What Is A Map Of The Customer’s Journey? (Why You Should Get One)

If you work in marketing for a billion-dollar store, you probably know a lot about your customers. You probably have a lot of buyer personas that tell you when they get up, what their favorite foods are, and where they like to shop. But do you have a map of the journey of a customer?

Customer journey maps help you see things from the customer’s point of view, so you can make shopping more personalized. The better you know your customers and how to serve them, the more likely they are to come back again and again.

Read on to learn what customer journey mapping is, why it’s important, and how to do it.

The Customer’s Experience

We can roughly divide the customer journey into three steps:

• Awareness: The person knows there is a problem or an opportunity, but they need more information to fully understand it and name it.
• Consideration: The person knows exactly what the problem or chance is. They are now doing a lot of research on their options so that they know how to deal with the problem in different ways.
• Decision: The person has decided for sure which product or service to buy.

A real customer lifecycle is, of course, much more complicated. Depending on the journey, there may be many small touchpoints and decisions.

So, a customer journey map is needed.

What is a map of the customer’s journey?

A customer journey map is a picture of the whole customer journey, from the beginning to the end. It shows what your customers want and how they feel at key times, as well as brand touchpoints, gaps, and places where they have trouble with your brand.

Your personas’ journey maps are like directions for them. They give more than just demographic information and help your marketing team and other stakeholders put themselves in the shoes of your customers. As a result, you’ll set business goals that are more customer-focused and make the omnichannel experience smoother.

Journey maps also show marketing teams how your audience thinks from the point of view of the customer. They want you to ask important questions about market research, such as:

• What made them realize that they had a frustration, problem, issue, need, a new goal, or chance?
• When they realize this problem/opportunity, what do they do?
• Where should they go?
• What do they use to find out things?
• What websites do they go to?
• Who do they ask for help?
• What kinds of problems do they face along the way?
• At each step of the journey, what questions do they have?

Think about all the ways people can interact with your brand in real time, such as through email, social media, video, search engines, your website, TV, etc. The customer journey map helps you keep track of all the different ways customers interact with your business, improve those interactions, and fill in important gaps.

Why is it important to map the customer journey?

Customer journey mapping is important because it helps marketers connect with buyers and remove roadblocks that could lead to lost sales, more customers leaving, or a bad reputation. As a result, you’ll shorten the time it takes to make a purchase, improve your conversion rates, and keep more customers.

It also shows you how different types of customers move through your marketing funnel, so you can improve the user experience for each group. For example, Millennials and Boomers will have different interactions with your company. C-Suite executives and small business owners have different priorities and will take different steps before making a decision to buy.

Customer journey mapping helps you make sure that your marketing plan is the best for each buyer persona.

In the end, your goal is to give real customers a personalized, positive experience.

According to research done by Salesforce, 84% of people think that being treated like a real person instead of a number is a big reason why they buy something.

When you map out the buyer’s journey for your customer personas, you’ll understand their needs better. Because of this, customer satisfaction will go up.

By making a map of the customer journey, you can focus on the results instead of the steps.

How to Make a Customer Journey Map

Now that we know what a customer journey map is and why it’s important, let’s talk about how to make one.

1. Make Buyer Personas & Customer Segments

First, divide your audience into groups based on the kinds of customers you serve. Then, make buyer personas for each of these groups.

If you sell consulting services, you might have a segment for clients in the healthcare industry, another for clients in the financial sector, and a third for clients in the technology sector. Or maybe you divide your audience into groups based on how many people work there or where they live.

You could instead divide your audience by age. For example, an e-commerce fashion brand might have different goals for pre-teens, teens, and women. Or, if you’re a fashion brand like Athleta, you can target by activity, like yoga, running, hiking, cold-weather training, tennis, golf, swimming, etc.

After you divide your audience into groups, make personas of your ideal customers from each group. Here are some buyer persona examples to get you started.

Whether you’re selling to businesses or to consumers and how much your product or service costs will affect the information you give about your personas. You might want to include the following:

• Age range
• Income / revenue
• Title of the job 
• Priorities
• Goals
• Challenges
• Interests
• Work to be done in the industry (JTBD)
• Pain points
• Things people wanted
• Features Desired

The goal is to learn as much as you can about your ideal customers. When you know what they want and what problems they are having, you can make a customer journey that speaks to them, walks them through the process, and makes them want to do something.

2. Use Empathy Maps to Find Customer Paint Points

The next step in making a customer journey map is to clearly identify customer pain points at each step of the journey.

• What do they feel when they first become aware? What kinds of problems are they having? Why do they want to start looking for ways to solve their problem? Do they need a certain kind of learning material?
  
• What do they need to know when they are thinking about it? What is holding them back from moving on?
  
• What is stopping them from pulling the trigger when they are making a choice? Do they offer enough comparisons to other options? What do they worry about, and how can you make them feel better? Have you given them enough proof from other people and assurances?
  
• During the retention stage, get feedback from long-term customers, such as a net promoter score (NPS).
  

Remember that buying is both a matter of facts and feelings. People make decisions based on a mix of objective facts and subjective feelings. To really get to know your customers, you should use an empathy map to deal with both of these possible roadblocks.

3. Make a List of Customer Journey’s Touch Points

How do you touch a customer? They are all the different ways a potential customer might come into contact with your brand. Among these, but not only, are:

• Your online site
• Sites run by other people
• Social media
• Search engines
• Videos
• Email
• Ads
• Check out sites
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• TV
• Radio
• Influencers
• Product demos
• Communication on the sales team
• Getting in touch with customer service

Add every point of contact to your customer journey map. When you look at the different touchpoints, you can see the different steps that customers take before they decide to buy. By understanding how they feel at each step of the customer journey, you can find psychological triggers that will make them feel more confident about taking the next steps. Then you can improve each brand touch point or even cut down on the number of them.

Audience Actions

When looking for touch points, pay most attention to the ones where people do something. Look for all the different ways your audience acts, like when they click on a Google search result, interact on social media, or answer an email.

Once you have a list of things to do, you can figure out the reasons and motivations behind each step. Then, to increase conversion rates, look for ways to cut down on the number of steps a customer needs to take.

Questions Asked at Every Step of a Customer’s Journey

In your customer journey map, it’s also important to list the questions that customers might ask at each touch point. Prospects may not be able to move forward in the buying journey if there is a lot of confusion, jargon, or uncertainty.

Record the real questions that your potential customers are asking at each step of the journey. If you do this, you’ll probably be ahead of most of your rivals.

If you don’t know what questions they’re asking, you should start talking to them and doing surveys. You can also get information from your salespeople, support teams, and live chat sessions.

The more questions you can answer at each touch point, the less friction potential customers will feel and the more likely they are to move on to the next part of their journey.

4. Make the Sales Funnel Work Better

The purchase funnel can be broken up into three parts: the top, the middle, and the bottom (tofu mofu bofu). Each segment corresponds to a step in the buying journey, which we already talked about:

• Tofu: Be aware
• Mofu: Think about
• Bofu: Choice
  

At each stage of the conversion funnel, give potential customers information that will help them move forward in their journey.

For example, at the top of the funnel, you can reach more prospects, make them more aware of your business, and build trust with them. At this point, it’s possible that your audience doesn’t even know about your brand. So give a strong introduction and show that you are a reliable source of information.

Instead of trying to sell, give prospects information that answers their questions and helps them trust you. Use gated content to get their contact information so you can set up automated campaigns to keep in touch with them.

Give prospects the information they need to make a smart buying decision in the middle of the funnel. But instead of trying to hard sell, focus on your value and what makes you different. This will educate your prospects and give them more confidence in what you have to offer.

At the bottom of the marketing funnel is where you should make the most direct sales. Position yourself as a consultant who can help them make their purchase fit their needs best. Show them things like social proof, case studies, warranties, highly rated customer service, money-back guarantees, projected ROI, etc. that will make them feel less risky. The goal of bofu is to get rid of any problems and make the sale.

5. Get More People Involved Using the Customer Journey Map

At each step of the customer journey, you need to know how to connect with your audience in a specific and effective way. You need to be able to talk about relevant pain points, answer questions thoroughly, and help prospects take the next step in the buying journey.

There are lots of ways to get people interested. You need to choose the ones that will help your potential customers along their journey in the most helpful and relevant ways. At each step of the customer journey map, figure out what the potential customer wants or needs most and how you can give it to them.

6. Ensure a Superior Customer Digital Experience

The main reason to make a customer journey map is to make sure that your digital customer experience (DCX) is great from beginning to end.

A user journey map shows each step a customer takes so you can make them as easy and enjoyable as possible. Customers, orders, and sales go up when people have great experiences.

Need evidence? Amazon has everything you need.

They have spent billions to make online shopping as easy as possible because they care so much about the customer experience. You can order with just one click, get free shipping in two days, and get recommendations that are very specific to you. Making such a great experience leads to millions of customers and hundreds of billions of dollars in sales.

7. Always Keep Track & Measure the Progress

The last step in the process of mapping the customer journey is to track and measure the data, then optimize it. You need to know the most important metrics for each touchpoint and figure out how well they convert.

For example, if people find your website through organic search, how long do they stay on the page? How many of them sign up for your email list or buy something? How can you make the page work better so that site visitors will take action?

Consistent optimization leads to improvements that keep getting better. Creating a better experience on your website leads to better engagement metrics, which leads to better performance in search results, which leads to more organic traffic and email opt-ins, etc.

Don’t know how to measure? Read our post about the most important SEO metrics to track.

Putting Together a Customer Journey Map

Customer experience maps help you learn more about marketing so you can better connect with buyers. By laying out the path your customers take, you can increase conversions, bring in new customers, and make more money. Customer journey mapping is also a good way to picture how the buyer’s journey should be in the future.

Follow these important steps for mapping the customer journey to help your business:

• Define your audience segments and personas
• Find out what their problems and pain points are.
• List the different points of contact with the customer.
• Make sure tofo, mofu, and bofu are all covered.
• Find ways to keep your audience interested throughout the journey.
• Ensure a superior customer experience
• Follow, measure, and improve