A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. A journey of a satisfied customer begins with a carefully drawn customer journey map.
“Rinse and repeat” – a motto that pretty much reflects an effective marketing strategy. The winning cycle isn’t rocket science: identify your customers – who they are, what they need, and what you can offer – and interpret these insights into a customer journey that marries your business with your audience.
But it can’t be that simple, can it?
Source: GIPHY
Here’s the thing: creating even a single customer journey is backbreaking labor, requiring full control of the respective traffic channel and deep knowledge of customer behavior throughout the marketing cycle from awareness to conversion to retention. Now imagine if you need a dozen customer journeys – omnichannel ones, no less – for multiple audiences with different desires and motivations.
Keep in mind, businesses struggle with optimizing their customer journey. According to Statista, only around 6% of companies have no trouble improving their customer journey, with 35% suffering from a lack of automation, suboptimal agent performance, silo management, and other issues.
Source: Statista
It’s not hard to identify the root of the problem. The underperformers either lack technical capabilities – customer journey tracking software and tools – or don’t understand the customer journey well enough.
Without a doubt, understanding the customer journey and associated software will put you ahead of the competition. With the right lead tracking suite and profound knowledge of customer interactions, you can generate and convert more leads while minimizing bounces down the road.
Without further ado, let’s examine a customer journey, how to build an effective one, and how to supercharge customer touchpoints along the way.
The customer journey is the path your customers undergo on the way to a conversion or bounce. This path exists as long as you have at least one customer, regardless of whether you acknowledge its presence.
Here’s a user journey example:
In this oversimplified customer journey model, our user went through awareness (sees your ads), consideration (rushes to your website), and purchase (subscribes to your newsletter and makes a purchase).
Now, if you ignore these stages, you will not gain any extra value from this customer barring the net profit: pleasant in the short term but not so great in the long run. On the other hand, if you dissect the user, their interactions, and conversion triggers, chances are you will know how to drive more similar customers to the purchase.
Understanding the customer journey – or rather multiple journeys your customers undergo as they interact with your brand – unlocks a world of good for your business. According to Statista, the three main drivers for customer journey design are delighting customers (48.5%), reducing customer effort (46%), and digitizing and automating marketing and sales (44.6%).
Source: Statista
Likewise, customer touchpoint mapping is vital for ensuring a coherent omnichannel experience across all touchpoints. Someone who started on Instagram, continued in their mailbox, and finished on your website must undergo a journey of the same quality as if they never switched devices or jumped channels.
There’s no better way to understand the customer experience journey than to walk through one yourself. Imagine running an insurance business with a focus on your blog for flood insurance seekers and target buyers from Louisiana, a flood-prone state.
Now, let’s think about how you can drive flood insurance seekers to conversion. For that, barring high-quality content around flood insurance, you need to divide the customer journey into stages and touchpoints.
Here’s your customer journey template:
In this simplified user journey map template, customers evolve from awareness to consideration to decision – and hopefully to purchase. At every customer journey stage, you have a specific motivation, customer action, place, and target action to address.
In reality, though, customer journey maps are more complex — with more stages and touchpoints — so no user journey template can fully apply. You will need your own customer journey flowchart that accounts for your unique customer interactions.
As valuable as customer journey mapping is for marketing and sales, many businesses are still missing out on developing a customer journey map and buyer personas.
At the same time, it has long been established that understanding customer journeys boosts engagement and conversion rates, among many other benefits.
Small talk aside, let’s get into the nitty gritty of customer journey mapping.
Source: HubSpot
When it comes to mapping the customer journey, it helps to be realistic. While covering all imaginable pathways with a single all-encompassing customer journey map may seem tempting and even cost-efficient, it’s infeasible.
Chances are you will need separate customer journey maps for business aspects like lead nurturing, customer churn, customer service and support, etc. Hopefully, after drawing the first map, things will get easier.
If Step 1 was quite nebulous with a substantial leeway in setting mapping objectives, Step 2 is where concrete things kick in. To create buyer personas, you need extensive customer data, such as demographics, psychographics, history of purchases, pain points, and everything you can unearth while adhering to consumer protection regulations.
Now, there’s only one realistic way to tap into your customer data: lead tracking software. Up-to-date lead tracking software like LMS Sync will dissect your marketing campaigns on the fly while collecting exhaustive information on your customers.
As you generate leads across different marketing channels – possibly even traditional ones like print media, billboards, and TV – your lead tracking software enables accurate customer journey attribution while collecting all kinds of marketing data. Besides explicitly shared information, you get access to legally withdrawable unsolicited insights like contextual, social media, and partner data.
Struggling to connect your online and offline customer journeys? Here are your top martech tools.
Note that data collection works equally well with web and call leads. You can know who your callers are and why they are calling, having a head start in the conversation. Call intelligence systems like Call Logic route callers extremely effectively, with every caller getting to the right agent or solving their request on the spot through an IVR system.
Take a sneak peek into call tracking software:
Wonder how phone calls affect the customer journey? Here you go.
Having set your goals and created customer personas, you are ready to assemble your jigsaw puzzle of the customer journey. For a good-looking picture, you must unmistakably define the customer journey phases (stages) and touchpoints across these phases.
You need to know when your customers take what actions with what results and what alternatives you can offer at every touchpoint. For example, knowing that your email subscribers are reluctant to switch to your website, you can enable in-email purchases with AMP technology.
| Consistency | Consistent engagement across all touchpoints is key, increasing revenue by up to 23%. By dissecting a specific target group with customer journey mapping, you can understand how to seamlessly move these leads to the conversion, including:
Imagine offering different pricing on your website and in your brick-and-mortar store. Such inconsistency would raise confusion and doubt and likely lead to unplanned bounces. On the other hand, a holistic view of your business would help you to quickly identify the problem. |
| Personalization | One-to-one marketing has long become a new norm, with around 35% of businesses having achieved omnichannel personalization in just one year, a mind-boggling 30% annual growth. An accurate customer journey map enlivens customer-centric marketing and sales, unlocking what a specific web lead needs at a specific touchpoint. Personalization and customer journey mapping are a match made in heaven. On the one hand, you can use new customer data to improve your customer journey map; on the other hand, a data-driven customer journey map can improve data collection. |
| Automation | With only 35% of businesses having their customer journey “mostly automated” or “fully automated,” a well-designed customer journey map can put you ahead of the competition by replacing manual labor. Streamlining repetitive and route tasks can propel your company to new heights, with the three most automation-prone marketing channels being email (63%), social media (50%), and paid ads (40%). |
| Customer Experience | Suboptimal customer experience has traditionally been a major obstacle in the conversion path, boggling almost half the customers. A carefully drawn customer journey map can reveal your most annoying friction points and even show you how to deal with them. Your business may suffer from:
All these and other problems can be solved or streamlined with the help of a well-thought-out user journey map, which enables an overarching view of your business at all times. |
| Customer Lifetime Value | Getting an accurate perspective of your customers’ needs and wants can help you retain more of them, achieving the highest retention rates. A customer journey map helps you zoom it out to the strategic level so you don’t lose the forest for the trees. |
Now, there’s no customer journey map template you can copy without working on it. Every business case requires a different customer journey map, with all maps comprising three basic stages:
Let’s walk through these stages.
It’s only logical that the awareness stage calls for creating buzz about your product. With lead tracking software, it won’t take much until you define what your buyers love as a ground for your customer journey touchpoints. For example, if you’re a photography business dodging Instagram for some reason, your customer journey map will likely point to it.
Customer Touchpoints at the Awareness Stage of the Marketing Cycle
| Content marketing | Entertaining, educational, and problem-solving posts on general topics, including interactive and video content. |
| Social media marketing | Entertaining and engaging posts on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms while maintaining two-way communication. |
| Online ads | Strategically placed paid ads in order to raise interest in target customers. |
| SEO | Improving Google rankings for target keywords, including long-tail keywords |
| Collaborations | Partner content: videos, reviews, and anything else allowing to tap into untapped audiences |
Creating a specific touchpoint may come naturally or require significant effort.
For example, if you’re an auto insurance provider and want to explore the segment of premium car drivers, you need to:
Remember that most collaborations require active engagement: answering questions, responding to comments, and removing spam. You can’t rest on your laurels and must constantly monitor and refine all touchpoints for your customer journeys. On the bright side, marketing intelligence software makes things easier with its frighteningly big automation potential.
Now that the awareness stage is past you, it’s time to lure customers into a lasting relationship. To make them love you, come up with a superior value proposition. Explain why your offer trumps everything that exists in the market, and marry your customer with it.
| Exhaustive product information | Detailed product description, case studies, testimonials, reviews, features, benefits, competitive advantages, and every detail that can tip the scales in your favor |
| Product demo | Product demos, free subscription, free trials, and everything that can bring it home while not requiring payment or a long registration process |
| Live Support | Round-the-clock live chat and toll-free live calls without long call queues |
A product webinar is an excellent example of a consideration stage touchpoint. For example, if you are a flood insurance company, you can promote this webinar on local websites from flood-prone states. At the webinar, you can explain when your insurance policy applies, why it’s better than the competition, and offer a discount to anyone who commits immediately.
Approaching the climax of the customer journey – the decision stage – you must put forward your major selling weapons, be it sales collateral, price calculator, quote, or some other irresistible tool. Likewise, the checkout process must be smooth and quick so your customers can commit before they get bored, annoyed, or change their minds.
| Quotes | Quotes based on the most critical parameters: prices, quantity, product type and included features, shipping information, validity period, etc. |
| Negotiations | Negotiating when customizing an offer, contract terms, or pricing |
| Checkout | Smooth order processing and confirmation process, including exhaustive details on the purchase |
It’s worth noting that the decision-stage touchpoints may be similar to the consideration-stage ones except for a higher level of personalization. As a rule, the closer a lead to the conversion, the more they need personalized assistance.
At the decision stage, you may offer a free one-on-one consultation where you discuss the customer’s specific requirements, showcase your product, and explain how it can synergize with the customer’s products, if any (for example, for business software, you may elaborate on integrations with the customer’s CRM or lead management system).
The customer journey doesn’t end with a conversion. Unlike in our simplified journey mapping template, most consumer journey maps also include the loyalty and retention stages geared towards generating recurring profits.
Source: KPMG
According to HubSpot, you have a 65% chance of selling to an existing customer instead of only a 12.5% chance of selling to a new customer. Not for nothing, 50% of marketers create content to strengthen existing customer relationships.
Now that everything is all set, don’t force the issue. First, test whether your newly designed customer journey works as you envisioned.
First of all, you can go the traditional way. Gather a diverse group of testers – your employees, target customers, and external testers – and run them through test scenarios. Document their impression of every customer journey stage and touchpoint, preferably in a numerical format like “0 to 10.”
Alternatively (or for better results), you can leverage lead analytics software to auto-test your customer journey. Whether you’re about to launch or everything is already up and running, lead analytics software can provide you with valuable customer journey insights through several specific instruments:
But you can go even further. You can simulate your campaigns without actually running them. Then, having exhaustive theoretical data, you can double down on the winners while saving time on long-shot campaigns.
As you’ve implemented your journey maps – website journey map, email journey map, product journey map, etc. – you must constantly update them as new data appears in your CRM system. But then again, you can’t keep it all together without automated software: the data is just too diverse and overwhelming – and it piles up with every new customer.
Within the current business realities, the best thing you can do is use lead management software to collect and interpret customer data without human intervention. Having brought it all to a single dashboard, you can easily manage heterogeneous campaigns and audiences.
| Self-Service | Across industries, 81% of customers are willing to resolve their requests independently before reaching out for help. Software like interactive voice response (IVR) provides self-service options alongside routing, improving the customer journey and taking the stress off live operators. Marketing software can automatically renew subscriptions, conduct payments, and provide basic advice, among many other features. |
| Tailored Content | From targeted email campaigns to personalized blog posts to customized guides, marketing automation software can issue and display content depending on a buyer’s persona. For someone remodeling their kitchen, you can send a “Kitchen Remodeling DIY Guide,” mentioning that professionals still do better. For avid HVAC blog readers, you can offer a brand-new HVAC solution. |
| The Right Timing | Hitting the right timing with your message is crucial to engage more customers across your touchpoints. Marketing automation software is an invaluable tool to reach out to your customer when needed, whether at night, on a weekend, or during your vacation. For example, you can set the system to send marketing emails at around 4 p.m. on business days when the recipients are more responsive while excluding the most clogged first quarter of an hour. |
Uncovering the truth about the customer journey and interpreting these insights into winning marketing strategies is easier when you manage the process from a united lead management system that takes care of every touchpoint.
This is exactly what Phonexa offers: a comprehensive pay-as-you-go marketing automation software suite around clicks, phone calls, emails, and SMS.
For only $100 a month, you get access to these eight proprietary solutions:
Choose your subscription plan now or schedule a free consultation to learn more about how you can elevate your marketing with Phonexa.
A customer journey map is a visual representation (a diagram, graph, or map) of all customer interactions with your brand from the get-go until conversion. A good customer journey map dissects your leads and sales prospects from A to Z so you can develop customized marketing and sales strategies.
A baby boomer from Facebook requires a different approach than a millennial from TikTok. A well-thought-out customer journey map interprets these differences into a data-driven action plan.
There’s no universal recipe for creating a customer journey map, as the ingredients may differ depending on your scale, target audience, technical capabilities, and budget. However, by distilling vast amounts of user journey mapping techniques into a single plan, here’s what you get:
At the time of creation, your customer journey map will unmistakably reflect your current customer behavior. But that’s not for long: as your business changes, you must continuously redraw the map to keep it relevant and effective.
Customer journey mapping – drawing a customer journey map – boils down to identifying customer touchpoints on their way to conversion. When mapping a customer journey, you will likely have to address these three stages (on the example of a simple customer journey map):
Different customer journey maps may include different stages and touchpoints, but the gist is to map out the full customer cycle, from the first acquaintance until conversion and possibly further.
While creating and displaying meaningful customer journey touchpoints is always a good idea, it doesn’t mean you should artificially inflate the number of interactions. Strive for quality and alignment of touchpoints, not their quantity.
For example, unlocking purchases only after registration may be a redundant touchpoint because of the unnecessary friction it creates. Removing this touchpoint would speed up the customer journey and grant you more buys.
Your customer journey map touchpoints reflect the specific customer engagement with your business. For example, a phone call is a typical touchpoint for a call-reliant business; Instagram is an inevitable touchpoint for photography businesses.
To create a specific customer touchpoint, you must understand whether it drives value for your specific audience. And if it does – for example, a live call for a consulting business – you can add it to your customer journey map, whether creating or updating one.
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