A customer journey map allows you to see what your customers truly want. While customer journey maps have been around for some time, many business owners can benefit from the use of this marketing tool.

Customer journey mapping is about building a story of your customer experience- from the first time they contact your business, while they engage with you, and into a long-term relationship. Journey mapping combines visualisation and storytelling, creating a holistic view of your customer’s experience.

Creating a Customer Journey Map
Customer journey mapping allows you to better understand your customer and create a detailed communication strategy with them. This improves your relationship with your customers and makes it more likely that they’ll remain loyal to your company.

When you begin mapping your customer journey, the first step is to consider all of the different touchpoints your customer would have with your business.

By now, you probably already know how important buyer personas are for your business. Once you’ve created these personas using your customer data, you can easily complete this step.

Touchpoints are the times that your customers interact with your company. And channels are the methods of communication, such as social media, email, phone etc.

Here are just a few of the touchpoints you can use to map your customer journey:

Discovery
How are your customers finding your business for the first time? There’s a high chance that your customers are finding you online, which is why your first digital impression counts.

Between your social media and Google analytics reports, you can easily see how your customers are first finding your business. While most businesses spend most of their marketing budgets on this touchpoint, customers are now very good at filtering out messages from traditional advertising.

Engagement
Once your ideal customer has discovered your business, how do they engage with you? While most businesses have a preferred method of engaging with their customers, this is backward. You need to look at how your ideal customers prefer to engage with you and adjust your methods accordingly.

Sale
This is the number one metric that most businesses are tracking. But it’s important to recognise that customer journey mapping is about identifying the triggers that actually lead to that sale. What do your customers need to know, feel, hear, and see from you before they sign on the dotted line?

Mapping your customer journey is about identifying the event that triggered your customer to take action and agree to work with your company.

If you’re not sure exactly what this is, ask your customers. You may find that what you think triggered the action, and what actually triggered it are two very different things.

Identifying the Gaps
As you begin to build your customer journey map, you’ll probably notice points where customers are falling out of your sales funnel.

These gaps are often due to negative experiences. They could be because they found your website difficult to navigate, your sales team never got back to them, or they had poor communication with a rep. For every gap that you identify on your journey map, create an action plan so they can be fixed.

These are just a few of the steps that you’ll use when you’re working on your customer journey map. If you’d like some help with any stage of this process, get in touch today.