The customer journey is more dynamic and complex than ever.
The number of touchpoints available to consumers increases every day which makes it more important than ever for us as entrepreneurs, CEOs, and business executives to take the time to truly understand how current and potential customers experience your business.
Customer journey mapping helps organizations better understand the steps a customer goes through when interacting with their company, from product discovery to purchasing and beyond. This visual representation provides valuable insights so you can evaluate the effectiveness of current and future marketing campaigns, but more importantly, it can help you identify opportunities to optimize your return on investment (ROI).
In this blog post, we will discuss the benefits of customer journey mapping (one may surprise you), and I’ll guide you on how to create your own customer journey map so you can begin to better optimize your marketing ROI.
BENEFIT 1:
Get More Out of Your Marketing Efforts
Every business, big or small, wants to maximize its ROI– it’s a key measure of success in any industry. However, achieving a high ROI can be challenging and requires a strategic approach.
By taking the time to understand how people experience your business, we can then confidently evaluate the effectiveness of current and future marketing campaigns. Not only will you have a clear view of activities that are high-performing versus low-performing, you’ll be able to quickly identify areas causing resistance or that are unclear to your customers, giving you the opportunity to tweak your messaging or create targeted content or campaigns for added clarity. Anytime we can provide clarity that wasn’t there before or make things easier to understand, it builds trust and increases engagement with your business which ultimately leads to more conversions, sales, and a greater ROI. Not to mention, having a tool that allows you to personalize your marketing strategy is a great way to increase customer loyalty, boost your company’s reputation, and ultimately grow your business.
BENEFIT 2:
Understanding the Customer Experience
The customer journey approach focuses on understanding the overall customer experience and journey, allowing you to create a more meaningful and personalized experience because you fully comprehend their needs, motivations, challenges, and pain points. Mapping out this journey provides you with valuable insights you can then use to tailor marketing strategies and better allocate resources to deliver a seamless experience from start to finish and beyond.
BENEFIT 3:
Better Collaboration Between Departments
The customer journey process inherently entails collaborating with different stakeholders or departments across your organization, from marketing to sales, customer service, and product development. This collaborative process ensures that each department understands their respective roles in delivering an exceptional and seamless experience. Collaboration leads to a more holistic approach to customer engagement, streamlines workflows, and creates a customer-centric culture. (win-win all around!)
How to Create Your Customer Journey Map
1. Identify Journey Stages
The first step is determining what journey stages make sense for your business. Here are the basic stages that will apply to many businesses — awareness, consideration, conversion, delivery, and retention or loyalty.
I’ve linked a basic template to get you started, here. To get the most out of this approach, I highly recommend mapping out the real steps your customers or buyers are taking in real life.
For additional reference, in the client journey map for Jessica Marie Creative, the journey stages I have included are research/awareness, consideration, conversion, onboarding, and loyalty.
2. Map Out The Details
Next, you’ll want to complete each journey row, customizing your responses to the individual journey stages previously determined.
CUSTOMER ACTIONS TAKEN & QUESTIONS ASKED
List any tasks or activities your ideal client is doing at each journey stage. Also, include where they may be looking for answers and/or any questions they are likely asking themselves or others at each stage.
TOUCHPOINTS
List where they interact with you – these can be physical, virtual, or social interactions such as going to your website, social media pages, email campaigns, in-person experience, or customer service interactions.
*Be sure to consider ALL possible channels and touchpoints, both online and offline.
EXPERIENCE
Highlight the emotions, thoughts, and motivations experienced at each stage. Your customers likely experience a range of emotions such as excitement, frustration, confusion, or joy during their journey. By understanding their emotional stages, you can tailor your messaging, content, and interactions to create a more empathetic and authentic experience. Understanding their motivations can help inform your marketing strategies and development initiatives.
CHALLENGES OR PAIN POINTS
These could be moments of confusion, frustration, or satisfaction experienced at each stage. By identifying these pain points, you can focus on addressing them to enhance the customer experience and improve customer retention.
OPPORTUNITIES
Analyze each touch point to identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. For example, you may discover an opportunity to streamline your online checkout process or identify the same set of questions coming up and use that as an opportunity to educate and build trust. By taking steps to make these improvements, you will boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Continuously Iterate and Improve
As you may guess, this is not a one-time activity. To get the very most from this, I can’t encourage you enough to continuously iterate, test, and refine your customer journey map based on customer feedback, market trends, and user behavior to continuously improve customer satisfaction, increase customer retention and loyalty, and drive growth for your business.
TLDR Recap:
Taking the time to create and execute a customized journey map not only provides important insights on how customers experience your brand, but it can illuminate areas of resistance or ambiguity that exist so you can create targeted content or customer-centric campaigns that speak directly to relevant needs or pain points. Additionally, this process facilitates increased collaboration between internal stakeholders, ensuring everybody understands their role in the customer journey and how they can contribute to delivering a seamless experience. Get a better sense of where you stand on the journey towards providing an exceptional customer experience by creating your own personalized journey map today! Happy mapping!
Have questions or thoughts you’d like to share? I’d love to you hear from you!
