A customer journey map is a representation of the experiences that your customers go through as they engage with your brand, your products, your services, and any combination thereof.
These maps can be built through customer journey builders like what’s offered in Ross Andrew Paquette’s own Maropost, which will allow you, as the company, to strategically plot out how you can enhance your customers’ journey with personalized experiences across multiple channels.
If you want to learn more about creating successful customer journey maps that will allow you to connect with your customers effectively, continue reading:
The Benefits of Customer Journey Maps
A customer journey map is one of the best ways of understanding your customers. Through this map, you can find out what they want and what you are doing that doesn’t satisfy their needs and expectations.
This is important because, according to Maropost CEO, Ross Andrew Paquette, “…companies are now competing predominantly on customer experience. And, the brands that are able to efficiently make use of the tools and technologies available to deliver excellent customer experience will be the ones to come out on top.”
Simply put. The customers are ‘king.’ They’re the ones that decide whether you are better than the brand you’re competing with. And, these days? They want their experience to be unified across all channels, they want it to be personalized to them, and they want it to be seamlessly integrated with their day-to-day life.
The only way to do this is to build comprehensive customer journey maps that will allow you to gain insight into what your customers are thinking. Fortunately, it’s really not that hard to do!
As you’ll see in the step-by-step introduction to customer journey mapping below:
The BASICS of Customer Journey Mapping
Mapping out customer journeys takes a lot of big data analysis. And, unfortunately, there is no actual step-by-step process that you can follow that will fit the needs of each customer.
You will find that it is an ever-evolving system, one that you’ll have to adjust based on the different insights that you can glean from whatever data you’ve most recently collected. Down below, we’ve broken down some of the most basic tips that you should know when it comes to customer journey mapping if you’re just starting out:
- Create Customer Personas: The first thing that you need to do is to understand your customers. Get into their mind, figure out who they are based on their past experiences, and find out what strategies work best on them and what doesn’t. You might find that you’ll have to create more ‘personas’ depending on the diversity of your customer demographics, or perhaps because of how your customers behave at different buying stages. Whatever it is you discover, internalize it so that you can use it for later stages.
- Identify Customer Checkpoints: Every journey needs at least a couple ‘checkpoints’, or in this case, milestone markers that will tell you what stage of their journey your customer is in. These checkpoints are the first things that you need to map out on your customer journey map, as it will make it clear to you at which stage customers are most likely to behave in certain ways with your brand.
- Identify Customer Roadblocks: Much like with the aforementioned checkpoints, there will probably also be identifiable ‘roadblocks’ in your process. These roadblocks take the form of frustrating experiences that can either temporarily or permanently hinder your customers’ journey, and, as such, should be identified immediately.
- Resolve Customer Roadblocks: After identifying all the roadblocks that your customers may encounter throughout their journey; you need to find ways around said roadblocks before moving forward. This should be one of your main priorities when creating a customer journey map, as it will result in a much-improved version of your customers’ overall experience.
- Rinse and Repeat: As mentioned above, customer journey maps are not meant to be permanent. A month down the road, when the next batch of data comes in, you might find even more roadblocks than before caused by your workarounds or you might find that one of your checkpoints has gone off the rails. Whatever the case may be, if you want to succeed, you need to improve your customer journey map every time that you work on it, otherwise, you will be left behind by the rest of your competition.
Now, as an extra tip, if you are worried about having to do all of this mapping by yourself, there are available tools that you can use to more intuitively solve whatever issues you might run into.
For example, Maropost, a marketing automation platform that was founded by Ross Andrew Paquette, allows for easy and intuitive customer journey mapping with a customer journey builder that will allow you to do all of the above and apply it directly to your marketing campaigns.
So, if you’re worried about the actual mapping portion of the process, don’t fear! As there are plenty of available solutions for you to try out there.
