A customer journey map is essential because there are more ways for customers to interact with brands, products, and services than ever before. Focusing on only a handful of touchpoints instead of taking a holistic approach runs you the risk of losing customers. Whether you’re a B2C, B2B, or nonprofit, every business and organization can reap the benefits of creating a journey map for their customers, users, donors, etc. Discover how a customer journey map can transform your marketing!
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A quick Google Image search of ‘customer journey map’ shows a wide array of visual representations but no matter what it looks like, the journey map tells the story of your customers’ end-to-end experience with your brand across all touchpoints. It includes every place that they can come in contact with your brand, both online and offline.
The stages of a customer journey map vary depending on the brand but here’s an example of what the stages can look like:
Awareness → Consideration → Purchase → Service → Loyalty
Then, each touchpoint falls into one of those stages. Touchpoints are any times that customers come in contact with your brand before, during, or after the purchase. For example, a common Awareness touchpoint is PPC advertising since that is when prospects get introduced to your promotional message.
Why It’s Powerful for Omnichannel Marketing
As we mentioned before, there are many ways that customers can come in contact with your brand so if you’re not taking all of these interactions into account in your marketing, then customers will slip through the cracks. That’s why ‘omnichannel marketing’ is crucial for providing customers with a seamless experience to increase loyalty.
Still not sure if a customer journey map is worth it? Let’s take a look at some numbers. It’s five times more expensive to attract new customers than retain current customers (Source: Invesp). Additionally, just increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95% (Source: Bain & Company).
Benefits of a Customer Journey Map
By now, you’re probably already seeing the benefits of customer journey mapping – but there’s more! Here are specific advantages that a journey map offers for business owners, marketing strategists, sales teams, and customer service reps.
Gain a deeper understanding of your customers.
Even if you sell only one product or service, that doesn’t mean all of your customers are the same. They have different goals and motivations for buying from you. Researching your customers and creating ‘buyer personas’ will help you craft content that appeals to and engages a wider range of customers than a small segment.
Create a logical order for your customer’s journey.
As your brand grows and more touchpoints arise, it can lead to disorganization in your business and confusion for your team on what to focus on. A customer journey map brings order to chaos by creating a logical process of how customers interact with your brand from start to finish.
See if the desired customer experience is actually happening.
We all want to give our customers the best experience every time they come in contact with our business but it’s much harder to know if that’s actually happening if we’re not conscious of every touchpoint. By laying out every interaction in a customer journey map, we’re in a better position to improve the whole customer experience.
Create personalized customer experiences.
One of the most effective ways to win customers’ business is through personalization. According to Salesforce’s research, “84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.” Not only does a personalized experience make them more likely to become customers, but it’s also becoming the expectation.
Optimize the customer onboarding process.
Having a journey map allows you to see how you can optimize the customer onboarding process by resolving issues like customers not understanding your product/service or not receiving as much value from it as they could. Just because you think the onboarding process is simple doesn’t necessarily mean that your customers do too.
Disrupt Your Industry with Customer Journey Mapping
Regardless of your brand’s size and offerings, a customer journey map can help you disrupt your industry by better understanding your customers and providing personalized experiences that resonate with them. While there are many templates available online, getting an outside perspective from an experienced marketing agency can help you see your brand, products/services, and customers in a new light to create a powerful customer journey map.
Connect with Mavericks Marketing today to find out what customer journey mapping can do for your brand!
