Customer Journey Mapping
Have you ever wondered what your customers’ experience with your brand feels like?
Are they really satisfied with their experience? Is the experience uniform across all who come in contact with your business? Well, CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING provides a way to get answers to all of these questions.
What is the customer’s journey map?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you/your brand. It is how people who know nothing about your business/brand become aware of it and at what point they transform from prospect to actual customers and ultimately loyal consumers. There are several ways people come in contact with your business, and it is important that every experience is the best it possibly can be. To ensure that customers get the best possible experience, businesses need to map out every touchpoint along the customer journey. Basically, a journey map allows business owners to see where customer service can be improved depending on the particular customer. It also allows for uniform customer service irrespective of how and when a customer comes in contact with your business.
Why is a Customer Journey Map Important?
A customer journey map helps business understand and define what paying and non-paying customers require in order to complete a purchase. It enables businesses to see where and how customers interact with their business, this is important because understanding the journey from a customer’s perspective enables businesses to identify common customer pain points and how the customer experience can be made better. Because a customer journey map breaks down the experience of a customer, it helps businesses to focus and pay attention to particular needs at different stages of the journey. This also allows businesses to concentrate effort and expenditure on what matters to maximize effectiveness and provide customer-tailored services.
Visualising a Customer Journey
- Awareness and Engagement Stage
The customer journey begins with awareness, this means a customer knowing a brand and what they offer. For a business, this means all the things you do to get in front of a prospective customer. It also covers how people who have no idea what you do come in contact with you. Organic reach, referrals, advertising, email marketing, social media among others are all ways to generate awareness. How does awareness happen for you and your brand currently?
When you have their attention, what do you do to keep it? In digital marketing, this is called engagement.
At this stage, businesses need to come up with ways to turn awareness to actual engagement. What can you do to make this happen you might ask? Well, your best bet is content creation; this could be in the form of a blog post, a video, a webinar or whatever works for your business or brand. You want to be very intentional and strategic with your approach depending on your business/brand and target audience because this determines whether or not they decide to stick around
.
- The Subscriber Stage
This is the stage where aware and engaged visitors give us permission to follow-up. As a business you should be thinking; what lead magnet (lead generation strategy) are we deploying? What efforts are we making to get engaged visitors' contact information? How are you doing that currently in your business?
- The Convert Stage.
The question we are asking at this stage is; how do we get the subscribers to make a micro commitment either with their money or time? This could be a small purchase or showing up for an event. At this stage, the relationship has transformed from a prospect to an actual paying customer.
- The Excitement Stage
The excitement stage is dependent on the convert stage; I mean they cannot be excited if they are not satisfied with your product or services. This needs a collaborative effort between all parties involved to ensure that all that was promised at the awareness stage is received and felt by the customer.
- Ascend Stage.
This stage works like a ladder with multiple stages. Generally, none paying consumers become paying customers by purchasing a lower-priced offering and then go higher. The stages differ depending on your business (it could be different products or different levels of subscription) and what it offers but the idea of ascension is important and mapping it out is equally so. How do we get people who enter at the bottom of the ladder to climb higher?
- Advocate and Promoter Stage.
This is the stage where customers are very satisfied with your product and/or service and they leave favourable feedback.
A promoter on the hand is basically an advocate who is now actively promoting your products and services. They are recommending your products/services and what this does for your business is to create awareness, which then leads to engagement and a whole new journey begins.
At every stage of your customer journey you want to continuously ask, what are we doing currently and how can we improve on that. It is also not compulsory to begin at the awareness stage. Look at other stages in your customer journey and fix all the loops before you begin creating more awareness so your customers enjoy the best possible experience when they come in contact with your brand/business.
