As marketers, we must all be aware of the customer journey. The customer journey is the path a customer starts along as soon as they make first contact with your brand. They traverse it as they become more familiar with your brand, make purchases, and share their views about their experience with others.
To track and visualize each customer’s journey, we must create a process to identify both our customers and the points at which they interact with our brand. Only once we have identified these points can we know how to support our customers through the process. In this article, we are going to outline the process you can take to do this. So read on!
Step 1: Research and Data Collection
Just about everything you do in marketing should start with research and data collection, and customer journey mapping is no exception. This whole process is based on knowing your customers and understanding their behaviour. Here are a few helpful methods for doing this.
CRM and Customer Support Data
The best way of finding information about your customers is to go straight to your main source of information about them. A customer relationship management system or CRM will be recording data about your customers all the time. Not only their very first interaction but all subsequent interactions they have with your brand, how long they have been a customer, what source or marketing initiative led them to you, down to how many times they have called customer support.
Your support logs will give you further details on any issues they have had with your brand, why they had these issues, and how they were resolved. Collecting and analyzing this data correctly is your head start in mapping your customer journey.
Surveys and Questionnaires
With the customer journey in mind, develop a survey or questionnaire for your customers with the intention of finding out the points along the way. Ask them where they first heard of your brand, if they knew about your brand before they decided to make a purchase if they purchased from you due to an offer or even if they took up any additional offers while making the purchase they originally came to your brand to make. The more direct information you can receive from your customers, the better. A good CRM will give you the ability to create forms and surveys, or you may want to try a premium third-party service that allows you to collect this data.
However, we suggest going the CRM route, as it enables you to keep all of your information in one place for easy cross-references and viewing customer history. Checking your Net Promoter Score will also be advantageous, as it will inform you of how likely customers are to recommend your brand.
Interviews and Focus Groups
Face-to-face interactions with your customers can also be helpful. They also give you the opportunity to get more detailed information about the customer journey than surveys. Try offering a small incentive or compensation for any time spent helping you to collect this data.
Web Analytics
Tools that track website sessions and conversions, such as Google Analytics, can be very helpful in learning more about customer behaviour. This method also makes it very easy to analyze large amounts of data.
Should you want to go even further down this avenue, heatmaps and session recordings can provide you with even more refined data. They allow you to see where users click, scroll, and spend most of their time as they interact with your website. These are premium services supplied by companies such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg.
Once you have all of your data collected, make sure to analyze what you have found, remembering to cross-check data from one source with another to see if you can find patterns or correlations.
Step 2: Defining Customer Personas
People are different, and one company will usually have many different types of customers purchasing from them or engaging with their services at the same time, especially when it comes to B2C marketing. Grouping your customers by demographics such as age, gender, location and household income, as well as other factors like interests and hobbies, will help you get a clearer picture of what exactly drives these individual groups to interact with your brand. It can also help with other various marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Identify Journey Stages and Support Your Customers
There are several stages of a customer journey, normally as follows:
Awareness
This is the point at which your customer first learns about your brand. Online presence is key to this process. For customers to find you, they have to be able to see you. You can enhance your visibility by harnessing the power of various channels, such as social media, digital ads and search engine optimization (SEO). One of the main ways to get yourself seen is by having a Google My Business (GMB) profile. If your brand reputation is good enough, this first stage may even be reached through word-of-mouth.
Acquisition
The next step in the journey for your customer is going from knowing about your brand to actually interacting with it, or as we say in marketing, converting them into a lead. You can easily achieve this by making sure you are using direct and well-thought-out calls to action in your marketing efforts. This should drive them to purpose-built landing pages with one simple and easy directive. You can also make processes such as signing up for your newsletter, downloading an app, creating an account or getting in touch as simple as possible. Incentivizing these processes is a sure-fire way to keep those leads on your radar.
Consideration
Have you ever purchased a product or service from a new company without checking your options first? No, we all weigh up the pros and cons of buying from a company before we dive into a purchase. At this stage, customers will be looking at the customer will be reading reviews, researching your brand, looking through product information, and even using comparison sites to see what their best options are. The best way we can reassure the customer that our product is the best is by having good products and services and delivering exceptional customer service as a standard, all of which lead to a good reputation. Through this process, we will be able to source reviews and testimonials from customers. We can also enhance our reputation by providing case studies of how our services have benefitted our customers.
Putting effort into maintaining a likeable and consistent brand personality goes a very long way at this stage. People will buy a product that is more expensive than another retailer if they like and trust the brand they are buying from.
Purchase Decision
Now comes the stage where the lead becomes a fully-fledged customer. Again, we can support customers through this process by making it as simple and secure as possible. Make your online shop easy to navigate, make all stages of the buying process quick and clear, provide various methods of payment and make sure to provide your customers with clear confirmation of their order and the details of where to go if they need help with the process such as an online chat or phone assistance. Then, thank them for their purchase and make them feel like a valued customer; it goes a long way.
Experience
The journey doesn’t end with making a purchase. After all, do you want a customer to only buy one thing from your brand? Exactly! We want our customers to make that purchase, be happy about their experience, and be secure in the knowledge that buying something else from us is a good idea. Again, we turn to the delivery of high-quality products and providing exceptional customer service. We want our customers to know everything they need to know about a product; if you don’t provide them with sufficient material about how to use a product, they will be unhappy with the product. The best example we can give you is to imagine trying to record a TV programme on a VCR with no user manual. We all know the woes associated with that situation. Provide user manuals, FAQ sections, various means of contacting customer support, and a good returns process for defective goods.
Did you know that if a customer has an issue with their product and receives good customer service that helps them fix their issues, they are more likely to give a company a good review even if the product they first received was faulty? A good experience goes a long way!
Retention
Once your customer is past the purchasing post and finished with the experience stage, it’s time to make sure they stay a customer. But how do we do that? A good start would be to incentivize further purchases with a loyalty programme. Web Geeks can vouch for loyalty programmes; if we are going to get a free lunch after we have bought 5 meals, we are getting that free lunch! The same applies to most things; people like incentives, as we have mentioned before. You also have to make sure that you keep engaging with your customers, have time to think of regular newsletters and personalized recommendations based on past purchases, allow your customers to create wishlists of your products and let them know if they are going on sale, Steam is a great example of this whenever they have a sale they let users know if any of your Wishlist games are reduced leading to many purchases even from people who have forgotten they had a game on their list, a discount is a very inviting prospect. Regular updates on social media and general posting will also keep your brand at the forefront of your customer’s minds.
Advocacy
One of the most important stages for any brand. When a customer is fully satisfied with you as a company, the products you sell and the services you deliver, they become ambassadors for your brand. Nothing speaks louder in this day and age than real-life recommendations from those non-affiliated with your company. To help our customers with this stage, it is good practice to have a process in place for requesting reviews from your customers. Leaving a review may slip a customer’s mind, but a gentle reminder can help them along. Make the most of this stage by asking your customers to refer others to your brand. What’s the word again? INCENTIVES!
Developing a good referral programme can really help you gain additional customers who already have a positive view of your brand from a friend or relative. You can also encourage your social media followers to create their own content for your pages, such as images and videos through marketing initiatives; remember the ALS ice bucket challenge? That raised a whole ton of money and gave a significant boost to the research on battling ALS. User-generated content is a hidden gem!
How Important is Customer Journey Mapping?
As you can see, customer journey mapping plays a very important role in marketing activities; once you fully understand the customer, their behaviour and the journey they travel whilst interacting with your brand, it gives you a better understanding of the whole process of marketing itself. It is key to identify these stages of the process and how and why your customer reaches them so you can target not only the customer themselves with your marketing efforts but also refine your marketing process to fully cover all points of this journey. We should always use the customer journey as a road map to campaign creation, and once our campaigns are finished, we must assess how each step of the process meets the needs of the customer at each stage. Doing this is a great way to identify any issues you may come across along the way and fix them before they happen. It is also good practice to test each process before running your campaign to make sure all parts are functioning correctly before you launch the campaign.
Key Takeaways
- Customer journey mapping is a process in which we identify the steps a customer takes as they interact with your brand from the moment they are first aware of your brand to post-purchase.
- To map out the customer journey, you must understand your customer through research and data collection, then analyze and cross-check your results.
- There are 7 steps in the customer journey – awareness, acquisition, consideration, purchase decision, experience, retention and advocacy.
- Once you can identify all the interactions a customer has with your brand you can work out how to fully support them through the purchasing process.
- Customer journey mapping allows you to fully refine your marketing processes. You should think of the customer journey every time you craft a campaign, then asses how it meets each step and test it before you launch.