Introduction

Marketers should always think from the perspective of their customers. And it’s a worthwhile talk for businesses about maintaining their relationship with customers. Your visitors should not leave your website after having a poor experience with your customer service structure. 

As modern marketers say the future of business all lies in the factor of customer experience. You need to find the customer expectations first and then work on technology that helps you to achieve things. 

The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”– Jeff Bezos, the CEO of the successful online business, Amazon.

The customer experience will outweigh the other factors like brand awareness, and product price and can be a key differentiator from your competitors. But do you know that you should have a customer journey map to design an effective user experience from visiting point to the conversion stage?

What is a Customer Journey Map?

The customer journey map is the visual representation of the customer experience with the website from the start point to the endpoint. It consists of different touchpoints from knowing a website, product search, searching reviews, customer service, and writing experience on social platforms. 

The designing of a customer journey map is very essential for both B2B and B2C companies. It makes you differentiate what your customers experience from what you expect them to do. It plays a role in making better decisions and building effective solutions that fulfill customers’ needs.

Types of Customer Journey Maps?

There are three types of customer journey maps that you can choose depending on specific goals. Here, let’s understand these maps to choose the best one for your business.

Current State Mapping

It is the most used type of customer journey map that shows the current state of customer interactions with your products or services. This map design is completely based on previous user data and observations. Using this you can visualize the customer’s thought process, emotions, and actions. The current state mapping is best for the continuous improvement of the customer journey.

For instance, you see that your mobile app receives a good number of visitors, and product searches but drops out at the transaction stage. But while crafting a customer journey map it shows the same user’s purchase products by using the online website. This interprets that users are facing an inconvenience using the mobile applications for completing purchases. So, with the available data, you can solve touchpoints like app interface, payment problems, broken links, or others.

Day In Life Mapping

This type of customer journey map is mostly used to discover opportunities for improving business growth. The day-in-life mapping shows all day-to-day customer activities when they visit your website. This may look similar to the current state map but gives more insights into the customer’s behavior and touchpoints to provide more value for users. For this, you need to check and study the users regularly during the interaction with your website.

For example, you have created a day-in-life journey map that shows the path of the customers from the search of a website to the delivery of a product or service. Through this map, you can find many unknown pain points and address them without customers even knowing they exist like

  • Features of competitors that are better than your product or services.
  • Why you are not ranking top places in SERPs.
  • At which touchpoint are the customers moving to the competitor’s websites.
  • Observe the website traffic sources and plan proper strategies to maximize the traffic.

Future State Mapping

The future state customer journey mapping is the representation of the ideal journey of customers you wish for your website visitors. In this type of mapping, you concentrate on providing new experiences to your customers to increase their engagement. For this, you need to study the customer’s daily activities and reactions to your marketing strategies. This mapping provides you with insights that are helpful to clear the gap between the expected user experience and where it is.

For example, this type of customer journey map is beneficial when you are planning to launch a new product. The current state and day-in-life journey maps give you the required information on how your previous users visit your website and end up purchasing. So, you can know the user's pain points and implement strategies that can improve the engagement rate for upcoming products.

Why Do You Need a Customer Journey Map?

There are many benefits of mapping customer journeys for your websites which are as follows.

Changes Your Perspective

Customer journey mapping changes your perspective of reaching the targeted audiences. You can get into the minds of targeted customers for better understanding. Instead of reaching customers with generalized tactics or uninterested users, you can use inbound marketing techniques for more engagement.

Inbound marketing is cost-effective and very efficient. It involves creating interesting content, and marketing strategies that focus on the user’s attention and then on sales. You can know what is attracting your present customers or turning them away. The journey map will help you to address the problems and eventually, you will end up serving an effective customer experience.

Know Your Audiences

You can not have exceptional results while repeatedly concentrating on the same broad audiences. You need to know the new demographics, user interests, and user attitudes towards the online market for expanding business or concentrating on particular audiences.

The customer journey map can give you a good picture of the types of audiences who are approaching your website. It will help you to advance your marketing strategies and reach customers’ expectations.

For example, an eCommerce website has drawn a customer journey map. It has been observed users are more interested in electronic products than other categories of the website. Now, the website owners can concentrate on adding new brands, products, offers, and marketing strategies in this section.

Explore New Opportunities for Development

The customer journey map reveals the gap between a business’s desired customer experience and real-time customer experience. You can discover unexplored areas by you or your competitors and optimize the touchpoints. Mostly these will be the unique points of customer experience that can make you stand out from others.

For instance, you own a travel website with flights and hotel booking facilities. But when you draw a customer journey map, you observe visitors searching for nearby restaurants for their hotel bookings. So, this is a new opportunity for the website to add a food & dining category that can improve the business growth.

Reduce Costs Of Marketing Campaigns

Every marketing campaign has definite goals and objectives. Building a marketing strategy around the customer journey will help you create solutions on a low budget. This will increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and decrease the cost of irrelevant factors for planning an optimized strategy.

For example, if your website’s customer journey map shows that maximum traffic is driving from the United States than other countries. You can use most of your budget on Google ads or push notifications concentrating on the U.S. to improve your online presence and drive traffic.

Steps to Create a Customer Journey Map

The customer journey map is all about gathering users’ information and data from various traffic sources available for your website. There is will no default template for the business as no two customers are the same. The journey mapping varies on products or services, and marketing practices you stick around. It means you have great space for exploring and experimenting. Here are the steps that can assist you in the mapping customer journey.

Setup Your Targets & Goals

You need to have a clear idea of why you want to make a customer journey map. When your objectives are clear you can dive into creating a map that directs you towards growth. For this, you can ask questions like who are specific targeted audiences? What factors or experiences do you want to consider? Expected results out of customer journey maps? and others. Completing this step will narrow down all the possibilities, and customer data and give you effective ways of hitting the targets.

Profile User or Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a fictional customer who represents all the demographics of a regular customer. This is the stage where you can gather all the customer information from surveys or interviews that will place you in the shoes of an average customer. You may find various customer personas who interact with your business. Make sure to be more precise as your whole customer journey mapping will revolve around the buyer persona.

Here are some good questions to include in your customer survey

  • How did you reach our website?
  • How do you know about our brand?
  • On a scale of 10, rate your website navigation experience?
  • What category of products made you visit our website?
  • Did you find solutions for your problems with our services?
  • At what stage of navigation have you faced a problem with our website?

For instance, when observing customers’ data you find various behaviors of users in reaching websites, searching, and purchasing. Now you can form different customer personas considering various parameters.

Once you have defined the customer persona, you need to choose one or two of them to concentrate on. The customer journey map tracks the behavior of one customer who takes a particular path to reaching your website. So, if you group two irrelevant customer personas while crafting the map it may not be accurate.

List out the Customer Touchpoints

You need to have a list of customer touchpoints in their journey. This is a crucial step as businesses will get to know the insights into customers’ actions. Having a great understanding of these touchpoints will help you to design a great customer journey mapping. You have to check these pain points from various traffic sources like social media, email, paid ads, and others.

Map the Customers Journey

Now you have decided on the buyer persona and the touchpoints, it’s time to determine their journey on your website. At this point concentrate on the customer’s actions on your website. Map how customers are reaching your website, product search algorithm, and conversion process.

Take the Customer Journey

Take the place of the customer and walk along the way you have plotted in the previous step. This will help you to analyze the missed pain points in the customer journey map. Getting into the shoes of customers will give the necessary additional information and experience you have excepted with your service.

Conclusion

Check your data analytics after solving the problems at different touchpoints you have found in the customer journey map. You can observe whether your website performance has improved as the way expected. In the other case, you can optimize the customer journey map and find new strategies to install. Follow these steps to design a customer journey map to do it well and serve value for your customers and business.