving them the extra “nudge” they need to buy right now. You may also have the goal of retaining existing customers and increasing buyer frequency/boosting conversions on your cross-sells and upsells.
Types of journey maps
There are different types of journey maps, and the one you use will depend on the goal you settle on in the beginning. The nine steps above are for creating a current state customer journey map – the most common type. Still, all three of the main types will primarily follow the above process. The main difference will be for a day in the life map where you’ll list the person’s daily activities instead of your touchpoints.
1. Current state journey maps
Your standard map, current state maps analyze what your audience currently experiences while interacting with your business. Use this form of customer journey analysis to improve the journey.
2. Day in the life journey maps
Day in the life maps are the most different as they analyze what your audience experiences throughout their daily activities regardless of your company. Use these maps to discover pain points in your audiences’ life so that you can address unmet customer needs before they ask. It can be a great way to realize new products.
3. Future state journey maps
As the name suggests, future state maps estimate what your audience’s experience of your business will be in the future. They can help bring your vision to life or allow you to map out where you want to go based on a current state map.
5 key customer journey mapping benefits
As sales and marketing professionals, you and your team already have a fair idea of the customer purchase journey. Why then do you need to map everything out? How does formally mapping a customer’s journey benefit your business? Let’s discuss the top five advantages.
1. Empathize with your customers and understand their pain points
A customer journey map lets you compare the actual customer journey vis-a-vis how you’d expected it to be. You can understand the customer’s perspective better; the challenges and pain points that forced them to take a different buying path than the one you’d planned. You can then use this data to improve the customer experience and optimize your sales and marketing strategies.
2. Get a uniform view of the customer journey
Many times, what your sales team knows about your customers is not what your marketing or product team thinks about them. This results in inconsistencies in the experience your customers receive. But if you use a customer journey map, all departments get a uniform view of the path a buyer takes when interacting with your business. This ensures all teams have the same intelligence, allowing them to work toward a common goal.
3. Plug delivery or customer experience gaps
Drawing a journey map lets you identify experience or service gaps in your buying process you may have not noticed otherwise. For instance, you may realize you don’t have an instant chat feature on your website to help customers resolve urgent queries. You can easily plug this gap by adding a chatbot, a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section, or a knowledge base page.
4. Predict customer behavior
Customer journey maps help predict how buyers will behave as they move through the sales funnel. You can observe their behavioral patterns and predict which ones are more likely to convert. You can then consider providing proactive assistance to potential customers to help them find the right products or take the right steps.
5. Improve the customer journey
Customer journey maps help you understand if it’s easy for buyers to interact with your business. Are the customer stages ordered in a linear fashion? Do customers have to repeat some processes to achieve their goals? These insights help you simplify the customer journey and make it easier for buyers to engage with your brand.
How to create a customer journey map
Here are some points to create a customer journey map which can convert more at each step:
1. Set your goals
A journey map without a purpose or goal is pointless. If you don’t create it with one in mind, it’ll become a confusing mess of information that you won’t know how to apply in the real world. Don’t waste your time with a map that doesn’t provide practical insight or tangible impact; set a goal and stay focused. Examples of goals you may have for your journey map include:
- Becoming customer-centered
- Assigning responsibility for touchpoints to departments
- Preventing abandoned carts
- Understanding a persona better
- Making an app more user-friendly
At this point, you’ll also want to define the scope of your map to inform how detailed or high level it will be. What’s needed to answer your questions thoroughly and accurately?
2. Select and create a buyer persona
A key step in understanding your leads is creating personas for them. A persona is a representation of your customers made up of demographics and psychographics. You may have multiple personas based on your audience segments or where they are in the buying journey.
Once you’ve defined your audiences, you’ll want to choose one. Combining all personas into one map may provide too much information and result in ineffective strategies. You can always create a map for each customer persona later, but start with your predominant persona or the one that aligns with your goal.
3. Identify the phases of your customer journey
List every phase in the customer journey related to your goal; you may be working on a specific platform or evaluating the entire purchase journey.
Many companies use the standard steps of awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy, but you can make them unique to your business. A SaaS company may prefer to use discover, try, buy, use and seek support. The point is that a coffee shop and an ecommerce store are going to have different phases. If you can, estimate a timeline for each phase.
4. Identify all your touchpoints
Your touch points are everywhere your audience interacts with your business, online or offline. Your touch points might include your ads, email, social media platforms, customer service interactions and website. You may even want to get specific – down to the landing pages or forms on your website.
Once you’ve listed all your touchpoints, assign them to the customer journey stages that they correlate to. And yes, they may belong to more than one.
With this, you can compare where your leads are going at each phase and where you want them to be. If there’s a difference between the two, it could be because it wasn’t clear where they needed to go.
A good strategy for your website is to take advantage of the Google Analytics Behavior Flow report. It will show you how your website users move from page to page and is a great way to identify your page touchpoints, the sources that lead to your website (possibly more touchpoints) and their sequences.
5. Identify customer goals at each touchpoint
Now, take the time to identify your customers’ goals at each touchpoint. Understanding their motivations will help you give them what they want. And, with an understanding of their expectations, you can exceed them. Take the example of a pizza delivery: A customer may expect their pizza to arrive in 20 minutes, but if you can get it there in 10, you just created a memorable customer experience. That is assuming everything else, from taste to packaging, met or exceeded expectations as well.
Your audience’s motivations may change between personas and depend on the phase of the journey they’re in.
6. Identify actions at each touchpoint
After making a note of customer goals, fill out the map with customer actions at each touchpoint and phase.
You can also use the Google Analytics Behavior Flow and Goal Flow reports to help here. The Goal Flow report will show you the path your visitors take (in other words, the actions) to complete a goal conversion. Where do they drop off? Do they go through unwarranted loops?
To get the most out of your experience map, make a note of their emotions as well. What feelings did they arrive with, and how do they feel during and after interacting with your brand?
This will arm you with the knowledge to instigate positive feelings and identify where actions and goals are contradictory. If a user takes the wrong step towards their goal, you’ve identified a friction area that could be due to bad information architecture.
7. Make a list of opportunities
Congrats! You’ve made it to our favorite part: identifying opportunities. It’s time to learn from everything you’ve accumulated.
What are your customers’ pain points? Where do they get lost and confused? Where do they hesitate? and Where do you fail to meet – or surpass – expectations? Where are you successful? Where do you earn raving reviews, high conversion rates or shortened task times?
Make a note of all obstacles and everywhere you want to improve on your journey map.
8. Use it
So you know where you can do better; the next step is actually doing it. The point of making your map was to uncover implementable insight, so implement it. Assign improvement tasks to specific individuals or departments. Have everyone review the map, understand it and use it in daily practice.
Whether you update whole product flows or tweak small areas, be sure to step back and see how it all flows together. You want to make sure every change fits and contributes to a seamless experience.
You may need new investments or tools to make changes happen, but that’s part of running a growing business. The good news is that a well-made map will make it easier to get management on board.
9. Revisit and revise
We see you trying to wrap a pretty little bow on that project and call it a day, but we’re not done with you. One of the most vital elements of a journey map is that you continue to re-evaluate it. Your business, customers and industry are always changing. Revisiting your customer journey is necessary to meet new expectations and foster growth.
Pick usability metrics to monitor, from customer satisfaction to task completion rates. Regularly test to discover new areas to improve, and update your journey when it’s time.
Some musts of journey mapping
There are five must-haves for every journey map that are easy to miss or forget:
- It must be presented in a way that everyone can visualize the journey. If they can’t understand it, they can’t use it.
- It must be from your audiences’ perspective. They’re the ones taking the journey and the only ones who matter.
- It must combine emotional response with tasks. It’s how you provide a positive user experience that they’ll remember.
- It must focus on the journey across multiple touchpoints. The customer doesn’t distinguish between touchpoints when thinking of the brand experience, and neither should you.
- It must differentiate between future opportunities and current experiences. Don’t miss out on growth because of a disorganized map.
Wrap up
Customer journeys have become more elaborate, making journey maps more vital than ever. Unlike many business trends, customer journey maps will remain valuable no matter how the times change. Regardless of technology advancements or industry shifts, a journey map can always adapt to provide the customer experience that will convert.