It can be hard to understand what customers want and need. Sometimes it seems like you have taken their wants and needs into account, but then new technology, preferences, or buying trends come up.

According to Baymard Institute, approximately 70% of online shoppers abandoned their cart in 2021. A customer may spend hours adding products to their cart just to close the tab due to a number of reasons, such as it taking customers several steps to get from point A to point B.

It is probable that you are not aware of all the steps customers take to purchase your product or service.

This post will provide an overview of the customer journey, including a definition and how to map it.

The customer journey is the way in which a customer has experiences with a company while trying to achieve a goal. The customer journey cannot be assumed or predicted from an internal perspective of a company. The customer journey is specific to the physical experiences your customers have.

The best way to understand your customers’ journeys is by asking them.

Why is a journey map important?

The process that a customer goes through from being introduced to a product to when they purchase it is called the buyer’s journey. Salesforce reported that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products, meaning that the customer journey is more complex than just offering a product and having the customer purchase it.

The different stops along a customer’s journey (such as seeing ads, speaking to customer service, or attempting to check out) can affect their actions. Therefore, it’s important for businesses to understand the process and consequences of each stop in order to drive customers towards a sale.

To create an effective customer journey map, you’ll need to understand your customer’s needs, motivations, and touchpoints. Touchpoints are any interaction your customer has with your business, whether it’s online, in-store, or over the phone.

A customer journey map helps to see the current process customers take, from the first to final touchpoint, to see if they’re currently reaching their goals and, if not, how they can.

Customer journeys are not linear.

It is difficult to accurately visualize the customer journey because it is rarely linear, buyers often go back and forth, and it is multi-channel.

To ensure that everyone understands the plan, business leaders use different types of maps, from post-it notes on a wall to Excel Spreadsheets to infographics. The most important thing is that the map is easy to follow.

However, you can’t just dive into creating your customer journey map. You need to first collect data from your customers and prospects. The process of creating an effective customer journey map is extensive, but it’s worth it.

1. The Buying Process

You’ll also list specific milestones vertically, which allows you to see the interactions between stages. A customer journey map is a graphical representation of the steps a customer takes to complete a purchase, including any interactions they have with your company along the way. You can use it to see what the customer’s experience is like currently and identify areas where you can improve it.

2. User Actions

The following text explores the various ways your customers might achieve the goal of purchasing your product. In the awareness stage, they might speak with friends and family about their needs and potential ways to fulfill those needs. From there, they might take a demo on your website, and then finally, they’ll use cash or a debit card to make their purchase.

3. Emotions

It’s important to keep in mind that your customers are trying to solve a problem and are likely feeling some sort of emotion as a result. If your process is lengthy or complicated, they may go through a range of emotions at different stages. Adding these emotions to your journey map can help you prevent negative emotions about the journey from turning into negative opinions about your brand.

4. Pain Points

When you see a negative emotion on your customer journey map, it means that something in that stage is causing pain for the customer. By adding pain points to your map, you can figure out which stage is causing the problem and why.

5. Solutions

The final element in your customer journey map are solutions. This is where you and your team brainstorm potential ways to improve your buying process. By doing this, customers will encounter fewer pain points and have positive moods.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint is an instance where a potential or existing customer can form an opinion of your business. Touchpoints can be found in places where your business comes in direct contact with the customer. A display ad, an interaction with an employee, a 404 error, and even a Google review can be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand consists of more than just your website and marketing collateral. It’s important to also consider the various ways customers interact with your brand (touchpoints) when mapping out their journey, as this can help identify areas where the journey could be improved.

Customer journey mapping: The basics 

Now that you know why it is beneficial to map out your customer’s journey, you can start doing so.

Here’s how you can start this process.

Learn where users come from

The first step to increasing your website’s conversion rate is to figure out what motivates your customers to visit your site in the first place. Once you know this, you can determine how many different types of customer journeys you need to take into account.

If your website only sells one type of subscription and all your traffic comes from paid Google ads, then you have complete control over what customers see when they click on your ad. This includes the ad copy and the landing page. The ideal exit point would be for the customer to sign up for your paid monthly service.

Your customers might come from multiple marketing channels and enter your site from hundreds of different pages. You will need to map out a number of journeys that reflect the user intent and the channels that brought them in.

Define the user goals

What are the goals that you think your customers want to achieve?

If someone enters the FAQ section via your Facebook page, it’s likely because they’re looking for help. Their primary goal is to find the right answer, so you should optimize the journey to help them do that.

During this process, it often helps to apply the AIDA marketing model to understand which stage your customers are in: 

• Awareness: They’re vaguely familiar with / have heard of your brand or products. 
• Interest: They want to learn more about your offers and compare them to alternatives.  
• Desire: They’re interested in your product or offer. 
• Action: They’re ready to act by purchasing a product or signing up. 

Knowing which stage of the AIDA model a customer is in when they reach your product will help you to set goals and design their journey.

Understand the user intent

Discovering why the user is visiting the site helps you tailor the site to their needs.

Although it may not seem like it, not every goal has to be about making a sale or getting a conversion. You can optimize your website for other things as well, like time on site, views of a certain video, clicks to key pages, and more. This is especially true during the early stages of awareness and interest when you want to encourage people to stay on your site and learn more about your brand.

When thinking about how to better satisfy customers on your website, it is just as important to take into account what kind of marketing campaigns or search terms led them there in the first place. This can give you more insight into what they are looking for.

For example, two people looking at the same product may have completely different needs. One person may be looking for a product with a certain feature, while the other person is looking for a discount code for the product.

Create the optimal path

Designing a user journey that considers your marketing channels, your visitors, and their goals will give you the best chance at success.

Design the most efficient path for customers to take to reach their desired destination with as little difficulty as possible. Ensure that customers can easily locate the desired page, navigate to it with a few clicks, and complete their task without feeling confused.

If you have any customer research available, it can be helpful to use it at this stage. You should collect information about each user group, what they expect, and how they would prefer to navigate the site.

If you don’t have a lot of this data, a good way to start is by doing a few qualitative interviews to test your assumptions about the best way for a user to go through the journey.

Test your customer journey

You should always test your website’s customer journey to make sure it works as expected. The only way to find out if it works is to actually experience it.

You can approach this testing in two steps.

Test the journey by pretending to be the customer. Start at the entry point and see how easy it is to find key elements on the landing page. Check if they are clearly visible, if the descriptive text explains them well enough, and if you can easily engage with them.

If you come across any unclear wording or links that are hard to find, fix them. But keep in mind: This is your site and you already know it well. That means you might miss some obvious problems because you instinctively know where to click and what to look for.

A more robust approach to testing the customer journey is user testing, which relies on people who are unfamiliar with your site.

To conduct a user test, you give a few specific tasks to new users and observe how they go about completing them. This allows you to note any points of confusion or frustration so that you can improve your site.

Conducting user testing in person involves observing someone as they try to complete tasks on a website. There are also third-party tools that can be used for user testing. User testing tools require providing the website to be tested, a list of tasks or a script, and preferences for the type of users. The user testing tool will then find people from around the world to test the website and note any difficulties with navigation or broken paths.

This type of testing can help you identify and address site architecture issues that make it difficult for users to complete their desired tasks.

Track and improve

You can’t just create a customer journey map once and never update it again. Your users and their needs are always changing.

It’s important to monitor your website’s performance after you’ve published your optimal site structure. This will help you identify new issues or potential opportunities to increase conversions.

If you want to make sure your customers are happy, you need to understand their journey from start to finish. Consider the things that might cause them pain points or make them emotional, as well as how your company can help them at every stage.

The most effective way to visualize information about a customer’s journey is to use a customer journey map. This is especially useful when you are trying to optimize the journey for the customer or explore new ways to serve a customer’s needs.

Related posts:

From Awareness to Acquisition: Creating a Content Funnel that Converts How SaaS Companies Can Provide Exceptional Customer Support 6 Tools Used to Collect Best Customer Feedback in 2022 11 Content Marketing Strategies to Build Brand Awareness