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E-commerce and online trade industry is growing so fast that it is necessary to be proactive and stay ahead of the curve.
The global online market size is predicted to hit 4 trillion in 2020, and the number will only continue to increase.
According to Salesforce, 74% of people switch brands if they find the purchasing process difficult, making brands lose customer loyalty.
Thus, the simpler you will make it for customers or users, the more profitable it will be for the business.
Digital marketers play a vital role in mapping the customer journey to provide a pleasant experience from the moment they connect with the brand. The customer journey map helps marketers to deploy successful campaigns and interact better with the users.
To deploy a customer journey map that provides a delightful experience every time your customers engage with you online, read further to design a customer journey map for your brand.
What Is A Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visible representation displaying the customer’s experience with the brand.
Consider it as you stepping into your customer’s shoes and looking at your business from their perspective. This process helps the digital marketing team outline the story of a customer’s experience by testing website landing pages, website content, and digital marketing campaigns from the client’s point of view.
The journey map will help you customize your customers’ experience since they must be seeing hundreds of advertisements, newsletters, and competitive content every day, and deciding amongst them can be tedious.
Digitalization has provided customers several options to interact and engage effectively with their favorite brands. For instance, reading a blog post, accessing website content, following various social media platforms, or creating an interactive campaign following a specific call to action.
A customer journey map will improve your customer engagement and help you boost conversions and revenue.
Why Create A Customer Journey Map?
Before coming on to the above question, let me ask you a question:
Do you know on which platform your brand has the highest engagement rate with the customer?
The reason for asking this question is because customers today have hundreds of options to choose from also other companies are trying to attract them. Thus, digital marketers need to know channels from where the brand is getting higher engagement to continue to feed them with more engaging and high-quality content and maintain engagement rate.
And by accessing the insights from the respective channels, digital marketers will understand customers’ likes and dislikes and what works for them. It will also lead marketers to figure out the most effective channels for converting leads into prospects and prospects into loyal customers. A customer journey map will not just help you do all this but do it efficiently.
Today’s customers are way smarter than before. The new-age customer is interested in knowing the brand as a whole, including what they are offering, how they interact, and how their services and products resolve issues. A customer journey map will help marketers clarify how to provide the prospectus that keeps them engaged and encourage them to complete the purchase.
Get Started With Your Brand’s Customer Journey Map
Now that you know what a customer journey map is and why you need one let’s find out what factors you will need to consider while mapping the customer journey for your business.
Step 1: Create a Buyer Persona
Customers’ feedback on their buying experience with your brand can significantly help you make an accurate buyer’s persona. A buyer persona will help you understand your buyers – their needs and the difficulties they face so that you can provide a solution that delivers.
You can also use questionnaires and user testing to get valuable customer feedback from your target customers. You can also contact your regular customers to get their input on the services and products they have purchased from you.
This will help you in configuring and developing more engaging touchpoints to drive them to make purchases by placing them logically. You can categorize them as social media touchpoints and web page touchpoints.
Step 2: Think Like A Customer.
Put on the customer’s hat and think about how they are moving to the end of the sales funnel to buy a product or service. Understandably, the customers are not the same; each human being has their thought process and needs when purchasing things for themselves. You, as a digital marketer, can’t predict a customer’s next move accurately.
Use the data you extracted from analyzing the touchpoints and move towards common goals: walking in their footsteps, purchasing products, and experiencing the whole journey and recording it. If you feel that the next step is not natural, then make a note of it and work towards fixing it, making the customer’s journey convenient and easygoing.
Step 3: Identifying The Touchpoints
A touchpoint is the point of communication between your brand and customer in the digital world, such as social media platforms, blogs, or advertisements. These touchpoints help customers know and connect with your brand; thus, it is an integral part of the customer journey map.
Begin with understanding how your sales funnel works, from generating leads through your content and marketing techniques to completing the purchase. The extracted information will help figure out the number of touchpoints between the customer with your brand, content, and what drives the customer to the next phase.
Step 4: Implementing Customer Journey Map
Now it’s time to develop a customer journey map using your findings and touchpoints and implement new results to your digital presence to see how they work.
Take help from google analytics to identify at what point on the customer journey map you are losing your buyers regularly. Work on those touchpoints and make necessary changes in the plan as well as on the digital platform.
Make the journey short and straightforward, just like your customers would prefer. Having too many touchpoints might not entertain your customer through the whole buying journey. Make sure you keep it easy-going and have them engaged to continue taking the next ideal logical step.
Step 5: Optimize Customer Journey Map Regularly
With ever-changing technology and the timely introduction of new advancements in online shopping platforms, your customer journey map will keep evolving to meet the trends. Hence, you should monitor your customer’s behavior against your buying cycle; it will help you identify the leaks and loops and streamline the customer experience accordingly.
Wrapping Up
I presume that now you have a clear understanding of the customer journey map, and by implementing it, you can provide a better customer experience to your customers.
Improving the touchpoints with digital marketing best practices such as pushing and distributing high-quality, educating, and engaging content, and making things easy for customers will ultimately benefit the brand to increase productivity. This way, you can help build trust with the brand and earn customer loyalty.
