How to make a customer’s journey map for your business?
The path your customers take to purchase your product or service is not always linear. Often, customers may feel reluctant, have a change of heart, or need other types of reassurance in the middle of their purchase. If you have been experiencing such situations with your prospects, it is perhaps time to create a customer’s journey map for your business. That way, you can pinpoint all the specific steps your target audience takes to get to the finish line and make that purchase. You as a company can then facilitate that journey and make it a straightforward process while avoiding potential setbacks ahead of time.
What are the critical elements of a customer’s journey map?
Creating a customer journey map is like connecting the dots. During the process of connecting all the dots, you learn about your customer, his needs and wants, pressure points, decision-making patterns, and much more. In the end, you should have a full scope of your customer’s experience and use it to plan your resources, time, and activities effectively. To better understand the fundamentals, our digital marketing New York team comprised a list of elements your customer journey map should have.
Even though every business creates a unique customer experience, there are certain common denominators. Those include:
- Understanding your customer persona
- Defining the start and the finish point
- Listing the phases of the purchase
- Laying out any touchpoints
- Simplifying the structure
Start drafting a customer’s journey map for your business by creating a customer persona
When you start examining your client base and how to satisfy different types of customers’ needs, you will be on the verge of creating a complete customer persona. Your customer persona is the profile of your target customer. It should include information on your customer’s demographics such as age, gender, location, education, and employment status. Other than that, it could consist of some background information on his family or work situation.
When you have a firm grasp on these puzzle pieces, you can start building a list of motivations and frustrations. These drive your customer persona’s purchasing decisions. For example, your target customer might have a passion for traveling and sharing photos on social media. In another scenario, he might be an environmental buff and always find ways to reduce his carbon footprint.
On the other hand, your customer might get annoyed by the overwhelming volume of products labeled eco-friendly. He or she has a difficult time finding something in his price range. So that right there is a depiction of your customer persona’s frustration that you should include in the profile.
Define the scope of your work
Now that you have a clear picture of your customer persona, background, likes, and dislikes, you should define the starting point of his journey map. Because every start needs a finish, defining the scope and goals is the next natural step. With these goals and objectives in mind, you will continue to go into more detail and describe how to get your business there. Some basic questions you need to ask yourself are your business goals depicted in the map, who will use the map, and who will be in charge of implementing it.
Go through the different phases your customer experiences when making the purchase
The whole idea behind a customer journey map is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Try accessing the steps your customer takes from the point a need arises to the point they make the purchase. These are unique to your business and highly depend on the type of products or services you offer, but you can outline some phases as typical.
Generally, your customer will initiate the process by becoming aware of the need. Then follows his intention to do a little research and learn about options to fulfill the requirement. After that, your customer starts to consider some choices more than others. Finally, your customer decides to purchase a product or service you are selling. The journey doesn’t end here, though. There is still the aftermath of the purchase where you offer post-sale support or initiatives to renew and retain the existing customer.
Re-discover all the contact points of the purchase process
One of the crucial segments of a successful customer journey map is defining when and where your customer comes to interact with your business. These might be phone calls you make to your customers or online chats you have on your website. Also, it might be the moment when your customers come to the cash register or physically visit your office or other business premises.
Typically, different touchpoints might include your website and social media profiles, newsletters, or emails you send. Defining these delivery points will ultimately help you get some valuable insight into what might be wrong with your current communication channels or customer service. Later on, improving on particular touchpoints will allow you to improve customer experience with customer feedback and constant adaptation.
Make the structure of your customer journey map as simple as possible
Remember the goals and objectives you started with. Think hard of the people in your organization who will use the map and the ways they will implement it. Indeed, it is advisable and highly recommendable to be as straightforward as possible when creating a customer’s journey map for your business.
A simple design focusing only on the key aspects and elements is a sure road to successful implementation and monitoring. If you do this part right, chances are your map will give people at your organization the initiative to solve long-term problems or guide your organization in future business endeavors. Reach to digital marketing NYC specialists for more insight on customer journey map design you can always.
