A customer journey is a path that customers take on your website from visiting the completion of the payment process. It tells you the customer’s experience tale with all the touchpoints. Mapping out each touchpoint will help you optimize them and help you create an excellent user experience, and enhance revenue.
Mapping out the customer journey with the markers will demonstrate the customer relationship at each point and help you make more effective use of customer engagement strategies and analytics tools. Customer journey mapping will form a clear path that will help you establish a healthy customer relationship and win their trust and loyalty.
Why does your business need to map out your customer journey?
- Promote a customer-centered company culture
- Gain inside into the customer base
- Pinpoint to the ideal customers
- Increase inbound marketing strategy
- Improve sales conversion rates
- Enhance customer experience
- Generate customer retention
- Decrease customer churn
- Increase the customer lifetime value
Let’s look at a step-by-step guide for customer journey mapping.
A customer journey mapping involves a few steps, such as:
Deciding what to Map
Customer journey maps have four types.
- Current state maps
It focuses on thoughts, feelings, and actions the customer experience during the interaction with your brand.
- Day in the life maps
It focuses on the broader view of your customer’s thoughts throughout their day, even if they are not interacting with your brand at that moment.
- Future state maps
It helps you visualize your customer’s future interactions with your company. It enables you to develop ideal objectives to achieve with your customers at each point.
- Service blueprint maps
With any types of maps mentioned earlier, you can emphasize the factors that contribute to users’ thoughts, feelings, and actions at a given stage in their journey. These factors contain software user experience, policies, procedures, technical issues, etc.
Describing your Customers
Identifying the customers is a crucial aspect of customer journey mapping. You can create a buyer persona that represents a typical customer experience. You can use survey tools to reflect your customer’s behavior on your website. You can focus on a few questions, such as why customers are attracted to your website, what problems they are trying to solve with your products or services, etc., and create your buyer persona.
Identification of Customer Interaction Points
Some of the basic customer interaction points include organic search, paid ads, social media, website hot spots, and email marketing. With the help of these touchpoints, you can create an amazing customer journey that will be relevant and enhance your customer engagement.
Laying out Customer Journey
Your customer journey consists of thorough stages, such as marketing, sales, onboarding, software adaption, support issue escalation, and license renewal. Each stage has sub-stages, and it will help you develop a more thorough customer journey.
Marking Customer Milestones
Your customer experience is built on three basic key elements, thoughts, feelings, and actions. To deliver adequate customer service, you need to identify and pay attention to these components and help them solve their problems with your services and products.
Customer journey milestones consist of a pre-sale software demonstration, initial purchase transaction, activation, adaption activities, cross and up-selling, and renewal.
Flag Events
You need to catalog negative components that may ruin your brand reputation and give a bad customer experience. You can strategize how you can respond to such events and minimize the risk of a potentially harmful experience by modifying them.
Adjust and Optimize
As you have created your customer journey, you can identify ways to improve your customer journey and enhance the user experience. You can test the customer journey process, customer behavior, and soliciting customer feedback. After gathering the data and optimizing these adjustments, you can make genuine improvements and provide your customers with smooth navigation.
That’s it for today. Hopefully, this article will help you get a brief insight about customer journey mapping that you can use to enhance your customer experience and keep them engaged with your website.
