Consumers are the lifeline of your business – they’re the ones who purchase your products and support the services you provide. However, retaining their loyalty to your company can be challenging with all the competing brands out there. And if you’re unaware of their changing needs, you’ll likely miss out on would-be consumers and lose the confidence of your current clientele.
Customer Journey Map And Its Relation To Your Company
How will you be able to retain your current patrons and gain new ones? You should be able to understand what their customer journey map is? What is a customer journey map? It’s the path your customers follow when they’re using a product or service.
To be able to fully take advantage of your patrons’ customer journey map, you must collect their insights to understand their purchasing habits. In doing so, you can make strategic decisions based on this information to improve customer experience and increase conversions.
Establish a customer journey map to represent your consumers’ experiences visually. You’ll be able to streamline the consumer onboarding process and compare client expectations with your current customer model.
Preparing a customer journey map can also help you in developing consumer-targeted campaigns, with the help of a digital marketing agency like Bang Digital.
How To Develop An Effective Customer Journey Map
The following is a six-step guide that you can follow to develop a customer journey map that can help your company. Read on to learn more.
1. Set Your Mapping Goals
Before you start outlining a journey map, it’s essential to determine the goals of this initiative, so you’ll understand why you’re making it. These goals must reflect your organization’s goals, like boosting revenue or gaining customer loyalty. This way, you can create a narrative that’ll help you strategize how to achieve your mission of retaining consumers.
Once you determine the goals of your journey mapping, you must decide on critical metrics you’ll monitor as you establish the maps. This enables you to measure whether your efforts are paying off or not.
For example, if one of these goals is to increase conversion rates, then evaluate the effectiveness of tracking how many people convert into new customers monthly. You can also measure how long it takes them to buy something or how often they return after purchasing something.
Setting these metrics over time will make it easier to see what works and doesn’t work after creating the customer journey map.
2. Develop Buyer Personas
After identifying the goals of the journey mapping, you have to determine the purposes of the consumers as they move through their buyer’s journey. This involves collecting an in-depth understanding of their preferences, including their topic of interest, to help you craft buyer personas.
You can develop personas by running market research to obtain this information. You may conduct surveys, run user testing with the products, or collect analytics from social media and your website. If you can gather more data, you’ll be able to make more realistic personas that will help improve your customer experience.
In addition, you may ask questions about what drove them to your organization and their experience with the website and the company. You may ask which competing brands they know, what makes them remember your brand, and how often they engage with your company.
Collecting important details lets you identify everyday needs and goals shared among different customer types. This way, you can create a profile for each persona that reflects a real customer who has interacted with your company.
3. Identify Journey Stages
After creating a buyer persona, you must study the customer journey stages. This is essential as it’ll help you identify which stage of the process is most important and where to focus.
Here’s a list of the four typical customer journey stages:
- Awareness
This is why your consumers search for a specific product. Aside from that, this includes their motivators for purchasing it from a brand.
- Consideration
In this stage, consumers have decided to purchase your product but are still weighing their options. Some factors may include the price and quality of other competing brands. They do this by reading product descriptions, gaining answers from Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), and researching online reviews.
- Decision
In this phase, the consumer is ready to purchase after collecting sufficient data. They do this by visiting your store to buy the product or adding the item to their online cart. Nonetheless, this is where they may be experiencing friction in the purchasing process, such as difficulty finding a payment option that fits their needs.
- Retention
This is the part where the client has finally made the initial purchase. After that, they’ll now assess the overall experience in using the product. This phase focuses on encouraging loyalty and testing the customer support service of the organization. If unsatisfied with the item, they might consider return or replacement options.
Being aware of these four customer journey stages is essential as it helps you to understand where your users are in their journey and what they need from you at each stage. This way, you’ll be able to find areas of improvement that’ll affect the consumers’ overall experience.
4. Determine Points Of Friction
Since you’re already aware of the stages in the consumer’s journey, you’ll now be able to discover points of friction. You must identify barriers that could affect the buyer’s purchasing decision. From there, you can brainstorm solutions that’ll reduce those friction points to make it easier to guide them towards the company sales funnel.
You can use the buyer persona to understand their needs and how they interact with your company. You have to look at every touchpoint between them and your business and see where a problem might prevent them from making a purchase decision.
For example, it takes too long for the customer service representative to respond when the buyer has an issue. Then, you have to fix this barrier immediately by using a chatbot to improve response time and not lose more consumers.
Another example is generic email execution. This can be a barrier as most prospective clients don’t like receiving multiple emails that don’t relate to their interests or browsing history. What you can do instead is craft compelling email headings that’ll encourage the buyer to click through the message.
In doing so, you can present relevant content that addresses their concerns about your products or services rather than sending them numerous messages that don’t entice them.
5. Collect Feedback From The Customers
After identifying the points of friction within the customer’s journey, you already know some of the pain points that some of them experience. Now, you must collect insights about how they think and feel about those friction points as they move from one stage to another. In doing so, you’ll learn more about how they want to be treated during each journey stage.
You can do this through surveys or interviews with customers who have gone through your journey before and customers who haven’t started it. For example, if your company sells shoes online, you can ask customers what they think about the shipping cost or delivery time at each step of their purchase process.
You can also observe users interacting with your website or software application and ask them questions about their experience at every step.
Once you receive all this information from customers, analyze it thoroughly so that it helps you understand where your problems are coming from. Doing this will allow you to develop a solution that’ll lead to happier customers and more revenue for your company.
6. Identify Areas Of Improvement
At this point of the client journey mapping, you may now determine the areas of improvement. This is essential because it allows you to adjust your consumers’ purchasing decisions and overall experience. This way, you can ensure they’ll be more likely to return to your store or website.
For instance, if your consumer is having trouble finding a particular product on your webpage, it might be because there’s no search option available on your site. If this is the case, then you should consider adding one for more straightforward navigation for them.
Similarly, maybe your FAQ page lacks enough information or could be missing altogether. In this case, you should add more content to help educate customers about any questions they might have before making a purchase decision.
If you can improve the customer journey process, you’ll see an increase in sales, profit, and customer satisfaction levels. In addition, it can help improve your conversion rates when people are provided with all the information they need upfront. This can prevent them from feeling like they have to go through a long process in their purchasing decision.
In Conclusion
The consumers’ journey is vital in elevating their experience as they engage with your organization. With this in mind, you must create a customer journey map showing how they move from point A to point B. You’ll learn what they must go through before making a purchasing decision too – leading to more effective marketing strategies.
As such, you must begin by knowing what you want from this journey, mapping and determining its goals. From there, you’ll be able to develop a buyer persona and study the journey stages to discover common friction points that affect the consumers’ decisions. After that, you must understand how your clients feel and think about the process to improve their experience with targeted actions as well.
A successful customer journey mapping is essential as it provides insights into their experiences while interacting with your brand. This way, you can develop advertising campaigns that help you connect with your target audience and improve your customer retention rate.
