How customer journey mapping can help you nail your marketing

A customer journey map is a visualisation of the journey your customers go through before taking a certain action, such as making a purchase or signing up to your newsletter. It plots the actions your customers take, the touchpoints they interact with, and the experience they have as they interact with your brand. 

The customer journey can be mapped as a timeline, a flow chart, or even a simple bulleted list. 

Generally, the lower the cost of the products or services you sell, the shorter and simpler the journey your customers will take. 

For example, for a business that sells lightbulbs through Amazon, the customer journey could be as simple as:

• Searching ‘lightbulb’ on Amazon.
• Clicking on the brand’s listing in the search results.
• Scanning the product description and reading a few reviews.
• Adding the product to their Amazon basket and hitting ‘buy’.

The customer journey map for a company that sells a product or service that requires more consideration will look a lot different. 

For example, someone looking for the best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or accounting software for their business is going to mull the decision over for far longer than they would which light bulb to buy. 

Which means software companies like HubSpot and Xero have much more complex customer journeys to contend with. 

Mapping out the customer journeys that matter most to your business can do wonders to help you define your marketing strategy and drive results. 

Here are the benefits it could bring to your business:

Get to really know your customers

No business truly understands its customers until it has mapped the journey they take before they buy. 

Until you know how people are discovering your brand and what touchpoints they’re hitting on the way to becoming a customer, you can only make educated guesses on why they are or aren’t buying from you.

Which means you can’t optimise your sales funnel and marketing strategy to convert as many customers as possible – because you don’t know what areas need optimising. 

Mapping out the customer journey for each of your buyer personas takes the guesswork out of your sales and marketing strategy and empowers you with the data you need to make decisions that will boost sales.

Pin down each of your personas

Each of your buyer personas has a different set of problems they’re looking to solve through your product or service, a different set of potential stumbling blocks that could prevent them from completing their customer journey, and a different chance of converting into a customer. 

If you don’t have a clear picture of the personas that are most likely to become your customers and what journey they’re likely to take to get there, then you’re liable to waste money targeting too broad of an audience – or worse, invest marketing budget on grabbing the attention of the wrong kind of customer.

And the more customer personas you have, the more detailed it pays to make your customer journey maps.

For example, a piano teacher might have several customer personas, from parents looking for a teacher to walk their child through the basics to professional musicians looking to hone their craft. 

The journey these two customer personas take to a purchase – and the actions they take and reservations they might have about buying – will be very different, and therefore they require separate customer journey maps for the best results.

Mapping out how each of your buyer personas move through your sales funnel will help you get the biggest possible return on investment on every pound you invest in sales and marketing. 

Use data to refine your strategy

Data doesn’t lie, and using it to guide your market strategy can yield incredibly effective results. 

For example, you might invest the majority of your marketing budget into producing a podcast that’s popular in your niche. However, the data could reveal that your blog – which you spend a fraction of your budget on – plays a much bigger part in the journey paying customers make to a purchase and ultimately drives twice as many conversions. 

Seeing the customer journey mapped out can bring facts like these to light, which you can then use to refine your marketing – doubling down on what’s working and leaving what isn’t behind.  

Improve conversion and customer retention rates

Armed with a complete view of the customer journey each of your personas takes, you can spot both the common patterns that lead to new customers coming on board and existing customers exiting the business. 

By logging the common touchpoints that customers hit before they buy, you can optimise your sales funnel to drive as many conversions as possible. 

You can also track the common behaviours of customers that leave your business and then put processes in place to help reduce your churn rate. 

And you don’t need to be Richard Branson to realise that using customer journey mapping to optimise these two areas alone will have a huge impact on your business’s bottom line. 

Customer journey mapping can transform your sales and marketing strategy and drive dramatic results, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. 

It’s simply a case of getting clear on what data you need to gather and how you’re going to get your hands on it. 

Here’s exactly how to create your own customer journey map:

Set your goals

It’s essential that you get clear on what you want to achieve through customer journey mapping if you want this process to have the biggest impact on your business.

For example, if your aim is to improve customer retention, then the sales funnel isn’t the place to start. 

And the more specific your goal, the better. 

Increasing sales might be too broad a goal to really take action on. ‘Increase retainer contracts with SMEs’, on the other hand, gives you a clear goal that will inform the areas of the customer journey you look to map and the personas you choose to target.

If you’re not sure where to start with customer journey mapping, think about the areas of your sales funnel you know can be improved on before even delving into the data – the channels you know you’re not getting everything you could be from. 

Another good entry point into customer journey mapping is to focus on one of the simpler aspects of your business. This can be a great way of getting experience in researching and mapping out all the key touchpoints of a customer interaction.

If you don’t know what areas of the customer experience you want to improve you won’t know which areas of the customer journey to map. 

Get clear on your goals and you’ll get the biggest return on investment from your customer journey mapping efforts. 

Decide what part of the journey to map

For the best results, you’ll need to create several customer journey maps, each of which covers a separate stage of the customer experience 

Each map you create should cover a contained event – the more specific the better. 

For example, mapping the journey a lead takes after landing on your site from a social media ad will generate more actionable insights than one that tries to summarise your entire sales funnel in one map. 

So, set the parameters of what you’re looking to measure based on what it is you’re trying to improve. This will give you data granular enough to drive real change across your customer journeys. 

Define your personas 

The last thing you need to nail down before you start gathering data is which customer personas you’re looking to improve the customer experience for or drive conversions with. 

If you analyse the behaviour of too broad an audience, your data won’t be as meaningful or actionable as if you’d focussed on your priority personas.  

For example, your personas might include SMEs, large corporations, and freelancers – with conversion rates being far higher among one kind of customer.

Focussing on optimising the customer journey for the person with the highest conversion rates will give the biggest boost to your bottom line and would therefore generate the biggest return on your investment. 

On the other hand, if your customer journey is converting far more freelancers than large corporations but your business’s objective is to shift to working with bigger clients, then that will determine where you focus your efforts. 

Neglect to segment your personas before you create your customer journey maps and the data that will be driving your decisions could be skewed by the behaviour of personas you’re not prioritising optimising your marketing efforts around.

So for the best results, map the journey of the personas that will most help you achieve your goals. 

Dig into the data

The biggest mistake you can make when you’re mapping out a customer journey is mapping the journey you think your customers take. 

To be of any use, a customer journey map needs to detail the actual steps visitors to your site take before performing the action you’re tracking. 

And to do that you need data. 

There are two ways to get this data: quantitative research and qualitative research. 

Quantitative research tells you what your customers do. 

This includes things like the products or services they buy, and how many pages they visit before they make a purchase, and which specific pages generate the highest conversions. 

Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console – as well as heat mapping software like Crazy Egg and Hotjar – can give you access to the quantitative data you need to map the customer journey. 

Qualitative research tells you why your customers do what they do. 

You might be able to take an educated guess at why a customer dropped out of your sales funnel through the quantitative data. But that’s all it can ever be – a guess. You won’t know what your customers are thinking. 

For example, Google Analytics might reveal that more than half of an ecommerce store’s customers drop out of a purchase on the payment page. But this business won’t know what it is about that page that’s making potential customers abandon their purchase. 

While they can guess that it’s their returns policy, or their shipping fees, or the payment process that’s turning customers away, they won’t know unless they conduct qualitative research. 

Qualitative research is the process of interviewing your customers, conducting focus groups, and asking people to narrate their thoughts as they navigate through the customer journey.

It reveals your customers’ explanations for why they take the route that they do and what they’re thinking each step along the way – essential data a marketer can use to optimise the customer journey.

You’ll get the best results by combining quantitative and qualitative data to paint a complete picture of what your customers do along the customer journey and why – in their own words – they do it. 

Map out the journey

Now that you’ve collected the data it’s time to create your customer journey map.

This should cover every single touchpoint in the process. The fewer rocks you leave uncovered, the more valuable your customer journey map will be. 

So, be sure your customer journey map captures:

• the actions the persona takes in this customer journey
• the motivations behind the persona’s actions 
• the obstacles that stop the person from completing this customer journey  

Truly understand these three aspects – and with the right data, you can – and you’ll have all the information you need to optimise any aspect of your business and boost conversions across the board.

Armed with all this data, you’ll be able to visualise the entire customer experience from start to finish.

For most businesses, this will uncover some obvious opportunities for optimisation that will lead to big wins. 

For others, it might reveal more subtle changes you can make to refine your processes – all of which can have a big impact on your bottom line when you add them up. 

But customer journey mapping has the biggest impact when it reveals that you need to pivot your entire product, service, or strategy if you want to serve your customers as effectively as possible. This can be a hard pill to swallow – but it can ultimately save your business. 

Because real customer data is behind all of the changes your customer journey maps inspire, none of the optimisations you make will be based on guesswork. 

You’ll be able to see exactly what actions your customers are taking – and where that differs from the route you want them to take. 

You can pinpoint sticking points and optimise the customer journey to remove them. 

And you can analyse the reasons behind your customers’ behaviour and change your processes to help remove the hurdles holding them back from higher conversion rates. 

This might mean giving them more information, streamlining the customer journey, or even completely overhauling a process you have in place. 

Then you can go back to the data and see exactly how the changes you’ve made have moved the needle on the metrics that matter when it comes to the customer journey you’re looking to improve. 

Of course, your business’s goals, your customers’ needs, and your industry’s landscape are always changing. For the best results, your customer journeys need to be regularly reviewed and optimised to keep your conversion rates as high as possible.

So, to get the most from customer journey mapping, make sure you’re always gathering and analysing new data so your sales and marketing strategy stays as effective as possible.