What is a Customer Journey Map & Why is It Important?

What is a Customer Journey Map & Why is it Important?

It’s perhaps an obvious statement, that “understanding your customers is central to winning their business”, and yet so few businesses seem to manage it effectively.  

The purpose of this article is to relate how easy it can be to achieve a great conversion rate and win business when using a customer journey map. 

So what is a customer journey map?

The customer journey map is a diagram that enables teams to visualize customers’ needs through storytelling.

The sales and marketing teams walk through the various approaches to becoming a customer (purchase point) taking into consideration buyer motivation and purpose. Where and when different types of interest groups are found, a new persona is defined and a conversion funnel is created with appropriate content to engage each persona. 

The customer journey map plays an important part in persona development.

The conversion funnel

When you have created a customer journey map and it’s fresh in your mind, review it and directly create a conversion funnel from it. It helps to brainstorm customers’ needs with the marketing team.

This process should be done for every persona because it helps to identify intervention points, these are points where targeted messages can be triggered with onsite retargeting, each and everyone is a potential micro-conversion point.

For example, a lead magnet with an appropriate call to action could be used to sell a topic-relevant ebook or offer a seasonal promotion.

Every additional conversion and customer interaction builds trust.

The point is to warm the customer up to eventually buying your product, by initially familiarizing customers with your processes without being pushy. 

Initially, don’t ask them to part with any money and instead focus on building confidence and comfort in your system and products.

The purpose of a customer journey map

The creation of a customer journey map is an opportunity to put yourself in the shoes of your customer, understand their fears and frustrations as well as identify any roadblocks to their purchase.

This is the ideal time to consider background content (persona specific) and the message content.

It’s also good to periodically review the customer journey map to identify areas of improvement or identify any changing consumer requirements and habits.

Getting the message right at every stage is an iterative, progressive process requiring ongoing optimization. This can be achieved through A/B testing of your onsite retargeting messages. Slight changes to the content, background, magnet link, or CTA can make huge improvements to individual message conversion rates.

Insights into the customer journey from customer feedback

To create an effective customer journey map, customer feedback is essential to identify roadblocks and pain points, again this can be obtained quite simply with onsite retargeting.

You can gauge consumer sentiment by utilizing a Net Promoter Score (NPS) banner for instance, or/and a feedback request message when exit intent is detected. Cart abandonment is another great opportunity to elicit feedback in your cart recovery message, be sure to add a link in your newsletter to a feedback form.

Google Analytics

By using Google Analytics, it’s possible to visualize the flow of traffic by going to Behavior, then Behavior Flow in the main menu.

On this page, you can highlight traffic sources to expand and see the details of user groups and how the flow from page to page from that point, from when they first arrive onsite until they leave.

If specific personas are interested in certain blog topics then expand on the blogs relevant to the topic to see what they do (where they go) from there and ask the question what else can we do to convert these readers. 

The image below displays an overview of a blog. By clicking on the blog it gives the option to explore the blog traffic in more detail.

journey map planning

Conclusion

From the Google Analytics user flow, you can set up onsite retargeting messages, retargeting by interest.

By doing so visitors are more likely to provide the information you need because your messages will be more relevant to them and their purpose in visiting your website. Onsite retargeting can utilize a subscribe with Facebook Messenger option which makes subscribing quick and easy. No visitor/customer details need to be inputted in order to retarget them later.

Building a subscriber list through subscription offers and gifts, such as newsletters, product discounts or whitepapers is the first step to turning a visitor into a customer.  Once the visitor is identified they become a user. Your next task is to find out as much as you can about this new user in order to engage and retarget them. Onsite retargeting provides the toolbox needed to engage the user with messages and optimize your messages through A/B testing.

The odds are if you have successfully identified the visitor then you already have some idea of what their interest is, however, this must be confirmed using multiple-choice feedback messages.

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey measures consumer sentiment and is another opportunity to elicit feedback if an NPS response is provided then add a thank you message requesting further details, and clarification related to why they voted as they did.

Final note and a word of warning.

Every move you make in developing content and your website should be carefully considered and planned to get as much data as possible from your users. This enables you to improve targeting and improve your conversion rate. In an age of GDPR and privacy concerns, it is essential that alongside your data gathering activities you include a notification that meets global legal requirements. Again onsite retargeting provides an answer with a GDPR banner – click to accept with a link to your policies and with advanced triggering you have full control.

(Note: Have you heard of OptiMonk? It’s a powerful onsite messaging solution that helps you convert up to 15% of abandoning visitors to sales and leads. Give it a try – click here to create a free account.)

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