How To Create A Customer Journey Map

Understanding your customers can be quite a challenge.

You may find it incredible to see your customers spending hours choosing the product and adding it to their cart, only to close down the tab and never complete the purchase.

It may be surprising to see that customers take multiple steps to move from Point 1 to Point 2, when it should only take a single step.

The root of all these misunderstandings lies in customer journeys. More precisely, your lack of a customer journey.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey represents the process that your customers go through when they interact with your company. The end goal of each customer journey is a sale.

Where does a customer journey begin?

That’s a question that is hard to answer, because customers start their journeys in a variety of ways.

They may interact with your brand on social media, search engines, or emails. It entirely depends on the physical and lived experiences of your customers. This means that the only way to find out how your customers embark on their journey to a purchase is by asking them.

However, even when you pinpoint where the journey starts and ends, you won’t know much about your customer’s behaviors. You will need to create a visual representation of their actions and implement that in your marketing and advertising campaigns.

This graphical representation of the process that a customer goes through on their way to achieving their goal is called a customer journey map.

Why is a customer journey important?

When you understand the motivations and the behavior of your customers, you can structure your business to make it more user-friendly and encourage sales.

By systemizing your customer touchpoints, you can guide prospects down the most efficient and effective path towards their goal.

While this may seem like a simple, linear progression, a customer journey typically contains many turns and shifts. Prospects usually interact with your brand on multiple platforms, channels and touchpoints, which makes it hard to visualize a customer journey.

Simply put, the customer journey is important because it allows you to refocus your efforts on inbound marketing, create a new customer target base, and it nurtures a customer-centric mentality.

Let’s break down each of these points separately.

Inbound marketing helps businesses because it targets a specific audience, as opposed to outbound marketing, which focuses on a broad spectre of potential customers.

By developing a customer journey, you can acquaint yourself with the needs, wants and desires of your prospects. This way, you can tailor a custom strategy that will help customers find your business and make purchases more efficiently.

Moreover, you can publish content that is interesting and useful to your customers and allow them to find you, instead of the other way around. This means that your effectively creating an additional touchpoint between your business and your customers.

Similarly, a customer journey is important, as it allows you to develop customer target base. Without a customer target base, you are forced to target a broad audience and waste precious resources on people who are unlikely to ever purchase your product or service.

Most importantly, a customer journey map nurtures a customer-centric mentality in your company. As your company grows, it can be hard to coordinate all the departments and keep the focus on your customers.

A clear journey map can be shared throughout your entire company, which allows you to better organize the marketing, sales and support departments.

How to create a customer journey map

Now that you know what a customer journey map is and why it’s important, it’s time to get down to business and start working on your customer journey map.

Generally speaking, a customer journey map will require three basic steps:

• Understanding your customers
• Defining the customer paths
• Examining the weak points

Let’s cover each of these steps in greater detail.

Understand your customers

If you want to create a customer journey map, you will first need to understand your customers.

However, we’re not talking about surface-level understanding of your customers here. You need to collect as much information as possible and develop detailed personas.

Personas are fictional characters that best describe your ideal customer.

Although personas rely on data, they’re more than that. They allow you to humanize your customers and stop viewing them as simple data points.

To develop a persona, you will need to consider the following:

• Demographics (age, gender, occupation, education, income)
• Location
• Psychographics (interests, values, activities)
• Behavior (patterns, benefits, product usage)

Now, you may be thinking that this is just too much information to collect and that there is no way for you to spend days working on it. However, that’s a common misconception.

Google Analytics contains all of this information neatly sorted into tabs and tables in the Audience option. Simply connect Google Analytics to your website and pull the data from it.

Define your customer paths

In the second step, you will need to assess your business.

Find all the touchpoints that your customers can use to find and interact with your company. Create a flowchart that explains how your customers do business with you.

To do this successfully, ask yourself this:

• How do customers find my business? What channels do they use to locate my website?
• How do they navigate through my site and make purchases?
• What actions do the customers need to take to complete a purchase?

Focus on one path and go through it until you find your way to the purchase page. Imagine you are a customer who has never visited your website and try to make a purchase for a specific item.

Then, rinse and repeat until you cover all available paths.

Keep in mind that this can take a while, because customers have countless ways to interact with online business. They can find you through social media, search engines, referrals, etc.

Usually, customer journey maps contain several stages:

• Awareness
• Market research
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Post-purchase

Examine the weak points

While you may develop a framework that works well in theory, practice often has the nasty habit of breaking down our theories. This is why it’s important that you test your customer journey and examine all of its points.

The easiest way to find and examine the weak points is to go back to Google Analytics and check the Behavior tab. Under Behavior Flow, you will find how customers actually interact with your website.

Compare the actual and the theoretical journey and you will likely find some discrepancies. Revisit your theoretical framework and edit it until it closely matches the actual journey of your customers.

If you notice that your customers are regularly leaving at specific points, you may need to redo that entire part of the journey. When people leave, it’s because your business can’t satisfy their needs adequately.

In case you’re unsure how you can improve specific stages of the customer journey, the best strategy is to look at your competition. See what the industry leaders are doing and replicate their tactics.

However, you should always look to go beyond your competitors. You need to have a competitive edge on the market or the customers won’t have any reason to replace the market leaders with your business.

Final words

While it may be tempting to ignore customer journeys and just go by your business feeling, it’s arguably the worst move that you can make.

If you plan to establish a long-term business, you will need customer journey maps. All niches are becoming more competitive and it’s becoming increasingly hard for businesses to remain profitable.

Customer journey maps are important because they allow you to better serve your customers. When you understand who your customers are, you understand what they want and need.

Ignoring customer journey maps is equal to ignoring customers.

No business that ignores its customers can expect to succeed.